Sea History 186 - Spring 2024

Maritime Defense of America

The Creesys' Record-Run Mutiny and the Naval Academy

Efie M. Morrissey to Greenland

Minneapolis

MINNESOTA

Red Wing Dubuque

WISCONSIN

Davenport

Fort Madison

Minneapolis

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MISSOURI

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MINNESOTA

IOWA

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Davenport

Fort Madison

WISCONSIN

Cape LOUISIANA

ARKANSAS

ss

St. Paul Mississipp i R i rev

ILLINOIS

Hannibal Alton

MISSOURI

Memphis

New Madrid

MISSISSIPPI

St. Louis

Baton Rouge

Houmas House

ARKANSAS

Greenville

M ississipp iRiver

Natchez Vicksburg

LOUISIANA

Baton Rouge

Houmas House

TENNESSEE

Memphis

MISSISSIPPI

Greenville

Vicksburg

St. Francisville

Natchez

St. Francisville

Cape Girardeau New Orleans

Oak Alley

36

BILL BLEYER

24

44

21

Historic Ships on a Lee Shore

Return of the Ida May

by Bill Bleyer

24 Mutiny Aboard the US Brig Somers

by William H. White

30 A Secret Mission in Wartime Greenland

Louise Arner Boyd aboard the Efie M. Morrissey by

Joanna Kafarowski

36 Captain and Navigator, Husband and Wife: Josiah and Eleanor Creesy’s Record Run

by David Hirzel

44 A Maritime History of the United States: The Creation and Defense of a Nation by Charles Raskob Robinson and Len Tantillo

illustrated by the American Society of Marine Artists

DEPARTMENTS

4 Deck Log

6 Leters

10 NMHS Cause in Motion

18 Fiddler’s Green

42 Curator’s Corner

54 Sea History for Kids

60 Marlinspike News

63 Ship Notes, Seaport & Museum News

73 Reviews

Cover: Supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) by Robert Gant Steele watercolor, 14 x 18 inches (see article pp. 44–53)

61st NMHS Annual Meeting

Join Us in the Hudson River Valley!

In all the years NMHS has been based in Peekskill, New York (more than 30!), we have never held our annual meeting at our headquarters. We are excited to invite you to join us this year to visit the Hudson River Valley and tour our ofce, which is also home to the new Ronald L. Oswald Maritime Library.

For millennia, libraries have served a critical role as repositories of knowledge and culture. Since its founding more than 60 years ago, NMHS has been collecting and accepting donations of maritime books and collections, and now has a library fully accessible to the public. On Friday afternoon (4:30–6:30 pm), 19 July 2024, we invite our members to visit our headquarters and check out the new Ronald L. Oswald Maritime Library and join us in the celebration of its debut. With more than 5,000 volumes, it is one of the largest maritime libraries in New York State—and what a treasure it is. You can peruse the collection online at www.seahistory.org/education/library/ and we look forward to your joining us in person for the celebration.

Te Hudson River Valley is so rich with history and beauty it is hard to pare down what we can cover in a weekend. We have secured a block of rooms at the Overlook Lodge of the historic Bear Mountain Inn, within the beautiful Bear Mountain State Park. We’ll be hosting our trustees’ dinner there on Saturday night for those who care to join. T is annual dinner is an intimate and casual a f air where we welcome our new trustees and get to know our local presenters and members.

Friday morning we will enjoy a boat excursion on the Hudson, after which many of our business neighbors at the Hat Factory, the 1870s historic brick building where we are headquartered, will open their doors to you before our afternoon library celebration. Saturday morning starts with a continental breakfast followed by the annual business meeting, local maritime history presentations, and lunch at the Cortlandt Yacht Club. In the afternoon we will make our way over to the US Military Academy at West Point and enjoy a tour of this historic and renowned institution.

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

West Point, from above Washington Valley (1834), by William James Bennet (c. 1787–1844)

If you can stay for Sunday, there are so many places in the area that you will want to visit: Washington’s Headquarters in Newburgh; FDR’s home and library at Hyde Park; the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring; Bannerman’s Island, the renowned modern art museum Dia Beacon, historic homes open for tours, plus kayaking, or hiking the Appalachian trail. Te list of things to do in the region is endless and we will be happy to provide ideas and help organize your visit to speci fc sites, depending on interest.

One place I want each of you to join me at is the last block of Peekskill’s own yellow brick road. Some claim it was the inspiration for Frank Baum’s yellow brick road when he wrote the Wizard of Oz. Whether or not that is true, it has come to represent the importance of following our dreams, of going into our adventures with hope and curiosity. Standing on the yellow brick road, you can see the river, the railroad, and the highway, and you too will believe that to follow the yellow brick road leads you to the world and adventures beyond.

I look forward to greeting you, our members from around the country and around the globe, at our 61st NMHS Annual Meeting.

—Burchenal Green, NMHS President Emeritus

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

PETER ARON PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE: Guy E. C. Maitland, Ronald L. Oswald, William H. White

OFFICERS & TRUSTEES: Chairman , James A. Noone; Vice Chairman, Richardo R. Lopes; Vice Presidents: Deirdre E. O’Regan, Wendy Paggiotta; Treasurer, William H. White; Secretary, Capt. Je f rey McAllister; Trustees: Charles B. Anderson; Walter R. Brown; CAPT Patrick Burns, USN (Ret.); CAPT Sally McElwreath Callo, USN (Ret.); William S. Dudley; David Fowler; Karen Helmerson; VADM Al Konetzni, USN (Ret.); K. Denise Rucker Krepp; Guy E. C. Maitland; Salvatore Mercogliano; Michael Morrow; Richard P. O’Leary; Ronald L. Oswald; Timothy J. Runyan; Richard Scarano; Jean Wort

CHAIRMEN EMERITI: Walter R. Brown, Alan G. Choate, Guy E. C. Maitland, Ronald L. Oswald; Howard Slotnick (1930–2020)

FOUNDER: Karl Kortum (1917–1996)

PRESIDENT EMERITUS: Burchenal Green, Peter Stanford (1927–2016)

OVERSEERS: Chairman, RADM David C. Brown, USMS (Ret.); RADM Joseph Callo, USN (Ret.); Christopher Culver; Richard du Moulin; Gary Jobson; Sir Robin Knox-Johnston; John Lehman; Capt. James J. McNamara; Philip J. Shapiro; H. C. Bowen Smith; Capt. Cesare Sorio; Philip J. Webster; Roberta Weisbrod

NMHS ADVISORS: John Ewald, Steven Hyman, J. Russell Jinishian, Gunnar Lundeberg, Conrad Milster, William Muller, Nancy Richardson

SEA HISTORY EDITORIAL ADVISORY

BOARD: Chairman, Timothy Runyan; Norman Brouwer, Robert Browning, William Dudley, Lisa Egeli, Daniel Finamore, Kevin Foster, Cathy Green, John O. Jensen, Frederick Leiner, Joseph Meany, Salvatore Mercogliano, Carla Rahn Phillips, Walter Rybka, Quentin Snediker, William H. White

Sea History e-mail: seahistory@gmail.com

NMHS e-mail: nmhs@seahistory.org

Website: www.seahistory.org

Phone: 914 737-7878

Sea History is sent to all members of the National Maritime Historical Society.

MEMBERSHIP IS WELCOME: Afterguard $10,000; Benefactor $5,000; Plankowner $2,500; Sponsor $1,000; Donor $500; Patron $250; Friend $100; Regular $45. Members outside the US, please add $20 for postage. Individual copies cost $5.99.

NMHS STAFF: Executive Director, Burchenal Green; Vice President of Operations, Wendy Paggiotta; Senior Sta f Writer, Shelley Reid; Business Manager, Andrea Ryan; Manager of Educational Programs, Heather Purvis; Membership Coordinator, Marianne Pagliaro

SEA HISTORY: Editor, Deirdre E. O’Regan; Advertising Director, Wendy Paggiotta

Sea History is printed by Te Lane Press, South Burlington, Vermont, USA.

Smokeless Batle?

Experts on the 1813 US landing at York will have noticed historical inaccuracies in the scene that I provided for Dr. Bill Dudley’s article on the amphibious raids on Lake Ontario (Sea History 185, Winter 2023–24). T at Photoshop sketch was an early version and my updated transmission for its correction went awry. My fault with apologies. T is art efort has undergone numerous historian-guided corrections, all done with multiple layers on Photoshop as part of the process; the f nal large oil painting had not yet been completed. Here is the corrected and more accurate version, and readers will be relieved to note that the Battle of York was not smokeless.

Pete R indlisbacher

Katy, Texas

Farewell Mike Rauworth

Mike Rauworth was such an incredible and important person to the maritime heritage community; he will be well missed. I loved his features in Sea History and have been known to quote his quirky phrases. He was always fun. I snapped this shot of him with our chairman (now chairman emeritus) Ron Oswald when he received our award for the best feature article in Sea History in 2017–18.

I encourage the maritime community to support the leadership of Tall Ships America as they chart their course after the loss of both Bert Rogers (executive director of Tall Ships America at the time of his death in 2018), and Mike in such a short time. (Read about Mike Rauworth on page 18 of this issue.)

Burchenal Green

NMHS President Emeritus

Gone But Not Forgoten

I would like to commend Sea History for the article on USS Tampa and the e fort to bestow, posthumously, the Purple Hearts that are due the 130 men who were lost with their ship when it

American Troops Landing at York, 27 April 1813

by Peter Rindlisbacher

PHOTO BY BURCHENAL GREEN

NMHS Chairman Emeritus Ronald Oswald and the late Michael J. Rauworth, who was awarded the Rodney Houghton Award for his articles on the Jones Act that appeared in Sea History 159 and 160.

was torpedoed by a Uboat in 1918. Who was Frank Garrett/Charles Green? In some ways, he was a nobody. A runaway teenager who joined the Coast Guard during World War I under an assumed name. But does that make his sacri fce less important than others whose names we might be more familiar with? Not at all.

This is a photo of a 17-year-old Charles Parkin, his Purple Heart medal, and the American flag presented to his family in 2019. Parkin was a shipmate of Charles Green (whom he would have known as Frank Garret) when the Tampa was sunk with all hands in 1918.

We honor our war dead as a reminder of true American patriots who willingly serve their country with honor and who made the ultimate sacri fce. Tat some of our fallen servicemen (and women) have no family to keep their memory alive should not devalue their service. I applaud the author of the article, Charles Meyer, and Green’s relatives (two and three generations later), who kept up the e fort to restore his name, to see that his Purple Heart is awarded, and for bringing us his story.

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The Descendants of Whaling Masters encourage you to honor your whaling ancestor with a membership. DWM celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024 and is eager to hear from anyone who had a relative who served on board a WHALER.

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Foundation Franklin

An excellent article in the last issue (“Tugboats to Remember” in Sea History 185) on the hardworking vessels that are all too often ignored in concentrating on the beautiful, or famous, or heavily armed. I was particularly pleased to see the painting of the former HMS Frisky, known as Foundation Franklin, during her career as a salvage tug. Her dramatic story is retold in Farley Mowat’s book Te Grey Seas Under (1964). Parts of Foundation Franklin are preserved in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her bell is located in the ofces of Svitzer Canada Ltd. at the same wharf from which Foundation Franklin operated all those years ago.

Charley Seavey Rockport, Massachusetts

Corrigenda: Foundation Franklin

As a marine researcher, illustrator, lecturer, writer, and editor on shipping and tugs in particular, I feel obliged to point out some errors in the winter issue regarding the salvage tug Foundation Franklin, which was based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I reside. Te cargo ship Firby ran ashore in the Strait of Belle Isle, a narrow body of water separating the northern peninsula of the island of Newfoundland from the Canadian mainland. It is assuredly not in France, which would explain why it was a relatively short tow of 625 miles to Quebec City.

Te name of the primary port in Newfoundland is St. John’s (with an apostrophe). It is important to give it the correct spelling to avoid confusion with the port of Saint John, New Brunswick. Foundation Maritime did not purchase the Bustler -class tug Samsonia, but rather it was chartered from the Admiralty from 1946 to 1952. It was renamed Foundation Josephine for the duration of the charter then reverted to Samsonia when returned.

Te artist/author presumably relied on the books Grey Seas Under and Te Serpent’s Coil, written by Farley Mowat. Mowat was well known for not letting facts get in the way of a good story. Despite the reverence tug enthusiasts have for Mowat’s works, they are not holy writ. Fact checking is essential using his works—and the works of others, too. I do admire Sea History. I read it regularly and wish you and the magazine best wishes for 2024.

M alcolm B. (M ac) M ackay Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

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Victory Chimes Inspiration

Te photo of the Victory Chimes departing Rockland Harbor under tow and the accompanying write-up in “Ship Notes, Seaport, and Museum News” on p. 69 of the winter issue of Sea History inspired this poem.

R ichard Dey Needham, Massachusetts

From the Editor: Te historic three-masted schooner Victory Chimes was sold at auction last year to Alex and Miles Pincus, owners of Crew NY, which operates two other historic schooners that they have converted for use as foating oyster bars in New York. (www.crewny.com)

Fare Forward, Victory Chimes

With three masts all sky-writing, there was no mistaking her along the coast, among the coastal islands, not from afar,

nor near with mattresses spread out on cabin tops and many passengers spread out on them without their tops,

beneath the sun, the schooner aslant, making her way, the tall white sails all drawing, drawing, drawing, across the bay.

“Sin ships!” Cap called ’em, the schooners out of Camden and Rockland. Youngsters in the school-ship Tabor Boy, we hardly understood why with such joy we laughed so hard.

Having hauled out of Baltimore fertilizer, coal and lumber, then out of ports in Maryland and Maine passengers escaping lives mundane, from Rockland Harbor

she’s being towed to North Moore Street, still undefeated, to join a feet of oyster bars freshly painted, rigging taut and tarred, sails still bent on, all drawing, drawing, drawing f rm white collars

under awnings. From Maine she’s gone but not her kind; and for these windjammers, the mattresses she leaves behind.

—Richard Dey

2024 National Maritime Awards Dinner

The National Press Club • 18 April • Washington, DC

National Maritime Awards Dinner chairs, Samuel F. Byers and Kristen L. Greenaway, along with NMHS Chair CAPT James A. Noone, USN ( Ret .), and Founding NMAD Chair Philip Webster, invite you to join us for our annual gala in Washington, DC, to honor three esteemed individuals: Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr., USMC (Ret.); Dr. William S. Dudley ; and Dawn Riley

America’s ambassador of sailing, Gary Jobson, will be our emcee. NMHS Vice Chairman Richardo Lopes and Voyage Digital Media will provide video introductions

on the awardees. Guests will enjoy a special performance by the US Coast Guard Academy Cadet Chorale, directed by Dr. Daniel R. M. McDavitt, DMA . Te Combined Sea Services Color Guard will present the colors.

In addition, the NMHS Maritime Art Gallery, hosted by American Society of Marine Artists President and award-winning artist Patrick O’Brien, will feature a selection of contemporary maritime art for sale (preview on pages 14–17). We look forward to welcoming you to this special evening as we pay tribute to these remarkable honorees.

The 2024 National Maritime Awardees

Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr., USMC (Ret.)

General Charles Bolden will receive the NMHS 2024 Distinguished Service Award for his extraordinary career in service to our country and his e forts to explore and understand the universe. T is award recognizes his accomplishments as a US Marine aviator and astronaut, and for his leadership roles as Deputy Commandant of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, Commanding General of Operation Desert Tunder in Kuwait, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator.

Bolden grew up in Columbia, SC. Following his graduation from the US Naval Academy in 1968, he joined the Marine Corps. He was based at the “Rose Garden” in T ailand during the Vietnam War and few more than 100 combat missions.

He later earned his Master of Science degree at the University of Southern California and graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland. As an astronaut from 1986–1994, Bolden logged over 680 hours in space and completed four missions as either pilot or commander.

Your perspective really changes when you see the thin blue line that is our atmosphere. You get an opportunity to see that we live in a single ocean. We live on a water planet. The continents are just bodies of land that manage to just stick up high enough that they protrude above the ocean.

His space shuttle f ights include the Discovery mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atlantis mission that carried the f rst space lab dedicated to understanding

NASA / PAUL E. ALERS

Earth’s climate and atmosphere. His f nal f ight was aboard Discovery in 1994, the f rst joint US-Russia mission.

After completing his service as an astronaut in 1994, he served as the Assistant Commandant of Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, and in 1998 as the Commanding General of the Marine Expeditionary Force attached to Operation Desert Tunder in Kuwait. He served as the Commanding General of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, prior to his retirement from the Marine Corps in 2003 after 34 years of devoted service.

President Barack Obama nominated Bolden to head up NASA in 2009. “Te combination of my leadership training at the Naval Academy and what I learned in the opera-

tional forces of the Marine Corps prior to becoming an astronaut stood me in good stead. It prepared me very well to lead.” Bolden oversaw the Mars Curiosity Rover landing, the Juno Space Probe orbit of Jupiter, and the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021.

Refecting on his career, Bolden stated, “I am an ordinary human being who has been a forded the opportunity to do some incredible things. I have had the gift of working with some of the most phenomenal people in the world–both in the Marine Corps and in NASA.” Te important part of his work, he reminds us, is the people, and he encourages young people to follow their passions and be persistent in pursuing their dreams.

Dr. William S. Dudley

Dr. William Dudley will receive the David A. O’Neil Sheet Anchor Award in recognition of his inspired and dedicated service to NMHS and its mission to promote awareness of maritime history. A prominent naval historian, Dudley has served as a trustee for the Society since 2012 and is the trustee liaison for Sea History.

NMHS is like a second family to me. There’s always a challenge—that is a given. But that is what it is about, enjoying the challenge, and I have always been happy to be a part of it.

Dr. Dudley and his wife, Donna, are past co-cha irs of the National Maritime Awards Dinner (NMAD), and he has been an active member of the NMAD committee.

Dudley’s love of the sea and all things naval has been a lifelong passion: “I am devoted to sailing, devoted to the Navy, and that has been a good part of my life... I’m a saltwater guy. I’ve got it in my blood.”

Dr. Dudley started his relationship with the Navy through active duty, serving on a destroyer and in the Selected Reserve from 1960 to 1963. After earning a PhD from Columbia University in 1972, he taught history at Southern Methodist University and became a supervisory historian at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, DC, in 1977.

