THE SEA PEOPLE OF by Peter Stanford
Ihe doughty steam tug St. Canute served in Danish waters, doubling in brass as firefighter and iceboat, until brought to Exeter where she is maintained in operating condition.
Ihe Bedford lifeboat, built in 1886and launched from the beach to save shipwrecked mariners, served into the 1930s. it now rests in the old fish market with the elegant Customs House of1689 in the background.
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!SCA-International Sailing Craft Association-is the banner they came ashore under, with the verve that is a hallmark of the founding director, David Goddard (and of the body of likeminded souls he and his wife have gathered around them). It is also the Roman name for the old Roman port of Exeter. The town , with the old half timbered hostelries of pastoral England surviving among more modern brick buildings of the industrial era , crowds with its crooked streets and narrow lanes under the imposing towers of its great Cathedral-a quiet-seeming town , located some way up the River Exe in Devon's rolling countryside, in the West Country. Being inland gave it some protection from sea marauders and the river made a convenient roadway to the English Channel, that broad avenue of European trade which even before Roman times may have been connected by ships with the more advanced Mediterranean world. In 1566 a canal was dug to improve Exeter's access to the sea particularly for the wool trade that had flourished by then for some centuries from this port. Later, as ships grew in size, other ports took the lead and Exeter became a backwater frequented by coasters and fishing craft , its vanished glories honored in the superb cathedral and history books. After World War II the last local maritime commerce died out, and for a few decades the city waterfront slumbered on, populated only by weekend strollers and occasional motorcyclists who staged races on its long wharf-until a young Major Goddard opted for early retirement in order to settle in Exeter and make the old harbor a center for the preservation of traditional sail. Strange craft began to arrive from all over-a pearling dhow from Bahrein , where Goddard had served, the old Bristol pilot cutter Cariad, immortalized in Frank Carr's A lachtsman's Log, and others. By June 1969 when Goddard and his gang opened shop as the Exeter Maritime Museum, they had 23 craft on display in the Canal basin and in one old building fronting on the basin. From there they rapidly expanded, saving craft from far corners of the world , and training a highly skilled corps of volunteers (with a very small cadre of permanent staff) to restore and to sail them . Quaint, even amusing as the jumbledtogether hulls of the craft that once again crowd the Exeter waterfront may be, they do not make up a grab bag of curios. The vessels are collected because they are vanishing from the ken of the human race, to whose progress each has in its way contributed . The skilJs, and yes, the attitudes
SEA HISTORY 100, SPRING 2002