Sea History 187 - Summer 2024

Falls of Clyde

Fireboats

14k 18k

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• 18" Rope Pendant Chain $750.

From the rich maritime heritage of whaling towns to quaint island villages and the grand seaside mansions of the Gilded Age, our small, comfortable ships can take you to the heart of New England’s most treasured destinations. Be welcomed back to your home away from home, where you can delight in the warm camaraderie of fellow guests and crew.

Small Ship Cruising Done Perfectly ®

PHOTO BY CHUCK HOMLER

Change of the Watch at NMHS

It is my distinct pleasure to greet you all in my frst Sea History Deck Log as the new president and executive director of NMHS. We f nd ourselves at an important moment in our organization’s evolution. With more than 60 years of institutional history to build on, now is a good time to evaluate NMHS’s role and determine how we can best further our mission and serve our members and the wider community. Later this year, we will embark on a strategic planning process that will involve conversations and feedback from our members and from those in the maritime feld.

Here are a few thoughts as we begin that process: We must continue to expand our role as the national voice for the maritime heritage community. Not only can we connect people who support and work in maritime museums, historic vessel preservation, shipboard experiences, and the maritime industry, we can serve as their advocate to governments and the public. Te stories and topics that f ll the pages of Sea History are critical to this endeavor, as are the many connections and alliances we have made over the years to build our signi fcant constituency.

Many of our nation’s museums, educational programs, and historic ships are stressed—underfunded and understa fed. If we do not step up to support these endeavors, we risk losing an important aspect of the narrative of our maritime story forever. NMHS can and should be that advocate. To do this efectively, we need to reach more people; a multimedia approach will be critical to reaching that broader audience. We will work to f nd new outlets for the stories, news, and issues covered in Sea History.

Maritime history IS the story of humankind, and for Americans it is the story of how our nation was founded and progressed to where we are now in the 21st century. To quote Carl Sagan, “You have to know your past to understand the present.” When we look to the

past, we recognize that maritime activity has always been the core of commerce, the crux of contemporary sea power, and the powerful driver that built this nation. Although it may not be obvious to many Americans, maritime activity has been foundational to our success from the very beginning. NMHS recognizes and appreciates the tremendous role that all things maritime have played in creating our civilizations—and our future! Our goal at NMHS is to be that connection and bridge to a deeper understanding of our seafaring past and its relevance to our world today.

At some point, you experienced a connection that brought you to these pages. In your youth did you enjoy messing about in boats? Do you still? Was it a trip to a historic ship that fred your imagination? Perhaps an enthralling visit to a maritime museum sparked your curiosity, or was it a rollicking sea story that touched of a lifelong obsession with the sea? Te National Maritime Historical Society seeks to inspire both dedicated maritime enthusiasts and the next generation; I envision NMHS providing the spark to ignite that curiosity and desire to create that connection and understanding.

(photo above) NMHS long-time and beloved president and executive director Burchenal Green (lef ), with her successor, Cathy Green (no relation) sandwiching Sea History editor Deirdre O’Regan at the 2024 National Maritime Awards Dinner. Burchie came to NMHS in 1995, became executive director in 2003—a few years afer Peter Stanford retired—and president in 2005. She has guided the organization for more than two decades through calm waters and rough seas, building on its strengths and steering a course steady and true. She leaves NMHS in capable hands and looks forward to continuing her work as an NMHS ambassador.

How relevant is maritime activity today? Very. This map reveals the ubiquity of modern shipping. Before the 20th century, the only way to transport goods, people, and communications across the world’s oceans was by sea. Today, despite advances in technology and air travel, 90% of world trade is still carried by ship. The sheer number of ships in service in this marine trafic map creates lines and concentrations of color: yellow—container ships, blue—dry bulk, red—tankers, magenta— car and vehicle carriers.

Te ships of yesteryear didn’t build and sail themselves, and that hasn’t changed in the 21st century. Our best days are ahead of us, I believe, even in these challenging times when our best and brightest are needed to help us adapt to changing seas and a changing world. In sharing the engaging oferings of Sea History and our educational programs and events, and through our determined advocacy eforts that supports our network of maritime allies, NMHS can continue to “stay a mast” and deliver its quality programs as it has for the past 61 years. We are delighted that you are with us on this voyage. No captain could ask for better shipmates.

—NMHS President and Executive Director, Cathy Green

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.

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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

OFFICERS & TRUSTEES: Chairman , CAPT James A. Noone, USN (Ret.); Vice Chairman , Richardo R. Lopes; President: Catherine M. Green; 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; Karen Helmerson; VADM Al Konetzni, USN (Ret.); K. Denise Rucker Krepp; Guy E. C. Maitland; Salvatore Mercogliano; Michael W. Morrow; Richard P. O’Leary; Ronald L. Oswald; Timothy J. Runyan; Richard Scarano; Jean Wort Trustees Elect: Samuel F. Byers, Elizabeth McCarthy, and David Winkler

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

FOUNDER: Karl Kortum (1917–1996)

PRESIDENTS EMERITI: Burchenal Green, Peter Stanford (1927–2016)

OVERSEERS: Chairman, RADM David C. Brown, USMS (Ret.); RADM Joseph Callo, USN (Ret.); Christopher Culver; Richard du Moulin; David Fowler; 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, John O. Jensen, Frederick Leiner, Joseph Meany, Salvatore Mercogliano, Carla Rahn Phillips, Walter Rybka, Quentin Snediker, William H. White

NMHS STAFF: Executive Director, Catherine M. Green; Vice President of Operations, Wendy Paggiotta; Senior Staf 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.

Panama Route vs. Cape Horn

On reading the opening sentence of David Hirzel’s informative article about the Creesys and their handling of Flying Cloud (Sea History 186, “Captain and Navigator, Husband and Wife: Josiah and Eleanor Creesy’s Record Run”), I stumbled over the claim that “in 1851, the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco was by sailing a fullrigged clipper ship around Cape Horn.” In fact, the fastest way was the Panama route: catching a steamship to Aspinwall, crossing the isthmus of Panama, and then boarding another steamer to San Francisco. Assuming close connections and no mishaps—by no means assured—the trip could be made in something like thirty days. For anyone interested in this fascinating era of American maritime history, the go-to source is Te Panama Route, 1848–1869 by John Haskell Kemble. Stephen Chapin K innaman Chappell Hill, Texas

From the editor: Indeed you are correct. In “Te Gold Rush by Panama, 1848–1851,” (Pacifc Historical Review, February 1949, Vol. 18, No. 1), John Haskell

Kemble wrote: “ Te Cape Horn route took more time, but it was less complicated in that the emigrant stayed in the same ship all the way. Although part of the course lay through notoriously rough seas, events proved that the traveler who chose this route was surest of reaching California alive and in good health. … Of the passengers arriving in 1849 at San Francisco, 15,597 had come round Cape Horn, as compared with 6,489 by way of Panama. Te latter route gained quickly in popularity, however, as its advantages of speed became known and ignorance concerning it was dispelled. Tus in 1850 there were 11,770 arrivals by way of the Horn and 13,809 by Panama. In 1852 more than 20,000 traveled to San Francisco by way of Panama, and the number continued to be usually between 15,000 and 20,000 a year until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. At the same time, the Cape Horn route declined in popularity as a passenger carrier, although it continued to be of great importance for the transportation of cargo to and from California.”

Midshipman—Not Cadet!

I was reading your article (Sea History 186) on the Somers mutiny and the US Naval Academy and noticed that the photograph of the current USNA grounds was captioned as a school of “about 4,000 cadets,” when during your entire article the title “midshipman” is discussed! As a graduate of the class of 1972, we have a sore spot of being referred to as “cadets,” which is f ne for members of USMA or USAFA, but not USNA!

B ob Baczenas, USNA Class of 1972 Burlington, New Jersey

From the Editor: T ank you for thi s correction. Please note that the error in the caption was all mine and that the author of the article did in fact get it

right, as noted in the main body of the article. We received numerous emails noting the error and appreciate that we have so many readers with keen eyes and who take the time to give respectful feedback.

Isaac Chauncey Silhouete

I recently read the article in the autumn issue (#185), “ Te Amphibious Raids on York and Fort George—Lake Ontario, 1813” by William S. Dudley. It was a wonderful article. I have particular interest in the topic, as I own a rare silhouette of Captain Isaac Chauncey, who played a major role in that story. T is cut-and-applied paper silhouette is signed and dated in ink “S. Higginbotham 1812” under the bust of the sitter, who is identi fed by the artist in the same ink below the image as “Capt. Isaac Chauncey.” Chauncey, born in Connecticut in 1772, commanded his f rst ship at the tender age of 12 and joined the Navy in 1798 as a f rst lieutenant. In 1804, Chauncey served aboard the US frigate Constitution during the First Barbary War (he also served aboard the Chesapeake, John Adams, New York, and President) and was promoted rapidly after that, achieving the rank of captain, the highest in the US Navy. Early in the War of 1812, in September, Chauncey was made “commander of the naval forces on Lakes Ontario and Erie … the most important command at the disposal of the Navy Department. In October 1812, he arrived at Sackets Harbor, New York, where he made his headquarters for upward of three years. An excellent organizer, he established a navy yard with a naval hospital and rope walk, and built or otherwise procured a feet of more than twenty vessels.”1 T is passage states matter-of-factly what Chauncey managed to do, but to fully appreciate this, one has to consider that f ghting the war on the Great Lakes required ships, and it was incredibly

H. LEE WHITE

Explore Well ™

di fcult, nearly impossible, to get ships from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. Consequently, they had to be built on the spot, and that required bringing in shipwrights and sailors from far away to cut the lumber, build and rig the ships, arm them, launch them, and, of course, sail them. Chauncey died in Washington, DC, in 1840.

Very little is known about the silhouette artist known as Sue (Susan) Higginbotham. Her earliest known work is dated 1807 and her last known work is dated 1841. Te latter work is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Te Higginbotham family has extended lineage in the Virginia area. It is possible that if she had been located near the District of Columbia, Chauncey might have had his likeness taken while on a brief visit to meet with President Madison and the Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton before he traveled to his command on Lake Erie, arriving in October 1812.

We were taught to accept and learn from the diferent places and people we lived with. Always accept everyone as a friend; give your respect and your trust (to a point, of course) right of. If people are not worth your friendship, they will let you know. Try to fnd out why and perhaps help them change their minds, but don’t make enemies. Tere are plenty of those around—you don’t need to make new ones.

Another possibility for Chauncey and Higginbotham crossing paths in 1812 is that Capt. Chauncey spent time in the booming settlement of Sackets Harbor, where the name Higginbotham is also found in the records. One of the few natural harbors on the shores of Lake Erie, just across the water from Ontario, Sackets Harbor was an important trading center and a magnet for transplanted New Englanders, British and French immigrants, and, of course, Canadians, as well as indigenous peoples. By 1814, Sackets Harbor had the third largest population in New York State, just behind New York City and Albany.

T is silhouette is housed in what appears to be its original early 19th cen-

1

2

tury birds-eye maple frame and hanging ring on top. Te silhouette paper is 4 ½ x 3 inches; its overall size, including the frame, is 7 3/8 x 1 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches. Te silhouette is not only a fascinating historical document of the War of 1812 but also a handsome record of a meeting between a US Navy hero and a very talented female silhouette artist.2

Steven Forss Charlestown, Massachusetts

Growing Up on the Move

I read with interest the article “Born to Sail” in the winter issue (Sea History 185) about kids growing up aboard ships. I am a former petty ofcer f rst class and Navy brat. My father sailed aboard just about every type of ship except subs. He even sailed aboard a tall ship. As children we traveled wherever our father went. Before we were out of grade school, my sister and I had sailed the Med, Paci fc, and Atlantic, as well as other waters. We were taught that people from all over are di ferent, and that it was us who were those people.

I could not, for my life, name half the schools I attended, as we moved about once a year, or give you the number or types of all the homes we have lived in, from a castle on the Rhine to a hut in the crater of the old volcano in Hawaii, to one-room living quarters where I had to sleep on the foor, or a village house in France that still had the bullet holes in the walls from World War II. We even lived in farms that had no indoor plumbing.

I learned that there are “insiders” and “brats,” and how to live with both. Te ones we called insiders were people who grew up in one house, one hometown. Brats were like us and moved around. We learned that we didn’t have time to earn someone’s friendship or they ours, so you gave those things right of. You didn’t get too attached to people, pets, or things, as you may have to leave them behind. When you moved into a new brat area, the kids would come over and “help” you unpack to see what loot you had, and you, of course, shared. Tey’d give you the lay of the land and schools, etc. Te families in the area welcomed the new family, and if only one parent was present, they ofered to help out. We called them our “Navy Family.”

Charles O. Paullin, Dictionary of American Biography, IV (1930).

Description of the silhouete by Jane Turano-Thompson. Photo by David Thompson Antiques & Art, South Dennis, Massachuset s.

COURTESY STEVEN FORSS

We were sometimes in the wrong place at the wrong time and met some bad people in bad situations, but that was part of being a military brat. My father knew people in high places— royalty, political and military leaders, industrialists, celebrities, etc. Some of his friends had been former enemies, and a few people were in low places. We kids learned a lot at the kitchen table.

I enjoyed the life of a brat and the life of a sailor. It wasn’t easy and I saw a lot that could have been better. I’ve made my share of mistakes, but you can’t undo what has been done, only try to improve what is coming. It was a good life.

Cliff

Baggett Huntington Beach, California

Capt. Bob Bartlet Sighting I came across your recent article, “A Secret Mission in Wartime Greenland—Louise Arner Boyd aboard the Efe M. Morrissey” by Joanna Kafarowski [Sea History 186], as I was continuing my research after publishing my father’s war journal from 1944 earlier this year. Here is a relevant quote from Chapter

10 in My Book to You from the Greenland Patrol, the WWII Journal of Howard J Faultersack. I thought you’d be interested.

...did you ever read about Robert Bartlett, the great Arctic explorer? He was the guy who took [Robert Peary] to the North Pole when it was discovered. [Peary] of course got the most credit, but it was Bob Bartlett who took him there. He took his ship to over 89° Latitude, the farthest north any ship has ever attempted to get. While we were in Narsarsuak, a two-masted schooner pulled into there and tied up opposite our ship, so Howie, who always wants to know what’s cooking, went over to take a look at it one noon and almost got “put on the books” for not being aboard ship for 1:00 o’clock muster. I got so interested in the ship I forgot to come back. I saw the captain, Bob Bartlett, and asked him if I could look at his ship, the “Morrissey,” over and he said, “sure lad, go where you like.” He

is a quite feeble man of about 65 years now, I say, but still stands wheel watch on open deck with the rest of his crew of 12 men. He does all sorts of odd jobs for the government: Smithsonian Institute, museums, zoos, etc. He has “brought ’em back alive” polar bears, walrus, seals, musk ox, etc.; has went where other ships said it was impossible to go with ship and all sorts of things like that. Te most beautiful part of it all is that he has full-color 35mm movies of most of these things. In the Army theater in Narsarsuak, he showed his movies and talked about his adventures. He had over an hour of the most beautiful color movies I’ve ever seen. We will all admit it takes quite a thing of beauty in the line of nature to make an audience of all men breathe a sigh of amazement, well some of the scenes of sunsets on ice and snow in color were so beautiful it took your breath away.

M ark Faultersack Middleton, Wisconsin

National Maritime Historical Society

2024 Annual Meeting

19–21 July • Hudson Valley, NY

Get ready for a weekend of celebration, history, and camaraderie at the National Maritime Historical Society’s 61st Annual Meeting in Peekskill, New York, in the heart of the beautiful Hudson Valley and home to NMHS headquarters. Join us as we raise a glass to our chairman emeritus, Ron Oswald, during the oficial opening of the Ronald L. Oswald Maritime Library. This is also the perfect occasion to welcome our new president and executive director, Cathy Green (see page 12). The Annual Meeting is an opportunity for NMHS members to come together, share achievements, and chart a course for the Society’s future.

Friday, 19 July: We invite you to join us on Friday, as we set sail on a two-hour Hudson River cruise aboard the Evening Star, a former USCG buoy tender. Enjoy the dramatic beauty and rich history of the Hudson Highlands with narration from the crew. With limited spaces, we’ve arranged for two cruise times: 11:00 am–1:00 pm and 1:30–3:30 pm. Box lunches will be served on both trips.