Dudley was the Director of Naval History for the US Navy from 1995 to 2004, concurrently serving as Director of the Naval Historical Center, Curator for the Navy, and

Coordinator of Navy Museums. He was promoted to Senior Historian in 1990 and later became the Director of the Naval Historical Center (now known as the Naval History and Heritage Command), a position he held until his retirement in 2004.

He is the author of many reviews, articles, monographs, and documentary editions. Renowned as a preeminent scholar of the War of 1812, he is the original editor of the fourvolume series, Te Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. His published works include Maryland: A History (2010), which received two best maritime heritage book awards; Te Naval War of 1812: America’s Second War of Independence (2013), co-authored with Scott Harmon; and his latest book, Inside the US Navy of 1812–1815 (2021). Current projects include a book on the antebellum US Navy 1816–1861.

Dudley served as president of the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) and the Society for History in the Federal Government. He is the former Chair of the Maritime Committee of the Maryland Historical Society, a past member of the Board of Directors of the Naval Historical Foundation, and the Board of Governors of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.

He is the recipient of the US Navy Superior Civilian Public Service Award and the NASOH K. Jack Bauer Award for Scholarship and Service. In 2014 he was honored with the Dudley W. Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement Medal from the Naval Historical Foundation.

PHOTO BY VERNON YOUNG JR.

Dawn Riley

Dawn Riley will be presented with the NMHS 2024 Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her remarkable sailing career, particularly for her role as a mentor and educator training premier-level sailors for future Olympic, America’s Cup, and other world-class sailing competitions. Riley has overcome barriers that previously excluded women from such pinnacle events in the sailing world. As the executive director of Oakcli f Sailing, she is leading the movement to invigorate the sport of sailing and fulf lling Oakclif ’s mission: Build American Leaders T rough Sailing—

We are building American leaders through sailing— yes. But what we try to do above everything is teach them what’s the best practice. How are you a leader? How are you contributing? No mater whether you are in the Olympics, sailing around the world, or running for ofice, you have to be a good human being and be counted on to do what’s right.

As a young teen, Riley declared that she was going to sail in the America’s Cup and race around the world. She has achieved the dreams of her youth and much more as a competitive racer, a champion sailor, and now a powerful role model to aspiring young sailors. “ Tere is no better way to be on a team than on a boat; you all have to work together to get to the f nish line. You literally can’t go home. You can’t go to the sidelines. You are on a boat!”

Riley was part of the f rst-ever all-female crew in the 1989–90 Whitbread Race aboard Maiden, which was documented in the 2019 f lm also named Maiden. She was a crewmember onboard America 3 when it successfully defended the 1992 America’s Cup, and she raced around the world a second time in the Whitbread Race as skipper of Heineken in the 1993–94 campaign. As CEO and captain of America True, Riley was the f rst woman to manage an

America’s Cup sailing team, a team that made the semi-f nal round. In 1999 Riley was named Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year for her victories on the match-racing circuit. She served as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and has served on many governing boards, including that of the US Sailing Association. Riley’s stellar reputation, excellence as a sailor, and dual induction into the National Sailing Hall of Fame and America’s Cup Hall of Fame as the youngest and sole female “dual-famer” is an inspiration to many.

In her 2013 autobiography, Taking the Helm (written with Cynthia Goss), she makes the case that women can be equally competitive with men in of shore sailing. Her accomplishments continue to inspire countless individuals and have signi fcantly advanced women’s participation in the sport.

You’re Invited!

Please contact us to reserve your place: seating is limited. Tickets start at $400. Attire is business/cocktail.

Hotel Block : NMHS has reserved a block of rooms at the Hilton Garden Inn at 815 14th Street NW, two blocks from the National Press Club, 17–19 April, at $309 per night (plus applicable taxes). T is rate is available until 27 March or until sold out. To reserve

your place at the dinner, make a hotel reservation, or for more information, visit us online at www.seahistory.org/washington2024, or call Wendy Paggiotta at 914 737-7878, ext. 557. Special thanks to Commodore Sponsor William H. White.

61st NMHS Annual Meeting

Peekskill, New York

19–21 July 2024

Trustees of the National Maritime Historical Society invite our members to join us for a weekend of celebration, adventure, and fellowship at our 61st annual meeting in Peekskill, New York, home to NMHS headquarters in the heart of the beautiful Hudson Valley. Join us to toast our chairman emeritus, Ronald L. Oswald, as we celebrate the oficial opening of the Ronald L. Oswald Maritime Library. This is a wonderful time for our members to come together to share our achievements and ofer their ideas as the Society plots its course ahead.

Join us on the morning of Friday, 19 July, for a Hudson River cruise aboard the Evening Star. Later that day we’ll gather at NMHS headquarters to christen the Ronald L. Oswald Memorial Library. Registration for the Friday boat tour with lunch and the library reception is $80 per person.

On Saturday, 20 July, we’ll enjoy a continental breakfast at the Cortlandt Yacht Club in nearby Montrose, followed by the annual business meeting, lunch, and presentations by leaders from the local maritime heritage community. We’ll hear from award-winning artist Len Tantillo on “Colonial Dutch & New York Waterways” and Tom Johnson, co-founder of Bannerman’s Island Trust, on “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal,” Michael J. F. Sheehan, senior historian, Stony Point Battlefeld State Historic Site, on “ Te American Revolution in the Hudson Valley,” and a talk on climate changes efecting the Hudson River and Valley.

Afterwards, members will meet at West Point to embark on a two-hour History and Tradition bus tour that highlights the rich story of the forti fcation at West Point, the US Military Academy’s role in the Revolution, and its continued in fuence on American military policy. Saturday evening we’ll meet at the Overlook Lodge at Bear Mountain to enjoy a group dinner. Registration for

the Saturday annual meeting is $100 per person and includes breakfast, the business meeting, presentations, lunch, and the West Point tour. Dinner at the Overlook Lodge is $90 per person (cash bar).

Sunday, 21 July, join us as we tour the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, an hour north of the Overlook Lodge.

We encourage you to extend your visit to take in a hike or kayak, or visit Bannerman’s Island, George Washington’s Headquarters, and the Vanderbilt Mansion.

NMHS Chair CAPT James A. Noone, USN (Ret.), and Program Chair Walter R. Brown encourage all NMHS members to join us. For more information and to register, please refer to the magazine wrapper, visit us online at www.seahistory.org/annualmeeting2024, or contact Heather Purvis at administrator@seahistory.org or (914) 737-7878 (ext. 0). If you can join us as an Annual Meeting Donor, Sponsor, or Underwriter, your support goes a long way and is much appreciated.

NMHS has reserved a block of rooms at the Overlook Lodge at Bear Mountain located at 55 Hessian Drive, Highland Falls, for $259 per night plus applicable taxes. To reserve your room, call 845 786-2731 (ext. 0) and use the code “National Maritime.” T is rate is available until June 4th, or until the block is full

Evening on the Hudson by William Muller

The National Maritime Historical Society

Special Preview of the 2024 Maritime Art Gallery

Te National Maritime Historical Society is excited to host the 2024 Maritime Art Gallery as part of the National Maritime Awards Dinner at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on 18 April 2024. As a Sea History reader, you have the opportunity to purchase one of the paintings before the gala during this special preview. To view additional paintings not presented here, please visit the gallery online at www.seahistory.org/artgallery2024. And if you can join us at the dinner in Washington, DC, you’ll have the opportunity to view the art in person and meet some of the artists. Under the leadership of marine artist Patrick O’Brien, president of the American Society of Marine Artists, a select group of artists has been invited to participate. New works by Patrick O’Brien, Brad Betts, Poppy Balser, Steve Bluto, Marc Castelli, Austin Dwyer, Lisa Egeli, Neal Hughes, Leonard Mizerek, Jeanne Rosier Smith, and Stewart White will be on display— and for sale. After the event, the exhibition will continue through 31 May 2024 at the Annapolis Marine Art Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland (www.annapolismarineart.com). 25% of proceeds will beneft NMHS and is tax-deductible to the buyer—shipping is included. Purchased paintings will be displayed as “Sold” during the event. To purchase a painting, please contact Wendy Paggiotta at vicepresident@seahistory.org or call 914-737-7878, ext. 557.

Onward! by Poppy Balser • 12 x 16 inches • watercolor • $1,300

I am both an artist and a sailor. I spend a lot of time looking at water to fgure out how to paint it. One of my favorite parts of painting boats is to show how the light refects of the water and up onto sails, and then bounces back and forth between sails and decking. It is a visual treat for an artist, and I do my best to make those efects visible to all in my paintings. I was fortunate enough to fnd myself on the water as the boats racing in the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta entered Camden Harbor. It was an immense treat to be surrounded by these magni fcent boats as they cruised by with all their sails aloft. —PB

Te painting depicts a fushdeck tugboat with a tripleexpansion steam engine. She is venturing into strong winds and ferce seas to rescue a freighter of 6,000 tons nearly six times her size! Some who crew these tugboats are born courageous … others soon learn to be! —AD

Rainbow by Marc Castelli • 22 x 30 inches • watercolor • $6,850

Ships of Wood, Men of Steel by Austin Dwyer 30 x 20 inches • oil on canvas • $5,500

x 48 inches • oil on canvas • $5,800

Te Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland, is home to a working shipyard with an intensive master-apprentice program. On the far left under the canopy is the Maryland Dove, a re-creation of a 17th-century vessel that has since been completed. Over towards the right side of the painting, the shipyard crew is rebuilding the museum’s 1912 river tug Delaware. —SW

12 x 17 inches • watercolor $1,800

In this painting (above), artist Neal Hughes is working on a painting of a wooden yacht during the Easton Plein Air Festival. He’s placed his easel against the afternoon sun and, because the vessel he is painting is behind him, he has to turn around frequently to observe his subject. Te splash of red is the collapsible wagon he uses to carry all of his gear. —SW

Before Dawn by Neal Hughes

12 x 16 inches • oil • $1,600

(above) Busy at the Boatyard by Stewart White 24

Painting at a Boatyard by Stewart White

My emphasis for Twilight’s Edge was to create the mood and atmosphere of a typical turn-ofthe-century harbor. Te open sky gave me an opportunity to create patterns of light and shadow, which refect throughout the piece. I chose the palette and the efects of light before sunset as it strikes the sails and refects in the water to heighten the mood and atmosphere. —LM

Gretel II is a 12 metre-class racing yacht designed and built to compete in the 1970 America’s Cup in Newport, Rhode Island. She raced against the American yacht Intrepid, which ended up winning the series 4-1. —SB

Te Chase by Stephen Bluto • 27 x 18 inches

Twilight’s Edge by Leonard Mizerek • 16 x 20 inches • oil on canvas • $3,800

PHOTO BY ALLISON LUCAS

CAPT Michael J. Rauworth, USCG (Ret.) (1949–2023)

Te sail training community is grieving the loss of an important leader in the death of maritime attorney Michael J. Rauworth in December. Among his many roles, Mike served as president and board chair for Tall Ships America for more than 18 years and continued on as a board member after he stepped down in 2021. His career as a mariner started in the US Coast Guard; he served as an ofcer in the Coast Guard and Coast Guard Reserves for nearly 30 years. His civilian career at sea included service on just about every type of vessel: square rig and schooners, icebreakers, cargo, military ships, passenger vessels, pilot—you name it.

Mike threw out the anchor after more than 200,000 miles at sea to become a maritime attorney focusing on Jones Act cases and those involving issues such as marine insurance, port security, marine construction and surety, and crisis management. On his LinkedIn page, he stated: “I help solve problems, mostly maritime. Sometimes in court, sometimes in better ways. And I help f nd solutions (mostly maritime), and steer around problems, which is even better. It’s quite gratifying.”

On the water and ashore, Mike was dedicated to promoting sail training and the opportunities it can ofer both trainees and crew. In that role he was dedicated to a fault. He was also very much interested in making maritime topics and law accessible and understandable to the lay person. In that spirit, he wrote articles for Sea History on the history and interpretation of the Jones Act, and, when maritime incidents made the regular news cycle, he would call and ask if I would like an article on related topics, such as the Limitation and Liability Act (after the fatal f re aboard the dive boat Conception in 2019) and the Law of General Average (in discussing MV Ever Given getting stuck and blocking passage through the Suez Canal in 2021). You can read his articles in Sea History 159, 160, 175, and 179. Mike was recognized in 2018 with the NMHS Rodney N. Houghton Award for the best feature article in Sea History in the preceding year.

I asked his long-time fellow sea captain, collaborator, and friend Captain Jonathan B. Smith for a few thoughts on Mike’s legacy, and he provided me with the following reminiscences.

—Deirdre O’Regan Editor Sea History

We first met 40 years ago, in the summer of ’83. He was chief mate in the four-masted barque Sea Cloud; I was skipper of the schooner yacht Marie Pierre. We were anchored together of Rhodes, in Greece. It happened to be my birthday, so the mood was festive. I finagled an invite over to Sea Cloud’s sundowner, over which Mike was presiding. He was a welcoming and gracious host. We enjoyed a few tots and sea stories together and then went our separate ways. How strange it was, then, that two years later we found ourselves co-captaining the newly built schooner Spirit of Massachuset s in Boston! So began a long-time friendship.

I have been thinking about what will stand out and remain whenever I think of him—beyond his expertise and experience in numerous realms. What are the descriptive words I’m looking for? “Af able, generous, forthright, welcoming (again), modest, dedicated, open, professional, likable…” all of these rolled into one, and more. It could be argued that Tall Ships America might well not exist today without Mike’s hand on the helm and checkbook at the ready. Through his seagoing background, knowledge of maritime law, and tireless eforts, he steered the organization through varied troubled seas for many years to the present. His influence has positively afected many.

I’ll always remember him as emblematic of the best qualities of a shipmate—dependable, kind, selfless, able—and expressive of a certain joy and humor. His unique smile lingers on as will his tireless eforts on behalf of those who go down to the sea in ships. Farewell, Mike.

—Captain JB Smith

CAPT Don Walsh, USN (Ret.) (1931–2023)

“A decade of exploration capped in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. ‘Buzz’ Aldrin stepping onto the moon began with the equally daring accomplishment of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in January 1960 descending to the botom of the Marianas Trench.”

Lieutenant Don Walsh made history in January 1960 when he and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard piloted the bathyscaphe Trieste to the deepest place on earth—Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. Teir groundbreaking descent stood unmatched for 52 years. Born in Berkeley, California, Don Walsh joined the US Navy in 1948 and served as an air crewman in torpedo bombers until he entered the US Naval Academy in 1950. After graduation, he served two years in the Amphibious Forces, followed by service in submarines and then aboard the Trieste from 1959–62. His 24-year naval career included service in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. During this period, Captain Walsh pursued a PhD in oceanography from Texas A&M University, focusing on remote sensing, and in 1969 he earned a masters in political science from San Diego State University, where he studied law-of-the-sea issues.

In 1975 Captain Walsh retired from the US Navy and in 1976 he founded the consulting company International Maritime Inc. He participated in more than 50 polar expeditions and piloted dives to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the Azores, the RMS Titanic wreck site, and the WWII German battleship Bismarck. Active in the design, manufacture, and operation of manned and unmanned submersibles, Captain Walsh also served as technical advisor for f lmmaker James Cameron’s deep-sea explorations.

—Dr. David F. Winkler, Naval Historian

(l–r) Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN, and Jacques Piccard in the bathyscaphe Trieste, 1960.

Captain Walsh was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was the recipient of numerous awards: the Explorers Club’s Lowell Tomas Medal and Explorers Medal, the Jules Verne Adventures organization’s Étoile Polaire medal, and the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal. In 2001 he was also selected as one of the world’s greatest explorers in Life magazine’s Te Greatest Adventures of All Time.

In recognition of this remarkable record of research, achievement, and service, in 2012 the National Maritime Historical Society awarded Don Walsh our Distinguished Service Award. He was an engaging, approachable, and personable recipient. He was enthusiastic about sharing his life’s work and honored to be recognized.

Don Walsh continued to play a key role in underwater discoveries. T rough his international consulting practice, he focused on ocean-related projects throughout the world. In 2020 his son Kelly Walsh completed a dive to the Challenger Deep, repeating the feat his father had achieved 60 years before.

Fair winds, Don Walsh, from your friends at NMHS and from an appreciative global community.

—Burchenal Green, NMHS President Emeritus

NOAA SHIP COLLECTION

US NAVY PHOTO BY JOHN F. WILLIAMS

We are mourning the recent death of Pam Rorke Levy, an enthusiastic and generous supporter of the Society who, with her husband Matt Brooks, received the 2019 NMHS Distinguished Service Award for their restoration of the historic yacht Dorade, regarded as one of the greatest yachts ever produced by Sparkman & Stephens. A vibrant and accomplished woman in many arenas, Pam was an Emmywinning television producer and creative director, creating a wide range of f lms and TV programs on subjects at the intersection of art, culture, and history for PBS, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, A&E, and the History Channel.

She was a supporter of the St. Francis Sailing Foundation, which supports young sailors at all levels of the sport. “It was important to both of us to make a positive social impact, and important to encourage youth to come into the sport,” said Matt.

Purchasing Dorade in 2010, the couple restored the historic yacht to racing condition. Pam shared her thoughts on her f rst experience underway aboard their new yacht.

The moment we walked onboard Dorade we fell in love, not knowing what we were geting into. Afer a first sail aboard Dorade, we realized this was not a boat we were going to be sailing around San

Francisco Bay by ourselves; it was a race car— designed to go in a straight line for a very long way.

Of her many wonderful qualities, it is her courage that stays with me. I remember a quote she gave us some years ago that epitomizes the thoughtful, generous, interesting person we have lost.

Absolutely, Olin Stephens is my role model. We were extraordinarily lucky to fall in love with his very first boat—the only boat he ever owned. He lived to be 100 years old and designed eight America’s Cup winners. Dorade meant a tremendous amount to him and it launched his career. There isn’t a time when I am on the boat when I don’t think about Olin being onboard. He was able to commit himself to excellence and discipline in every way, and he did it with an extraordinary sense of humility and gratefulness. No mater how many races we win, I want to have that kind of humility—that there is something more to learn and be generous in sharing the credit and the experience with as many other people as we can.

