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The Restoration of the Schooner Bowdoin Also Revived a Maritime Tradition by Renny A. Stackpole AN HISTORIC AMERICAN vessel has been completely restored and will once more resume her role at sea. She now rides at anchor at Rockland, Maine, and when she sails again in 1986 she will revive a New England maritime tradition. She is the Arctic exploring schooner Bowdoin, and for nearly thirty-five years, under the command of her owner, Admiral Donald B. MacMillan, she completed twenty-six voyages to North Atlantic waters, engaged in Arctic exploration and scientific research. My first glimpse of this graceful, white-hulled schooner was in 1959, when she came to Mystic Seaport to be enshrined. At the same time I had my first meeting with her owner and skipper, Admiral Mac Millan, and recognized the unique qualities of the man who had taken his schooner on her many Arctic voyages from 1921 to 1954. He lectured that evening at the old meeting house and I absorbed every part of his recounting of his adventures. At the conclusion of this remarkable octogenarian's discourse, and the usual congratulations and tributes, Admiral MacMillan disap peared from the hall, vanishing into the darkness out-of-doors. My father, who was at the time the Curator of Mystic Seaport, smiled at my query as to the whereabouts of the guest of honor. He had a hunch and told me where I might find him. Only a few yards away alongside a wharf at the river side, almost hidden by the night, we found "Captain Mac", standing quietly by the wheel of his schooner. After greeting him, I stayed for a while and he naturally lapsed into memories. I will not forget what he said before he returned to the meeting house that night. "I believe the Bowdoin will sail again." Then with his voice clear and sharp, "How would you like to take her north!" It was unmistakable; the veteran explorer had foreseen the even tual revival of the schooner as an active schoolship a decade later. During his quarter century in command of the Bowdoin, "Captain Mac" never took a seasoned crew aboard his 88-foot schooner. Instead, he favored students and research scientists who might hand, reef, steer, and lend a hand to the prodigious research he had initiated as