Later that day (4:30–6:00 pm), we invite you to our headquarters for the grand opening celebration of our new Ronald L. Oswald Maritime Library—a maritime treasure with more than 5,000 volumes, making it one of the largest maritime libraries in New York State. Registration for Friday’s cruise with lunch and the library reception is $80 per person.

Saturday, 20 July: On Saturday, we’ll gather at the Cortlandt Yacht Club for a continental breakfast, followed by the annual business meeting and presentations by leaders from the local maritime heritage community. Notable speakers include award-winning artist Len Tantillo, who will discuss “Colonial Dutch & New York Waterways;” Tom Johnson, co-founder of Bannerman’s Island Trust, on “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal;” Michael J F Sheehan, senior historian at Stony Point Battlefeld State Historic Site, on “ Te American Revolution in the Hudson Valley.” We will also be treated to a special preview of the upcoming documentary on the Ernestina-Morrissey by NMHS Vice Chair Richardo Lopes

After lunch, we will meet at the US Military Academy at West Point to embark on a two-hour “History and Tradition” bus tour that highlights the Academy’s history and pivotal role in the American Revolution and stories of notable graduates who helped shape our nation.

T at evening we’ll enjoy our annual trustees’ dinner at the Overlook Lodge at Bear Mountain. T is intimate and relaxed venue is the perfect setting to welcome our new

trustees and president and get to know our local presenters and NMHS members. Te highlight of the evening will be “Rendezvous with Treason: Te André/Arnold Conspiracy,” a dramatic performance by Sean Grady and Gary Petagine, portraying the American Revolution’s most intriguing characters—Major John André and General Benedict Arnold—and their fateful 1780 meeting in Haverstraw, NY. Registration for the Saturday Annual Meeting is $100 per person and includes breakfast, the business meeting, presentations, lunch, and tours. Dinner at the Overlook Lodge is $90 per person (cash bar).

Sunday, 20 July: On Sunday, we’ll drive an hour north to Hyde Park for a 10 am guided tour of Springwood, FDR’s lifelong home, before we head to the adjacent FDR Presidential Library and Museum, which features extensive interactive exhibits on the Depression, New Deal, Dust Bowl, World War II, Civil Rights, and the formation of the United Nations. Members can enjoy a stroll through the beautiful gardens and enjoy lunch at the on-site café. Registration for the guided tour and entrance to the Presidential Library is $20 per person.

We encourage you to extend your visit and immerse yourself in the region’s rich history and natural beauty. Hike along the iconic Appalachian Trail, kayak on pristine waters, or explore Bannerman’s Island, George Washington’s Headquarters, and the breathtaking Vanderbilt Mansion. Te possibilities for adventure are endless, and the NMHS sta f would be delighted to provide ideas and help you organize your visits to speci fc sites, according to your interests.

NMHS Chair CAPT James A . Noone, USN (Ret.), and Program Chair Walter R . Brown eagerly await your presence. For more information and to register for this unforgettable weekend, please refer to the magazine wrapper, visit us online at www.seahistory.org/annual meeting2024, or contact Heather Purvis at hpurvis@ seahistory.org or (914) 737-7878 (ext. 0). If you can join us as an Annual Meeting Underwriter, Sponsor, or Donor, your support will go a long way and be 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.

See you in July!

The 1748 Arrival of Governor George Clinton by Len Tantillo

US Military Academy at West Point

Springwood at Hyde Park

Welcome Cathy Green—New NMHS Executive Director

It is my great pleasure to introduce Catherine (Cathy) Green as the new NMHS president and executive director. Cathy has been immersed in the maritime world for nearly three decades and has the ideal skill set, experience, and network to lead NMHS on the next leg of our voyage.

A veteran of some of the top maritime archaeology programs in the country, Cathy has deep connections with research and the preservation of some of our most vulnerable resources— submerged cultural sites, a.k.a. shipwrecks. Tese “museums of the sea” are vital in supplementing the research on historic ships, shipping, and waterways we have been conducting and sharing for decades.

Cathy has a strong appreciation for the importance of place-based and experiential learning. She taught on undergraduate semester-at-sea programs, which for decades have introduced many young people to the world of traditional sailing ships, maritime history, marine science, and seafaring. Te preservation of historic vessels has always been a primary mission of NMHS, but preserving our shared maritime heritage is much more than cultivating support for wooden ships. It is also encouraging new generations to experience what it is like to stand watch, work as a crew for a shared goal, and enjoy the unparalleled beauty of a sunrise at sea.

Most recently, Cathy led the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, home of the historic navy submarine USS Cobia, as its executive director. Her vision and leadership there helped that organization to tackle new capital projects and address overdue updates to exhibits and programs, increasing visitation and visibility in the community. As the voice of American maritime heritage, NMHS, likewise, needs to amplify our impact. Te stories in Sea History

(clockwise from top lef) Cathy Green served as a NOAA maritime archaeologist with the National Marine Sanctuaries Program from 2004 to 2017. As a member of the Sea History Editorial Advisory Board, she has been a regular atendee at NMHS galas and events. Fresh out of graduate school, Cathy embarked on several SEAmester programs with Southampton College, teaching maritime history and literature of the sea to undergraduates on oceangoing programs aboard traditional schooners, sailing between New England and the Caribbean, and on the Pacific in the Sea of Cortez and out to Hawaii.

need to reach more people. Like Cathy’s former museum, we need to update our tools and tactics. To efectively support maritime museums, research, education, and experiences, NMHS needs to be creative and establish new venues to reach out to a broader community, both to support you all in your endeavors and to bring new members aboard on this curious and wonderful voyage in which we f nd ourselves.

Please join me in welcoming aboard Cathy Green. Taking part in our annual meeting in Peekskill, New York, this summer will be the perfect opportunity to meet her and other NMHS members while enjoying the picturesque views of the Hudson Valley that slide by as we cruise down the river and tour the area.

CAPT James A. Noone, USN (Ret.), Chairman, NMHS Board of Trustees

2024 National Maritime Awards Dinner

The National Press Club • 18 April • Washington, DC

Awards & Inspiration

The National Maritime Awards Dinner in Washington was an interesting, fun, and informative evening. It was both an inspirational and humbling experience to be surrounded by such accomplished people drawn from the many corners of the maritime community, who all care deeply about our maritime and naval history, supporting and encouraging the next generation of mariners, and protecting our aquatic resources.

Dawn Riley: “Go Sailing — Have Fun for the Rest of Your Life!”

Dawn Riley, a veteran of four America’s Cup campaigns and two Whitbread races, a member of both the National Sailing Hall of Fame and the America’s Cup Hall of Fame, and the 1999 Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year, was recognized with the NMHS Distinguished Service Award presented to her by Gary Jobson, America’s “Ambassador of Sailing” and the gala’s MC. With her professional racing career in her wake, Riley is energetically organizing, encouraging, inspiring, and training the next generation of competitive racing sailors. She is a past president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and has served on the US Sailing Association Board, among others. In her current role as executive director of Oakclif Sailing on Long Island, New York, she works with young people to “build American leaders through sailing.” In her remarks, Riley encouraged us to “f nd your passion and your pastime and inspire a young person and change their lives.”

The 2024 National Maritime Awardees

(back row, L–R) NMHS President Emerita Burchenal Green, NMHS President and Executive Director Cathy Green, National Maritime Awards Dinner Co-Chairs Samuel Byers and Kristen Greenaway. (front row, L–R) NMHS Trustee

VADM Al Konetzni Jr., NMHS Distinguished Service Award winner Dawn Riley, and Master of Ceremonies Gary Jobson.

Major General Charles F. Bolden Jr.—Navigating Space

Major General Charles F. Bolden, environmentalist, former NASA Administrator and astronaut, and retired US Marine Corps Major General, was presented with the NMHS Distinguished Service Award by Admiral Michael G. Mullen, USN (Ret.), 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Sta f. Admiral Mullen recognized him for his grace, stamina, success, humility, and for his commitment to the people he worked with over his long and storied career. Admiral Mullen, also a graduate of the US Naval Academy Class of 1968, recalled that when Bolden was elected class president, he was met with joy and admiration from his classmates, of whom, in a class of 1,200, he was one of four Black midshipmen. Major General Bolden was the 12th Administrator of NASA and appointed by President Obama in 2009; there he advanced the US space program until 2017 when he left the agency.

I have had the blessing and privilege to look down on this incredibly beautiful planet and have seen that we live on a water planet, … [with] a single ocean that we have to protect and guard jealously. … One of the things you never forget is the view of Earth from the vantage point of space… It is the most breathtaking thing you’ve ever seen. … You can distinctly see the blue line that separates space from Earth and you begin to feel somewhat insignifcant. I left Earth a person who was environmentally curious, and I came back a full-fedged environmentalist, because you realize how fragile we are as human beings.

—Maj. Gen. F. Charles Bolden Jr.

Major General Charles Bolden Jr. is presented with the NMHS Distinguished Service Award by ADM Michael G. Mullen, USN (Ret.).

Dr. William S. Dudley—NMHS’s 2024 Sheet Anchor and a “Saltwater Guy”

In presenting Dr. William Dudley with the NMHS David A. O’Neil Sheet Anchor Award, Dr. Jennifer London introduced him as an unwavering and reliable presence for the naval history community throughout his long career. “Dr. Dudley is a saltwater guy with a love of the sea and the Navy deeply engrained in his life’s work. May his work continue to inspire us to understand the importance of our maritime heritage and the enduring value of our sea power.”

“ Te best years of my life began when I arrived at the Naval Historical Center in 1977. Tere, I worked among the many and varied specialists of naval history,” Dudley remarked. Ten he quipped, “I never thought of myself as a sheet anchor. But here we are. Every ship needs one.”

Dr. Jennifer London presented Dr. William Dudley with the David O’Neil Sheet Anchor Award for his dedicated and valuable service as a member of the NMHS Board of Trustees and for his contributions to naval history.

Te US Coast Guard Academy Cadet Chorale, under the direction of Dr. Daniel McDavitt, received a standing ovation and the introductory videos by NMHS Vice Chair Richardo Lopes were a highlight of the evening. We are grateful to our Commodore Sponsor William H. White and to all of our supporters of this wonderful and worthwhile event.

—Burchenal Green, NMHS President Emerita

Admiral Bruce DeMars, USN (Ret.) (1935–2023)

A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Admiral Bruce DeMars served for 44 years; his last position was Director, Naval Nuclear Propulsion, in which he directed the historic transition of that program to the postCold War period. Upon his retirement, both houses of Congress saluted Admiral DeMars with resolutions recognizing his many years of distinguished service. Admiral DeMars was a resolute proponent of the teaching of naval history at the Academy, leading the class of 1957 in supporting the US Naval Academy Museum and endowing a Distinguished Chair in Naval Heritage. As one selected to f ll that chair, Dr. David Winkler observed: “Not only did the Naval Academy midshipmen beneft from being taught by some of the top names in the feld, but the class funded recent post-doc graduates—providing opportunities for new scholars to teach, publish, and grow the profession.”

As chairman of the Naval Historical Foundation, DeMars extended its outreach and directed fundraising for exhibits for the National Museum of the US Navy, including a new Cold War Gallery. Winkler noted: “DeMars pushed for integrating the history of technology in the context of naval history for visitors—both live and on the museum’s website. T at philosophy is being carried over into the design of the future Navy Museum in Washington.” For his outstanding leadership in promoting education and greater awareness of these important chapters in naval history, NMHS honored Admiral DeMars with the NMHS Distinguished Service Award at the 2012 National Maritime Awards Dinner. Senator Christopher Dodd made the presentation. Admiral DeMars was an admirable, gracious, and interesting person; a good shipmate; and a dedicated advocate for the Navy and its history. — Burchenal Green, NMHS President Emerita

Sail Aboard the Liberty Ship

Brown

On a cruise you can tour museum spaces, bridge, crew quarters, & much more. Visit the engine room to view the 140-ton triple-expansion steam engine as it powers the ship though the water.

Reservations: 410-558-0164, or www.ssjohnwbrown.org

Last day to order tickets is 14 days before the cruise; conditions and penalties apply to cancellations.

SS JOHN W. BROWN

Falls of Clyde under sail of Oahu, ca. 1917.

The Fall of the Falls of Clyde

by James P. Delgado

.Whether it’s a classic account by an author such as Basil Lubbock, Harold Underhill, Alan Villiers, or Jim Gibbs, or the increasingly rare spectacle of one of these ships in harbor, the majestic and yet industrial nature of historic vessels stirs the soul of all of us who love ships. Falls of Clyde is one of my favorite historic ships, a rare survivor of the large, multi-masted iron and steel sailing ships that epitomized the end of deep-sea sail and the struggle by shipowners to adapt to an increasingly

global economy and the shipment of bulk cargoes in direct competition with steam.

I have been privileged to play a small, but—I thought—consequential role in ensuring the preservation of Falls of Clyde, as I was able to with other ships, but I now fnd myself documenting the sad decline and working to save what components we can at what feels like the inevitable end for the ship. Much has been said, online and in private discussions, about its plight over the past few decades. Having been pulled into

the middle of the discussion—and the problem—I’ve learned much, and so I share these observations and facts about what has transpired and what is likely to happen. I’ll cut to the chase at the start; if this article had a movie soundtrack, it would be the sea chantey “Leave Her, Johnny”—For the voyage is done and the winds don’t blow….

Falls of Clyde was built in 1878 at Glasgow, Scotland, during a shipbuilding boom inspired, in part, by increased trade with the United States. Te ship made several voyages to American ports,

Falls of Clyde at the dock in Honolulu in 2023. In a hull survey conducted by marine surveyor Joseph Lombardi in March 2023, he noted that “the rudder (severely rusted away in its own right) is held to the vessel by the crosshead at the rudder post and one set of pintles and gudgeons on the hull; it is in imminent danger of falling away from the vessel.”

BY

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JAMES DELGADO

notably San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, while under the British fag. It carried bulk freight, as did many British sailers of its time, such as Balclutha , Wavertree, and Elissa. Falls of Clyde was sold to American owners in 1898 and gained American registry by a special act of Congress in 1900. Henceforth the vessel was involved in the nationally important Hawaiian transpaci fc sugar trade for Capt. William Matson’s Matson Navigation Co., a shipping f rm of international scope and signi fcance that remains in business today.

Falls of Clyde, the ninth vessel acquired by Matson, is the oldest surviving member of the Matson feet. After 1907, Falls of Clyde entered another signifcant maritime trade, transporting petroleum as a sailing oil tanker. Speci fcally modi fed for the petroleum trade as a bulk cargo carrier, it is the last sailing oil tanker left in the world. It is also the last surviving iron-hulled four-masted sailing ship. It was for those reasons that the vessel was saved from destruction by history-minded maritime preservationists Fred Klebingat and Karl Kortum after its time had run out

as a foating fuel barge in Alaska, and the dismasted hulk was towed to a temporary home in Seattle.

Saved at the last moment by sympathetic interests in Hawaii, Falls of Clyde was brought then to Honolulu, where money, sweat, and tears were poured into the ship to save and then restore it. In the hands of the Bishop Museum and moored on the waterfront next to the iconic Aloha Tower, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. I frst saw the ship, after hearing much about it from Karl Kortum, when I was working on the

An estimated 10,000 people showed up to witness the arrival of Falls of Clyde in Honolulu in October 1963. The ship had last been used as an oil barge but was retired from that duty in 1959. It was laid up in Seatle until supporters rallied support in Hawaii and arranged a tow across the North Pacific by the US Navy tug Moctobi (ATF-105). Restoration commenced in earnest in the spring of 1968.

archaeological study of the USS Arizona wreck site at Pearl Harbor. At the same time, working with the maritime preservation community, with an appropriation from Congress and in tandem with our partners at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Maritime Initiative (a program I then headed, now the National Park Service’s Maritime Heritage Program) was conducting an inventory of the nation’s historic ships, shipwrecks, lighthouses, and other maritime sites, and selecting assets for study as potential National Historic Landmarks (NHL), the “cream of the crop” of America’s historic properties.

Ships were vastly underrepresented on this list, and our program worked to correct that. Between 1987 and 1991 we completed the inventory, which involved personal inspection and detailed studies of more than three hundred vessels, and selected roughly half of them for study to see if they met the exacting standards for National Historic Landmarks. I personally, or with Kevin Foster and Candace Cli ford, completed a third of them, with others done by Kevin, Ralph Eshelman, Nick Dean, and others. T at involved visits in drydocks, during restorations and reconstruction, sailing, steaming, motoring. We got to know these vessels as best we could through tours and discussions with those who worked on them, who were their stewards and their interpreters.