Fair winds, Pam. You will be long remembered and missed. From all of us at the National Maritime Historical Society. —Burchenal Green, NMHS President Emeritus

Pam Rorke Levy (1956–2024)

PHOTO BY ALLISON LUCAS COURTESY PAM RORKE LEVY AND MATT BROOKS

Return of the Ida May

A Replica of Long Island’s First Motorized Oyster Dredge Launched in Oyster Bay Afer 12 Years

PHOTO

by Bill Bleyer

Building a replica of the historic Oyster Bay shell fsh dredge Ida May took a dozen years, about $1 million, 35,000 hours of mostly unpaid labor by 70 volunteers and a few professionals, plus a lot of perseverance in the face of fundraising di fculties and COVID-19 complications. While the project took a full decade longer to complete than anticipated, the vessel is on track to carry paying passengers on Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s north shore.

Last spring, Ida May was launched by trailer into Oyster Bay after the boat was completed in a shed on the southern edge of the harbor by the Christeen Oyster Sloop Preservation Corp., the organization that had previously restored the 1883 sailing oyster dredge Christeen.

Te volunteer group, called the Ida May Project (IMP), has since turned over Ida May to another nonproft, the WaterFront Center, which runs marine educational programs onboard boats, in the classroom, and along the

waterfront. Te center also operates the Christeen for harbor tours.

Te IMP started out with plans to restore the original Ida May, which was launched in 1925 by Frank M. Flower & Sons. “It was built by Frank M. Flower on the beach in Bayville,” said George Lindsay Jr., president of the volunteer group. “ Te story [goes that] he did it after he thought he had lost his three sons on a smaller boat when they were making a routine trip to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. Tey almost sank the boat and had to put into City Island. For four days Frank Flower didn’t know where his sons were. So, he decided to build a bigger boat. It was the f rst oyster dredge built to be motorized, as far as we know.”

Te 1925 Ida May would dredge for oysters and clams and then transport them to the city f sh market, usually with a crew of two or three. Te boat was designed with a broad beam and shallow draft. “A lot of the oystering is done in fairly shallow water,” Lindsay

explained. “It was [built] wide to make a stable platform. Virtually the entire hull was a hold for clams. Everything forward of the pilot house was just cargo. Tere were a couple of berths on either side of the diesel engine so two or three people could spend the night there, but it wasn’t designed for cruising.”

Te boat was engaged in oyster dredging for 75 years. Te Flower company retired her and brought her ashore in September 2003. But the dredge, as designed, would not have been able to carry paying passengers under current Coast Guard regulations. Having deteriorated beyond repair while the restoration efort was being organized, it was demolished in 2010.

Instead, they adjusted the goal and made plans to build a replica. Starting in November 2011, volunteers worked part-time with a professional shipwright as money became available. Te original Ida May was 45 feet long and 15½ feet on the beam, constructed with bent oak frames and cedar planking. Te

Ida May under construction. She was built by mostly volunteer labor in a shed along the Oyster Bay waterfront.

replica is a foot wider, to meet Coast Guard requirements for carrying paying passengers. Construction got underway with a $125,000 contribution from singer-songwriter Billy Joel, who owns a harborside home on Centre Island on Oyster Bay, and who worked on a dredge owned by Flower & Sons as a teenager growing up on Long Island Sound.

Te new iteration of Ida May is framed with two layers of three-inch white oak, some of it left over from the Christeen project, and the rest was obtained in Virginia. Her planks are 1¾inch white oak, the pilothouse frame is white oak, and the exterior is red cedar. Te interior is black walnut paneling with cherry trim. Te original 45-foot Ida May was constructed with bent oak frames and cedar planking.

Several weeks after the f nal hull plank was installed, the widow of Clint Smith, a former town harbormaster who organized the Christeen group, smashed a bottle of champagne against the bow and Ida May slipped into the harbor. It was a breezy May morning with the Christeen and bay constable boats standing watch. In celebration, a f re truck sprayed water into the air—and accidentally on town ofcials and other people watching from the dock(!).

“It’s very exciting because, for me, it’s been a seven-year commitment,” Lindsay said. “It’s been a tremendous learning experience. And it’s been really fun. But the goal was always to get the boat f nished and launched, and here we are.” After the launch, the punch list included getting the engine and some other equipment running, Lindsay said.

Te f nal steps—sea trials and Coast Guard certi fcation for carrying up to 44 passengers—are currently underway. “ Te plan initially is to introduce her to the community to get people familiar with the vessel,” said George Ellis, executive director of the

WaterFront Center. “We also expect her to be an active participant in the current resurgence of oyster farming. We’ll do educational cruises and perhaps get involved in research. We hope to partner up with some of the universities and other groups engaged in oyster farming.”

“She’s very maneuverable,” Lindsay said. “Her steering worked out very well. She cruises very comfortably at about 6½ knots, and we got her up to about 9 knots.”

With the recent sale of the Flower company’s remaining wooden dredge, Ida May is now the only wooden oyster boat in Oyster Bay, and, as such, she is preserving the history of commercial shell f shing in Oyster Bay, both by actually doing the work itself, and by representing what was once a thriving industry in the region so that this generation and generations to come are aware of their local history.

(www.thewaterfrontcenter.org)

Bill Bleyer, a retired award-winning reporter for Newsday, is the author of six books on Long Island history. During his 33-year career writing for Newsday, he also wrote the “On the Water” Sunday column for five years. He contributed a chapter to Harbor Voices—New York Harbor Tugs, Ferries, People, Places & More (published by Sea History Press, 2008). Bleyer continues to write articles as a freelancer and is a frequent speaker at venues across the Northeast.

The original Ida May was built in 1924–1925 on the beach in Bayville, New York. She dredged for oysters and shellfish for 75 years before she retired in 2003.

OYSTER SLOOP CHRISTEEN PRESERVATION CORPORATION

OYSTER SLOOP CHRISTEEN PRESERVATION CORPORATION

Mutiny Aboard the US Brig Somers :

How a Mutiny and its Controversial Resolution Led to the Establishment of the US Naval Academy

Mutiny. Not a word a sea captain ever wants to hear aboard their ship—naval or merchant, large or small. A mutiny could, and often did, prove fatal to some of the ship’s company—the captain and perhaps ofcers if a mutiny was successful, the mutineers if it did not.

I doubt there is anyone who has not heard someone referred to as a “real Captain Bligh.” William Bligh was the commanding ofcer of the Royal Navy Armed Vessel Bounty and in 1787 was sent to Tahiti to gather breadfruit trees for transplanting to the British Caribbean. Breadfruit was cheap and easy to grow in a tropical environment, and it was thought the sugarcane plantation owners could use it as a staple to feed their slaves. Bligh was sailing short-handed, with no other ofcers aboard—just three master’s mates, one of whom, Fletcher Christian, was given a brevet promotion to midshipman so he could act as f rst lieutenant (2nd in command). Te long trip from England to Polynesia was arduous, to say the least, (30 winter days spent trying to claw around Cape Horn before giving up and taking the longer route east around the Cape of Good Hope) and the crew was inexperienced and diffcult. T at said, Bligh had only one man lashed during the entire trip. So… cruel? Not so much!

Once they arrived in Tahiti, they had to wait months for the breadfruit trees to be mature enough to dig up and transplant to pots for the ride to the Caribbean. In the meantime, the men became enamored with the somewhat promiscuous local ladies; some even

by William H. White

married them. When it was time to leave, most preferred to remain but went out with the ship like good British sailors. Tat’s when the trouble began. Te men missed their girlfriends and wives, and Fletcher Christian, using partly imagined and partly valid complaints about Bligh, led the men in a revolt, putting the captain with eighteen of his supporters overboard in the longboat, while Christian and his cohorts sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti. Mutiny!

In a stunning feat of navigation and seamanship, Bligh successfully sailed the overloaded longboat 1,500 miles to Indonesia with the loss of only one man—a truly remarkable feat in an open boat. In the meantime, Christian, realizing that staying in Tahiti would almost guarantee their capture when the Royal Navy returned, took the ship, nine British sailors, fve Tahitians to help sail her, and twelve Ta-

hitian women to a mis- charted and uninhabited island called Pitcairn. Sixteen mutineers preferred to remain in Tahiti and, proving Christian’s surmise correct, were ultimately captured or killed when HMS Pandora arrived to bring them to justice. Books have been written (including one by your humble scribe) about this mutiny and the aftermath. It’s too long a story for this article, but (spoiler alert) ultimately a few of the mutineers were caught, returned to England, tried and hanged. Christian was convicted, but in absentia . Bligh’s reputation was smeared forever, quite unfairly. He was not cruel—perhaps guilty of being a poor administrator, but ultimately he was held blameless by a Royal Navy court-martial.

Bligh went on to command other ships, one of which was involved in another pair of notorious mutinies when much of the enlisted cadre of the Royal

Mutiny on the Bounty: Fletcher Christian and his co-conspirators cast Captain Bligh and those loyal to him of in an open boat in the Pacific Ocean.

NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON, P.D.

Navy rebelled while in harbor in Britain. Te so-called Spithead and Nore Mutinies involved little more than a modern-day strike. Even so, they roiled the British Fleet in 1797. Te Spithead Mutiny lasted about a month and involved sixteen ships in the Channel Fleet, of concern given the ongoing war with France. Te issues involved living conditions, pay, victualling, and compensation for illness or injury. While the sailors remained relatively peaceful, and, indeed, promised to go to sea if the French were spotted near the coast, negotiations became stalled and several small incidents occurred. Admiral Lord Howe intervened and brought a peaceful solution to the issue.

Te coincidental mutiny in the T ames Estuary, the Nore Mutiny, was a di ferent story. Tere, the crew of HMS Sandwich took control of the ship and were copied by several other vessels in the anchorage. Due to the feet being spread out across the anchorage, little consistency or union was possible. Each ship elected a representative to try to coordinate the efort. One man, Richard Parker, was elected “President of the Delegates,” apparently without his knowledge. Te demands were ridiculous, including the dissolution of Parliament, immediate peace with France, and a pardon of all participants. Violence bubbled up, killing many, and a blockade of London followed. Some 50 ships of the Royal Navy, with loyal crews, ultimately put down the mutiny. Parker was hanged along with 29 others, another 29 were imprisoned, nine were fogged, and some others were sent to Australia.

Tere were other mutinies in other nations (Russia had a famous one in the early 20th century, the so-called Kronstadt Mutiny), but until the mid-19th

Spithead, 1797. Mutineers man the yards to voice their demands to the Admiralty. Steel engraving by W. H. Overend, 1890.

century, the American navy had experienced none. Enter US Brig Somers.

Somers, a new ship designated as a training vessel and captained by Alexander Slidell MacKenzie, had been sent to sea by Commodore Matthew Perry in September 1842, following a summer shakedown cruise from New York. MacKenzie was tasked with carrying dispatches to another ship, Vandalia , then on anti-slave patrol of the coast of Africa. MacKenzie missed Vandalia at multiple ports on the Atlantic coast and ultimately arrived in Monrovia, Liberia. Tere he learned he had missed

her again and quickly left to recross the Atlantic, hoping to catch up with her at St. Tomas in the Virgin Islands.

Te brig’s crew consisted of the usual gang of sailors, mostly young inexperienced “landsmen,” plus four midshipmen and one ofcer, Lt. Guert Gansevoort. Before we get too far into the story, let us look at how a young man might become a midshipman and then achieve a lieutenant’s commission in the United States Navy.

Tere was, of course, no Naval Academy at the time and, should a lad of 14–16 years of age wish to join the

Navy as other than a fo’c’sle hand, he had to be sponsored by someone with political clout to obtain an appointment from the Secretary of the Navy as a midshipman. After serving three or four years in that role, he had, presumably, learned the skills necessary to ascend to lieutenant. He would then be examined and tested by senior offcers and, if found competent, would be promoted to lieutenant. Fail twice and he would be passed over, precluded from attaining ofcer rank.

Should a lad have no sponsor and still wish to become an ofcer, he could sail in the merchant feet for several years (at least three) to gain the seamanship skills necessary, post for master’s mate (still in the merchant feet), and then seek a midshipman’s berth in the Navy. A lengthy and arduous path, indeed.

Now, back to the Somers mutiny. By the time the brig had returned to the Caribbean, Captain MacKenzie saw that his crew’s morale was dismal. Te men were sullen, unresponsive to orders, and generally slack in their duties. He heard a whisper from Lieutenant Gansevoort, his f rst lieutenant, that there might be trouble brewing, possibly instigated by one of the midshipmen—Philip Spencer, who was, interestingly, son of the Secretary of War John C. Spencer.

Young Midshipman Spencer had, to say the least, a checkered past. He had been invited to leave two di ferent colleges (Geneva and Union) due to his wild and uncontrolled behavior and then signed aboard a Nantucket whaler. He subsequently was told by his father that if a life at sea was his choice, then it should be as a “gentleman” (a com-

missioned ofcer). Using his political in fuence, the elder Spencer obtained a midshipman warrant for his son.

Young Spencer was as fractious a sailor as he had been a student. He remained undisciplined and impossible to control, assaulting f rst a senior offcer aboard the North Carolina and then a British ofcer while on a port visit in Rio de Janeiro. To avoid a courtmartial, he resigned his commission but, due to his father’s position, his resignation was not accepted. Te Navy then assigned him to the training ship Somers, thinking the training might be a help in turning the young man into a productive member of the naval ofcer corps.

A charismatic young man, Spencer curried favor with many of the crew by, among other things, providing them with tobacco and liquor. In August

1842, he told the purser’s steward, J. W. Wales, of his plan to lead about twenty of the men to take over Somers, and then sail as a pirate in the Caribbean. It should be noted that piracy in the Caribbean, for all intents and purposes, had been extinguished since about 1830. A shipmate, seaman Elisha Smalls, was also involved in the planning. Te following day, Wales told his boss, Purser Heiskill, and the f rst lieutenant, Guert Gansevoort, about the plan. In turn, Gansevoort tipped of Captain MacKenzie.

MacKenzie took the information with a grain of salt but told his f rst lieutenant to keep an eye on the

men and listen for any rumblings. Mr. Gansevoort learned that Spencer held nightly meetings with his loyalists, including Smalls and Bosun’s Mate Samuel Cromwell, both of whom had sailed in slave ships before joining the navy. Cromwell was a known troublemaker with a deep hostility towards his superiors. Gansevoort also noticed that Spencer seemed to spend a lot of time studying charts of the West Indies and sketching ships with the black fag used by pirates. Crewmen loyal to the captain also reported Spencer seeking information about the Isle of Palms, reputed to be a pirate hangout. Over the course of a few months, it became

apparent that Spencer and the other midshipmen, along with some of the seamen, were going to cause trouble.

Captain MacKenzie confronted Spencer, mentioning the information from the purser’s steward as well as Gansevoort’s observations. Te midshipman responded that he told Wales the pirate story as a joke, but MacKenzie was unmoved. He had Spencer arrested and placed in irons—hands and feet—and kept on the quarterdeck, while his cabin and belongings were searched. Discovered in the search were two documents, written in Greek (later referred to as the “Greek Papers”), which another midshipman translated. Tey ofered absolute proof that Spencer was fomenting a mutiny. His intent, clearly spelled out in the Greek Papers, showed that the rest of the crew would join—or be forced to join—and those who refused would be “disposed of.”

Te tenor of the ship immediately changed. Te crew’s loyalty was divided; the smallest deviation from normal caused concern to the two ofcers, and everyone was suspect. An accident aloft that damaged the rig seemed suspicious. When questioned about it, Cromwell,

Midshipman Philip Spencer

Captain Alexander Slidell MacKenzie

NHHC, USN

known to be one of Spencer’s confederates, blamed Smalls, who immediately confessed. Both joined Spencer in irons on deck. Te same evening, as a new t’gallant mast was being hoisted into place, several crewmembers rushed the quarterdeck but were stopped when Lieutenant Gansevoort pulled his pistol and pointed it at the sailmaker, Charles Wilson. Further incidents occurred among the men, from an attempted theft of liquor for the prisoners to an attempt to gain access to the arms locker, while still others refused to stand their watches. Tey were summarily fogged.

MacKenzie realized his ship was in danger and arrested four more men, bringing to seven the total in irons. In his growing concern, he acknowledged he did not have the resources to secure

the prisoners he already had in irons, let alone more. He wrote a letter to his senior sta f —the surgeon, purser, sailing master, and three remaining midshipmen (loyal to him)—requesting their opinions and a resolution to the situation. Further crew interviews resulted and, in a matter of days, a unanimous decision was reached that Spencer, Smalls, and Cromwell were indeed guilty of “intent to commit mutiny on a United States Naval vessel.” Tey suspected more were in league but recommended that the three be hanged to make an impression on any who might be sympathetic to their cause. Mackenzie took the recommended action that same afternoon: 1 December 1842. Without a court martial or trial of any kind.

Te bodies were buried at sea and Somers sailed for St. Tomas and then New York City, reaching there on 15 December 1842.

Of course, the news spread quickly and a court of inquiry was convened to investigate the mutiny and MacKenzie’s solution. (MacKenzie had requested a court martial to clear his name.) He was charged with oppression, illegal punishment, and the “catch-all”—conduct unbecoming a naval ofcer. Te captain defended himself and witnesses supported his claim of justi fcation under the circumstances. Te court declared him innocent of all charges and cleared his name, deliberating from late January to the end of March. Public opinion, fueled by novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s writings on the subject, remained f rmly against MacKenzie, but seemed to have little impact on his career. MacKenzie died ashore of heart disease in 1848. He left a mark on the literary world with several published books including: A Year in Spain, by a Young American (1829), Popular Essays on Naval Subjects (1833), Te American in England (1835), Spain Revisited (1836), Life of John Paul Jones (1841), Life of Commodore Oliver H. Perry (1841), and Life of Commodore Stephen Decatur (1846).

As an aftermath of the mutiny and court-martial, it was readily apparent that proper midshipman’s education was an important need and using a naval ship—in this case, US Brig Somers as a school ship was not a viable way forward without proper classroom instruction.

Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft found appropriations to establish a naval school at a ten-acre Army post named Fort Severn in Annapolis, Maryland. On 10 October 1845, with a class of 50 midshipmen and seven professors,

Ringleaders Hanging From the Yardarm by Alfred Kappes (1850–1894)

ALAMY.COM, P.D.

the Naval School became a reality. Te curriculum included mathematics and navigation, gunnery, steam, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French. Captain Franklin Buchanan was its f rst superintendent.

