H eart of Oak. H ere in this model of B uckler's H ard on England's south coast in 1789 are a ship ofthe line and a heavy friga te a-buildingfrom seasoned oak timbers fro m nearby farms, to meet the growing threatfrom revolutionary France. Ten years earlier similar ships were built here to fight the French-Spanish-D utch attack on Britain, then involved in trying to p ut down the American Revolution. A little downstream from this yard, whose buildings house an excellent museum today, was the building site for one ofthe artificial harbors used in the Anglo-American D -D ay landings of 1944.
THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART XX
The Voyage Is Toward Freedom How the Sailing Ship Changed Our World and What Tiie Might Learn .from Her Long Voyage by Peter Stanford
W
en the sailing ship van ished over time's horizo n as the ceani c carrier of human traffi cs, she left a trem endous eritage shaking the air like a dying trumpet blas t. T h e sailing ship left us a heritage that chall enges us today, as heirs of her long, 5, 000-year voyage to bring the wo rld of humankind in to uch with itself and with the ocean planet Earth . Much of what we learned in the long voyage in fundam entals of attitude and behavior was learned in the actual sailing of the ships-to which we'll return in o ur next and fin al chapter. Bur now, in this chapter near the end of the voyage that is this particular narrative, is a rim e to square things away and see the passage we've been through put into som e kind of order-as a seam an does at the ending of any voyage. "Toward Freedom " is the ride ofJ awaharlal Nehru's auto biography, in which this grand phi losopher, states man and leader of Indian independence posited freedom not as simply the absence of oppression but someth ing mo re pos itive, something you use to do things in the world. And his pi cture of freedom embraced all humankind and India's role in the comi ty of English-speaking nations to which India com mitted so much. That progress "toward freedom" was and is the burden of the sailing ship's long vo yage-th e ca rgo of learning, the riches of human interchange that the sailing ship spills o ur on the wharves of our seaports of the m ind, for those who keep their m ental po rtals open to such arrivals and such ideas . N or everyo ne would agree with this, of course. Indeed , a recent mayor of the City of N ew Yo rk, that legendary center of wo rldwide sailing ship traffics, said he saw no reason to celebrate Operation Sail 1992, whi ch in his view simply honored the ships that had brought his Afri can ancestors to America in chains. But ho nest people may differ, and a few years later the African-
SEA HISTORY 90, AUTUMN 1999
American essayist T homas Sowell anno unced the perhaps surp rising concl usio n that the majo r impact of the Europeans, English an d Americans on the African slave trade had been to end it-in their own terri to ries and aro un d the wo rld . And sti ll more recen tly an Afri can gro up cam e quietly to the U ni ted States to visit New Yo rk's newly rediscovered graveyard of slave fa milies, to apologize to these va nished people for the slave trade that bro ugh t them th ro ugh the ago nies of the M iddle Passage to lives of servitude in America. W hat a deeply responsible and moving thi ng to do! Of co urse they di d not exo nerate the slave traders o r slave owners, but they di d something no ble, I feel, in recognizing the Biblical truth that we are al l fu ll of sin. I suggest that learn ing to confront that truth as these good people did, directly and w ithout fanfare and hullabaloo, is the path to transcending the fearfu l d ivisions which ex ist in the human family today. T he oth er great realization we need to come to is to recognize that people before our rime, and people to come after, have all the reali ty that we do o urselves. H isto ry is a liberating force- but only if we res pect its continuities and hard-wo n experi ence. We have the choice to igno re history, but it is very certain that history will not ignore us. For it is a living force, with pas t, present and future in it, and it affects the lives of natio ns and individuals. We are all caugh t up in the web of its concerns and its o utcomeswhich we also can affect.
T he Great Achievement Ir took a lo ng time, but there is no question but that the sailing ship, in her five- tho usan d-years' sailin g, particularly in the latter half of the millennium now ending, transformed the condition of mankind and its understanding of itself, bringing the peoples of the Earth in to awareness of each other.
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