I personally conducted the study of Falls of Clyde, having done the same for other historic sailing vessels: Balclutha , Elissa , Adventuress, American Eagle, Bowdoin, Christeen, Ernestina , Governor Stone, Isaac H. Evans, J. & E. Riggin, La Merced, and Lewis R. French.

( T is list does not include tugs, lightships, freboats, destroyers, battleships, aircraft carriers, and others I did the studies for.) Tere were also dozens of those that we studied that did not meet the rigid standard for being a Landmark, but which were listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I mention this not to boast of what I or the team did, but to set the record straight to those who are claiming that my recent subsequent reevaluation of Falls of Clyde, which has led to the withdrawal of that status, was done by

those with no knowledge, appreciation, or love of Falls of Clyde or other ships. Our assessment in 1988–1989 found that Falls of Clyde retained integrity of design, materials, and workmanship, all critical aspects of being determined eligible or listed in the National Register and key to NHL designation. Following this, it was designated a National Historic Landmark because of its exceptional national signi fcance as the oldest surviving American tanker and the only surviving sailing oil tanker left a foat, not only in

Restored and open to the public as a museum ship in Honolulu, 1998.

the United States, but also in the world. Tat historic signifcance is unchanged, but the condition and the surviving aspects of Falls of Clyde that convey that signi fcance have been lost to either decay or removal.

Te ship is now a partially fooded, heavily corroded vessel with structural failure and a substantial loss of historical and architectural integrity. I regularly visited Falls of Clyde in the years following the designation as a National Historic Landmark, and my ofce budget paid for the initial documentation of Falls of Clyde for the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) when the National Park Service (NPS) reactivated the long-dormant program to perpetually preserve the documentation of the nation’s most historic ships at the Library of Congress. I watched with dismay, despite the eforts of devoted supporters, donors, and the ship’s custodians, as Falls of Clyde deteriorated, was damaged by storms, and reached a crisis point two decades ago.

In 2005, the status of the ship was noted by the National Historic Landmark Program as threatened due to corrosion of the hull and resultant leaking that weakened the hull’s integrity. Te vessel has further deteriorated substantially in the nineteen years since then. Te State of Hawaii commissioned the most recent survey (March 2023), which was undertaken by Joseph Lombardi, AMS (Accredited Marine Surveyor) of Ocean Technical Services, LLC. Lombardi has more than four decades of professional experience,

(above lef) Pumps cannot keep up with the water coming in from the hull and from leaks in the deck above; her tanks and the hold are in a constant state of flooding. This photo was taken in March 2023.

(lef) Spars stored on the weather deck.

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BY

(above) Corrosion has opened holes that have accelerated further corrosion in the ship’s interior spaces. (below) Falls of Clyde at her berth in Honolulu, 2023.

BY

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JOSEPH LOMBARDI

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JOSEPH LOMBARDI

including surveys of National Historic Landmark/National Register-listed historic vessels, among them past surveys of Falls of Clyde. T is survey, building on that experience and familiarity with the ship, notes that “the scope of the material condition of the vessel in her present unsafe situation dictates the need for a complete reassessment to fnd the alternative for the disposal of the vessel.”

I went on board Falls of Clyde to assess it not long after that. I spent a day walking through every accessible space and compartment. Tere is a strong risk of the ship sinking. Te survey found that it is progressively leaking and if there is a loss of power, the failure of the pumps that are keeping Falls of Clyde a foat would lead to catastrophic fooding. Tere are multiple failures in the lower and upper hull due to holes,

(above) Severe rust and corrosion have destroyed the pipes and historic oilpumping system. (below) The view from her HABS/HAER survey in 1989: forward pump room looking af at oil tank bulkhead; from lef to right are the fire and bilge pump (lef background), ballast pump, and cargo oil pump.

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rivets and patches from previous repairs that are failing, and the loss of structural and watertight integrity in all the bulkheads and tanks. Te bow, the lower masts, and the main (weather) deck are also structurally compromised. In some cases, hull plating is now held in place to the frames with C-clamps. Te loss of the ship’s inherent structural integrity will complicate, if not preclude, the ability of a salvor to raise it without risk of substantial hull failure.

If it transitions from a leaking hulk to a wreck, raising the vessel might require raising it in pieces, e fectively “scrapping” it in place. It is likely that Falls of Clyde would not survive a foat in the event of a major weather event; perhaps it might not even be capable of a tow. Te iron hull is so corroded that I was reminded of Balclutha pre-restoration, when a foating log punctured the hull near the bow, and I, as a younger NPS diver, applied a wet-steel patch to that hole below the waterline.

Te loss of the vessel is irreversible and extremely unfortunate, if not tragic. Falls of Clyde is a unique surviving sailing craft, and its historic signi fcance is clear; however, the vessel has already lost most of the qualities or aspects of integrity that convey its signi fcance, criteria that led to its listing in the National Register and its designation as a National Historic Landmark. T is is not—nor should it be—confused with structural integrity, which the ship also now lacks.

Te historic oil-pumping system is rusted to the point where its piping no longer exists, and the pumps themselves are falling apart; the tanks are missing structure. Essentially, only the ghost of the system that made the ship a sailing tanker remains. Te mast steps are rusted and the lower masts are no longer rigged; in order to walk on the weather deck, you must walk on the iron spars that cover it, as otherwise you would fall through the rotten wooden

decking. Te rain enters freely from above, as the sea also seeps through an iron hull that has the appearance of hard-packed, crusted sawdust in some places and faking scabs in others.

Except for the lower masts, the rig has been dismantled in its entirety. Te bowsprit is gone; the stem and sternposts are rotted and failing. Scraps of the rudder remain tenuously in place. During my visit, I was on site to witness the fgurehead hauled of roughly by movers as the Friends of the Falls of Clyde had sold it to a local tiki bar.

Deckhouses and the aft cabin stand open to weather, f lled with rotting furniture and papers; only the galley retains its interpretive displays and artifacts, inexplicably left behind. Some still carry the catalog numbers of the Bishop Museum, including one of the handmade rigging tools of Jack Dickerhof, whose work to re-rig the nation’s historic ships was a key aspect of the early years of maritime preservation in America, and to whom we owe so much. If readers detect a tone of outrage, it pales in comparison to my sorrow.

Tese observations are ofered to paint an accurate picture of what Falls of Clyde ’s condition is now. Is it irreversible? To summarize Villiers’s famous observations: ships, in time, become wrecks or replicas. Today, Falls of Clyde could be characterized as a (barely) foating wreck; to save it means a nearcomplete rebuild, which, if I read the Scottish proposals for the ship correctly, is what they propose to do in order to return it to sailing condition. T at essentially preserves the name— not a hull, not the decks, not the masts and spars, not the now-vanishing oil tanker systems, not the rotted joinery and ship’s fttings.

With the evidence frmly before it, the State Historic Preservation Ofce held a public meeting, following every step of the law and regulations, and provided advance notice via certi fed mail to all parties with an interest, including the Friends of Falls of Clyde. After reviewing the facts, the advisory board voted to remove it from Hawaii’s Register of Historic Places, and the State Historic Preservation O fcer

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Falls of Clyde’s historic figurehead on its way to its new home in a local tiki bar.

also requested that the NPS delist it from the National Register of Historic Places.

After serving notice, the NPS delisted Falls of Clyde at the start of February 2024. Te notices have been sent out for the next step, which is a recommendation to the secretary of the interior to withdraw the ship’s National Historic Landmark status because the loss of integrity that led to the National Register listing is an essential element in NHL designation. If a vessel doesn’t meet the National Register criteria anymore, by law it cannot be a National Historic Landmark.

Is Falls of Clyde the only NHL studied, nominated, and designated Landmark to be delisted? No, and I have noted with sorrow that the steam schooner Wapama, the freboat Deluge, the carrier USS Cabot, the steamer Ste. Claire, USS Inaugural, and others are now delisted. In some cases, the ofcial delisting occurred years after they were lost, like the long-scrapped Wapama and Cabot, the sunken Inaugural, and the partially scrapped and fooded Deluge Te NPS Maritime Heritage Program is no longer an independent ofce, nor does it have a director, and in a system with thousands of landmarks, the loss of integrity—or the complete loss of a landmark—does not always reach ears in Washington. When it does, however, delisting and withdrawal of designation does happen.

What happens next? An environmental assessment has been completed, and a request for proposals is being issued to seek bids from qualifed parties to remove Falls of Clyde from Honolulu harbor. Tat could include placing it in a barge and taking it back to Scotland, if the bonds and conditions for safe removal can be met, which was not

the case the last time this was considered. It may be removed for disposal at sea, but hazardous materials removal, stripping of environmentally harmful materials, including that which could snag and harm marine mammals, would need to happen frst. Te condition of the hull is such that the Coast Guard will require a full resurvey to determine if it could safely be towed the more than twenty miles of shore to the designated sea disposal site for ships. It could also be broken up ashore at a facility or, if too unstable to move, carefully dismantled where it now lies in its tenuous berth. It all depends on what the bidders can safely ofer that meets the conditions of the environmental assessment.

Is there any good news for the maritime preservation community? Yes. When the at sea disposal of Falls of Clyde was set to happen a decade ago, a Programmatic Memorandum of Agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bishop Museum (then the owner of record), the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and the Hawaii Historic Preservation Division set out a series of actions to mitigate the loss. T at agreement is no longer in efect: the Bishop transferred its ownership to the Friends of the Falls of Clyde years ago, the EPA is no longer an active part of the next steps, and the ship is no longer listed in the National Register. However, the Hawaii Department of Transportation, Harbors, stepped into the gap to take the steps outlined in that memorandum.

Late last year, we completed the HAER documentation for Falls of Clyde. It has now been completely documented for the Library of Congress, adding to the collection of archived historic plans, new drawings, and

photographs (now over a hundred) of the ship and its features, albeit some of them are as ruinous as an ancient city in decay. Te entire vessel, inside and out, was documented with LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), as has been done with other ships of late, so that Falls of Clyde will have one of the more extensive records in the HAER collection, which continues to grow in close partnership with the Council of American Maritime Museums and its member institutions. Tere is a detailed list of all remaining artifacts, as well as key features (such as the original windlass and the patent steering apparatus) that the RFP will request that the successful bidder will remove, if it can be

Falls of Clyde afer its conversion to a barque rig to make it easier to operate with a reduced crew. Date unknown.

done safely, for ofer to any quali fed museum or heritage organization.

In closing, as noted, this is indeed a sad occasion—but it is not unique. Tere are other historic vessels, including National Historic Landmarks, that are in peril. Take stock of this and of the price of complacency. As we all sat back, Falls of Clyde deteriorated over many years. While this is not a time to point f ngers at who did or did not do what, it was clearly more than a local friends group could handle when a major museum could not. It has been a risk in an active harbor and hazardous to board for some time. Te Harbors Department is doing what it is legally required to do. It has done much for

Falls of Clyde, despite some emotional statements that would seek to blame government when it is a larger failure by society. Or, perhaps, society made a choice. I wish Glasgow had taken the ship back in 1959.

James Delgado is no stranger to the maritime preservation and museum world. As the founding director of the National Park Service’s Maritime Heritage Program, then known as the National Maritime Initiative, he oversaw the first national inventory of America’s historic ships, shipwrecks, lighthouses, and life-saving stations, as well as the establishment of the Secretary of the

Interior’s Standards for Historic Vessel Documentation and for historic ship restoration; the National Register bulletins for nominating historic ships, shipwrecks, lighthouses and other aids to navigation; and the “Maritime Heritage of the United States” National Historic Landmark study for large preserved historic vessels. He personally conducted a number of the NHL studies and authored or co-authored the reports. Delgado was also a founding member of the National Maritime Alliance. He was the author of the Falls of Clyde NHL study, and most recently the study that recommended delisting the ship from the National Register and withdrawing its NHL status.

Guardians of the Harbor

Exploring the Vital Role of Fireboats

by David Rocco

Fireboats are specialized watercraft designed for f ghting shoreline and shipboard fres.

Te frst freboat, dating back to the late 18th century in England, was created by an insurance company. Early f reboats were essentially tugboats retroftted with basic frefghting equipment. Tese watercraft have evolved over time and, with advances in technology and equipment, have become more and more adaptable to a variety of situations.

In addition to their primary role in putting out f res, they are also used to transport f refghters, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), doctors, and passengers from ships and land-based emergency situations. In some situations, f reboats have also been used as ice breakers and tugboats. Fireboats

with their water jets shooting water, sometimes in di ferent colors, make great additions to ceremonial maritime celebrations such as Fleet Week or parades of sail.

On September 11th, 2001, after the f rst Twin Tower collapsed, the New York City Fire Department’s (FDNY) John D. McKean, Fire Fighter, and the retired John J. Harvey were sent to relocate people in Lower Manhattan who were otherwise stranded, either to New Jersey or further north along the city’s waterfront where they would be out of harm’s way. When the second World Trade Center tower collapsed, it buried the nearby f re hydrants under debris. With an unlimited supply of water available to them, the three f reboats were then dispatched to the Battery Park seawall, where they started pump-

ing harbor water to pump trucks waiting nearby. Te trucks then pumped water to the Ground Zero site, so f refghters there could start putting out f res on “the Pile,” and other buildings in the area that were also on f re. Te McKean, Fire Fighter, and John J. Harvey pumped water continuously for three straight days.

Likewise, in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake (a.k.a. “the World Series” earthquake) struck, it ruptured both natural gas lines and underground water lines in the Marina District. A massive fre broke out and the fre trucks had no access to water. Te crew of the City of San Francisco f reboat Phoenix sprang into action and pumped water from the bay to land-based fre engines. Tanks to their eforts, along with those of land-based f re f ghters and local

PHOTO BY DET. GREG SEMENDINGER, NYPD

The evacuation of people trapped in Lower Manhat an on 9/11 was carried out by every available vessel in New York Harbor, including three historic FDNY fireboats: John D. McKean, Fire Firefighter, and John J. Harvey. The red vessel visible alongside the Batery is the John J. Harvey.

volunteers, numerous lives and historic buildings were saved. At the time of the earthquake, the Phoenix was the last f reboat in the San Francisco Fire Department. She was scheduled to be decommissioned later that year, which would have left the City of San Francisco without any f reboats. T anks to the success of the Phoenix’ s crew in response to the earthquake, government leaders in San Francisco reconsidered the plan and decided to retain the Phoenix f reboat. Recognizing her valuable role to the community, marina owners and a private donor paid for a second f reboat for the city shortly after the earthquake and named her Guardian

A few years later, the city ordered a new f reboat, the St. Francis, which was put in service in 2016.

With more than 12,000 miles of coastline and more than 25,000 miles of navigable inland waters, American port cities and waterfront communities have a vital need for f reboats as part of their f re f ghting infrastructure. For waterways and harbors shared by multiple jurisdictions—New York Harbor, for example—agreements are in place for f reboats from one area to assist in frefghting or emergency situations for the other.

The cooperation between the FDNY and northern New Jersey marine

units came into play in July 2023 when the cargo ship Grande Costa d’Avorio, carrying an assortment of new and used automobiles, caught f re in the Port of Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the largest container port on the East Coast. Managed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, this marine terminal is the main container ship facility for goods entering or leaving the New York metropolitan area, as well as the northeast section of North America. Te FDNY Marine units assisted the land-based Newark, New Jersey, fre department in combating this blaze, which lasted six days before it was declared fully extinguished. Tragically, two Newark frefghters lost their lives.

Since the Port Authority does not have a marine unit, it relies on local municipal f re departments for emergency situations. From the investigation conducted afterward, it was determined that Newark Fire Department frefghters were not trained properly to fght ship f res.

Mutual aid didn’t make a diference in July 2020, when a f re broke out on the lower deck of USS Bonhomme Richard (LH-6), a US Navy ship located at the Naval Base San Diego. As with the Port of Newark ship fre incident, landbased f re f ghters were inadequately

San Francisco Fire Department Fireboat Phoenix

John D. McKean

PHOTO BY DAVID ROCCO

trained to fght ship f res. It didn’t help matters that the fre suppression system had been recently disconnected because of maintenance work. It took four days for f refghters to extinguish this f re, which injured 63 sailors and civilians and severely damaged the ship. Based on the timeframe and the high cost estimate to repair the ship, the Navy made the decision to decommission Bonhomme Richard and sell her for scrap.