In 1850 the Naval School ofcially became the United States Naval Academy. A new curriculum went into efect requiring midshipmen to study at the Academy for four years and to train aboard ships each summer. Tat format is the basis of a far more advanced and sophisticated curriculum at the Naval Academy today.

As the US Navy grew over the years, likewise the Academy expanded. Te campus of ten acres increased to 338. Te original student body of 50 midshipmen grew to a brigade size of 4,000. Modern granite buildings replaced the old wooden structures of Fort

Severn. One of the main buildings at the Academy is named Bancroft Hall, in honor of the founder of the school.

A further result of the Somers situation was the abolition of fogging in the US Navy, efective 1850. Interestingly, Herman Melville used the mutiny and resulting executions as fodder for his novel Billy Budd , having gained most of the original details from his f rst cousin, Guert Gansevoort, f rst lieutenant in Somers

Te US Brig Somers, under di ferent commanders, continued in service, experiencing several tragic events in the Mexican War. In 1846, under the command of Raphael Semmes, she was lost in a storm of Mexico with about half the crew. Semmes would go on to become a Confederate naval ofcer, captaining the most successful Confederate raider, CSS Alabama .

William H. White is a former United States Navy oficer with combat service. He is also an avid, life-long sailor. As a maritime historian, he specializes in Age of Sail events in which the United States was a key player and lectures frequently on the impact of these events on our history. White has eight historical novels and one nonfiction history to his credit, each set in the early 19th century and centered on the young American Navy. He has also writen two books centered on the Royal Navy in the late 18th century, one dealing with the capture of the Bounty mutineers and one focusing on a major shipwreck on Grand Cayman, where he used to live prior to moving to Florida. More information can be found on his website, www.seafiction.net. Mr. White is a trustee of the National Maritime Historical Society.

Today’s US Naval Academy spans 338 acres and is home to 4,000 cadets who are pursuing bachelor of science degrees and commissions as ensigns in the Navy or second lieutenants in the Marine Corps.

US NAVY

PHOTO,

A Secret Mission in Wartime Greenland:

Louise Arner Boyd aboard the Efie M. Morrissey

With a cheery welcome, I was waved aboard the Ernestina-Morrissey, moored at her berth in New Bedford, Massachusetts. I had been looking forward to visiting her for over a decade, since my research began into the extraordinary life of American explorer Louise Arner Boyd, who sailed in this ship during her 1941 Arctic expedition. Te schooner has only recently opened to the public following the completion of a seven-year multimillion-dollar restoration project at the Boothbay Harbor/Bristol Marine Shipyard in Maine. As I stepped on the deck, I was greeted by Captain Ti f any Krihwan and, by chance, Sea History editor Deirdre O’Regan, who were keen to show me around.

Built in just four months at the John F. James and Washington Tarr Shipyard in Essex, Massachusetts, and launched on 1 February 1894, the schooner was originally christened Efe

by Joanna Kafarowski

M. Morrissey. She saw service as a Grand Banks f shing vessel out of Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland before Arctic explorer Captain Bob Bartlett purchased her in 1925. It was the beginning of a lifelong love a f air.

No more graceful, trim, staunch nor able craft than the Efe M. Morrissey was ever launched from this famous shipyard and the men who built her knew it. In that day shipwrights built sailing vessels with a real pride in their work and with more than a touch of genius. She was just a good, honest, beautiful craft.…I loved that schooner the f rst minute I clapped eyes on her and the feeling has grown ever since.

Captain Bartlett was by then already a renowned Arctic explorer who had skippered the vessels that took

Robert Peary to the Arctic, including the expedition when Peary reputedly conquered the North Pole in 1909. A few years after that, Bartlett’s legendary status grew when, in 1914, he almost singlehandedly saved the crew of the ill-fated Karluk during Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. Between 1926 until the start of the Second World War, he sailed to the Arctic fourteen times.

Captain Tifany Krihwan has commanded the Ernestina-Morrissey for nearly three years and is the ship’s third female captain. Currently, only twelve percent of captains in the American tall ship feet are women. She is well acquainted with the vessel’s illustrious history: “I have a strong sense of connection to the people associated with the vessel and feel the spirit of the previous captains.” Due to the scale of the renovation project, not a lot of the ship’s original fabric from Bartlett’s era has survived, but the helm, windlass, stem, and the bowsprit from that era are still there. Te billet head, freshwater tank, and a few dozen other items from the original ship are stored in a nearby warehouse. As I walked the deck and went below, it was easy to imagine life on an Arctic voyage with Captain Bartlett bellowing orders during a gale.

After participating in the 1928 international rescue mission to locate South Pole conqueror Roald Amundsen as well as leading four of her own daring expeditions to East Greenland in the 1930s, Louise Arner Boyd was about to undertake one f nal Arctic mission. She was the best-known female explorer of her time and, as a result of her scienti fc contributions, had received accolades and awards from around the

Efie M. Morrissey, 1930, Ford–Bartlet East Greenland Expedition.

(right) Efie M. Morrissey anchored of Greenland during a 1932 voyage chartered by Marie Peary Staford to supervise the construction of a monument to her father, Robert Peary, then reputed to be the first to trek to the North Pole. Bob Bartlet was Peary’s ship captain. Louise Boyd was among the crowd of well-wishers on the dock when the Morrissey departed New York.

(above) The Bartlet expeditions made Ef ie M. Morrissey famous, atracting the atention of the media, photographers, and artists. This contemporary painting of the ship was painted by artist Cliford W. Ashley (1881–1947), most remembered as the author–illustrator of The Ashley Book of Knots.

world. Asked by J. H. Dellinger of the National Bureau of Standards to undertake a secret mission on behalf of the American government, Boyd never hesitated.

During the Second World War, Greenland held a position of strategic importance. According to a publicity statement, the expedition planned to carry out radio and geomagnetic investigations focusing on studies about the ionosphere, but this was only partly true. In fact, Boyd was also tasked with providing the US government with information about potential military landing sites and other sensitive data, but she kept this to herself. As in her previous voyages, she was also the sole photographer, f lmmaker, and botanist. Te 1941 Louise Arner Boyd Expedition would be the f rst time she worked directly with Bartlett, although their paths had crossed many times before. Boyd was sure that they would work well together but nothing could be further from the truth.

When the Efe M. Morrissey left Washington, DC, on 11 June, Boyd had high hopes for the voyage, but the ship was barely underway when hostilities between her and Captain Bartlett erupted. Both were of a mature age and in the latter stages of their careers and had f rm—some might say intransigent—views of how the mission should proceed. Te Morrissey was unfamiliar to Boyd and she made the mistake of comparing her unfavorably to her previous expedition ships—the Norwegian Veslekari and Hobby Te Morrissey’ s Newfoundland crew were fercely loyal to their ship and to Captain Bartlett, with whom they had sailed on many previous voyages. Tey did not

(top lef) Captain Bob Bartlet was a veteran Arctic expedition leader and navigator.

(lef) Ef ie M. Morrissey, 1930, Ford–Bartlet East Greenland Expedition.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, BOB BARTLETT COLLECTION MS 116

take kindly to Boyd’s assertive manner. While the scienti fc sta f —physicist Archer Taylor, engineer Frederick Graceley and radio operator Tom Carroll—remained loyal to Boyd, the young ship’s doctor, John Schilling, openly undermined her authority as the expedition’s leader.

I don’t give a damn about her or her whole scientifc project which is so insincere on her part, her motivation being purely sel f sh and self-promoting. Well, it takes all kinds of people to make a world, and I suppose the Miss Boyds with all their money, scattered brains and loose tongues have their place.

T roughout the summer of 1941, the Morrissey worked her way north from Newfoundland to the west coast of Greenland, thus entering an active, volatile military zone. Before their departure, the Navy released a general advisory relating to the expedition:

“ Tere may conceivably be some jeopardy in connection with their operations and that any attendant risks are taken entirely upon their own responsibility. Conditions may make it impossible for the Navy Department to render assistance in the event of unforeseen contingency.” Tey were on their own. Louise Arner Boyd was never one to be dissuaded by the possibility of danger. Her strong sense of patriotism would not allow it.

After experiencing stormy weather of Cape Farewell at the southern tip of Greenland where Captain Bartlett displayed the full range of his vocabulary of profanities, the Morrissey dropped

(top right) Louise Arner Boyd, 1928 . (right) Louise Arner Boyd (2nd from lef) aboard the Morrissey with scientists (l–r) Frederick Gracely, Archer Taylor, and Tom Carroll, 1941. MARIN

anchor in Julianehåb (now known as Qaqortoq). Teir arrival was fortuitous as several ships, including the schooner Bowdoin, USS Bear, and USCG cutters Northland and Comanche were moored nearby. Te Northland was commanded by Commander Edward “Iceberg” Smith, who became a good friend of Boyd’s . All the other vessels were part of the Greenland Patrol—a US Coast Guard operation designed to defend Greenland against Axis forces and escort and supply Allied ships. Frank Meals, who became the commanding ofcer of Comanche, later wrote to Boyd to express his thanks for her work on Greenland, stating that it allowed him and his crew to “safeguard our navigation of these largely unsurveyed waters.” Boyd also met up with Colonel Benjamin Giles of the US Army Corps and ofered him assistance. He later wrote:

I was very glad indeed to receive the photographic negatives of KIPISAKO air feld and position of the main base, both as to longitude and latitude and magnetic declination. Both the pictures and the exact position of the air base serve a very useful purpose and on behalf of the War Department, I wish to personally thank you for your splendid spirit of cooperation in obtaining these data.

Te Morrissey continued sailing further up the Greenlandic coast, stopping next at Ivigtut (now known as Ivittut), which held special importance during the war. Ivigtut was the home of the world’s largest reserves of naturally occurring cryolite used in the aluminum smelting process. Te site was heavily protected

by American forces. Here they encountered USCGC Modoc, which was another member of the Greenland Patrol. Captain Bartlett had not been briefed on Boyd’s secret government mission and was impatient with her regular “socializing” in each community. Miss Boyd spent time meeting with Modoc’ s commander as well as with the mine administrator. Nearly eight decades later, I visited the abandoned remote Greenlandic community while working as guest lecturer on a cruise ship. Te mine closed in 1989, but many dilapidated buildings were still standing and I glimpsed unruly muskoxen roaming the hills. It wasn’t hard to imagine Louise Arner Boyd conversing with the authorities about wartime matters in such an evocative place.

Boyd and her team continued onwards to Godthåb (now the capital city Nuuk), where a new American consulate was being established. Crossing the Arctic Circle, the Morrissey stayed a short time in Tule before spending four days in Etah. Captain Bartlett’s journal of the entire voyage is housed in the Robert A. Bartlett Archives in the Bowdoin University library and presents his colorful account, but most of Louise Arner Boyd’s logs are missing. One sole exception is volume three of her 1941 expedition log (in the Marin Public Library, San Rafael, California). In it she wrote:

We left McCormick Bay after breakfast and set our course following this southern shore of Prudhoe Land. Ten, Good Bye! Adieu to Greenland! Leaving her shores bathed in brilliant sunshiny blue skies. Glassy waters studded with countless icebergs and the ripples and shoals of countless little auks!... I do so with the

Map showing the route taken by the 1941 Louise Arner Boyd Expedition.

same prayer now for the f fth time repeated: “May my Arctic Gate again open and let me pass to the lands beyond in the Polar world. May I again return to Greenland!”

Te Morrissey navigated through Lancaster Sound and continued southwards, stopping at Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung and Clyde River in what is now modern-day Nunavut, Canada, before carrying on to Hopedale, Turnavik, and Battle Harbour in Labrador. Te Efe M. Morrissey arrived at the Coast Guard

pier in Washington, DC, on 3 November. Te United States formally entered the war only days later on 7 December 1941.

Captain Bartlett and Louise Arner Boyd bickered for months afterwards about petty details related to the contract and good relations between them were never restored, but the National Bureau of Standards and the United States government were delighted with the f lms, photographs, maps, and data generated by the expedition. Boyd received thanks and congratulations from various agencies,

including the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution, which informed Boyd that her data had solved many Arctic transmission problems with which his department had grappled. Te Radio Section of the National Bureau of Standards stated: “ Te data gathered within the auroral zone constituted the missing link in the NBS emerging radio weather forecasting service.” Boyd was retained as a military consultant by various branches of the US government. She never sailed on the Efe M. Morrissey again. T is was the last expedition of Louise Arner Boyd’s distinguished career as an Arctic explorer. After six Arctic voyages, she never made it back to her beloved Greenland again.

Dr. Kafarowski is a Fellow of The Explorers Club, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a board member of the Society of Woman Geographers. She is the author of The Polar Adventures of a Rich American Dame: A Life of Louise Arner Boyd (Dundurn Press, 2017) and Antarctic Pioneer: The Trailblazing Life of Jackie Ronne (Dundurn Press, 2022). She is currently working on her next book about women and exploration in Greenland, which will be published by Princeton University Press in 2026. She can be reached at joannakafarowski@gmail.com

What Happened to the Efie M. Morrissey?

Captain Bob Bartlet led four more war missions to the Arctic on behalf of the US government but died a few years later in 1946. Afer his death, the Morrissey caught fire while undergoing repairs in New York and was scutled. In 1948, Captain Henrique Mendes of Cape Verde Islands and his sister, Louisa Mendes of Massachuset s, purchased the ship and re-named her Ernestina, afer the captain’s daughter. For the next several decades, Ernestina carried goods and passengers between New England and the Cape Verde Islands. In 1982, the Republic of Cape Verde ofered the schooner to the Commonwealth of Massachuset s as a gesture of goodwill. She was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Ernestina–Morrissey is now an education and training vessel for Massachuset s Maritime Academy, while simultaneously maintaining her role as a public educational vessel in New Bedford.

Coming Soon! Voyage Digital Media / Richardo R. Lopes, in collaboration with the National Maritime Historical Society, is in the final production stages of the documentary Sails Over Ice and Seas the Life and Times of the Schooner Ernestina- Morrissey. Release date will be announced by NMHS later this year.

Louise Arner Boyd receiving an award from the Department of the Army, 1949.

Captain and Navigator, Husband and Wife—

Josiah

and Eleanor Creesy’s Record Run

by David Hirzel

In 1851, the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco was by sailing a full-rigged clipper ship around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Long, tall, and lean, this new type of ship became the most desirable means of passage, with accommodations for cargoes that would bring in a big proft upon their safe arrival at t he Golden Gate and for a few well-heeled travelers able to a ford the cost.

Te Transcontinental Railroad had yet to be built (that came in 1869), and it would be another 63 years before the Panama Canal would be completed

to allow passage between the Atlantic and Paci fc Oceans. Te Cape Horn route was long and treacherous, requiring months of hard sailing driven by a brave and skilful sea captain and crew. Having left New York, a ship might not see land again for f ve months—if it was lucky. If very unlucky—never again. A ship would not be posted “missing” until at least six months had passed before she failed to arrive at San Francisco.

It was a long and hard way to go, but at the time still the most efcient. Clipper ship captains were under pressure to drive their ships hard and make

the passage in record time. Not the ideal place for family time, but more than one ship’s master brought his wife onboard, as had been done for years by captains of whaling ships and other ships sailing distant sea routes.

The Clipper Ship

To the armchair sailor, the “clipper ship” calls to mind the image of a graceful tall ship, powering her way through the seas under a cloud of full-bellied white canvas sails, with a sharp bow cutting through the waves. Te sun shines benignly on the scene, full of promise and the lure of exotic ports in far-of lands.

Donald McKay’s Flying Cloud. Painting by Antonio Jacobsen (1850–1921)

Sometimes this romantic image holds true; more often the ship sufers through storms and contrary winds, doldrums, and near-mutinies on her long voyage around the Horn.

Josiah Perkins Creesy was known as a hard-driving captain. His wife, Eleanor, serving as the ship’s navigator, piloted the brand-new clipper ship Flying Cloud to a record-setting maiden voyage from New York to San Francisco, a run of more than 16,000 miles. T ree years later, the couple smashed that record with an even faster time, a record that stood for 135 years, broken at last by a modern high-tech sloop. Captain and Mrs. Creesy were a formidable team.

Josiah Creesy was a sailing ship captain long before he ever met Eleanor Prentiss at a dance. At age 27—both of them—they were “older,” with no desire to have children. He found in her a woman not only willing to travel the seas with him but a wife who had long sought a mariner for a partner, as she came from seafaring stock and her sea captain father had taught her navigation. As the captain’s wife, she would share the relative comfort of the master’s cabin and potentially bring the calm of a woman’s presence to the otherwise uniform masculinity of a sailing ship’s crew.

Eleanor (Prentiss) Creesy was born in Massachusetts, in 1814. Her parents gave her as good an education as would beft a girl at that time when a young woman’s prospects were almost exclusively focused on marriage and family. Her father owned and operated the schooner Californian out of the family’s hometown of Marblehead. He took her along on his voyages up and down the East Coast and, at her request, taught

her how to navigate the ship—not just the rudiments, but the whole f ne art and practice of celestial navigation, as well as meteorology, currents, and the mathematics to pull it all together. Te navigator’s job combines a mathematically detailed reckoning of the ship’s constantly changing location on the trackless sea with an astute understanding of climate and weather, mechanics of the hull, rig, and sails. Of these, working out the mathematics of latitude and longitude, complicated as it is, was the easy, predictable part.

As a young woman, Eleanor became bored with shoreside life and the prospect of entering the dreaded realm of “spinsterhood,” should she remain unmarried. Marriage to a successful sea

captain was a good option for a woman who wanted to sail the world, and when a marriage proposal came from Captain Creesy, she did not hesitate to accept. Captain and Mrs. Creesy tied the knot in 1841.

Although Captain Creesy had no real need for another navigator (he was used to handling that task himself), over the next ten years he came to rely on his wife’s navigational skills as they sailed together aboard the Oneida from New York to China and back, bringing crates of Chinese tea to the American market. Eleanor did much more than take the occasional sun-sight with her sextant; she handled the whole range of course-plotting for those fve voyages, while Josiah remained in command

Captain Josiah Creesy. There are no known contemporary depictions of Eleanor Creesy.

of everything else related to the ship and its operations. Te Creesys fgured out how to work together in a meaningful way that transcended the conventional roles on the distribution of power within a marriage. Teir newly styled union, f rst put to the test during the voyages in the Onieda from New York to Canton, would lead to their record-setting run in Flying Cloud in 1851.

