form and wholeness, her integrity. When I went to visit her there and spoke to waterfront people to try to learn something of the vessel's working career on the waterfront, I gradually noticed that they did not call her ponton, or barge, as they called other hulks, but el gran velero-the great sailing ship. She spoke coherently to them, all right! And she and her breed speak to others today. O nce, waking early one morning in San Francisco, I went to visit the Cape Horner Balclutha on the waterfront therea ship similar (but different, reader, different!) to the Wavertree. The early morning sunlight gilded her spars and wavered in watery patterns on the curved grey-pa inted plating of her bows, rising from the salt water that clucked and murmured around it. As I stood with my head thrown back, tracing those fire-tipped lances of her yards and mast trucks as pi ring to a limitlessly promising heaven, I felt someone pass by. It was a yo ung mother wheeling a wicker pram with a very yo ung child inside. She turned around after a bit and wheeled it back across the disused railroad tracks and asphalt of the waterfront. A little embarrassed to approach her as a stranger, I asked
her what she was doing there. "Walking my child," was her spirited reply. I looked at the warehouse buildings, the wide sweep of the deserted Embarcadero, and then at the yo ung woma n standing against the gaunt, challenging shape of the ship, under the far-seeing gaze of the white robed wooden figurehead borne by the Balclutha. "Ir's a good place co be," she concluded, smiling "Don't you think so?" I did think so. That young person she was wheeling up and down over the rough tarred roadway was being brought up in a way to soak in, from the very outset of his own life's course, the challenge and the beauty of the high endeavor pursued by people before his time, who helped build the world he will inherit. How far back do those efforts go, beyond these surviving Cape Horn sailing ships? And what was the sailing abo utwhy did people make this huge extended effort that brought mankind ultimately to Cape Horn and that built the Cape Horner, the ultimate sea chariot, to make the voyage? Learning from Royals and Gallants The quest for the truth of the Cape Horn
Mainmast Foremast
sailing ship might well begin with the naming of the Wavertree's masts: starting at the bow, the fore, main and mizzen; then each mast reaches skyward in three sections. In the case of her mainmast, the stout iron lower mast reaches 69 feet above the deck, and its wooden topmast, 52 feet long, which with needed overlap at the doubling, reaches 37 feet 6 inches farther up; and finally the topgallant (not yet stepped as these words are written) will reach 60 feet 6 inches above that-so that its truck is 166 feet above the deck, or abo ut 16 stories high. When Wavertree was launched in 1885, she was rigged for a skysail, so the skysail pole is included in her tapering, slender topgallantmast. And the history of the development of the Cape Horn sailing ship is recited in the naming of those masts and the sails they carry. The topmast sail, in this case the skysail, was obviously added last in the evolution of the full-fledged sailing ship . It sounds like a word from the practical 1800s, tipping its hat not to royalty or gallantry, but to a natural phenomenon, the sky. And indeed we find this sail blooming on American ships as the 1800s open, Americans having every reason to cram on all the sail The Wavertree's sister Milverton, whose sail plan is shown here, sports the main skysail the Wavertree was built to carry. Both ships were denuded of this lofty kite to economize on labor.
Mizzen
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Main$ait -- , ~ - ¡ -- ¡¡
SEAHISTORY 155, SUMMER2016
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