Te type of f reboats that were called to assist the land-based frefghters from the San Diego Bay area, such as those of the San Diego Harbor Police and from a local tugboat company that had a few water monitors, also didn’t have the capacity to fght a ship f re of this size. Considering the fact that the Navy spends billions of dollars building

and then maintaining its ships, it’s hard to believe that it does not have a freboat division. Apparently, the Navy did have its own freboat unit, but dissolved this unit more than thirty years ago.

Another prime example of mutualaid arrangements is the relationship between the f re departments serving the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach. Each port is located in the

San Pedro Bay Port Complex and listed in the top twenty busiest ports in the world. Te Port of Los Angeles, which covers both the county and city, operates fve f reboats, including the large-class Fireboat #2, Warner L. Lawrence, which can pump 38,000 thousand gallons of water per minute. T is tally does not refect the retired 1925 freboat Ralph J. Scott Te Port of Long

USS Bonhomme Richard (LH-6) fire, San Diego, 2020

The Los Angeles Fire Department 1925 fireboat Ralph J. Scot (vessel towards the right, showing its port side) batling a blaze at the Harbor Grain Terminal in 1967 in San Pedro, California.

Beach Fire Department operates three f reboats, two of which are the largeclass f reboats Protector and Vigilance. Tese vessels can each pump 41,000 gallons per minute.

Te FDNY maintains a number of di ferent-sized f reboats as assets in the largest f re department in the Western Hemisphere. (Tokyo, Japan, ha s the largest f re department in the world, with 18,000 f refghters.) Te FDNY employs more than 11,000 f refghters and has eleven f reboats in use on a year-round basis, with an additional f ve in service during the warmer months.

FDNY’s Marine Co. 1 Tree Forty Tree and Marine Co. 9 Fire Fighter II, commissioned in 2010, were considered the world’s largest and most advanced f reboats at the time. Each can pump 50,000 gallons of water per minute. Te Tree Forty Tree was built to replace the then-56-year-old John D. McKean Named in honor of the 343 FDNY f refghters who lost their lives on 9/11, Tree Forty Tree was commissioned at 0900 hours on 11 September 2010, exactly nine years after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Te Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore has since built the freboat Red Sail fsh (2019), which can pump more than 63,000 gallons per minute. Singapore, with ten f reboats, is the second busiest port in the world; Shanghai is the busiest. Europe’s busiest port in Rotterdam operates three f reboats.

As for the eight historic f reboats in the US in the following list, New York State has the distinct honor of being the home state for four of them. T ree of the four are retired from the FDNY: John J. Harvey, Fire Fighter, and John D. McKean Te fourth NYS-based historic f reboat is the Edward M. Cotter, still in use by the Bu f alo Fire Department. At 124 years old, Edward M. Cotter is considered the oldest active f reboat in the United States.

Historic Fireboats in the US

Edward M. Cotter

Status: Active f reboat, Bu f alo, NY Builder : Crescent Shipbuilding of Elizabeth Port, New Jersey (1900) Notable Incidents: Tere have been three name changes for this vessel: she was christened William Grattan in 1900, her name was changed to Firefghter in 1953 and Edward M. Cotter in 1954. In July 1928, William Grattan was fghting a f re aboard a crude-oil barge when an explosion killed her chief engineer, Tomas Lynch. In 1960, under the name Edward M. Cotter, the f reboat sped 20 miles across Lake Erie to assist the Port Colborne, Ontario, f re department, which did not have a

f reboat and was struggling to fght a f re in a grain elevator—then the largest in Canada—along the waterfront. T is response was the f rst instance in which an American freboat crossed an international border to help authorities in another country. Te Edward M. Cotter was listed on the US National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry on 28 June 1996.

Duwamish

Status: Floating museum, Seattle, WA Builder: Richmond Beach Shipbuilding Company, Shoreline, Washington (1909)

Notable Incidents: Te Duwamish is the second-oldest f reboat in the United States and was considered the most powerful freboat in the world for nearly a century (from 1909–2003). She was designed with a ram bow, capable of sinking a burning vessel.

Te devastating 1910 Independent Asphalt Co. f re was Duwamish ’s f rst call. Over the next 74 years, she was in regular use tamping down f res and assisting in waterfront and maritime emergencies in Seattle. Duwamish retired in 1985 and four years later was

added to the State and National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry. She was also designated a Seattle Landmark in 1986.

SS Deluge

Status: Scrapped

Builder: Johnson Drydock Shipbuilding Company, New Orleans, LA (1923)

Notable Incidents: Deluge had an active service life, fghting, on average, forty fres per year, including the Scantic freighter f re in 1930, the Christmas

Eve 1958 fre when a barge loaded with crude oil slammed into the Standard Oil tanker Baltimore, and the Algiers school house f re in 1958. In addition to f re fghting, she was also used for towing and other services. Te vessel was added to the State and National Historic Registry and was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1989; she was retired from service in 1992. After years of neglect, the deteriorated historic freboat was scrapped. Te Deluge was recently delisted from both the State and National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry.

Ralph J. Scott

Status: Dry berth in the San Pedro Port Complex, San Pedro, California

Builder: Los Angeles Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., San Pedro, CA (1925)

(below) The Grand Trunk Pacific Dock in Seatle caught fire in July 1914. The Duwamish is visible at the far right, bat ling the fire from the south and trying to keep the flames from jumping to the nearby Colman Dock.

Seatle’s Duwamish, 1910

Notable Incidents: Te schooner Sierra f re in 1926, the devastating tanker explosion and fre on Terminal Island in October 1944, the tanker Markey explosion and fre in June 1947, the San Pedro Matson Terminal Fire in March 1960, and the supertanker Sansinena explosion and subsequent f re in December 1976 were just some of the major emergencies she responded to. During World War II, the Scott served as a patrol boat for the San Pedro Port complex. Ralph J. Scott was designated as Los Angeles Historic–Cultural Monument No. 154 in 1976 and added to the State and National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry on 30 June 1989. (Ralph J. Scott was originally referred to as Fireboat #2.)

Fireboat No. 1

Status: Museum vessel, dry berth, Tacoma, WA

Builder: Coastline Shipbuilding Co., Tacoma, WA (1929)

Notable Incidents: Between 1930 and 1942, Fireboat No. 1 fought 14 major f res along the Tacoma waterfront, including the Clear Fir Lumber Co. f res of 1934 and 1942. Fireboat was added to the State and National Register of Historic Places in December 1983 and the National Historic Landmark Registry in June 1980.

John J.

Harvey

Status: Operational museum vessel (a foat), New York, NY

Builder: Todd Shipbuilding and Drydock Corp., Brooklyn, NY (1931)

Notable Incidents: John J. Harvey’ s career included responses to some of the most famous maritime disasters in New York, such as t he Cunard Line pier f re in 1932, the Normandie ship f re in 1942, the El Estero ammunition f re in 1943, the collision and resulting f res aboard the oil tankers Alva Cape and Texaco Massachusetts in 1966, and

another collision and f re involving the Esso Brussels / Sea Witch in June 1973. On 9/11, despite the fact that the John J. Harvey had retired from active service in 1995, she was requested to take part in the maritime evacuation transporting people away from the danger zone in Lower Manhattan. Te Harvey returned to the Battery Park seawall to work with FDNY f reboats Fire Fighter and John D. McKean pumping river water to Ground Zero for three consecutive days. Te John J. Harvey was added to the State and National Register of Historic Places on 15 June 2000.

Fire Fighter

Status: Operational museum vessel (a foat), Greenport, NY

Builder: United Shipyards, Staten Island, NY (1938)

Notable Incidents: Alongside John J. Harvey, Fire Fighter responded to the Normandie ship f re in 1942, the El Estero ammunition f re in 1943, the oil tankers Alva Cape and Texaco Massachusetts collision and f re in 1966, and the Esso Brussels / Sea Witch collision and f re in June 1973. Fire Fighter took part in the maritime evacuation operation in Lower Manhattan on 9/11. Fire Fighter then joined the John D. McKean and John J. Harvey, supplying Hudson

River water to Ground Zero in response to the 9/11 attack (see John J. Harvey, above). Fire Fighter was added to the State and National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry in 1989.

USS Hoga ( YT–146 )

Status: Museum vessel, Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum, North Little Rock, AR

Builder: Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation, Bronx, NY (1941)

Notable Incidents: Te Hoga played a major role during the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. Te Hoga was also in Tokyo Bay, Japan, for the ofcial surrender that took place on 2 September 1945. In 1948 the Navy loaned the Hoga to the City of Oakland, California. Between 1948 and 1994, the Hoga was used as a f reboat under the name City of Oakland. In 1994 Oakland returned the Hoga to the Navy. Te Navy in turn made the vessel available for donation, selecting the city of North Little Rock, Arkansas, to take ownership in 2005. She f nally arrived at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum on 23 November 2015. Te Hoga was added to the State and National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark Registry on 30 June 1989.

John J. Harvey

John D. McKean

Status: Museum ship (a foat), Stony Point, NY

Builder: John G. Mathis Shipbuilding Company, Camden, New Jersey (1954)

Notable Incidents: Te John D. McKean and her crew played a critical role in extinguishing the Staten Island Ferry Terminal fre in Manhattan on 9 September 1991. Ten years later, the f reboat played a central role in the remarkable maritime evacuation of residents and ofce workers in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Te McKean was joined by FDNY’s Fire Fighter and the John J. Harvey, supplying Hudson River water to Ground

Zero. In January 2009, the McKean was involved in the rescue operation of US Airlines Flight 1549. T is water landing became known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” John D. McKean was added to the State and National Register of Historic Places on 28 July 2023.

David Rocco serves on the board of directors for the Fireboat McKean Preservation Project and has been involved as a volunteer for many cultural and environmental initiatives in the Hudson Valley and New York City. An author and award-winning photographer, he co-wrote (with Don Keith) of The Inde-

structible Man, about Navy legend Dixie Kiefer. Scenic photography of the Hudson Valley and beyond has been his passion for many years. In 2019, he was awarded the 2nd annual Lawrence (Larry) Salley Photography Award by Arts Westchester for his body of work documenting the Tappan Zee Bridge/ Gov. Cuomo Bridge project. Twenty of his photos documenting the July 2016 Tappan Zee Bridge crane collapse were featured in an episode on the Science Channel’s Engineering Catastrophes program, “New York Crane Collapse.” To learn more about the Fireboat McKean Preservation Project, visit www. fireboatmckean.org.

USS Nevada (BB-36) aground and burning of Waipio Point afer the Japanese at ack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Ships assisting her, at right, are USS Hoga (YT-146) closest to the viewer, and USS Avocet (AVP-4) on Hoga’s starboard side.

USS Hoga (YT-146)

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Cables and Conflict in the South Atlantic

Relations between governments and companies operating international communications networks can be fraught with di fculty. T is is no less true today than in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a time when imperial rivalries were on the rise and advances in technology were cranking up the chauvinistic volume. In the mid1890s, the growing demand for international communication infrastructure set of a chain of events leading Britain to annex the remote uninhabited island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic, only to be forced to rescind the action a short eighteen months later.

Trinidad became a diplomatic pawn in the highly proftable business of laying submarine cables linking Europe, Africa, and South America. What followed led to anti-British riots in Bra-

by Dr. Charles R. Maier

zil and anti-British tirades in American newspapers. As these matters of high f nance and diplomacy climaxed, an American, James Harden-Hickey, announced his claim as Trinidad’s lawful prince, complicating and adding a note of levity to the crisis.

T e tiny island measures four square miles and lies approximately 685 miles east and a few degrees north of Rio de Janeiro. Today, it is usually described with the Brazilian spelling Trindade, though to Victorians it was Trinidad. Volcanic in origin, it is part of a chain of fve islands (the remaining four are much smaller).

Historically, the island was occupied and then abandoned by Britain during the wars of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later, the island became entwined in a broad range of matters concerning Brazil’s trading and

communications links. An economic boom in the 1880s saw British investment in Brazil increase fvefold. Te glory days faded, however, when the imperial regime headed by King Dom Pedro collapsed in 1889 in the face of a military revolt. Te mid-1890s witnessed a new age of prosperity, in which Brazilians began to seek alternatives to British trade and investment, as Americans were looking to Latin American trade as an antidote to their own country’s economic woes.

Helping fuel Brazil’s growth was the burgeoning business in telecommunications. Sir John Pender was Great Britain’s reigning cable tycoon. His companies dominated telegraphic communications between Britain and Latin America, as well as India, the Far East, and Australia. Pender’s career grew exponentially after an American venture

The tiny island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic lies nearly 700 miles of the coast of Brazil and was hotly contested in the late 19th century by Brazil and Great Britain, which sought to use it as a way station for a proposed transAtlantic cable.

Carte des voies de communication établies dans le Monde entier, au moyen de la vapeur et de l’électricité; “World’s Steam and Electric Map,” 1862. The proposed track of a submarine cable line the British sought to lay across the Atlantic, linking Great Britain and South America, superimposed on this map created by Anatole Chatelain (1817–1898). The map outlines communication routes across the globe: major railways, steamship routes, and telegraph lines—both terrestrial and submarine. “The advent of steam power and electricity during the mid-19th century totally revolutionized global transportation and communications. Telegraph lines delivered messages almost instantly over thousands of miles versus correspondence, which previously took months. The map also shows the survey routes for the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable, a connection that was first opened in 1858 but would not become practically operable until 1866.” 1

1 Alexander Johnson/Dasa Pahor, 2023, David Rumsey Map Collection.

Great Britain

Montevideo

Buenos Aires

Trinidad Island

Cape Verde

Ascension Island

to lay a trans-Atlantic cable failed, and Pender personally f nanced and supervised a second attempt, which in 1866 successfully linked the continents. Pender was active politically, serving as a Liberal member of Parliament for most of the late nineteenth century.

Pender’s cable to South America landed in Brazil, but by the mid-1890s earlier monopolistic concessions granted by Brazil were expiring. New taxes were imposed on Pender’s operations, and legislation was introduced allowing Brazil to purchase British lines connecting that country’s cities. An Americanowned line serviced the west coast of South America, and a proposed Andean link posed a possible threat to Pender’s monopoly. A further complication arose in Argentina. Service to that country passed through Brazil, which taxed all Argentine tra fc crossing its territory. Politicians in Argentina approached Pender ofering to subsidize a direct under-sea line to their country, bypassing Brazil. To Pender, the Argentine ofer was tantalizing; he viewed it as a bargaining tool to secure concessions from the Brazilian government.

Te chairman of one of Pender’s many companies was a retired Royal Navy admiral, Sir George Henry Richards. A distinguished cartographer, Richards had surveyed the marine boundary between British Columbia and the United States before retiring. In November 1894, he presented the case for annexing Trinidad to the Foreign Secretary in Britain’s Liberal government, John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley. Kimberley should enable laying a British line directly, Richards

John Pender, “the Cable King,” dominated suboceanic telegraphy in the second half of the 19th century. This caricature was published in Vanity Fair, 28 October 1871.

argued, from Cape Verde in West Africa to the British Island of Ascension, and then on to the unclaimed island of Trinidad. From there it could run straight to Buenos Aires in Argentina, bypassing Brazil altogether. Failing this, Richards warned, a hostile Brazil might nationalize cable lines and direct services across the Andes to “lines of an American Company, and through the land-lines of the United States,” threatening secure communications. Richards urged Kimberley to “resume formal possession” of Trinidad. T is was needed, as the length of the f nal run of cable required a break between Ascension and Buenos Aires. Trinidad was ideally suited for the purpose. Sta f at the Foreign Ofce showed little enthusiasm for the scheme, stating it would be wise to check with the British legation in Rio de Janeiro before acting. “No,” Kimberley replied decisively, “immediate steps should be taken to take possession of the island.”

Orders to perform the annexation without delay were sent to Commander Francis John Foley, the senior ofcer at the Royal Navy’s small South-east Coast of America squadron based in Montevideo, Uruguay. Foley’s fagship, HMS Barracouta, encountered strong currents and headwinds during her sixday passage to Trinidad, arriving on 17 January 1895. Te crew hoisted the White Ensign and placed a copy of the annexation proclamation in a glass bottle and deposited it at the base of the fagsta f. On a rock face visible from the sea, the crew painted the word RECORD in eight-foot letters. Foley carried-out a similar ceremony on the only other sizable island in the chain, Martin Vas Rocks.