Flying Cloud

In 1851, the California Gold Rush was in full swing, and redesigned clipper ships, referred to as “extreme” clippers, were all the rage. Hardly a week passed without one of the daily newspapers in cities up and down the eastern seaboard touting the launch of another “greyhound of the seas” and speed records being set for the voyage between New York and San Francisco. Longer, leaner, and faster than the other, more fullbodied, cargo ships, these extreme clippers were the thoroughbred racers of the shipping trade and would test the ultimate skills of the captain and navigator.

For those who could a ford the premium rates, passage aboard an extreme clipper ship around Cape Horn was as good as any of the other cross-country routes. For those in a hurry to strike it rich in the gold felds, speed—or the illusion of it—was worth the cost. Even so, the typical passage from New York, at 160–180 days in 1847,1 was hardly fast.

Te full-rigged Flying Cloud was the newest vessel launched from the East Boston shipyard of shipbuilder Donald McKay. Departing on her maiden voyage from New York on 2 June 1851, her holds were f lled with general cargo for San Francisco that were in demand on the West Coast. Only two years prior, the city had been a sleepy outpost on the far side of the continent; now it was the destination for thousands of men who would have a growing need for a wide variety of supplies.

In the deckhouse, eleven passengers occupied the six staterooms. No one knew, on that day, that they were sailing into the record books. Te captain and his wife only knew that with their new ship and the sailing directions just published by Matthew Fontaine Maury, 2 they had a good chance at a fast passage.

Pathfinder of the Seas

For all the risks they took in hauling cargo across stormy seas all around the world, sailing ship captains were a conservative lot. Tey tended to follow the same tried-and-true sailing directions on their approach to Cape Horn that had been the rule of thumb for centu-

ries. Tradition mandated that the ship must sail well to the east, a thousand miles or so towards Europe, before putting the helm over and heading southwards to avoid contrary winds and currents believed to confound passage around the easternmost point of Brazil. Few ventured to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Maury, “the path fnder of the seas,” started to assemble innumerable data points from the logbooks of the ships making oceanic voyages and showed that near-shore routes along the coast of Brazil would indeed produce the fastest passages. As head of the Depot of Charts and Instruments at the US Naval Observatory, Maury recognized

Mathew Fontaine Maury, “Pathfinder of the Seas” (1806–1873)

LIBRARY

(opposite page) Maury’s Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, 1848.

the wealth of data that logbooks contained, observations about wind, currents, and weather for any given day, for any square mile of ocean on Earth. To gather even more data and in an efort to standardize what mariners were recording, he created an Abstract Log for the Merchant Service, a form distributed to all oceangoing merchant ships, with marked sections for recording the wind and current direction and speed observed at the latitude and longitude noted for a ship’s position with each entry.3

Where were the most favorable winds blowing and how consistent were they? From which direction and at what strength were they most likely to be found? Where were the limits of the doldrums? What was the set of the current in any given location? In what is surely the earliest conception of “big data,” his book and companion charts held the key, but sailing masters were at f rst hesitant to put them to use. Te few who did reported excellent results with greatly improved passages. As one example, within the year of its being published, the Baltimore barque W. H. D. C. Wright shaved seventeen days of its typical run from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro.

Eleanor Creesy Embraces the Challenge

In 1850 Eleanor Creesy bought a copy of Maury’s newly published Wind and Current Charts and was determined to try out its recommendations. Her husband was onboard with the idea, and when they put to sea on 2 June 1851 aboard the recently launched extreme clipper Flying Cloud, rather than heading east out of New York, they plotted a course southwards according to the new sailing directions and began their record run.

Of course, no book of generalized sailing directions can guarantee the presence or absence or direction of wind

on any given day. While it is the navigator’s task to locate the ship’s position on the globe, the captain’s job is to use the winds as they are found, to direct the ship as nearly as possible in the course planned. Detours in search of the more favorable winds are a part of the routine.

Flying Cloud crossed the doldrums near the equator in only four days; those who rejected Maury’s suggestions were two weeks in getting through. Better winds favored them south along the coast of Argentina as well, but adverse weather was bound to hit. When a furious gale descended on the ship on 9 July, Josiah shortened sail to carry only staysails and close-reefed topsails. A burst of wind ripped the staysails to tatters. Te fore and main topmasts split and carried away. Rolling uncontrollably, the ship dipped her yardarms into the sea on either side.

Any captain worth his salt is prepared to deal with emergencies at sea, and Josiah Creesy was a veteran sea captain. When the gale died down, he had the deck cleared of splintered timbers and tumbled gear and set the crew to restoring the rig. Repairs at sea like this were a matter of course for all sailing ships far from port for months at a time, but after the main topsail carried away for a second time on 12 July, the Creesys began to wonder if their ship had been too lightly built.

Well south now, the shortest route lay dead ahead through Le Maire Strait, a f fteen-mile-wide gauntlet between the coast of Argentina and Staten Island. Most ships avoided this narrow seaway alley—once committed, there is no turning back. Any route around Cape Horn is fraught with danger; nevertheless, the long way around was considered relatively safer than an inside passage. Te winds in this “graveyard of ships” blow from west to east around the Horn, and indeed around the world. Over 800 ships had been overwhelmed

here, lost without a trace. Seldom do the winds allow an easy westing. Most ships of that era took weeks or months to make the passage from the Atlantic Ocean into the Paci fc, but the Creesys put their faith in Maury and steered for the strait. Maury’s sailing directions showed no alternative to facing the dead-on headwinds blocking their way west around it, and, in this case, luck, more than the skill of the navigator and the competence of the captain, came into play.

As Flying Cloud entered the strait, an easterly fresh breeze—that rarest of winds in that part of the world—propelled her easily through the Drake Passage and westward to the Paci fc Ocean. In just four days she had rounded South America and was now headed northwards to San Francisco. Eleanor Creesy had guided the ship over one of the fastest passages thus far yet recorded: 8,200 miles over the course of 51 days, an average of 160 miles per day.4

Tey still had to contend with variable winds and doldrums that interrupted the broad belts of southeast and northeast trade winds. But these winds, and the best way to take advantage of them, were already well anticipated by Maury’s sailing directions, recommending a course swinging far to the west. It meant sailing more miles, but would likely guarantee better winds and a shorter time overall.

Between noon sights on 20 and 21 July, Eleanor found that the ship had covered a truly remarkable distance: 374 nautical miles in 24 hours, a world record for any sailing ship.5 Te captain noted the achievement in his log, along with other notes on the day’s sailing— setting and taking in sail as squalls hit and other sea conditions and ship activity. Despite a gathering storm, the ship drove on. By 2 August, she logged another 992 nautical miles (1,440 statute miles) in three days. Te way was clear for an end-to-end record-setting

voyage. Well of the coast of California, the time had come to take advantage of westerly winds. By the 24th she was heading straight for the Golden Gate. Ba f ing winds slowed her progress to a wearying 52 miles made good, but by 2 am of 31 August, the ship hove to just 30 miles of the Farallon Islands, awaiting daylight before proceeding through the narrow Golden Gate and towards the burgeoning city just beyond.

Te Flying Cloud splashed her anchor at San Francisco’s North Beach later that day. Te run from New York had set a new record: 81 days 21 hours. To show that their record run wasn’t a fuke, three years later the Creesys broke

NOTES

1 “The Centennial of Pressure-Patern Navigation,” by Lieutenant Commander John Lyman, US Naval Reserve, United States Navy Institute Proceedings, March 1948, p. 309.

it again by another 9 hours—in the same ship along the same route. T at new record for a sailing vessel around Cape Horn would stand challenged but unbroken until 1989.

Legacy

Captain Josiah and Eleanor Creesy, aided by their brave choice to rely on Maury’s charts, proved the way to more efcient sea travel. Eleanor’s remarkable navigational skills, a rarity for a woman to have in that era, and the captain’s decision to rely on her skills, enabled the Flying Cloud’ s record-setting voyage, and the one that followed. Teir example remained a guiding light for

2 Maury was a career oficer in the US Navy in 1851. He later earned a reputation as a traitor when he joined the Confederate Navy and the rebellion of the Southern states at the start of the Civil War in 1860.

sailing ships until the Panama Canal opened in 1914, rendering passage by the di fcult sea lanes around Cape Horn a thing of the past.

David Hirzel has wri ten extensively about tall ships and polar exploration, with books about Tom Crean and Louise Arner Boyd (available at amazon.com) and articles in Sea History and Marlinspike. This article is adapted from a chapter in the upcoming book The Superpower of Small Teams: Inspiring Stories of Risk, Innovation and Success by David Hirzel with co-author Brad Borkan, to be published by TerraNova-Press later this year.

3 Mathew Fontaine Maury, Scientist of the Sea, Frances Leigh Williams, Rutgers University Press, 1963, p. 150–151.

4 Flying Cloud, David W. Shaw, p. 214.

5 Flying Cloud, David W. Shaw, p. 227.

Flying Cloud Arriving in San Francisco from New York, by John Stobart

Penobscot Marine Museum

On the Rocks

by Kevin Johnson

The Curator’s Corner series in Sea History ofers maritime museums the opportunity to feature historic photos from their collections that, while available to researchers upon request, rarely go on public display. Each issue, we ask a museum curator to pick a particularly interesting, revealing, or representative photo from their archives and tell us about it. In this installment, we are invited into the archives of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. Enjoy!

Photographs of maritime disasters tend to trigger our morbid curiosity. Most often they are snapshots of a spectacular event, though not necessarily spectacular photographs. When they are taken by someone skilled with a camera, however, they can transcend the circumstances of the scene to become iconic images. T is is the case with this photograph made by Captain James Perkins of SS City of Rockland aground on the rocks at the mouth of the Kennebec River near Popham, Maine.

Te City of Rockland was the sister ship to SS City of Bangor. She was built by the William McKie yard in East Boston for $350,000. Launched in September of 1900, the 1,696-ton steamship measured 274 feet in length, with 25foot paddlewheels powered by a 1,600-horsepower steam power plant. She was built with a grand staircase leading to the main saloon and 200 state rooms with 200 berths—she could carry 2,000 passengers! Te City of Rockland was to be the star of the Eastern Steamship Company, running the Boston-to-Bangor route. Unfortunately, her 23-year career was marred by multiple accidents, even a collision with her sister ship of of Portland in 1906.

Te incident depicted here was the straw that broke the steamer’s back. On 2 September 1923, she had made her scheduled stop in Bath, Maine, and was working her way back down the Kennebec River. In the best of weather, the Kennebec was a di fcult run for large ships with its ledges, islands, and strong currents and tides. On this particular day, there was a dense fog and a strong ebb tide. Te ship ran aground on a ledge near Dix Island, less than two miles from the mouth of the river. She was eventually refoated

and towed to Boston, where she sat at a wharf for a year before being towed to the aptly named Misery Island, where she was mercifully scuttled.

Tere were numerous photos made of this incident, but none as arresting as the one by Captain Perkins. Te great ship is perched on the rock with her bow pointing up into the air, looking like a rocket ready to launch. In the foreground, a young man in collared shirt and tie sails his ski f Te juxtaposition provides scale, allowing the viewer to appreciate the size of the ship. Tere is no shortage of irony as the grand steamship lies helpless like a beached whale, while the tiny ski f powered only by a small sail and steered by oar glides uninhibited toward the great carcass.

Perkins himself was a steamboat captain who ran steamers back and forth on the Kennebec River between Bath and Popham. He knew the river and its perils well. He was also a fair shot with a camera. Born in 1867, he grew up in Popham Village. His view of the world was shaped by the river and its bustling maritime activity. He navigated the waterway professionally for more than three decades. His position in the pilot house a forded him f ne views of the shoreline, coves, islands, and lighthouses, as well as the towns and summer communities that dotted its banks, a lifesaving station, and the boatyards, wharves, and landings along the wide meandering river. Perkins died in 1935. His niece, Jane Stevens, published many of her uncle’s images in the book One Man’s World: Popham Beach, Maine. When she died in 2008, her heirs donated the collection of nearly 600 glassplate negatives to the Penobscot Marine Museum.

Kevin Johnson is the photo archivist for the Penobscot Marine Museum.

“

In the best of weather, the Kennebec was a dificult run for large ships with its ledges,

islands,

and strong currents and tides. On this particular day, there was a dense fog and a strong ebb tide. The ship ran aground on a ledge near Dix Island, less than two miles from the mouth of the river. ”

The Penobscot Marine Museum has more than a half a million photographs in its archives. In addition to the glass-plate negatives of Captain Perkins, the archive holds the collections of the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co., Atlantic Fisherman and National Fisherman, Kosti Ruohomaa, and Everet “Red” Boutilier, among others. In 2024, PMM will launch its new online database featuring more than 130,000 photographic records. Fine art prints are available, and image licensing for publication, educational, and commercial use is an option. The museum itself boasts a campus of twelve buildings, including two boat barns in the historic district of Searsport, Maine. The exhibits are open seasonally from Memorial Day through mid-October. The museum ofices, research library, photo archives, and education department are open by appointment year-round.

40 E Main Street, Maine • Ph. 207 548-2529 • www.PenobscotMarineMuseum.org

PENOBSCOT

SS City of Rockland, On the Rocks, 1923

A Maritime History of the United States: THE CREATION

AND DEFENSE OF A NATION

by Charles Raskob Robinson and Len Tantillo

illustrated by the American Society of Marine Artists

The Batle of the Virginia Capes—also known as the Batle of the Chesapeake—was a crucial naval batle in the American Revolutionary War. It took place near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on 5 September 1781, when the French fleet under Admiral de Grasse with 37 ships prevented the British fleet under Admiral Graves from supporting or evacuating British troops, which American and French troops under Generals Washington and Lafayete had cornered at Yorktown, Virginia. Their only escape thus thwarted, the British surrendered, signaling the end of the Revolutionary War. The event underscored the wisdom of General George Washington, who opined “No land force can act decisively unless it is accompanied by maritime superiority.”

The mission of the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA) parallels that of the National Maritime Historical Society in that both organizations strive to promote a better understanding and appreciation of American maritime history and marine

art. Te most recent evidence of this is the new book published by ASMA, A Maritime History of the United States: Te Creation and Defense of a Nation,1 from which selections will be presented in Sea History in a series of articles throughout 2024. Te undertaking for

this book began years ago, when the Department of Defense invited ASMA to mount an exhibition in the Pentagon to interpret the timeline of American maritime history. Later, Congress created the National Semiquincentennial Committee, which invited ASMA to

The Batle of the Virginia Capes oil, 24 x 36 inches, by Patrick O’Brien

contribute something to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026, with programs and events beginning this year.

Te exhibition at the Pentagon opened in the summer of 2023 in the Patriots’ Gallery and will run through most of 2024.2 Visited by more than 160,000 members of the public annually, the Pentagon is a secure facility but the public can sign up for a tour, which includes the ASMA exhibition, by going to www.defense.gov/Pentagon-Tours.

While the book covers all aspects of American maritime history, the Pen-

tagon exhibition focuses on the role of defense, and a selection of those works are presented in this issue. Forthcoming issues of Sea History will focus on the other aspects of our maritime history— the role the sea and inland waterways played in the creation of the nation: its discovery, settlement, commerce, communication, transportation and culture, arts and letters, sports and leisure activities, and environmental and bio-diversity concerns. Te book puts the role of the sea in sharp perspective by reminding the reader that during the f rst half of our nation’s history,

the fastest way to communicate and move people and goods was by water, a concept that is, for many, hard to grasp. Of course, we remain a maritime global community: approximately 70 percent of the world is covered by water and 80 percent of the world population lives within 100 miles of the sea. Even today, nearly 90 percent of trade is conducted by ships.

ASMA artists have, through art, interpreted a timeline of our history on the high seas and inland waterways and are honored to share their work with you in Sea History.

A New Nation—A New Navy

In the War of 1812, American frigates performed remarkably well against the powerful British navy, winning five victories over Royal Navy ships of similar rating. These encounters were victorious, but nonetheless bloody, events. Cannonballs ofen penetrated the enemy’s wooden hulls, sending shrapnel of splintered wooden planking among the gun crews surrounded by smoke and deafening noise. The frantic activity on the gun deck is captured in this dramatic painting.

IMAGES COURTESY ASMA AND PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Gun Deck Af oil, 13 x 28 inches, by Robert Sticker (1922–2011)

War of 1812

The Constitution earned the nickname “Old Ironsides” during an engagement with the British frigate Guerriere of Nova Scotia on 19 August 1812. The Constitution’s hull—a combination of white oak planking and live oak frames—withstood the Guerriere’s fusillade of cannonballs, leading one of her sailors to exclaim:

“Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”

The Constitution and the Guerriere oil, by Robert Sticker

Privateer Prince de Neufchatel in Night Action, Sou’west of the Nantucket Shoals oil, 18 x 20 inches, by Charles Raskob Robinson

Expansion and Technology

US Ironclad Monitor, CS Ironclad Virginia, and the US Steam Frigate Minnesota watercolor, 14 x 21 inches, by Ian

H.

Marshall (1933–2016)

Following the Mexican War in 1846, in which Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory to the United States (forming much of what are now states in the American southwest), the nation plunged into the Civil War (1861–65), the deadliest conflict in American history. The war saw significant advances in ship design and technology from ironclads to screw propellers and rifled cannon.

(opposite page: Privateer Prince de Neufchatel in Night Action

Privateers (private vessels licensed to at ack and seize enemy vessels during wartime) played an important role in the War of 1812. The American privateer Prince de Neufchatel (17 guns) is remembered for its financial success as well as its fighting valor. Becalmed of Nantucket on 11 October 1814, HM Frigate Endymion (40 guns) sent more than 100 men in boats under the cover of darkness to board and capture her. The twenty minutes of fighting that ensued were among the bloodiest of the war. The British frigate lost over 80 percent of its men, and the American crew of 37 sufered the same rate of casualties. Although the Prince escaped that night, the following year the British succeeded in capturing her when, crippled by a gale, the American privateer was unable to outrun them.

