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A pearling dhow, the Museum 'sfirst overseas craft, was built by the Sheik of Bahrein as a present, in the living tradition in which no plans are used, but only the shipwright's eye, ''coupled with experience and instinct. "
for film work as a replica of the Queen's Shallop of 1698. When Sir Alec Rose came to open the Museum in late July that year, he had been rowed up to the basin in style aboard her. Two more sharply contrasting craft were on display ashore. One was the racing proa Cheers, a bright yellow futuristic-looking object sporting two sliverlike hulls. She had been built for the 1968 Singlehanded Transatlantic Race and had done well , placing third. Swelling above Cheers was the ample bosom of the Bedford, a beamy pulling lifeboat built in 1886 for the Tyne Lifeboat Society. A fat cork belt encircling her upper strakes did nothing for her looks , but the extra
buoyancy it provided had seen her safel y through decades of hard weather service on a particularly nasty stretch of coast. We sailed from Exeter on August 21 , continuing around the coast, but returned to the Basin and our friends at the Museum in October. We laid up there for three months, preparing the ship for her eventual passage to Canada. This visit was bracketed by trouble at Turf: we went firmly aground in the lock entrance going up and remained there until the pub ran out of beer and the spring tides made again a few days later. Bound out en route for Bristol in January we were _weatherbound there for another three days. No, Exeter is not the easiest place to
Jolie Brise, built as a French pilot cutterjust before World War I, and sailed between the wars by yachting immortals E.G. Martin and Bobby Somerset, is owned by the Museum and operated by Dauntsey's Sailing School.
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The 61ft Hong Kong fishing junk Keying II, was new-built fo r a Hong Kong festival in London-with Exeter and the world ofhistoric ships the ultimate beneficiaries.
reach by sea, even less so since the completion of the new motorway bridge which would have had the masts out of our ship. But the Exeter Maritime Museum is thriving, adding significantly to the collection of working craft and bringing lustre and new life to what had been a seedy part of a beautiful city. Let us hope that it will long continue to do so! ..ti Mr. Myers, an artist, who has done much work for the National Maritime Museum , San Francisco, and the National Society, is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the American Society of Marine Artists, and has sailed with the likes of Alan Villiers and Adrian Small. He lives with his wife in Cornwall.
The Exeter Philosophy No one knows how the Greeks managed to row their triremes, with their three great banks of oars, for none survive. Experience with modem replicas of Elizabethan sailing ships seems to indicate that we have either failed to reproduce correctly or have too little experience of how to sail such ships, for we do not seem to be able to get them to go as Drake must have done. The Arabs are forgetting how, only fifty years ago, they sailed their beautiful baggalas down the African coast. And are we not ourselves losing sight of the intricacies of firing a coal burning boiler or the pitfalls of running a reciprocating steam engine-the heartbeats of the industrial revolution? If an object is worthy of preservation , so, surely, is the knowledge of how it was used , but better still the technique of actually using it. So, for this reason the museum sails a number of its craft and raises steam both in the tug and in Brunel's drag-boat which has been in wo rking order for more than one hundred and thirty years. Unfortunately it does not follow that because the museum can sail its pearling shewe or its Shetland fourern that it can therefore get the best out of these boats for this requires much experience. The museum would therefore be very chary at making any firm deductions as to the ability of this or that craft in relation to another or to the wind itself. Nevertheless, the practice will continue for those in the future to make their own deductions, for the technique, if not the expertise, will be preserved . - D.A. GODDARD
SEA HISTORY 100, SPRING 2002