Te orderly annexation proved the only straightforward aspect of what followed. Te newly appointed head of the British diplomatic mission in Brazil, Constantine Phipps, was taken aback when he received the news. Brazilian

authorities greeted the news with outrage when word f nally reached them in July 1895. Brazil’s foreign minister, Carlos de Carvalho, summoned Phipps to a tense meeting in which he lectured the British diplomat on the fact that Trinidad’s ownership by Brazil was not in question. He further asserted that Brazil was prepared to send a warship to the island if necessary. Te American diplomat in Rio de Janeiro, Tomas Tompson, sent a report to Washington informing the secretary of state of the annexation, something that could well be viewed as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

When Brazil’s representative in London called at the Foreign Ofce to protest, his assertions were dismissed by ofcials. Tey pointed to Britain’s earlier occupation of the island and the fact it had been uninhabited for many years. As this was unfolding, Britain’s Liberal government was defeated at the polls. Robert Arthur Talbot GascoyneCecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, assumed the ofce of foreign secretary as well as prime minister in July 1895. Salisbury was not inclined to rescind the annexation, but directed Phipps in Rio to use friendly discourse to discourage the Brazilians from dispatching a warship to Trinidad, describing this as a blatantly unfriendly act. Brazil’s foreign minister responded by quoting historical documents and precedents supporting his country’s case for ownership.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s congress rang with speeches decrying British aggression. Protests abounded. Police had to post guards at the British consulate in Rio. Attempts were made to break down the door of the consulate in São Paulo; in the nearby town of Santos, the owner of the Café de Londres cautiously re-named his establishment the Café de Trinidad.

Te Brazilian press unanimously denounced the British action, and if the

intent of annexation was to protect British commercial interests in Brazil, what transpired on the ground proved the exact opposite. In one day alone, Phipps noted, “exchange on London [fell] 8 per cent.” Even the country’s most moderate newspaper was calling for retaliation against “British companies in Brazil which exhaust all the wealth of the country.”

Te historical information provided by Brazil helped shake the Foreign O fce from its complacency. As the tumultuous month of July 1895 drew to a close, Lord Salisbury telegraphed Phipps, stating that it was necessary to assume a more fexible approach, perhaps leasing the island from Brazil, as the present situation was “most unsatisfactory.”

In Washington, the hot summer of 1895 was enlivened by serious press reports of British aggression on the remote island in the South Atlantic. Tese were balanced by bizarre reports of the carryings-on of James Harden-Hickey, an American asserting his claim to be the rightful princely ruler of the island.

Te second assistant secretary at the State Department, long-time sta fer Alvey Adee, wrote to Richard Olney, the individual Grover Cleveland had recently appointed to head the State Department. Adee remarked that the “newspaper men are wild about the Trinidad business.” He observed that the question of “whether we will permit Great Britain to purchase the island from Brazil in defance of the Monroe Doctrine” had become mixed with reports that “Harden-Hickey’s Chancellor is coming to Washington to demand recognition [of] the mid-ocean Principality.”

James Harden-Hickey was born in San Francisco, but at an early age moved with his French mother to Paris. He became an active member of various royalist circles and wrote articles and novels promoting monarchical values

and romantic adventures. His second marriage in 1891 was to a daughter of John Flagler, a wealthy American fnancier and business associate of Andrew Carnegie. While the marriage did not last, Flagler money played a part in Harden-Hickey indulging his fantasy of becoming an absolute monarch.

Harden-Hickey had visited the seemingly unclaimed island of Trinidad on a yachting excursion. Buoyed by Flagler’s wealth, he wrote to the British Foreign Ofce in 1893 stating that he intended to assume possession of Trinidad, something the Foreign O fce chose to ignore. He then proceeded to declare himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, and used his contacts at the New

York Times to publicize his claim. Somewhat comical press accounts of the would-be prince of Trinidad helped divert American public attention from the more serious diplomatic and commercial aspects of the Trinidad a f air. Under pressure from a New York Times correspondent, Adee met with HardenHickey’s “chancellor” and friend, the Comte de la Boissiere. Adee reported to Secretary of State Olney, “It has not been easy for me to recite this conversation with the appearance of seriousness, and I certainly do not expect you to receive it in any very serious light.”

In London, the Foreign O fce never took Harden-Hickey’s claims seriously. Even so, the downside of the

annexation was becoming increasingly clear. Constantine Phipps in Rio wrote to Lord Salisbury that, in his opinion, Pender “had never been frank with either the late Government of Her Majesty or with that of Brazil.”

When a British government legal opinion supporting annexation was leaked to the press, Brazil found itself again racked by protests and agitation to legislate against British businesses. Newspapers in Brazil printed scurrilous press reports of Pender’s shady business dealings, and pressure mounted for Brazil to break of diplomatic relations with Britain. Meanwhile, it was rumored that Rothschild interests were working behind the scenes to deescalate the crisis.

Lord Salisbury sent Phipps a long diplomatic note seeking common ground with Brazil. Phipps shared this with the Brazilian Foreign Minister a week before Christmas, 1895. Despite some misgivings, Britain and Brazil agreed to use the good ofces of Portugal to adjudicate matters. Te Portuguese decision stated that the island had in fact been properly transferred to Brazil by Portugal in 1825, and that Britain should recognize Brazilian sovereignty over the remote archipelago.

In August 1896, the Foreign Ofce directed the Admiralty to send a warship to the island to renounce Britain’s claim. HMS Barracouta once again steamed to Trinidad, where the crew hauled down the colors, dismantled the f agsta f, and removed the record of occupation deposited only eighteen months earlier. In a touch of irony, the signal con f rming de-annexation was sent to London from Montevideo across the very Brazilian cable lines that had helped spark the Trinidad a f air in the f rst place.

James Harden-Hickey proclaimed himself James I, Prince of Trinidad, in 1894.

Sir John Pender died in July 1896, and did not live to see Trinidad returned to Brazil. Te proposed cable linking Africa and South America via Trinidad was never laid. Te early twentieth century saw the growth of wireless telegraphy, and the declining strategic importance of cable technology. Today Trinidad remains generally uninhabited and bereft of a cable station, though it possesses a small Brazilian naval research facility.

James Harden-Hickey had to watch as his Principality of Trinidad was swept up in negotiations involving multinational communications interests. He was devastated to see his fantasy state slip from his imaginary grasp. In 1894 he wrote a book entitled Euthanasia: Te Aesthetics of Suicide. It argued for euthanasia and suicide in cases where life was no longer worth living. In February 1898, depressed and impoverished, Harden-Hickey took an overdose

of morphine in an El Paso, Texas, hotel. It was said that his handmade princely crown was found among his remaining possessions.

In Washington, the Trinidad annexation proved yet another irritant in the larger scheme of Anglo-American relations. As 1895 drew to a close, the attention of both the State Department and Foreign Ofce shifted to British Guiana, where another British breach of President Monroe’s doctrine generated actual threats of war. Diplomacy, however, triumphed, creating a crucible in which Britain and the United States moved away from these hemispheric irritants towards mutual accommodation.

If the Trinidad annexation heightened American suspicions of British territorial designs in the Americas, in Brazil it also did serious damage to British commercial interests. Caving to the demands of one communications pro-

vider tarnished Britain’s reputation as a trusted trading partner at a time when United States trade and in fuence in the region were expanding. Today, the Trinidad a fair can serve as a cautionary tale, highlighting the dangers posed to corporations, diplomats, and regulators working to de f ne relations between national governments and providers of communications infrastructure in an increasingly interconnected world.

Dr. Charles Maier studied history at the University of British Columbia, King’s College London, and the Royal Military College of Canada. He enjoyed a thirtyyear public service career, employed successively by the British Columbia Historic Parks System, the Yukon Archives, and the ofice of Canada’s Governor General. Following retirement Dr. Maier has taught for Carleton University and Canada’s Royal Military College.

Originally built in 1873 in Newcastle, England, the cable ship Hooper was re-named Silvertown in 1881 and saw extensive service laying submarine cables along the east coast of South America in the 1890s.

Nantucket Historical Association Sharking at the Haulover

by Michael R. Harrison

The Curator’s Corner series in Sea History ofers maritime museums the opportunity to feature historical 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 Nantucket Historical Association in Massachusets. Enjoy!

Disenchanted with his work as a portrait photographer in Yonkers, New York, Henry S. Wyer (1847–1920) returned to his native Nantucket in 1881 to take artistic photos of the island to sell to summer tourists. T is arresting image is one of the photographs he created that summer, which he sold as Sharking at the Haulover. It depicts sand tiger sharks laid on the beach after a recreational f shing expedition.

Famous as a colonial and early American center of the whale fshery, Nantucket ceased to be a competitive whaling port in the mid-nineteenth century due to its shallow harbor entrance and the development of railroads on the mainland. Seeking an alternative economic engine, Nantucketers developed the island’s f rst amenities for tourists in the late 1840s. Tey began concerted eforts to advertise Nantucket as an ideal “watering place” after the Civil War, extolling the island’s abundant sand, breezes, and summer sun. A rush of hotel building and land speculation followed in the 1870s and 1880s, setting in motion a new economy based on hospitality, real-estate sales, and construction.

Nantucket’s skilled watermen were central to the growth of the island’s resort economy. Engaged in commercial f shing in winter, in summer they shifted their attention to tourists by ofering recreational day sails, transportation, and sport-fshing opportunities of many kinds. Bluefshing, both by boat and from the beach, was very popular, as was freshwater fshing for white perch in the island’s ponds. Shark f shing was a particular local specialty ofered by a handful of enterprising captains, whose activities were recommended to more adventurous visitors in many island guidebooks.

Fishing of this kind was done with hook and line from thirty-foot whaleboats rowed of shore. Te dory seen here was used for ferrying the paying customers back to the beach

and hauling the sharks ashore. Beach parties often watched the sharks being brought in, and the woman posed in the dory—dressed as she is—was probably not part of the sharking party on this day. Te four or fve sharks shown by the boat were a modest catch for this violent activity. Hauls of ten to twenty sharks were frequently reported. One party that went out from this same beach in summer 1878 captured ten sharks within thirty-fve minutes of shoving of. “ Tey were all of one mind on their return to town,” the Nantucket Journal declared, “that these trips are among the best day’s sport a man can have.” Travel writer A. Judd Northrup echoed this sentiment in his 1881 book about summering on Nantucket. At the end of an entire chapter devoted to the ferocious process of shark hunting, he declared, “I confess (with a little twinge) that I was never more excited with any sport (!) in my life than with this my f rst capture of a shark.”

Te man at the center of this photo is one of the Norcross brothers, f shermen whose activities included shark f shing from the “Haulover,” the narrow spit of land that divides Nantucket’s upper harbor from the Atlantic Ocean. (Judging from his clothes, he had also not been in the party that day.) Te brothers received customers from the island’s hotels, as well as the Wauwinet House, a small hotel right by the Haulover that they owned and operated, beginning in 1884.

In partial justi fcation for slaughtering so many sharks, the f shermen rendered out the oil from the sharks’ livers and turned the carcasses over to local farmers for use as fertilizer. Te tourists usually headed home with sharks’ teeth, and, maybe, a picturesque Nantucket view by Henry Wyer, as souvenirs.

Michael R. Harrison is Chief Curator & Obed Macy Research Chair at the Nantucket Historical Association.

Sharking at the Haulover

“Nantucket’s skilled watermen were central to the growth of the island’s resort economy. Engaged in commercial fishing in winter, in summer they shifed their atention to tourists by ofering recreational day sails, transportation, and sport-fishing opportunities of many kinds.”

The Nantucket Historical Association collects and interprets the history of Nantucket Island, located of the southeast coast of Massachuset s. This year, in partnership with the Norman Rockwell Museum, the association is celebrating the genius of illustrator and puppeteer Tony Sarg (1880–1942), island summer resident and inventor of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. The Association owns numerous historical properties on Nantucket, including the Oldest House, the Old Mill, the Whaling Museum, and Research Library. Check the NHA website for which sites are open at various times of the year.

15 Broad Street, Nantucket, Massachuset s • Ph. 508 228-1894 • www.nha.org

A Maritime History of the United States COMMERCE BY SEA

by Charles Raskob Robinson and Len Tantillo illustrated by the American Society of Marine Artists

Our waterways have always been vital for commerce, tracing back to trade conducted by the indigenous peoples of this continent. When Europeans arrived by ship more than 400 years ago, they used inland and coastal waterways to connect with other settlements and the ocean to maintain ties with Europe. Trade would serve as the economic engine that would drive the development of tiny coastal communities into thriving port towns and cities.

Today, our reliance on maritime commerce continues to grow. Ships and seafarers provide the link between domestic and global markets, and the vessels they operate are the direct descendants of ships built centuries ago, which

have evolved through innovations in naval architecture, vessel construction, and technology.

A Maritime History of the United States: Te Creation and Defense of a Nation, a new book by the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA), presents a timeline of American maritime history through the works of ASMA artists. T is is the second installment of a series we are presenting in Sea History based on themes in our maritime story, such as naval and coastal defense, commercial shipping, passenger travel, fsheries, yachting and recreation, etc. In this issue, we look at the history of commercial maritime activity through the eyes of contemporary marine artists.

—Deirdre O’Regan, Editor

New York Harbor, 1790, watercolor, 9 x 12 inches, by Lewis Victor Mays (1927–2015)

Dutch Fluyt, East River, Manhatan, ca. 1655 oil, 20 x 30 inches, by Len

Tantillo

Oceangoing vessels made trade possible and, with it, the development of seaports, which became hubs of commerce and politics early on. Even as far back as 1658, before the British took New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York, international trade was evident, as seen here where a Dutch merchant ship (known as a fluyt) ofloads cargo.

Southeast Light, Block Island, 1880s, oil, 12 x 16 inches, by William R. Davis Jr.

Throughout history, lighthouses have served as vital navigational aids, guiding ships along coastlines and through treacherous waters. Recognizing the country’s vested interest in protecting shipping, Congress passed “An Act Making Appropriations for Light House, Light Boats, Buoys, &c.,” in 1851 and established the US Lighthouse Board in 1852.

Located atop Monhegan Bluf on Block Island, Southeast Light was the highest lighthouse in New England when it was built in 1875 and still is today. Light beamed through its Fresnel lens could be seen more than 30 miles out. Its steam-powered foghorn was fueled by a coal fire in the small building to the right. Southeast Light was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1997.

Glimpse of the Sun gouache, 12 1/2 x 19 inches, by Jim Grifiths

Cargo capacity and speed were important elements driving the evolution of ship design, and by the middle of the 19th century, speed was indeed king. Faster than anything on land, clipper ships covered vast distances for tea in China, gold in California, and traditional commerce elsewhere in record times. Depicted here is the 1851 extreme clipper ship Flying Fish underway in the Golden Age of Sail.

The glory days of extreme clipper ships were short-lived, however. As wood in shipbuilding gave way to iron and steel and wind power gave way to steam, sailing cargo ships fought to remain competitive. The last true commercial square riggers held on until the middle of the 20th century carrying bulk cargos, such as Australian grain and South American nitrate, across long distances. Large holds were a requirement, but keeping to a tight schedule was not.

Cora Cressy oil, 21 x 30 inches, by Loret a Krupinski

The history of shipbuilding in Bath, Maine, on the Kennebec River goes back to the early 1600s, when the pinnace Virginia was launched by members of the Popham Colony to explore local waters but was ultimately used to return the setlers to England when the colony was abandoned. This was the first ocean-going English ship built in the Americas, and it was the start of a shipbuilding tradition in the region that continues to this day.

Over the following generations, Bath became a center for wooden shipbuilding, particularly for square-rigged ships and large schooners like the five-masted Cora Cressy, depicted below. The Cressy was built at the Percy & Small Shipyard in Bath. Launched in 1902, the 273-foot schooner became known as the “Queen of the Atlantic Seaboard” afer surviving a 1924 gale that claimed at least two other large sailing vessels. Her sailing career ended in 1928, afer she was damaged in a gale and laid up.

Bath Iron Works (BIW) was founded on that same stretch of land along the banks of the Kennebec River and carries on the region’s shipbuilding tradition. In 1995, the shipyard became a subsidiary of General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense contractors and a leader in surface ship design and construction. In 2023, BIW was awarded the contract to build three new Arleigh Burkeclass destroyers (DDG-51).