Modern Navy

The Great White Fleet

oil, 24 x 36 inches, by Patrick

O’Brien

In December 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt, a great believer in sea power and the important role of the Navy, sent sixteen new batleships of the Atlantic Fleet manned by 14,000 sailors on a 14-month, 43,000-mile voyage around the world as a grand pageant of American sea power. Seen here in the Straits of Magellan with their distinctive white hulls and gilded scrollwork adorning their bows, these ships comprised what would become known as the Great White Fleet.

US Navy Destroyers Escorting the Olympic, Winter, 1918 watercolor, 12 x 19 inches

by Jim Grifiths

The most significant role of the Navy during World War I was transportation of troops and materials. American shipyards turned out cargo ships at record speed (470 in the 19 months of the war), but many were lost to the enemy while crossing the Atlantic. The Navy’s convoy service was dangerous for both crews and ships, but utlimately successful in delivering staggering numbers of men and supplies to Europe, eventually tipping the conflict in favor of the Allies.

Over USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3) in 1937 oil, 26 x 40 inches, by Richard Allison

Fighter Squadron (VF-31), the “Tomcaters,” is the second oldest fighter squadron operating in the US Navy. The distinctive (VF-31) “Felix the Cat” insignia—a black cat holding a bomb with a lit fuse—is depicted here on the fuselage just below the pilot. This symbol has been used by the Navy since 1929, when it appeared on an earlier biplane in Bomber Squadron (VB-2B). The insignia is still used in the Navy among the Tomcater Squadron pilots.

Boeing F4B-4s from VF-6B, the “Felix the Cat” Squadron Flying

World War II

Contact: USS Slater in 1944

oil, 17 x 24 inches, by Len Tantillo

Much like in World War I, the Navy was responsible for geting men and materials across oceans in the Second World War. While Japan had been an ally in the first conflict, in World War II the United States was batling enemies in both the Atlantic and Pacific. To deal with the enormous losses inflicted by German U-boats and Lu f wafe bombers on Allied shipping in the Atlantic, US, British, and Canadian navies adopted a convoy strategy. Convoys also braved the Arctic waters of the Barents Sea and at acks from German-occupied Norway to reach the Russian ports of Archangel and Murmansk, enabling the Soviet Union to continue its campaign on the Eastern Front. The convoys were essential, but the cost was enormous. Between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships and 175 warships were sunk, with loss of life among naval and merchant personnel topping 72,000. In this scene, USS Slater responds to a submarine contact while escorting a convoy to England in December of 1944. The Slater is the only surviving destroyer escort from WWII still afloat and serves as a museum ship in Albany, New York.

Over IJN Akagi—SBDs at Midway, oil, 20 x 30 inches, by Richard Allison

In the Batle of Midway, the Japanese force lost all of its planes and all four of its carriers, including the IJN Akagi. The Japanese carrier was commissioned in 1927, and, by the time of the Batle of Midway, it had participated in Japanese aggression in China and the at ack on Pearl Harbor, and was active in the southwest Pacific, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies. “SBD” stands for “Scout/Bomber/Douglas,” the warplane that featured exceptional divebombing capabilities due to the perforated dive brakes on its wings, but it was translated by those who flew them as “Slow But Deadly.”

On 8 December 1941, the United States declared war on Japan and, three days later, on the Axis powers. To wage these wars, large numbers of soldiers and matériel had to be transported across both oceans. Having lost many of their own cargo ships to German Uboats, the British were already working with American shipyards to build standardized cargo ships when the Americans joined the war. The US modified the design being used in the British ships to build its own fleet. President Roosevelt atended the launch of the first of these new vessels, the Patrick Henry, and told the crowd that these new ships would bring liberty to Europe—hence, “Liberty Ships.” Known as the “Great Gray Fleet,” the Libertys represented the largest number of single-class ships ever built—2,710 constructed between 1941 and 1945. Two Liberty ships survive today: SS Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco, and SS John W. Brown in Baltimore. Liberty ships were armed with bow and stern gun platforms that were manned by Navy sailors. Crews numbered between 38 and 62 civilian merchant sailors and 21 to 40 naval personnel. Many of these ships were used to carry troops home at the end of the war in what became known as “Operation Magic Carpet.”

The Great Gray Fleet, acrylic, 12 x 23 inches, by Edward M. Grifith

US Coast Guard

Shortly afer the federal government was established by the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, it created the Revenue Marine (later renamed the Revenue Cutter Service) to protect its principal revenue—tarif s on foreign trade. Its 10 twomasted armed cuters also provided the only maritime defense until the US Navy was established in 1798. Built for speed, these topsail schooners generally operated out of ports where tarif s were collected and were built to be fast. This scene captures the 155-ton cuter Joseph Lane, named in honor of the first governor of the Oregon Territory, to which it was assigned. Christened at its launch in 1849 as the Revenue Cuter Campbell, it was renamed afer major repair work was completed in 1855. It patrolled the West Coast until sold in 1869.

Keeping the Sea Lanes Safe, oil, 30 x 24 inches, by Austin Dwyer

The Coast Guard’s responsibilities include search-and-rescue, marine safety, maritime law enforcement, marine environmental protection, and maintaining aids to navigation. Seen here is the 175-foot USCG Cuter Henry Blake (WLM 563), one of fourteen state-of-the-art and highly capable Keeper Class Coastal Buoy Tenders. In addition to its other missions, it is responsible for the maintenance of 184 aids to navigation in the Pacific Northwest.

US Revenue Cuter Joseph Lane in San Francisco Bay, oil, 16 x 22 inches, by Christopher T. Blossom

Post-World War II

USS John Paul Jones (DD-932), watercolor, 27 x 26 inches, by Richard C. Moore, USN (Ret.) (1932–2017)

In addition to its combat might, a key role for the US Navy has been to “show the flag,” to simply be present and be seen in troubled circumstances, demonstrating the potential force behind American diplomatic power. When diplomacy fails, more action is required. This scene captures the destroyer USS John Paul Jones (DD-932), which played a major role by showing up when tensions flared up in the eastern Mediterranean in 1956–57. Afer Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel, France, and the UK invaded the country to regain control over this vital waterway. The United States opposed the invasion and threatened economic sanctions unless the invading forces withdrew. They eventually did, with Israel the last to leave in March 1957. Diplomacy proved efective, but the presence of the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean certainly helped. USS John Paul Jones joined the Sixth Fleet that same month and further demonstrated the “power of presence” two months later, when a threat to overthrow King Hussein of Jordan was handled by simply sending a destroyer and other ships of the Sixth Fleet to the region. The artist who painted this scene served as a line oficer in the Navy and then as a chaplain aboard this ship.

During the 1980s the Navy was enlarged to counter the threat from the Soviet Union. Advances were seen in Nimitz-class supercarriers, Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, and Los Angeles-class at ack submarines, and the installation of the revolutionary Aegis Weapon System (AWS). USS Michigan (SSGN-727), depicted in this painting, is an Ohio-class boat built as a nuclear-powered ballistic submarine (SSBN-727). By 2007, the sub had been converted to a nuclear-powered guided missile submarine (SSGN-727) and it has been on active duty ever since.

Cover image: USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72), 14 x 18 inches, by Robert Gantt Steele. Aircraft carriers form the centerpiece of today’s Navy. Together with the US Coast Guard, the Navy serves as the maritime branch of the nation’s armed forces and remains the most able to provide “over the horizon” capability for any future action in the region. (www.americanmarineartists.com)

USS Michigan (SSBN-727/SSGN-727) in Bangor, Washington, in 1989 oil, 24 x 36 inches, by John Charles Roach, USN (Ret.)

Navigating the Gulf Stream

Last summer, beachcombers in Rhode Island came across coconuts washed up on the beach, still in their husks afer having floated more than 1,000 miles from the tropics. Two years earlier, 14 –year–old Michael Kearney found a coconut on the beach on the southwestern coast of Ireland, more than 4,000 miles from where scientists believe it came from!

The buoyant tropical fruits were likely carried to these far–flung beaches by the Gulf Stream, that famous “river in the ocean” that starts in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean and travels north and east along the East Coast before turning towards Europe across the Atlantic Ocean. The powerful current transports more water through the ocean than all of the world’s rivers combined, and its warm temperature is responsible for moderating the climate in coastal New England, Bermuda, Western Europe and even as far north as Norway, where the air over the ocean in winter is an astonishing 40° F (22° C) warmer than is typical for that latitude.

Ship captains were the first to discover it. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon was sailing towards Florida in 1513 when he encountered a current so

A River in the Ocean AFRICA

This coconut likely traveled more than a thousand miles by the current of the Gulf Stream before washing ashore on a Rhode Island beach.

strong that it pushed his ship backwards. The first person to study and document its path was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wore many hats in his role as an American Founding Father, as well as work as a scientist and inventor, but he first became interested in the Gulf Stream when he was working as the Deputy Postmaster General of the American colonies. He wanted to know why ships carrying mail took weeks longer to get across the Atlantic when sailing east–to–west vs. west–to–east.

He consulted his cousin, Timothy Folger, a Nantucket sea captain, who told him about the strong current in the Atlantic that can speed up or slow down a ship’s progress considerably, depending which way it was sailing. The two men worked together to produce the first–ever map that showed the path of the Gulf Stream—and it was the first to name it as such. Franklin’s goal was to help ship captains plan their routes to take advantage of its speed or to avoid it altogether when traveling in the opposite direction.

Since then, the Gulf Stream has been studied at length by scientists and is a topic of intense analysis. Modern technology—satellites, research vessels, remote sensing

instruments, etc.—allows us to collect data with greater precision, related to temperature, weather and climate, and track.

If you are on a boat entering the Gulf Stream, it actually looks like a river. Its bright cobalt–blue color is dramatically diferent from gray–green–blue of the rest of the Atlantic Ocean it flows through. Mariners sampling water temperatures as they proceed notice a dramatic increase in water temperature as they enter the Gulf Stream, not to mention the strong current that may be pushing them along or holding them back.

These days, mail goes by air, so leters you send to Europe won’t get there in less time than you’d get a reply. And the Gulf Stream still doesn’t warm Europe enough for coconuts with wanderlust to sprout new groves in Galway Bay or on the edges of Norwegian fjords. But, if you put a message in a botle and drop it in the ocean, that steady, reliable river in the ocean might just find you a new pen–pal on the other side of the Atlantic. Just be sure they send their reply by airmail or email—the Gulf Stream only goes one way.

—Deirdre O’Regan

The Franklin–Folger Map of the Gulf Stream. Franklin published three editions of this map, each with new information. This is the third version, published in 1786. It was used by mariners to plan their routes across the Atlantic.

Crossword clues and answers* can all be found within this issue of Sea History!

1. 7. 11. 12. 13. 14. 17. 19.

Flying Cloud’s designer / shipbuilder, Donald . (2 words) Why people were so eager to sail to the West Coast in 1849.

Captain who took Louise Arner Boyd to the Arctic. (last name) Made the first chart of the Gulf Stream. River where SS City of Rockland wrecked.

(2 words) Novella inspired by the Somers incident. (2 words) a.k.a. Merchant Marine Act of 1920.

Ernestina’s original name (last name only).

Brig used as a training ship before the US Naval Academy. Hometown of the US Naval Academy. 1850 wind and current charts instructed ships to hug the coast of this South American country.

A ship that runs is ofen wrecked.

Flying Cloud captain’s wife served in this role onboard. Olin Stephens’s classic racing yawl.

A canal dug across this isthmus made it much easier for ships to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

(last name) Secretary of War in 1842; Somers’s obstreperous midshipman.

DOWN

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 8. 9. 10. 15. 16. 18. 19. 21. 24. 25. *Answer

A very buoyant tropical fruit.

Ida May fished for oysters on this type of boat. Type of sailing vessel Louise Arner Boyd used for her 1941 Arctic expedition.

CAPT Don Walsh’s record-seting submersible.

Ida May’s engine was fueled by this.

(2 words) Southern tip of South America.

Gold Rush state.

Husband and wife team aboard Flying Cloud.

Type of ship built to sail fast to San Francisco. Louise Arner Boyd expedition sailed along the coast of this northern country.

Type of “sailor” who studies maritime history by reading about it.

Rebellion against the captain.

(last name) Developed wind and current charts. End of the yard; site of a hanging at sea.

harles Scammon, a rare combination of naturalist, artist, ship captain, and commercial hunter, was born in Maine in 1825. As a young man, he sailed to California, likely for the Gold Rush, but he must not have had much success with this—or at least he missed life at sea—because on 1 April 1852, in command of a litle brig named the Mary Helen, he wrote that he steered out of San Francisco Bay with his crew, bound for “elephanting.”

Elephanting? Was this an April Fool’s joke?

Captain Scammon was sailing southwards along the coast looking for elephant seals, also known as “sea elephants,” or marinos elefantes to the early Spanish colonists. Elephant seals are the largest of all fin-footed mammals, bigger than sea lions and even walruses. There are two species. The northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris), which Scammon was afer, is found only in the eastern North Pacific, migrating and feeding as far north as the Aleutian Islands. The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) has a much wider range, swimming and breeding throughout the Southern Ocean and the edges of Antarctica.

by Richard J. King

M. Scammon

An adult male northern elephant seal can weigh three to five times more than a female—as heavy as a mini-van. The elephant part of their name comes from their trunk-like nose, found only on the bulls. This profound proboscis can grow as long as two feet, signaling to females their fitness as a potential mate. The nose seems to accentuate their bellowing roars, and it inflates when two bulls are competing for territory on the beach—although as they slam and bite at each other’s barrel chests, their noses are mostly flopped out of the way.

In the 1850s, Scammon and his crew anchored of the coastal islands of California and Baja California, where elephant seals were known to haul out on the beach to molt, mate, and give birth. Female sea elephants come ashore to give birth to a single pup, feeding them intensely with their rich milk as they starve themselves for about a month, devoted to tripling their babies’ weight. At this stage, the “weaners,” as biologists call them, are then lef on their own to learn how to swim and hunt as their inexhaustible mothers mate again and then go back out to sea for the rest of the year with only a one month break ashore to molt. They swim thousands of miles in the open North Pacific.

Charles

(1825–1911)

SCIENTIST

Scammon and his crew slaughtered the seals on the beaches— males, females, and young. The men then rendered oil from the blubber by boiling it, the same way as was done in the 1800s with whales. At the time, elephant seal oil was considered an exceptional lubricant for machinery, even more valuable than whale oil. Scammon and his crew sailed back to San Francisco with 350 barrels of the precious oil, having killed about 100 or 200 elephant seals.

A quarter century later, afer his career as a whaleman and Coast Guard of icer, Charles Scammon wrote and illustrated a litle-known yet extraordinary book about his travels and hunting at sea. Scammon recognized the rapid decline of elephant seals, writing in 1874: “Owing to the continual pursuit of the animals, they have become nearly if not quite extinct on the California coast, or the few remaining have fled to some unknown point for security.”

After surviving over 10,000 years living beside Native peoples, who likely hunted them in some regions, the northern elephant seal was nearly extinguished by American hunters in less than a century. Afer a few isolated sightings by hunters and naturalists, in 1911 a devoted expedition found about 150 of these seals breeding on a desolate beach of Isla Guadalupe of Baja.

(top lef) Charles Scammon’s illustration of the “sea elephant” from his book, The Marine Mammals of the Northwestern Coast of North America.

(middle) Up to 10,000 elephant seals return to breed, give birth, and molt their skin on the beach at Point Año Nuevo in central California.

(lef) Look at that schnoz!

BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT, DEPT. OF THE INTERIOR

SOPHIA WITTIG

LINDA HALL LIBRARY

In 1922 the Mexican government enacted conservation laws for the northern elephant seal. The United States followed, and now, afer the addition of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 and other changes in North American policies, demands, and atitudes, northern elephant seals have had the space to rebuild healthy populations. Today, they visit about 25 pupping colonies from Mexico all the way up to British Columbia. They even occupy areas where there is no historical record of seals there, such as at Point Año Nuevo at the northern edge of Monterey Bay, a litle peninsula that Scammon would have sailed right past in the 1800s and not seen a single elephant seal. Today, especially in the winter, you can visit Año Nuevo State Park and watch 100s of elephant seals molt, mate, nurse, fight, and sunbathe. You can hear the croaks and bellows of the adults and the screeches of the young, while ravens and gulls hang around for scraps and great white sharks lurk just ofshore. Biologists estimate that more than 210,000 northern elephant seals are living in the North Pacific today, and their numbers are increasing each year. According to expert Mark Hindell, this is “one of the most remarkable population recoveries of any mammal.”

For previous Animals in “Sea History,” see www.seahistory.org or the book Ocean Bestiary: Meeting Marine Life from Abalone to Orca to Zooplankton, which is a revised collection of over fifeen years of this column!

“Sea History for Kids” is sponsored by the Henry L. & Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation

(middle) A young female swims along the kelp beds of Cedros Island, of the coast of Baja California.

(right) Map showing the breeding grounds and range of the Northern Elephant Seal.

by Captain Michael Rutstein

Sailing Programs Continue to Sufer from COVID Fallout

Te economic efects of the COVID pandemic continue to echo through our feet of tall ships and traditional vessels. Some programs, such as BaySail in Bay City, Michigan, are f nding that demand for their sail-training and scienceunder-sail oferings is not rebounding to pre-2020 levels.

Board member Joe Parker says the non-proft organization has no choice but to put one of its two schooners on the market; it has put Appledore V up for sale. Te steel-hulled 65-foot schooner has been on the hard since the end of the 2019 season. “We replaced a ton of steel framing and did a lot of updating on the boat,” says Parker. “It was a tall ship festival year in the Great Lakes, which was great. We kept two boats busy—and then the pandemic hit, and we were completely shut down for basically two seasons.”

Business has been slow to rebound, leading the BaySail board to conclude that they’ll be lucky to f ll their primary boat, Appledore IV. T at leaves Appledore V as an expensive parking-lot decoration.

“ Tere’s still a little bit of a mortgage on the boat. We have to pay storage, we have to pay rent for the jack-

stands, and we have to pay insurance. Our cost to own it without using it, not counting the mortgage, is nearly $15,000 a year.”

Appledore V

It will come as no surprise to Sea History readers that many of the boats sold in this industry—particularly in the Maine windjammer feet—are passed along on buyer-friendly terms, sometimes seller-f nanced, to former crew, former captains, and people who were already in the industry. Tere aren’t a lot of newcomers walking through the door saying, “Hey, here’s a half a million bucks, I want to run a schooner!”