(opposite page)

East River Scene Showing the Consolidated Edison Steam Generation and Coca Cola Plants watercolor, 15 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches by Carl G. Evers (1907–2000)

As technology advanced, it was water transportation that fed the coal-fired power stations and new industries. In the early 1900s, Con Edison built a coal storage facility across the Hudson River on the New Jersey side because real estate in Manhat an had become prohibitively expensive. Coal was transported to company power plants on the East River by water. Oil and natural gas eventually replaced coal to reduce pollution in the city.

Steam on the Waterfront oil, 24 x 36 inches, by David

Tutwiler

By the mid-20 th century, the centennial of the Golden Age of Sail, steam-powered transportation networks dominated both waterways and on shore. In this image, steam tugboats escort a steam freighter in New York Harbor, while a steam locomotive switcher maneuvers cargoes from ships to connecting transports.

(below)

Esteem Splendour oil, 24 x 30 inches , by Patrick O’Brien

This painting is one of seven that ASMA president Patrick O’Brien was commissioned to do for ExxonMobil. The paintings depict newly built supertankers at the time of their commissioning and were given as gif s to the respective ships’ captains and crew. These paintings are well-traveled artwork, since they are hanging in the captain’s quarters aboard the ships.

Gathering of Giants

acrylic, 13 1/4 x 32 inches , by Edward M. Grifith

Container ships were an American experiment, introduced in 1955 by Malcolm McLean, a North Carolina trucker. Containerization proved so successful that it would come to revolutionize commercial shipping as well as port facilities. Most of the world’s cargo ships of today sail under a foreign flag, as seen here in this painting of the 950-foot Ming Europe of the Taiwanese Yang Ming Line.

Charles Raskob Robinson is a Fellow and charter member of the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA), the nation’s oldest and largest not-for-proft educational organization dedicated to promoting American marine art and history. In 2013 he directed the Naval War of 1812 Illustrated, a documentary by the Society in conjunction with the US Navy and dozens of museums. He is the curator of the current exhibition at the Pentagon, also titled A Maritime History of the United States: Te Creation and Defense of a Nation, which will run through 2024.

Len F. Tantillo is a Fellow and long-time ASMA member and board member. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he is a licensed architect who left that feld to pursue a career in the f ne art of historical and marine painting. His work has appeared internationally in exhibitions, publications, and documentaries, in addition to f ne art museums and galleries. He is the author of four books and is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.

To purchase the book or learn more about ASMA, visit www.americansocietyofmarineartists.com.

Could This Be IT for SS United States?

By the end of this summer, the fate of the famed ocean liner SS United States is likely to have been determined. A decision in a court case brought by the owner of the Philadelphia pier where the ship has been docked for 28 years against the SS United States Conservancy, which owns the vessel, in an attempt to evict the ship from its berth, is expected any time. Even if US District Judge Anita B. Brody rules against an immediate eviction, the Conservancy believes she might order the ship to leave after a reasonable time to search for a new home, or rule that Penn Warehousing’s doubling of the rent for the ship was permissible. Te judge had urged the parties to settle, stating that neither side would be happy if she has to rule in the case, but no settlement was reached in a two-day trial held in January. Te Conservancy is planning to try to move the liner one way or the other, either to a new temporary home or, preferably, a permanent one.

Te ship has been in South Philadelphia since 1996. Te current rental agreement with Penn Warehousing and Distribution, signed in 2011, stipulates that the ship would be docked for $850 per day. Te pier company doubled the rent for South Philadelphia’s Pier 82 during the Covid epidemic and is trying to evict the vessel so that the property can be redeveloped.

Rebu fed by ofcials in New York City in its attempt to make a Hudson River pier the new permanent home for the storied ship, the Conservancy has reached out to the governors of Pennsylvania and Florida to seek their help in fnding an alternate site in Philadelphia or a berth in Miami. Leaving no stone unturned, the Conservancy even reached out to President Joe Biden for help. A Conservancy spokesman said it had not received responses from those individuals, but he added that there have been productive talks with congressional representatives from Pennsylvania. Te SS United States Conservancy is seeking help in identifying a pier, but is not asking for any government funding.

If no new temporary or permanent berth can be found, Conservancy leaders have been talking internally about the possibility of selling the ship for scrap or turning it into an arti fcial reef—a preferred worst-case option, but one that would still cost tens of millions of dollars in preparation.

All of this activity came after the Conservancy and the Long Island-based real estate f rm RXR issued a redevelopment plan for New York City with the ship as the centerpiece earlier in the year. Five years after agreeing to partner on the project, the Conservancy and RXR released a detailed multi-use proposal they say would be f nancially viable and create thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue for a host city. “Despite our continued progress, the ship is facing serious and immediate threats,” said the Conservancy’s president Susan Gibbs in February. “A judgement against the Conservancy in the litigation with Penn Warehousing over their doubling of our rent without proper notice could be devastating. It could result in the forceable removal of the ship, signi fcant f nancial duress, and loss of the SS United States.”

In the meantime, RXR, which had been paying the rent in Philadelphia since 2019, ceased that support last year when the planning work was wrapping up. Since then, the Conservancy has continued to pay the original rent.

Te ideal location for the ship, RXR and the Conservancy agreed, was Pier 76 between 35th and 38th Streets in Hudson River Park near the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, near where the ship berthed during her

SS United States shatered the transAtlantic speed record in both directions on her maiden voyage in 1952, a record yet to be broken. In speed trials, she achieved 38.32 knots. Crossing the Atlantic, she averaged 35.59 knots.

working career based out of New York. Te pier, which is owned by the state, is currently used for impounded vehicles and events. NY Governor Kathy Hochul and other ofcials, however, have shown no interest in pursuing the project and have declined to meet with the Conservancy. Hochul’s ofce referred a request for comment to the Hudson River Park Trust, which manages the park. Te Trust’s statement:

At least three Hudson River Park Trust presidents have seen proposals to bring the SS United States to the park over the last 15 to 20 years. Tere are multiple reasons why it’s not already here. First, bringing any vessel to a pier requires the pier be able to accommodate it. In its current condition, Pier 76 cannot support even a small recreational vessel, let alone one the size of SS United States, which is 990 feet long with a draft of 31 feet. Beyond rebuilding the pier, dredging—governed by a lengthy regulatory approvals process not controlled by the Trust—would also be required. For these reasons alone, Hudson River Park’s Pier 76, and any other park location, cannot currently serve even as a temporary berthing site for the vessel. Long-term,

Hudson River Park is in discussions with elected ofcials and community stakeholders about how to achieve our dual policy goals for Pier 76: creating high quality public open space for the community and identifying a revenue-generating use for the pier that helps support maintenance of the overall park as intended by our enabling statute.

A Conservancy spokesperson responded that:

Despite what the Trust may contend, no governor or Trust president has ever been presented with as complete and viable a plan to redevelop Pier 76 into a true capstone project for the park as the one presented by RXR, MCR, and the Conservancy late last year. Te grand return of SS United States to New York’s West Side as a world-class waterfront destination would help the trust achieve its legal mandate of being f nancially self-sustaining. Te project would drive substantial revenue, create jobs, revive the West Side’s storied “Ocean Liner Row” history, and provide the public amenities the community deserves, including acres of open, green

PHOTO BY CHUCK HOMLER,

SS United States at her berth in Philadelphia.

space. Pier 76 has languished in limbo for decades as a tow pound, and as girders and asphalt. As with any major waterfront project, complex regulatory requirements and technical challenges would need to be addressed. Te Conservancy’s redevelopment team and top-f ight engineers were prepared to handle them in close coordination with elected ofcials and community stakeholders. … We are disappointed that after being presented with a potential $1 billion economic development project that Governor Hochul, the Trust, and other New York State ofcials are unwilling to even consider advancing a substantive conversation.

Te feshed-out plan developed with hotel operator MCR Hotels would re-purpose this important historic ship as a 1,000-room hotel with restaurants and bars, museum, and event venues with acres of public green space. Te Conservancy and RXR are willing to donate the ship and the design and engineering work to a host city to expedite the process of f nding a new homeport. RXR and MCR developed full design drawings, engineering and construction feasibility documents in consultation with American shipyards, a

f nancial analysis to demonstrate the project’s viability, and an assessment of the permitting and regulatory requirements. Te work was carried out by a team that included Gibbs & Cox, the vessel’s original design f rm; Perkins Eastman and HLW architects; and local land-use and regulatory counsel. Te fabled history of SS United States and the radical design created by William Francis Gibbs using more aluminum than for any previous ship to make the ship light and fast has been told in many books, including SS United States: Te Story of America’s Greatest Ocean Liner, by William H. Miller (1991); Te Big Ship: Te Story of the SS United States, by Frank O. Braynard (2011); and A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the SS United States by Steven Ujifusa (2013). In her maiden round-trip voyages in 1952, the United States, built with numerous technological breakthroughs including revolutionary propellers, set still-unbroken transAtlantic speed records of about 35 knots.

With design help and funding from the US Navy, the vessel was designed to be able to be converted into a troop transport that could speed 14,000 troops 10,000 miles to a battle zone without refueling. Built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Virginia, the liner

Conceptual rendering of the redevelopment site on Manhat an’s West Side with SS United States as its centerpiece.

transported more than one million passengers, including a host of celebrities such as Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Salvador Dalí, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Four US presidents sailed aboard SS United States: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton—fresh out of Georgetown University and on his way to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Gibbs wanted his ship to be freproof, so he insisted that no wood be used, hence all that aluminum. Te one exception: the ship’s Steinway grand pianos were made from a rare f re-resistant mahogany.

After 17½ half years of service, the vessel was acquired by the federal government and then sold in the late 1970s to a series of developers who examined plans to put her back into service. Te ship was acquired by Norwegian Cruise Line in 2003 and then in 2011 by the Conservancy. In 2016 Crystal Cruises explored rebuilding the United States as a modern cruise ship but abandoned the idea after a $1 million feasibility study determined there were too many problems to overcome. Since then, the Conservancy has been pursuing redevelopment as a static attraction.

RXR has a track record of adapting and updating historic buildings including, in New York: the Helmsley Building, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, and Pier 57 on Manhattan’s West Side for Google ofces. MCR, which describes itself as the third-largest hotel owner-operator in the US, successfully converted Eero Saarinen’s landmark 1962 TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport in New York into a hotel.

Bill Bleyer, a retired award-winning reporter for Newsday, is the author of six books on Long Island history. During his 33year 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.

As the owner of “America’s Flagship,” the SS United States Conservancy leads the efort to ensure that this enduring expression of American pride and innovation inspires for generations to come. You can support the Conservancy by visiting www.ssusc.org to donate, subscribe to their free e-newsleter, and learn more about how you can help.

Maritime Careers

Senior Program Manager—Laila Linares with the US Dept. of Transportation Maritime Administration (MARAD)

When Laila Linares was a kid, she liked to figure out how things worked, how to fix them, and how to make them beter. She ofen helped her father with maintenance projects around the house and on their cars. In high school she took as many honors and Advanced Placement classes as she could and got a summer internship focusing on civil engineering. Her father is a professional mariner, and so, when it came time to look for colleges, he suggested the US Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA), which ofers a four-year bachelor’s degree in fields related to ships and seafaring, such as marine engineering, maritime law, maritime logistics and security.

USMMA is a unique, challenging institution for students—called midshipmen—who want to take the path less traveled, are willing to work hard, and want to serve our nation in some way. As a United States service academy, USMMA is part of— and funded by—the federal government.1 In return, graduates must fulfill a service obligation, which can include work in the US maritime industry and service as an oficer in a reserve unit of the Armed Forces, or active duty in any branch of the Armed Forces or the non-armed uniformed services.

After graduation from high school in southern Florida, Laila packed her bags and headed to Kings Point in Long Island, New York. Four years later, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marine engineering systems and a minor in environmental engineering, a USCG-issued Unlimited Third Assistant Engineer’s license, and an oficer commission in the US Navy Reserve.

Her first job out of college was with the Military Sealif Command, during which time she served as a Merchant Marine engineering oficer aboard ships sailing across the globe, operating and maintaining marine propulsion plants, and supervising the engineering department. She later worked ashore doing strategic planning, contract administration and vessel design, construction, and repair projects.

Today, she’s got a shoreside job with the US Maritime Administration (MARAD), overseeing and managing the $1.75 billion National Security Multi-Mission Vessel (NSMV) program, which will provide the nation’s maritime academies with new purpose-built, high-tech training ships for the first time in history. Laila may not go to sea these days, but the job takes her out of the ofice on a reg-

ular basis to inspect vessels as they are being built in the shipyard, attend management meetings with the shipbuilder and management contractor, brief Congress on the status of the program, and present at conferences and forums on all kinds of topics related to the maritime industry. In her program management reviews, she addressed complex topics related to ship design, safety, testing, and logistical support.

Laila also spends considerable time in the ofice implementing the

1 USMMA is one of 5 federal service academies and one of 7 maritime academies (the other 6 are state schools). You can find information about maritime academies and careers in the maritime industry at www.maritime.dot.gov/maritime-workforce.

many tasks and managing the many people who help align the new NSMV program with MARAD’s business strategy and goals. These aren’t typical “pencil-pushing” tasks, as they require creating a vision and keeping the big picture in mind, which she finds to be very engaging and fulfilling. To say that she’s busy at work is an understatement.

In addition to her undergraduate degree and license from USMMA, along the way Laila earned a master’s degree in engineering management and certification from the Project Management Institute. As a senior program manager with the federal civilian agency, she is required to maintain a Federal Acquisition Certification for Program and Project Managers (FAC-P/PM) core certification program.

Laila feels passionately about her role in the maritime industry and also about encouraging and supporting women and minorities, who are historically underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) workforce. In her time of, she volunteers to mentor high school students who wish to pursue a STEM career, atend a US service academy, or pursue a maritime career.

To young men and women, she says: “I encourage you to stay confident in your desire to work in a STEM field and ignore anyone who tells you that math and engineering are too hard.” Laila is the perfect example of how “with hard work and dedication, anyone—regardless of gender, race, or color—can develop the proper skill set to pursue and be successful in their dream career.”

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

Visiting the Philly Shipyard in 2023 to check on the progress of the first NSMV, the Empire State before it headed to its new home at SUNY Maritime College in New York.

Laila was a panelist at the 2022 Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington, DC.

ANIMALS IN SEA HISTORY

by Richard J. King

are Gray Whale Spoted in Atlantic—First in Over 200 Years.” So read a headline this past March 2024 in Forbes magazine. Several other news outlets published similar stories. Whale surveyors from New England Aquarium, peering down from an airplane over waters south of Nantucket Island, saw something they had never witnessed: a gray whale swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. Although common today in the eastern North Pacific, they have long been considered extinct in the Atlantic. Yet this was not the first time in recent years that this has happened. In 2010, whale biologists identified a gray whale in the Mediterranean of the coast of Israel, then later of the coast of Spain. In 2013 a diferent gray whale was spoted in the

South Atlantic of Namibia, even farther from their known range. In 2021 biologists tracked a young male gray whale in the Mediterranean of the coast of France. And last year, a father and son on a fishing trip filmed a gray whale of Florida, which was likely the same individual seen this past spring to the south of Nantucket.

The most-likely scenario, biologists think, is that with recent die-ofs of gray whales in the Pacific and with global warming, which has opened a passage through the Arctic in summer months, an occasional adventurous—or desperate or confused or hungry—gray whale has explored farther afield.

This Atlantic gray whale made national news when it was spoted swimming south of Nantucket last summer.

For hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of years, all the way up until the 1600s or early 1700s, populations of gray whales lived year-round in the Atlantic. Inspired by the recent sightings of gray whales in this ocean, in 2015 a team of scientists compared the DNA of living gray whales in the Pacific to that of the few known fossils and old bones of Atlantic gray whales found in natural history museums in Europe and the United States. Their study found that the two groups, the Atlantic and Pacific gray whales, likely mixed several times in the last 100,000 years, perhaps due to shifs in ice pathways in the far north and changes in sea level.

This map of the geographical range of the gray whale was produced by NOAA Fisheries. It was updated in April 2023, less than a year before the sighting, and does not show any presence of gray whales in the Atlantic Ocean.

So what happened to the Atlantic gray whale?

Whaling seems the most likely culprit. Like the now-critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), gray whales are slow swimmers, slow enough that they can be harpooned from boats under oar or sail power. Gray whales are also the most coastal of the large whales, thus perhaps the most vulnerable as targets of whalers. In the 1800s, whaling in the North Pacific had a severe impact on the gray whale population, although their numbers have since recovered, at least on the eastern side of the Pacific along their annual track from California up to British Columbia and Alaska and back.