Appledore V ’s selling points include a rebuilt 90-horsepower Lehman diesel

and gearbox, both installed during the 2019 reft. While not especially “yachty” down below, there are accommodations, so crew can live aboard. Says Parker: “Although it’ll need to be reinspected in the spring, everything is there. It could be put together and up rigged in a day or two. Te entire boat was inspected with ultrasonic thickness gauges as well as visual inspection from the inside, and we replaced anything that was suspect. It should be good for another 30 years.”

Parker also notes that the Coast Guard has already approved the installation of additional ballast (estimated cost: $30,000) that would boost the current COI and allow for overnights underway.

“ Te [BaySail] organization was pretty fush with cash early on. Te Attorney General of Michigan told Dow Chemical to f nd some environmental organizations and give them money. Well, BaySail got $500,000 and went out and bought Appledore V for $350,000.

“It’s been good, but in hindsight we’ve not f lled the schedule enough to generate a break-even point with that boat, and that’s just the bottom line.”

Choppy Waters on Lake Erie

Te US Brig Niagara, a War of 1812 replica vessel based in Erie, Pennsylvania, is currently without a captain or crew. Te ship is owned by the state of Pennsylvania and managed by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC). Te Commission has decided to recon fgure its relationship with the Flagship Niagara League (FNL), the non-proft organization that has been operating Niagara for the PHMC since the ship was rebuilt and launched in 1990. FNL separately operates the schooner Lettie G. Howard.

Brig Niagara

FLAGSHIP NIAGARA LEAGUE

SIMON PIERRE BARRETTE VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

On 18 December, a PHMC press release essentially gave two weeks’ notice to Niagara’ s ofcers and announced that, henceforth, it would take over the hiring process. Flagship Niagara League volunteers created a petition on Change. org requesting a public forum to discuss the changes. Te brig’s unique and complex rig makes crew continuity an important operational and safety concern.

Te petition garnered over 700 signatures and led to a sit-down in January between FNL volunteers and the PHMC ofcials. Te volunteers were not appeased. “ T is meeting was supposed to be an informational session. We were mostly just talked to, and we were told there wouldn’t be an opportunity for questions. So, we felt that it was very unproductive and very unprofessional,” longtime volunteer Gary Dudenhoefer told YourErie.com.

Privately, volunteers expressed dissatisfaction with the PHMC’s site administrator, James Hall. Hall came to Erie in 2020 after spending 13 years with the Delaware Division of Parks & Recreation, lacking any sailing or tall ship experience. More generally, the concern was that running all decisions through the PHMC bureaucracy would lead to more of the delays and inefciency that characterized increased the PHMC’s involvement in 2023.

Te PHMC directly managed the brig and hired the crew between 1992 and 2009. Te Flagship Niagara League then operated Niagara under a ten-year operations agreement with the PHMC that expired in 2021. Te two organizations have been operating on a year-byyear basis since then.

Te PHMC’s December press release also announced additional funding: “$400,000 annually to support operations, in addition to the existing $350,000 earmarked for maintenance and operations. During 2024, the PHMC will embark on a multi-milliondollar Commonwealth Capital Project

to tackle Niagara’ s deferred maintenance and to make major systems upgrades.” One of the few square-rigged vessels in the US feet that sails on a regular basis, Niagara has long been a centerpiece of tall ships events on the Great Lakes and beyond. Te FNL has sent an impressive group of alumni mariners out into the industry.

Moving forward, the PHMC has stated that Niagara will be less focused on sail training, and will limit her sailing closer to home. She will not sail at all in 2024, but the PHMC plans to have her underway by 2026 for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Sailcargo Sputers

One of the most intriguing projects in the sustainable cargo and sail-training felds in recent years has been Sailcargo Inc.’s construction, in Costa Rica, of Ceiba, a wooden-hulled three-masted sailing vessel designed to carry cargo on carbon-free routes along the West

Coast of the Americas. After selling shares worldwide to fund the construction and establish the business, Sailcargo appears to have lost steam. While the company is still collecting awards and accolades, there has been turnover at the top of the organization, construction on Ceiba has been temporarily halted, and the rebuilt cargo vessel purchased in 2022 to jump-start cargo operations, Vega, has yet to cross the Atlantic, leaving it a year and a half behind schedule.

rigid. Te fate of the vessel and the company are unclear at this time.

New Name, Same Mission

Te Foundation for Underway Experiential Learning (FUEL) is now doing business as Martha’s Vineyard Ocean Academy. Teir principal platform is the engineless topsail schooner Shenandoah, built for Captain Bob Douglas at the Harvey Gamage Shipyard in 1964. Douglas donated the 170-ton schooner to the program in 2020.

Recently, Sailcargo CMO Alejandra Teran acknowledged that “the company underwent changes in its leadership team and a redirection of the strategy” in 2023 and is currently focused on fundraising to re-start construction. Vega is a historic three-masted wooden schooner built in Sweden in 1909 and rebuilt in 2006. Concerns about her spars and rigging derailed her earlier attempt to cross the Atlantic, and an insurance policy allowing the 115-year-old vessel to carry cargo remains elusive.

Co-founder Dani Southcott, formerly the face of the organization and its principal spokesperson, has left Sailcargo to found another clean shipping startup, Veer Group. Meanwhile, at AstilleroVerde (Green Shipyard) in Costa Rica, Ceiba sits fully framed, with foors, deck beams, and knees in place. Interior planking is complete, and steel strapping has been installed to make the hull stronger and more

MV Ocean Academy is currently fundraising to build a new steel schooner, which will also be named Shenandoah. With a new vessel, they plan to add semester-long voyages to their program oferings and create an endowment for student scholarships. “Our Phase One goal is $3,250,000 to construct the hull,” says Ocean Academy’s Ian Ridgeway, who claims they’re already halfway there.

Tey’re also in the process of accreditation from the Association of Experiential Education. Ocean Academy would be the f rst shipboard program to achieve AEE accreditation.

Co-founder Casey Blum, who has masters’ degrees in outdoor education and social work, has collected data on student outcomes from their programs over the past three years. She is preparing to publish her data, which speaks to the benefts of sail training generally, and more specifically about Ocean Academy’s programs aboard Shenandoah.

GORDON

Graphic depicting what Ceiba will look like when completed.

Shenandoah

Te National Park Service withdrew the National Historic Landmark designation from the steam ferry Ste. Claire on 11 December. Te ferry is remembered as one of the two “Boblo Boats,” used to carry guests from Michigan’s eastern shores around Detroit to Boblo Island. Structural work was begun on Ste. Claire in 2016 that was described as a restoration, but a steel structure added above the main deck was described in the National Park Service Withdrawal of Designation Report as “considered to be an inappropriate alteration,” and part of the historic boilers had also been destroyed. A f re caused by welders working onboard on 6 July 2018 essentially destroyed all of her wooden superstructure except for a small section at the stern. Te report concluded that Ste. Claire “has ceased to meet the criteria for designation because the qualities which originally led it to be designated, have been destroyed.” Te accomplished naval architect Frank Kirby designed the excursion ferries Columbia (1902) and Ste. Claire (1910) to take families to nearby Bois Blanc Island, which possessed a tranquil park featuring a dance pavilion, bath house and café, playgrounds, and baseball diamonds for a day’s respite from the city. Te name of the destination morphed in the common parlance to Boblo (sometimes also spelled “BobLo). Te two “Boblo Boats” became a popular draw on their own merits; they were luxuriously appointed and orchestras accompanied enthusiastic dancers in their large ballrooms. Passengers not in the dancing mood could view the ferries’ triple-expansion steam engines, or just sit and enjoy the scenery on the 18-mile river cruise. Te two vessels served on this circuit for decades until the park’s waning attendance moved management to discontinue the service in 1991. Ste. Claire changed hands several times before the f re in 2018. Te Ste. Claire Restoration Project still

hopes to bring Ste. Claire to the condition where she can become a venue and museum honoring the Boblo Boat heritage. Her “big sister” ship Columbia is owned by the SS Columbia Project; that ferry is currently in Bu f alo, New York, where that group continues to work on her restoration towards a hoped-for career on the Hudson River. (www.bobloboatdetroit.com; www.ss columbia.org) … T is year the USS Lexington Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, donated items from their collections to be returned to the families of the items’ owners. Te World War II artifacts in question are Yosegaki Hinomaru, called Good Luck Flags in English. Tese f ags, signed by family and friends and often inscribed with personal messages, were given to Japanese service members before going to war. Te non-proft Obon Society, based in Oregon, works to fnd the family members of the servicemen

to whom individual fags belonged in order to return them to the family. Te Obon Society has repatriated more than 500 of these fags, regarded as non-biological human remains, to Japanese families and communities. A fag belonging to Japanese serviceman Shigeyoshi Mutsuda, who was killed in action, was presented to the Obon Society in a repatriation ceremony at the USS Lexington Museum on 20 July; representatives from the museum and the Obon Society then accompanied the f ag on its journey to Japan and the family. Inspired by this action, the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum contacted the Obon Society and sent its four Good Luck Flags to the Society for repatriation. Te museum’s director of collections and curatorial a f airs, Meredith Kablick, said “We believe it’s important for museums to review their collections and determine if it’s ethical to keep certain objects. As these f ags are now considered nonbiological human remains, it was our

Ste. Claire

DETROIT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

moral duty to return these fags to the families in Japan. It’s been an honor to participate in this process and to promote cultural diplomacy between our countries.” Te museum-ship USS Lexington is an Essex-class carrier launched in September 1942; she served in the Paci fc Teater for a total of 21 months in combat. She was decommissioned in 1947 but reactivated in 1955, operating with the Seventh Fleet out of San Diego. In 1962 she was designated a Navy Training Carrier. Since 1992 she has

A Good Luck Flag that Patriots Point sent to the Obon Society to be repatriated in Japan.

The US Navy History Experience: 1776–1945

The all new Nautical History Gallery & Museum opened in 2023, featuring ship models that cover the evolution of US Navy ships from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World Wars I & II—includes the beginning of naval aviation. These hand-crafted 3-D miniatures were created by Joe Frangiosa Jr., a retired 4-year Navy vet & 16-year USMC helicopter crew chief.

PATRIOTS POINT

served as a naval aviation museum. Located on South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum is home to the Essex-class carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10), the destroyer USS Laf ey (DD-724), a feet of 28 historic aircraft, a Vietnam Experience exhibit, and the Medal of Honor Museum. Its educational and overnight programs reach more than 40,000 school-age children annually, focusing on history, science, and technology. (Obon Society, www.obonsociety.org. USS Lexington Museum, POB 23076, Corpus Christi, TX; Ph. 361 888-4873; www.usslexington.com. Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum, 40 Patriots Point Road, Mt. Pleasant, SC; Ph. 843 884-2727; www.patriotspoint.org)

… Te Mobile, Alabama, maritime museum GulfQuest is starting 2024 with a new director and a new name. Karen Poth, former creative director of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, assumed the helm as executive director in September. Meanwhile, the museum is dropping the name GulfQuest and will be operating under the name National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico. Te museum is planning two major new exhibits this year, one celebrating the Alabama Deep-Sea Fishing Rodeo, an event billed as the largest fshing tournament in the world, and one sharing the history of vessels that call the Gulf of Mexico home. (155 South Water St., Mobile, AL 36602; Ph. 251 436-8901; www.gulfquestmuseum.com) … A piece of wood from the mast of USS Maine has been donated to Arlington National Cemetery, location of the USS Maine Memorial, by New Jersey’s Pascack Historical Society. Te three-foot-long spar was donated to the historical society two decades ago by someone who claimed it was a relic from the Maine, having picked up the item at a local garage sale from someone who claimed it had been retrieved from the

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shipwreck in Cuba by a diver. Retired history teacher Christopher Kersting took it upon himself to investigate the story to see where it led. Eventually the quest was brought to the attention of retired Navy captain Steve Whittaker, who consulted the records regarding the Maine’ s construction and maintenance for information about the materials used in building the ship and the history of her paint jobs— f rst white, then tan, and fnally black. Te artifact and the fecks of paint he found on it appeared to match with what he had discovered about the Maine. Finally, Whittaker happened upon an 1899 photograph of the shipwreck site in Havana Harbor, revealing the point of the mast where the spar had been cut, con frming that the piece did originate on the Maine. Te Pascack Historical Society donated the piece to Arlington National Cemetery, which will engage conservators to stabilize it for its collection. Te armored cruiser USS Maine was launched in 1889 and commissioned in 1895; she was sent in 1899 to Havana, Cuba, to protect American interests during the war for Cuban independence. An explosion on 15 February of that year destroyed the ship, resulting in 261 fatalities; it is still debated whether the explosion was caused by a Spanish mine or a f re in the ship’s coal bunker. Te incident drummed up American sentiment to draw the country into war with Spain. A decade after the tragedy, the US Army Corps of Engineers returned to the shipwreck site and raised the vessel, recovering 65 bodies. Te rest of the ship’s remains were then scuttled in deep waters north of Havana. Te mast was installed on a granite base to form a monument; the names of those who died are inscribed onto the base. (www.pascackhistoricalsociety.org; www.arlingtoncemetery. mil) … Te German corvette Hiddensee has been scrapped at a shipyard in Bridgeport, Connecticut Te

ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

USS Maine Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The wreck of USS Maine when it was raised in 1911.

NHHC, US NAVY

ship had been part of the museum feet at Battleship Cove since 1997, but in October of last year the museum decided to dispose of the vessel in order to focus its f nancial resources on the remaining assets in its feet; Hiddensee was in need of expensive repair work before it could continue as a museum vessel. Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts, is home to the submarine USS Lionfsh, the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., and the battleship Massachusetts, as well as two PT boats, two helicopters, and two of the f rst drones

to be used by the military. Built in the Soviet Union for the East German navy, the Tarantul I-class guided missile corvette was commissioned in 1985 as the Rudolf Egelhofer. After the reunifcation of Germany in 1990, she was transferred to the navy of the Federal Republic of Germany and renamed Hiddensee. In 1991 she was transferred to the US Navy until being decommissioned in 1996. (5 Water St., Fall River, MA 02721; Phone: 508-678-1100; www.battleshipcove.org) … Te Jubilee Sailing Trust group announced in December the closure of the Jubilee Sailing Trust (Tenacious) Limited (JST(T) L), the company that owns and operates SV Tenacious. Te organization had been facing fnancial difculties for some time; in 2019 a concentrated oneweek appeal for £1 million (approx. $1.25 million) kept it a foat, and the subsequent pandemic losses continued to chip away at its funds. Te group announced in 2021 that it would sell Lord Nelson, one of its two sail training

Tenacious

Hiddensee

DEPT. OF DEFENSE

PHOTO BY PATRICK WERNHARDT VIA WIKIMEDIA

ships; when no buyer was forthcoming, it was put up for auction. JST(T)L then cancelled a planned voyage to the Caribbean in its remaining vessel, Tenacious Te Jubilee Sailing Trust, a separate charity, will be reviewed by the Charity Commission as to whether it might continue to operate; the JST(T)L an-

nouncement stated that its “deed of trust does not restrict operations to only include tall ships, which may mean the charity could operate in a diferent manner in the future.” Te Trust was founded in 1978 by Christopher Rudd and Dr. Tony Hicklin to ofer sailing experiences for disabled and non-disabled

participants working together. Te JST began with voyages on square-rigged vessels such as the Marques, TS Royalist, and Søren Larsen. When funding made it possible for JST to acquire its own vessel, naval architect Colin Mudie designed the organization’s frst ship, the three-masted barque Lord Nelson,

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launched in October 1986. She was the f rst ship designed to allow people of all physical abilities to sail side-by-side, including wheelchair accessibility and wheelchair lifts, accessible toilets, power-assisted steering, a speaking compass, Braille signage, and other tactile markers for the visually impaired. She was followed by Tenacious, designed by Tony Castro, in 2000. Te organization developed programs such as Youth Leadership @ Sea, Diversity @ Sea, and Sailing Forces, integrating wounded and recovering service members with civilian crew. (www.jst.org.uk) … Te City of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, voted on 18 December to decommission the ferry Norgoma, which had been languishing in the St. Mary’s River for the last fve years. Te city assumed ownership of the vessel in 2019 from the St. Mary’s River Marine Her-

itage Centre Board (SMRMCH), which had been using her as a museum ship. Te city has been trying to f nd a new owner for the vessel, and talks with as many as ten parties led to two purchase agreements, but neither led to a fnalized sale. With few viable options, the city contracted with Purvis Marine to dismantle the vessel for $395,000, along with a waiver of land f ll fees for the non-ferrous materials. Norgoma was built in 1949 in Collingwood, Ontario. She made a weekly fve-day round-trip run along far-fung communities of the “Turkey Trail,” the east-west water route

between Owen Sound and Sault Ste. Marie. Te 187-foot ship could carry 200 passengers (with sleeping quarters for 100) and was equipped with a galley that could turn out 144 meals at time. Once the TransCanada Highway was completed in 1962, Norgoma was converted from steam to diesel power and was adapted to accommodate more vehicles to serve as a car ferry between Tobermory and South Baymouth. In 1974 she was replaced by the much larger Chi-Cheemaun ferry, which is still in service today. After the Norgoma’ s retirement from service, she was moved to Sault Ste. Marie to be used as a museum vessel. Norgoma’ s sister ship, Norisle, was built in Canada in 1946 and served on the ferry route between Tobermory and Manitoulin Island, also retiring in 1974. Between them, the vessels had a carrying capacity of approximately 88 automobiles and 400 passengers. Norisle was purchased for $1 to serve as a museum vessel in the Manitowaning, her f rst and last port of call; she was towed to Port Colbourne last October to be recycled. … Sally Snowman, the last remaining ofcial lighthouse keeper in the United States, retired in the end of December. Snowman had been tending the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor for the past twenty years. Te original lighthouse on the site was built in 1716, but British forces destroyed it in 1776. Te replacement lighthouse was completed in 1783. In 1859 its tower was raised 14 feet to its current height of 102 feet above sea level. Te National Historic Landmark is slated for sale by the US Coast Guard; the future owner will be required to preserve the lighthouse. When Snowman signed on in 2003 as the site’s 70th caretaker, the station’s light and foghorn had already been automated (in the 1990s); her duties involved the upkeep of the site, mowing the grass, and leading visitors on

JOCK RUTHERFORD

VIA WIKIMEDIA

tours—often in period costume. In a December interview, Snowman told NPR: “Seeing the far expanse of the universe, the sunrises, the sunsets— they are phenomenal. To me, they were never the same twice. Te sea was never the same twice. Te cloud cover was never the same. It was like dying and go to heaven.” … Te Annapolis Maritime Museum was able to reopen to the public on 3 February, after cleaning up from a major food event. Annapolis experienced the third-worst food in its history due to a storm surge in early January, and the museum took on 18 inches of water. In the hours leading up to the storm, sta f and volunteers moved displays and their contents to a safe, dry location and succeeded in protecting the collection. City and insurance mandates required that the walls be removed and the interiors dried and sanitized before allowing the museum to host the public again. (723 2nd St., Annapolis, MD; Ph. 410 295-0104; www.amaritime.org) … In November, the Noble Maritime Collection on Staten Island unveiled the restored 19 th -century ceiling mural in the

museum’s Writing Room, a historic feature of the former Sailors’ Snug Harbor retirement home. Te Victorian mural is hand painted in the trompe-l’oeil style, creating the optical illusion of a three-dimensional glasshouse roof with fora suggesting the South Seas, where many of the resident mariners had sailed during their careers at sea. Te mural was originally commissioned by Sailors’ Snug Harbor around 1883 in celebration of the retirement home’s 50th anniversary. Part of the original ceiling collapsed in 2020 during a thunderstorm. Te restoration project was funded by the VersaillesGiverny Foundation, facilitated by the New York Landmarks Conservancy (NYLC), and designed and executed by EverGreene Architectural Arts. In the 1990s, a volunteer crew rehabilitated a former Sailors’ Snug Harbor dormitory from 1844—Building D, designated as a National Historic Landmark—and converted it into a new home for the Noble Maritime Collection museum. During this efort, the crew discovered

the glasshouse ceiling mural under decades of paint layers and plaster patches, and its restoration was a crowning achievement of the rehabilitation of the building. After the collapse, an emergency grant from the New York Landmarks Conservancy funded the study by EverGreene to assess the condition of the ceiling and later to document the mural, including a full photogrammetric digital scan and paint analysis. ( Te Noble Maritime Collection, 1000 Richmond Ter., Staten Island, NY; Ph. 718 447-6490; www.noblemaritime. org. NYLC, nylandmarks.org) …

USCG PHOTO

PHOTO BY CIRO GALENO JR., COURTESY NOBLE MARITIME COLLECTION

Sally Snowman

The restored Writing Room ceiling mural at Sailor’s Snug Harbor..