But if whaling was the reason for the extirpation of gray whales in the Atlantic Ocean, it would have had to occur quite a long time ago and with very limited whaling technology. Few gray-whale bones have been found in Indigenous or colonial refuse piles or archaeological sites. Historians would also expect to find records in ship and market accounts, but there are very few writen records from anywhere around the North Atlantic that document the hunting—or even the presence—of gray whales in those waters. One of the few historical accounts of the gray whale in the Atlantic is from Iceland around 1640, in which the “sandloegja,” its Icelandic name, made “good eating.”

Two of the other rare early accounts are from near where the gray whale was spoted this past spring. Historically, gray whales were perhaps known as the “scrag” whale. The story goes that in 1668, an animal identified as a “scragg” whale swam into Nantucket Harbor for 3 days, perhaps becoming trapped there, until the locals decided to harpoon the animal. “This first success encouraged [the Nantucketers] to undertake whaling as a permanent business,” wrote local historian Obed Macy.

A gray whale sticks its head out of the water to take a look around, a behavior called “spy-hopping.”

The second mention of likely Atlantic gray whales seen near Nantucket is from 1725. Paul Dudley, who would go on to hold a position on the Massachuset s Supreme Court, wrote a natural history article about whales in New England, in which he described “the Scrag Whale.” This whale was “near a kind to the Fin-back, but, instead of a Fin upon his Back, the Ridge of the Aferpart of his Back is scragged with half a Dozen Knobs or Nuckles; he is nearest the right Whale in Figure and for Quantity of Oil; his Bone [baleen] is white, but won’t split.” Dudley’s description matches that of the gray whale, especially with its white or yellowish baleen and the knobby knuckles on the tail stock.

Biologists and historians propose that if early whale hunting by humans was not the only reason for the eradication of the Atlantic gray whales, other factors might have been a change in its food source or disease, brought on by climate shif s or some other variable. With the rapid climate change we are experiencing in the 21st century, it’s likely we’ll continue to see more gray whales back in the Atlantic in the decades to come. If we knew what killed them of in the Atlantic centuries ago, we might be beter able to help them when they return.

can see this whale’s baleen plates in the roof of its gaping mouth.

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 18 years of this column!

BY DOUG PERRINE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Gray whales take giant gulps of water to feed, using their baleen to filter zooplankton (tiny fish and organisms in the ocean such as krill, crustaceans, and copepods). You

here is one thing about stories written for adults that is almost always ferent from stories that younger people enjoy: the animals NEVER talk. It’s a shame because adding a horse’s, crow’s, or dog’s point of view to a story might really liven up some otherwise tedious classics. How much more interesting might Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick have been if every other chapter was told by the whale himself?

Well, it turns out that sometime soon we might just get to hear their voices from a whole new perspective! Animal researchers have started to recognize that the noises our animal friends make are not just chirps and grunts and howls. Animals can communicate some pretty complicated messages to each other—much more than just “Yum! I sure love grass!” or “You’re annoying me.”

Animal language researcher Con Slobodchikof at Northern Arizona University studied prairie dogs for more than 40 years and fgured out that the critters he was studying were observing him just as closely. “ Tey’re able to describe the color of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun,” he said. Another team at the University of Washington determined that crows not only remembered

“I Speak Whale”

by Richard O’Regan

the face of someone they considered hostile, but they told their families and neighbors. Years later their children, grandchildren, and other groups of crows in the area recognized that individual and would caw loudly at them when they came nearby.

Just this May, the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) published a research paper saying the years of recordings they have made of the clicks and pops made by sperm whales in the Caribbean prove that the whales are talking to one another.

To make that discovery, they fed the data they collected about the timing, sequence, and grouping of the whale sounds into arti fcial intelligence programs to identify patterns. Tey learned that the whale’s clicks are grouped and repeated in distinct ways that form a kind of “whale vocabulary.” Tey can’t tell what the whales are saying to one another—but it is clearly some kind of language. Another observation they made is that whale calves, like human babies, spend a couple of years babbling and making random noises before they master the language of their family group. Whale families do stick together, and each clan seems to have its own variations on the language. It could be that, like your friends or relatives from a diferent region, each group has an accent or dialect. It might

even be that whale families have injokes that outsiders don’t get.

CETI’s research helps explain why, in the 1800s, only a few years after whalers started hunting in the Paci fc, sperm whales across the whole ocean started avoiding ships and used new strategies to evade them. Now, scientists studying all kinds of animal communication are hopeful that they will be able not only to interpret what animals—from prairie dogs and elephants to crows and coyotes—are saying to one another, they’ll be able to communicate with them. If that happens, it’s sure to be only a few years before we can read Ahab and Me: My Side of the Story, by Moby Dick.

MARLINSPIKE NEWS: SAILING SHIPS & SAIL TRAINING

Mathew Turner’s Hybrid Drive System, Chasing Down Problems and Making it Right

by Captain Michael Rutstein

Since 2017, the sail-training community has been captivated by Sausalito-based non-profit Call of the Sea’s eforts to build and operate the brigantine Mathew Turner. Based on the record-seting 19 th-century vessel Galilee and named afer her prolific builder, the Turner was designed as a long-distance sail-training platform. Her build was innovative in several ways, most significantly for her hybrid drive system, which promised clean power and ocean-crossing range.

The Turner was launched in 2017 and was operational just in time for the pandemic. Since then, Call of the Sea’s eforts to develop a sail-training program have been hindered by a series of perplexing dificulties with her vaunted drive system. We spoke to the director of vessel operations, Michael Rogers, about the organization’s successful efort this spring to diagnose the issues and get the brigantine back on track.

Marlinspike: Michael, tell us about your current role with Call of the Sea and Matthew Turner and how you came to be with them.

Michael Rogers: I’ve been the director of vessel operations since the beginning of the year. Since my taking this position, we’ve had a busy winter. We had to drydock our other vessel, Seaward —took the masts out, replaced all the standing rigging, did some work on the steering, and repainted her. Ten I could turn my attention to the

Matthew Turner, where we had some rigging issues and, of course, the problems with the propulsion system. We were fortunate. We’d hired a good winter crew. I had a really good mate, Noah Limbach, who had been one of the Turner’ s original riggers. He knows the rig really well, and that allowed me to focus on the engineering side.

Marlinspike: People are intrigued by your unique diesel hybrid propulsion. Can you explain how it works?

Rogers: Te system was designed by British Aerospace Engineering (BAE); it’s primarily used for transit buses. Te system is designed with two independent propulsion systems, starting with the propellers. Te screws are driven by the HybriGen—an AC traction motor (ACTM). T is also serves as a generator. From the ACTM runs a series of high voltage cables to a device called the propulsion control system, or PCS. Te PCS is connected to the battery bank, or energy storage system (ESS).

Brigantine Mathew Turner

Michael Rogers Director of Vessel Operations Call of the Sea

A view of Mathew Turner’s engine room. The cuting-edge power and propulsion system holds tremendous promise, but to date it has also been expensive and problematic.

Tese are the lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt modules. We have seven on each side. Tey hold about 700 volts DC when they’re fully charged, and they provide about 50 kilowatt-hours. So, we have a reasonable range with these. Tey’re built by a company called Corvus.

We take the power from the ESS to the PCS and that then runs to the ACTMs—the traction motors; these then drive the propellers. When the charge rate gets low or the operator decides to recharge, the generators will kick in. Tey call it the integrated starter generator (ISG) because it can start the diesel engine as well as produce three-phase AC power. Te ISG is coupled to a Cummins six-cylinder diesel, about 230 KW, that runs on biodiesel.

Te goal was to come up with something that was cleaner than a conventional diesel. For the most part, we

have achieved that goal. Te long-term plan was for her to sail of shore and run as a Tahiti packet, which is what the design is based on. Te regenerative power from the propellers should be able to support the house load. Under sail, in regenerative mode, it should produce 8 KW at 8 knots. Tat’s easily achieved in 12–15 knot trade winds. Tere’s no direct connection between the diesel generator and the propulsion motors. When people hear “diesel hybrid,” they sometimes assume that there’s a direct connection. In this case, everything is powered by the DC energy storage system—the batteries.

Marlinspike: Are there any other traditional sailing vessels with this system, or anything like it?

Rogers: T is system is used in only one other sailing vessel in the entire planet, that I’m aware of. T at vessel is

a megayacht in South Africa, and they have virtually the same system with a few tweaks.

Marlinspike: So you spent most of your f rst months on the job trying to get this system to function as intended. Rogers: Yes. Tere are two areas where faults occurred last year. Te Corvus module in the portside pack (the battery control module), which monitors all the voltages and temperatures, started to malfunction. We were able to replace this, and now we have spares on hand. Te other was within the BAE system. Te way the boat is set up, we have a controller area network (CAN) bus of signal cables that monitor all the various devices and then take that information back to the system control unit (SCU). Tere’s a constant microsecond dialogue between all the components of the system. CAN bus systems have

been around since the 1980s and they are quite robust, but if there are too many of these things called error frames, or voltage spikes, it will send a warning to the helm.

We have diagnostic software that can identify the exact fault. We kept seeing fault 157, which indicated a communication problem with the oil-cooling pump on the starboard ACTM. Occasionally we’d see fault 155, which indicates a communication problem with one of the cooling pumps underneath the diesel.

If the system perceives that it has lost communication with one of the components for more than fve seconds, it initiates a shutdown. T is only occurred when the ISG was actively charging; we didn’t get a shutdown during normal propulsion. But obviously this was concerning!

We spent quite a bit of time chasing symptoms. We were looking at the cooling pump that was indicated as being faulty. And then we started looking at the integrity of the CAN bus itself and realized that there were a few areas that needed to be improved. For example, you don’t want to run these signal cables close to DC wiring, but there are quite a few places where they are all bundled together.

After a while, we realized that the problem wasn’t the hardware components themselves. Te problem was that there was data corruption occurring, which was being misread as a fault.

We spent hundreds of hours—myself and one of our volunteers, Chad Brubaker, a former senior systems engineer with Google, and our engineer, Terray Daignault—looking at all the connections on the CAN bus system and at all the grounds to see if we could identify a ground loop. And we started to realize that the problem was

electromagnetic interference. We got a meter that measures electromagnetic interference and took it around the engine space to see where the hotspots were.

I also requested an assessment from Specialty Field Services, a company recommended by BAE. Tey sent a technician down, and he suggested we look at the high-voltage terminals at the bottom of the generator. Tose things are really hard to get at. Eventually, Terray came up with an ingenious little tool and we were able to look inside. Sure enough, we found corrosion—there was moisture in there. We took care of the corrosion and put it back together. It then worked a bit better—but we hadn’t actually f xed it.

We spent another 100 hours going over everything again but still couldn’t get it to work a hundred percent. I called SFS back and this time they sent us an engineer who had spent 29 years with BAE and had done a lot of the original design work on this system. If there was anyone who would know what to do, it would be this guy. He determined that we had corrosion in the overbraid, which is the stainless-steel braid that covers the copper-conducting part of the high voltage cables. He told us to buy an aerosol spray that dissolves corrosion. I forget the name of it, but it cost like eight bucks. We sprayed it on and put everything back together and, sure enough, it improved. It wasn’t completely f xed, but it was a lot better.

We needed to replace the high voltage cables, which cost about $35 a foot. And we needed over a hundred feet! T ankfully, we got a donation from American Marine up in Bellingham, Washington, who happened to have 100 feet on hand, and we just had to pay for shipping. We swapped out the cables and re-connected everything. Te error-

frame rates dropped to three per minute from 60, and we haven’t had a shutdown.

We feel we’ve gotten to the bottom of the original problem. Te question was, where did the moisture come from? Some of the original engineers and installers later told me that when they were priming the cooling system of the ISG, the ISG started to f ll with water because an O-ring was missing or damaged. Tey got most of the water— which was mixed with ethylene glycol—out of the ISG, but only after it submerged the cable connectors and lugs. Water got into the cables, the overbraid corroded, and the corrosion caused resistance. Te resistance produced electromagnetic interference and corrupted the data, so the SCU shut the system down.

I’m glad to say that we’ve been operating just fne since mid-March, when we got it all back together.

Marlinspike: Given the complexity of this system, I don’t see how a series of short-term captains or engineers could operate this vessel successfully. Rogers: I think you’re right. I recently did an engineering brief with our new crew. I kept it as simple as I could, but it’s a complicated system. We know it is a good system; it does make sense. Tere’s nothing wrong with the fundamental engineering. I think there were some issues with the installation, particularly the way the CAN bus is not separated from the DC wiring, which we can f x.

Marlinspike: Would you recommend this system to someone who was building a brigantine starting today?

Rogers: I think they could certainly learn from what we’ve discovered. We’re looking at doing some upgrades. With

the newer technologies, the charge/ recharge rate is much better. Te cell chemistry is far advanced from what we have. Te battery architecture utilizes active cooling and cell isolation, so safety concerns are mitigated. What we’re looking to do is hybridize the system upgrades to some extent, keep the diesel engine, the generator unit, and the propulsion system, but change the lithium-ion modules for something newer and safer, and make upgrades to the cabinet so we can cool things better. T at’s going to run probably $150,000 to $200,000 just for new modules and the software upgrades.

Marlinspike: Wow! What has Call of the Sea spent on this propulsion system?

Rogers: I’d say $700,000 to $800,000. Tat’s a guess. If we were to do it again today, it might be twice that. Put it this way—we’re budgeting $700,000 just to make the upgrades, and that includes keeping some of the main components.

Marlinspike: As desirable as it may be to have this kind of system, it doesn’t seem like the cost is something most sail-training organizations can support, at least at the current stage.

Rogers: I agree. Tere has been an ongoing discussion at the board level about exactly that. In a way, we are everyone’s guinea pig. People who are intrigued by the promise of these systems are watching to see what happens with us.

Marlinspike: Now that you fnally have the system functioning as intended, is Matthew Turner headed for Tahiti?

Rogers: First we need to upgrade the lithium modules and make some changes to the software and some of our management systems. I think we can get

the cost down a bit. Part of our concern is range. Te way the boat’s set up, we only have a thousand gallons of fuel. T at’s not going to get us very far. Te argument’s always been, you’ll be sailing with the trade winds, but the trade winds aren’t as reliable as they used to be. Te old Galilee, which this ship was modeled on, made it to Tahiti from San Francisco in 17 days, but they had ideal conditions, and they packed on sail.

I’m not sure we could do it in 17 days. Even if we could, we’d still have to fnd a way back, which is a whole lot harder. Making longer voyages was the original intent for the ship, and it’s certainly my goal. T is year I will spend a lot of time trying to get a sense of what this system can and cannot do. Te goal this season is to start taking her of shore, do some shorter trips coastwise, and get a sense of the reliability.

SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM

On 21 March, more than 1,000 wellwishers turned out to watch the battleship New Jersey (BB-62) depart her berth on the Camden, NJ, waterfront to return to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was built in 1940–1942. After a brief stay at the Paulsboro Marine Terminal for ballast, the battleship was guided by four McAllister tugs to the shipyard and moved into dry dock for the f rst time in 32 years. All 165 through-hull openings, which are patched with blanks, will be inspected, and all of the zinc anodes— originally installed for passive cathodic protection from corrosion in salt water when New Jersey was mothballed in Bremerton, WA—will be replaced with aluminum anodes, which perform better in fresh water and are better suited to New Jersey’ s home berth in the Delaware River. Finally, the approximately 125,000 square feet of underwater hull surface will be given 3 to 5 coats of paint. T is routine preventative maintenance, underway as of press time, is expected to take about two months. (62 Battleship Pl., Camden, NJ; www.battleshipnewjersey.org) ...