Te sail training Barque Picton Castle will begin another world circumnavigation, the ship’s 9th, in October 2024. Te ship’s previous eight voyages around the world have all followed a similar route, sailing west in the tropics via the Panama Canal. T is next voyage will begin and end on the Atlantic coast of North America, but it will see the ship sail east, mostly in the higher latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Picton Castle will trace commercial sailing ship trade routes of old, including rounding both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Ports of call include Cape Verde, Cape Town, Reunion, South Australia, Tasmania, Auckland, Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, the Falkland Islands, St. Helena and a number of islands in the Eastern Caribbean. Te voyage begins in the ship’s homeport in

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in October 2024 and will conclude in Virginia in June 2026. Captain Dirk Lorenzen will assume command for this voyage from Captain Dan Moreland. Lorenzen is a long-time chief mate in Picton Castle and has considerable high-latitude experience under traditional sail. As always, the ship will be crewed by a combination of professional and trainee sailors. Applications are now open for trainee-crew positions. No sailing experience is necessary, but applicants must be in good health and ft for extended, adventurous passages at sea. Details and an application are available at picton-castle.com/voyages/aroundthe-world-by-way-of-cape-horn.

Route for Picton Castle’s 9th world voyage in 2024–26 by way of the Great Capes.

COURTESY BARQUE PICTON CASTLE

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Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies , Jailbreaks, BlockadeRunning , and the Slave Trade by Jonathan W. White (Rowman & Littlefeld, Lanham, Maryland, 2023, 336pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-15381-7501-9; $29.95hc)

Civil War historian and Lincoln Prize-winning author Jonathan W. White remarks in the prologue to Shipwrecked that he had never heard of Appleton Oaksmith before one of his students mentioned him. From obscurity, White has rescued Oaksmith, who led an adventurous life and fgures as representative of several themes of the Civil War era. T is is a fast-paced, deeply researched book centering on a charismatic rogue who, despite his Northern background, became a slave trader and blockade runner. Oaksmith’s slave-trading was only stymied by the illegal actions of the Lincoln administration to jail him—until he could escape, fee, and ultimately receive a pardon from President Grant.

Shipwrecked is not really a maritime story, although Oaksmith (1828–87) had adventures aplenty a foat. As a teenager, he sailed to China on a two-year voyage; during the Gold Rush, he served as the master of vessels of California and Mexico, where he dealt with a mutinous crew; he ran his ship Mary Adeline aground in the Congo River, where she was attacked by tribesmen and gallantly defended by Oaksmith and a skeleton crew until a British warship rescued them; he out ftted ships during the American movement to try to seize (“liberate”) Cuba, which would have extended Southern slavery; and during the Civil War, he commanded slave traders and blockade runners. Nevertheless, White’s focus is not on Oaksmith as a mariner. Tere are few sea stories and no shipwreck (at least not a literal one) in Shipwrecked. Rather, the book is written as a family biography of Oaksmith; his mother, a once well-known

literary fgure named Elizabeth Oaks Smith (the original family name); and Appleton’s father, brothers, wives, and children.

Appleton Oaksmith was born in Maine into a family that later moved to Brooklyn and Long Island, trying to live by the pen. His mother, Elizabeth Oaks Smith, was a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, essayist, and orator, who advocated for women’s equal rights and abhorred slavery, but whose writings barely su fced to support the family. His father, Seba Smith, was an older man known for his long-running, famous parodies until he became infatuated with mathematics and wrote a geometry book that further stressed the family’s fnances and his marriage. Into this highly educated, financially strapped family, Appleton as a boy mastered Greek, Latin, French, and Spanish, and became so fuid a writer that throughout his life, he could dash of

publishable poetry when the mood struck him. But for reasons White does not explore, Appleton turned to the sea, presumably for adventure and to seek his fortune.

Photographs by Anne T. Converse Text by Carolyn M. Ford

vicariously

“An outstanding presentation deserves ongoing recommendation for both art and nautical collections.”

10”x12” Hardbound book; 132 pages, 85 full page color photographs; Price $45.00

For more information contact: Anne T. Converse Phone: 508-728-6210 anne@annetconverse.com www.annetconverse.com

Voluminous letters by family members and Elizabeth’s diary entries provided White with poignant details of the family’s relations, politics, and outlook. As in his other books, White displays command of all the material and he has done yeoman research into government records and newspaper accounts to provide a nuanced picture of the whole family. Unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably when a man engages in criminal acts, Appleton Oaksmith’s motivations, involvement in the slave trade, and even some of his movements are not always clear. Like many criminals now and then, he professed his innocence, a cry taken up by his mother, but he was connected to so many ships engaged in the slave trade as to render his claims not credible. Yet White mentions many slavers in passing, and Appleton’s role with most of them is unclear. Why and how a man of his talents and a professed Union man (albeit a Democrat who sought to conciliate the South) would get involved in the abhorred slave trade when the Lincoln administration clearly meant to stamp it out is not obvious, and in the absence of def nitive evidence, one wishes that the author would have engaged in some informed speculation.

pardon, settled in North Carolina, where he served in the legislature and was known for being anti-Ku Klux Klan and supporting the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, and saw sickness and disasters envelope his family. White aptly sums up his saga as a “life of adventure, crime, risk, failure, and heartache.”

Shipwrecked is a f ne book about obscure fgures of the Civil War era. While Shipwrecked will not a fect how a reader looks at the major issues of that time, Jonathan White frames some of those issues through the prism of a man on the “wrong” side but who managed (mostly) to stay a few steps ahead of the law.

Frederick C.

L einer Baltimore, Maryland

Adventurers: Te Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550–1650 by David Howarth (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2023, 459pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-0-30025072-5; $35hc)

Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Archway Publishing.

Secretary of State Henry Seward emerges as a cold, ruthless f gure. Seward, despite being a famous lawyer, knowingly initiated illegal acts against Oaksmith with the connivance of federal marshals. To bring Oaksmith to justice, Seward ordered his virtual kidnapping abroad; Oaksmith was imprisoned without charges and denied legal assistance, had his trial venue changed, and was convicted by the testimony of witnesses whom the government had bought of. Oaksmith escaped from jail, somehow made his way to Cuba, engaged in blockade-running for the South, and escaped yet again to England. Years after the war, he returned to the United States. He received a

Te British East India Company (EIC) evokes images of sailing ships loaded with luxury goods and bristling with cannon, companies of armed combatants, hordes of specie, and exotic spices, as well as mega-profts and amoral leadership. Large-scale global trade, joint stock companies, and international competition were ready to change the world when the EIC was chartered in London in 1600. Despite competition from the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and especially the Dutch, the EIC was a resounding fnancial success to the extent that it appears to have been destined for greatness from the beginning. David Howarth, in Adventurers: Te Improbable Rise of the East India Company, 1550–1650, puts that myth to the sword and, to borrow from the Duke of Wellington, concludes that the success or victory of the EIC was “a close-run thing.”

Veteran master mariner Christopher McMahon shares true depictions of life aboard the merchant ships he sailed aboard during the 1970s and ’80s engaged in worldwide trade with tales of raging storms, bizarre captains and crews, piracy, and the magic of the sea.

Anne T. Converse Photography

Neith, 1996, Cover photograph Wood, Wind and Water

A Story of the Opera House Cup Race of Nantucket

Live

through the pictures and tales of classic wooden yacht owners who lovingly restore and race these gems of the sea.

Devoted

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“...An

“What

“…Real,

In any era, international merchants are adventurers in competition with other nations engaged in diverse markets operated under widely varying regulations expressed in several languages and multiple monetary units. In 1600 the international market was further complicated by a dearth of information on every essential aspect of the business. Not much real information was known about the lands in the East, lands anticipated to be rich markets for domes-

tic goods and sources of valuable goods for resale at home. Routes to those attractive markets were not well known, and sailing ships dependent on wind power took months to get there and sometimes years to return home. Shipwrights had to build vessels that could withstand years on the water, and provisioners had to f nd food with shelflives of months—not days or even weeks—with the goal of maintaining enough crew to operate the ship.

Much of the Howarth narrative is built around Tomas Smythe, who served as governor of the EIC for the f rst two decades, through thick and thin—mostly thin. Considerable attention is awarded the main competitor of the EIC, the Dutch East India Company (or the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, a.k.a. the VOC). Te VOC had a big head start when the EIC made the scene. Anyone evaluating the two companies at that time would not have given the English much of a chance, considering the more highly developed Dutch economy.

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Howarth’s is not a typical business history; he explains changes that were happening in the legal system, the government, structure of religion, and what it meant to be English in a world when England was an underdog nation. Economics had yet to take shape around Adam Smith’s Te Wealth of Nations (1776)—that tome wouldn’t come out for almost two more centuries, so business adventurers and those opposed to business adventuring sparred over issues like the meaning of specie and its impact at home if shipped abroad. Everything was in fux, and Howarth’s narrative emphasizes the uncertainty that accompanies fux.

Readers acquainted with tales of the wild, wild West will fnd Howarth’s tales of the Savage East even more eyepopping. Whereas the violence that characterized the American West was fueled with six-guns and repeating rifes, the violence of the East involving the EIC was driven by cannons in broadsides from sailing ships. Bandits lit up the West, but the “bandits” faced by the agents of the EIC were the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch merchant adventurers. Te history of the early EIC set out by Howarth matches any Zane Gray epic and the narrative is as muscular.

David O. Whitten

Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina

Prisoners of the Bashaw by Frederick C. Leiner (Westholme Publishing LLC, Yardley, Pennsylvania, 2022, 352pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, 978-1-59416386-9; $35hc)

Mr. Leiner has written what is likely the ultimate story of the capture of the US frigate Philadelphia in 1803, the resultant imprisonment/slavery of her 300-plus crew and ofcers, and, f nally, the release of those prisoners in 1805. Meticulously researched and annotated, this volume reads like a novel but is, in fact, a brilliant factual reference for anyone researching that event or just wishing to learn about a particularly dismal period in American maritime history.

No story of the grounding and capture of Philadelphia would be complete without the inclusion of Stephen Decatur’s masterful execution of his plan to board and burn the ship, thus ensuring the Tripolitan pirates would be precluded from adding her to the bashaw’s navy. Leiner has demonstrated his frm grasp of the plan’s formation and execution, giving his reader an insider’s look at the skill and planning required to complete the task successfully. Te execution was so well done that Lieutenant Decatur, who led the 75-man mission, was subsequently “jump-promoted” to captain by the United States Congress.

Te lives of the men incarcerated in the bashaw’s castle is laid out clearly and the treatment of both the men and ofcers will surely bring outrage to the reader. His descriptions of the boredom and arduous slavery, minimal food, and the cultural and religious di ferences referred to in letters by the participants were carefully researched. Te reaction to the event at home was widespread at the time, and Leiner includes examples of eforts made by many in the States to provide relief to the captives.

Also included are the often frustrating e forts on the diplomatic side to

orchestrate the release of the American sailors—made even more challenging by the necessity of pulling in other nations as intermediaries, as the United States had no direct access to Tripoli. Te bashaw was foolishly greedy in his demands to the negotiations on our behalf by emissaries friendly to both the US and Tripoli and, in conjunction with those negotiations, precipitated an overland military action. ( Te reader should note that both the city and the country—now Libya—were then known as Tripoli.)

Leiner’s book, in conjunction with Gardner Allen’s 1905 volume, Our Navy and the Barbary Corsairs, will give a reader the most informed and complete

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TetimewasOctober1991. Te shipwas AnneKristine,theoldest continuouslysailingvesselinthe world.Whatawaitedthemwas HurricaneGrace,thesouthernend ofwhatcametobeknownas“Te PerfectStorm.”

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look at our f rst encounter with the denizens of the Middle East. Prisoners of the Bashaw belongs on any history bu f ’s bookshelf and will satisfy any seeking information about this important con f ict.

William H. White Bonita Springs, Florida

122 Years on the Old Bay Line by Jack Shaum (Arcadia Press, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, 2022, 96pp, illus, ISBN 978-1-63499-399-9; $25.99pb)

T is heavily illustrated book is part of the America T rough Time series from Arcadia Press, which publishes neighborhood, local, and regional history. Color and black-and-white images of people, places, and ships tell the story of the largest steamship company to operate on the Chesapeake Bay, and it stands out as a particularly enjoyable book from a publisher that releases more than 900 new titles a year.

Te Old Bay Line has been the subject of many histories over time, but this one is a colorful modern account of the company. It stands well with longer well-regarded Chesapeake Bay steamer books, such as those by Roger H. Burgess, Alexander Crosby Brown, and David C. Holly.

Te Old Bay Line was formed early in the history of steamboat service in Maryland and Virginia. It grew in a complicated series of acquisitions, mergers, route expansions, and new construction. Te company frst operated wooden sidewheelers and later evolved to rely on large steel screw-propeller boats. At times, sailings included stretches of open ocean routes linking to states above and below on the Atlantic coast.

Te narrative leaves no era neglected, though it emphasizes the last half of the company’s history. Author Jack Shaum brings the story alive by including evocative personal impressions of travel onboard the line’s steamers. Details include stories of company

practices, ofces, personalities, and assorted disasters, including fres, groundings, founderings, and boiler explosions. Simple images of signs instructing passengers aboard company steamers help take you along. Illustrations are plentiful enough to allow readers to cruise through the book just reading captions if they are so inclined. Take a cruise on the Chesapeake, I think you will enjoy it.

K evin Foster Hyattsville, Maryland

Dark Waters, Starry Skies: Te Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign, March–October 1943 by Je f rey R. Cox (Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2023, 528pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-1-4728-4989-2; $35hc)

World War II in the Paci fc, a topic as immense as the Paci fc Ocean itself, has generated an equally immense output of presentations, articles, books, and f lms and will, no doubt, continue to do so as long as people continue to research, write, and publish. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, the struggle for Guadalcanal may be the most fetching topic for scholars, perhaps competing with the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Volumes fve and six of Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Te Struggle for Guadalcanal August 1942–February 1943 and Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier 22 July 1942–1 May 1944 ), published threequarters of a century ago, is an important early analysis that includes the seven months addressed in Dark Waters, Starry Skies. Since that time, dozens of other studies on the topic have been published. Can there be more to reveal in a work that concentrates on those seven months of the war? Te short answer is yes.

Dark Waters, Starry Skies is Jef rey Cox’s third book on the Guadalcanal campaign. What Cox had access to that

Morison did not are documents from the Japanese, Allied records that have been declassifed, and the studies others have produced over 75 years. Where earlier narratives might refer to a Japanese fotilla of eight destroyers, Cox provides the names of the eight along with the names and ranks of most of the captains. Instead of noting that several torpedoes launched, Cox tells us who launched what and when, and the results of the attack. Details include the names and ranks of pilots who were shot down or who were doing the shooting. Cox’s rendition is replete with details, details that both distinguish the value of the work and make reading it somewhat tedious.

Te Cox volume is not like most of the books typically published by the Naval Institute Press. His writing is packed with sentence fragments that ambush readers who take composition seriously. Regarding his analysis, it is less academic and more akin to a radio commentator describing a baseball game with occasional asides that ofer criticism and evaluation. Cox tends to focus on the confusion of combat and leaves his readers wondering why battle plans were even attempted, considering how they apparently evaporate with the opening salvos. Historians have argued that battles are won by the side with the fewest mistakes, and Cox assures us that is the case as he points out the errors on both sides and puts names on them. Errors cost lives, thousands of them.

Dark Waters, Starry Skies is recommended reading for students of the naval war in the Paci fc, although f rsttime readers on the topic might be overwhelmed by the details and miss the forest for the trees. Nevertheless, general readers, especially those looking for an exciting bout in history, will delight in this work.

David O. Whitten, P hD Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The National Maritime Historical Society is grateful to the following individuals and institutions who have so generously supported our work. We are also grateful to our many anonymous donors.

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