Te Old Town district of Alexandria, Virginia , is host to a new windowfront exhibition, Buried Ships of Robinson Landing. Te temporary installation, located at the corner of the Strand and Pioneer Mill Way, features scale models of the remnants of three ships found on the city’s waterfront. Te remains were originally discovered during a routine archaeological survey in preparation for the construction of Robinson Landing, a complex comprising residential space and restaurants. Archaeologists from Tunderbird Archaeology, working in coordination with Alexandria city archaeologists, uncovered the remains of three 18thcentury ships, as well as an 18th-century warehouse and a 19th-century mill. A previous pre-construction excavation nearby exposed a 1755 public warehouse and timbers from the hull of a 50-foot vessel; remains from both are undergoing conservation. Te Robinson ship remains have been scanned and the team used computer models and 3D printing to create scale models of the pieces, and then used wire to represent the surrounding elements of the ship’s

hull based on historical sources and archaeological documentation. Tose original timbers were then placed in Brenman Pond, to be stored in a manner that preserves the possibility of future study and conservation. Te exhibition will run through the end of 2024. (www.alexandriava.gov) … Mystic Seaport Museum has been awarded $821,000 in Federal funding to support education programming and its historic watercraft collection. Te award designates that $570,000 from the US Dept. of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Education will support the Center for Experiential Education Maritime Adventure Program to engage under-resourced youth a f liated with New London Youth A f airs in experiential maritime and STEM education. Students will have the chance to gain skills in marine carpentry, sailing, powerboating, astronomy, and navigation, along with learning about maritime heritage and marine conservation. Tey will have the opportunity to apply their skills through of-campus experiential learning activities and participate in paid job-readiness training. Te Save

Bat leship New Jersey (BB-62)

Buried Ships of Robinson Landing

America’s Treasures program (through the National Park Service) will provide $251,000 in grant funding to support the preservation of—and access to— the museum’s small craft collection. Beginning with the museum’s 1931 acquisition of the sandbagger Annie, the collection has grown and is now the

largest watercraft collection in the country. Te vessels vary from rowboats and canoes to schooners and powered craft. Te grant will support the renovation of a 35,000 square-foot space in the museum’s historic Rossie Velvet Mill, which will become the Wells Boat Hall. (75 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic,

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buoy or station (or geographical coordinates) using the phone keypad. With the expansion of satellite internet options at sea, however, usage of the service had dropped of to fewer than 150 calls per day. It was fnally shuttered on 16 March of this year. (www.noaa.gov)

On 24 January, the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) appointed its f rst chief sustainability ofcer, Ilya Espino de Marotta, to spearhead the development of a comprehensive sustainability strategy focused on decarbonization, adaptation, and transition. In announcing the new position, Panama Canal Administrator Ricaurte Vásquez Morales remarked: “Sustainability is not new for the maritime route, as the Canal’s legacy is rooted in, and depends on, sustainability. However, we recognize that we must be more ambitious, something we have been moving toward for some time.” “As an international trade hub,” said Espino de Marotta, “we have an opportunity to not only drive sustainability at the Panama Canal, but also help shape a more sustainable and productive ecosystem for global trade.” Te Canal Authority is collaborating with the World Bank and International Finance

Corporation to f nalize the canal’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory and will complete a climate risk assessment and commit to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for reducing emissions. Te PCA has planned over $8.5 billion over the next fve years in capital investments. $3.5 billion will fund infrastructure and equipment including a photovoltaic plant, and the purchase of electric vehicles and hybrid tugs; more than $2 billion will go toward new sustainability-focused initiatives, $2 billion will fund implementation of a more robust water management system, and another billion dollars will fund digital transformation and decarbonization-focused improvements. Te

PCA intends to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. October 2023 was the canal’s driest month on record, with a rainfall 41% lower than usual. In response to the season’s drought, daily transits were reduced from 32 to 24 in November, down to 20 in January, and 18 in February. Additionally, watersaving measures include the use of water-saving basins in the Neopanamax lock and cross-f lling in the Panamax locks. (www.pancanal.com) … On 25 April, the Fletcher-class destroyer USS Kidd (DD-661) departed its berth in Baton Rouge, LA, where it has been a museum ship for the past 40 years, for some much-needed work in dry dock . Te 376-foot destroyer is currently hauled out at the Toma-Sea Marine Constructors (TMC) shipyard in Houma, LA. USS Kidd will undergo a comprehensive overhaul—the f rst since 1962—with an anticipated return in 2025 during the next seasonal highwater cycle. Repairs are being made to 1/8 page AD

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her hull, which had been damaged by the ship’s movement in the supportive cradle in which she sits at her home berth in Baton Rouge. Te cradle allows the ship to rise and fall with the annual rise and fall of the Mississippi River. Te cradle will also be refurbished during the haulout period; the adjacent USS Kidd Veterans Museum will remain open to the public. Named for Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, who was killed aboard USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor, the destroyer was commissioned in 1943 and served with distinction in World War II and the Korean War. She survived a kamikaze attack and would earn 12 battle stars for her service. Te only destroyer left in a WW2 con fguration, she was selected as a f lming location for the 2018 Tom Hanks f lm, Greyhound. (USS Kidd Veterans Museum, www.usskidd.com) ... Te USS Lexington Museum held a launch party in March to introduce the public to

the Blue Ghost comic book , created by artist Juan Carlos Ramos, in which the historic carrier is a character. In the fctionalized comic, USS Lexington (CVS 16) has been transformed into a Mechanized Robot Guardian (MRG) to protect humanity from an adversary organization known only as VIRUS. Te comic is available with fve di ferent collectible covers. While the storyline is fctional, elements of the ship’s

history are woven into the text, and di ferent areas of the ship are highlighted. Te comic book is available at www.RamosMecha.com and through the ship’s store. Lexington was commissioned in 1943; she was the oldest working carrier in the Navy when she was decommissioned in 1991. Te Essexclass carrier was originally named USS Cabot, but that was changed to Lexington when word reached the shipyard that the existing carrier of that name, Lexington (CV-2), had been sunk in the Coral Sea. Spending 21 months in combat during the Second World War, she participated in most of the major operations in the Paci fc Teater. USS Lexington was given the nickname “Blue Ghost” by Tokyo Rose in World War II after the Japanese reported sinking Lexington on four separate occasions, only to have the ship return safe and sound each time. (2914 N. Shoreline Blvd., Corpus Christi, TX; www. usslexington.com)

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Women On the Water • 12th Annual Conference

by Deirdre O’Regan, Editor

We are facing a crisis in the maritime industry. According to the US Maritime Administration (MARAD), “the maritime sector has seen a steady decline in personnel due to myriad factors, including retirements, career changes, and hiring and funding challenges. As a result, an inordinate amount of institutional knowledge has disappeared from federal, state, and local maritime transportation departments, and within the private sector.”1

Part of the problem is that the maritime industry is still a man’s world, and it isn’t set up to make it reasonable for half the potential workforce to stay in the industry. Tere are many experienced female professional mariners running ships today, more than you might think, but the path to the bridge and the desire to stay in the industry have been fraught with challenges for women. Many decide it just isn’t worth it.

How to address this problem? It starts with attracting young women to the feld in the f rst place, and maritime academies are stepping up to the plate to shift the demographic. One way to support young women just starting their careers is to gather them together with veteran female mariners and leaders all in one place to foster networking, mentorship, and honest discussions about real-life challenges women face in the industry—and how to overcome them. Enter the Women On the Water (WOW) conference, an annual threeday event hosted by MARAD in partnership with the seven state and federal maritime academies.

MARAD Administrator Ann D. Phillips: “Any forum in which we can create awareness of the opportunities that maritime careers present to women is time well spent. Industry’s eforts to actively recruit women could help address the critical shortage of mariners that the nation faces today.”

Tis year’s conference, held 29 February to 2 March, was hosted by Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where more than 50 panelists and moderators gave presentations and participated in panels to discuss topics on work-life balance, opportunities in the clean-energy and deep-sea sectors, and shoreside work. Te conference was attended by academy cadets and midshipmen from across the country, leaders in the maritime industry and sea services, and active professional mariners who shared their experiences and did not hold back on some candid advice. “Retaliation is real,” shared one panelist who addressed sexual harassment on the job, advice about reporting incidents, and how to make it a positive and viable career choice. Make no mistake, the challenges can be substantial, but, they assured everyone, those challenges are worth facing and working to overcome. Tere is no “pulling up the ladder” behind them in this group, which made the event that much more valuable.

Te Great Lakes Maritime Academy will host the 13th Annual Women On the Water Conference in 2025 in Washington, DC. Dates TBD. (www.maritime.dot.gov/education)

Capt. Lisa Chaplin Dixon (lef), Marine Superintendent at Chevron Shipping, and Capt. and O f shore Mooring Master Andrea Morrison served on the “Vessel-Based Experiences and Careers Near and Far” panel.

Academy cadets and midshipmen gather at the 12th Annual Women On the Water Conference .

Who was Lascarina Bouboulis?

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Sailing with the Wind of Freedom: Lascarina Bouboulis and the War for Greek Independence

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“...An

“What

Eric

“…Real,

Left For Dead: Shipwreck,

Survival at the Edge of the World

Treachery, and

by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright, New York, 2024, 320pp, illus, notes, index, ISBN 978-132409-308-4; $29.99hc)

When I opened the package containing my galley copy of Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead, my frst reaction was, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Initially, I thought the publisher’s marketing team might be trying to emulate

the cover art of David Grann’s massively successful Te Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, which I enjoyed. Let me tell you that this book stands on its own two feet, and I was pleasantly surprised by Dolin’s gripping narrative.

In Left for Dead, Dolin recounts a dramatic event from the War of 1812 involving an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago. Te encounter, marked by misunderstandings and mistrust, left three British sailors and two Americans stranded in the harsh Falklands for eighteen months.

Te cast of characters includes a range of individuals, from greedy cap -

tains pursuing wartime prizes to prostitutes returning home after serving sentences in the New South Wales penal colony. Te convergence of English, American, and Spanish interests lends the story a fctional quality, yet its events are f rmly grounded in reality. Dolin navigates the reader through moments of hope and despair, particularly in the trials faced by Captain Charles H. Barnard of the American sealer.

Dolin skillfully portrays the castaways’ desperate existence, re fecting the common perils of seafaring life during that era. Te story is rich in complexity, featuring greed, deception, bullying, leadership, ingenuity, and hardship. Dolin masterfully builds suspense as he lays out the narrative, maintaining pace and distilling facts with the conjecture necessary to comprehend the many moving parts of this tale. Te situations described often brought to mind the trials and tribulations faced by Ernest Shackleton and his men in Alfred Lansing’s Endurance. Unlike Dolin’s previous works, which span long periods, this book’s focus allows him to delve deeper into his ensemble cast of characters. Te brief, structured chapters facilitated easy reading in short intervals.

I could continue to praise this book, but I’ll end this review by urging you not to waste another minute—buy this book. It is worth your time and money.

Will Sofrin Santa Barbara, California

Peep Light: Stories of a Mississippi River Boat Captain by Lee Hendrix (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2024, 216pp, illus, gloss, index, ISBN 978-1-49685-036-2; $22pb)

Like many Americans reared along its prodigious length, Lee Hendrix succumbed to the Mississippi River’s exotic allure early. As a teenager in St. Louis, he aspired to be a barge laborer,

to his parents’ consternation. But the river’s pull was irresistible. “ Te river had everything that I lacked,” he writes in this absorbing new book. “It was majestic, powerful, beautiful, and free.” He signed with a towing company in 1972 at an innocent 18 and, by the time he retired 46 years later, could look back on a career that included deckhand, pilot, casino boat captain, teacher, master of M/V Mississippi (the world’s largest river towboat), columnist, and “riverlorian” on the American Queen. Peep Light presents a collection of Hendrix’s short pieces originally written for publications like Big River Magazine and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Taken in toto, they constitute a memoir with a chronological story arc, but as with any such collection, there are digressions and outliers. Nonetheless, as the book’s title implies—a peep light is mounted on top of the jacksta f at the head of a barge tow to help the pilot navigate—

Hendrix keeps mostly on course, his focus on the river and the people who work it.

His father drove him to his f rst interview at a towing company, hoping to dissuade him along the way, but young Hendrix insisted on pursuing his dream. Hired on the spot as a deckhand at $25 a day, he reported to the dock in warm clothes and steel-toed boots at 5 pm Te boat did not arrive until well after 10 pm—a valuable early lesson in patience—and then he was on board, the crew quarters a spartan room “f lled with outlet furniture and peeling foors.”

As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Mississippi River knows, it is f rst and foremost a commercial and industrial corridor, massively engineered for food control and crowded 24/7 by workboats pushing long barge strings that haul half a billion tons of cargo annually. Hendrix

beautifully immerses the reader in this rough and dangerous world.

Peep Light’s early chapters constitute a veritable hymn to deckhands. Hendrix clearly respects the vital role these men and women play in keeping the country’s raw materials moving. He writes elegiacally of “worn, stained, white mule leather gloves, cutof blue jeans, sleeveless work shirts, and headbands” and extols the “deckhand’s potpourri,” a pungent mix of “grease, sweat, suntan lotion, sour corn mash, poly-d lines, and a little torn fesh ...Not pretty, but proud smells.”

Hendrix provides a glossary that de f nes the riverboat’s arcane lingo, terms like batture, break coupling, double locking, monkey fst, splice, tow knee, and wing wire, or “wing whar” as the hands pronounced it. Ten there is the work itself. “Ratchets and wires can weigh as much as a hundred pounds or more,” he writes. Deckhands are active

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in all weather and face a thousand perils, not the least taut lines that can snap, stinging like a rubber band or cutting a man in two. “ Te energy within the line exploded like a shotgun blast,” Hendrix writes of one such mishap. “Floating line fbers f lled the gloaming night air as the line lay broken and limp at my feet.” Fortunately, no one was hurt that time. Young Hendrix wisely paid attention to the more experienced deckhands. His pride knew no bounds when one old-timer complimented him on a di fcult splice: “ T at’s a f ne job, son. You’re gonna make a river man.”

When he moved up to the pilothouse, Hendrix’s responsibilities expanded with the view. He had to learn the river’s every quirk and current, confusing bends, and landscape features. Bridges posed an especial menace. Clearing them when the river ran high could be dicey, and ramming into a piling meant potential disaster, as recently demonstrated in Baltimore harbor. One of Hendrix’s most hair-raising experiences came onboard M/V Mississippi during the 2011 foods. Anchored near Cairo, Illinois, he learned the Corps of Engineers intended to blow open a nearby levee to moderate the

river’s terri fc volume. It was a di fcult decision that meant nearby families would lose their farms and homes. Hendrix cast of and moved into the channel. All of a sudden, the pilothouse windows started shaking as if “they would burst into shards. I turned to see f reballs and f aming embers silhouetted against the night sky. Fire and debris from the explosion billowed hundreds of feet into the air. It was time to get the hell away from there.”

Contemplating his river years, Hendrix registers some of time’s changes. “Oral history (where we learned a whole lot about what not to do) these days is almost completely lacking,” he writes, “mostly due to smartphones. We do get paid better, though heading into town will get you f red.” During the 1980s, he explains, towing companies introduced drug tests and more security, keeping hands onboard during stops. Tese measures robbed river towns of

their time-honored rollicking color— doubtless a good thing to many.

Hendrix does yeoman service in this thoughtful and entertaining collection. Peep Light nicely captures the river man’s working life, both changeless and ever-changing, just like the mighty Mississippi itself.

John S. Sledge Fairhope, Alabama

A Maritime History of the American Revolutionary War: An AtlanticWide Confict over Independence and Empire by Teodore Corbett (Pen and Sword Maritime, South Yorkshire, England, 2023, 267pp, notes, index, 9781-3990-4041-9; $34.95hc)

Te author starts with a simple premise, that the maritime history of the American Revolution is not well documented because of two widely divergent factors. Contemporary American chroniclers and later historians

tended to oversell the tales and derringdo of the “renegade heroes” of the fedgling United States Navy, while British historians view the American War of Independence as a minor aside in the greater history of empire-building. Its maritime story has never really been a research focus of major importance.

Corbett makes it his goal to bring the story under one cover and without impudence. His matter-of-fact style leaves no room for nationalistic interpretation. Te main characters and events are approached non-judgmentally and simply tell the story fact-byfact. When so gathered, that story is quite impressive. Te names of the Americans involved read like a map of New England, with surnames that would later be adopted as place names for towns and cities across the region. Te maritime con f ict spread well beyond New England waters, of course, from the Hudson River Valley and

Chesapeake Bay to England and back to Lake Champlain. Te con f ict expanded beyond the Americans and the British to include the French, as well as unwilling participants like the Dutch and the Danish. It truly was, as the subtitle states, “an Atlantic-wide conf ict over independence and empire.”

Of prime interest are the clandestine operations of Silas Dean in exhorting others to commit domestic terrorism in British shipyards, of Ben Franklin negotiating with the French to enter the war, and the f ne line would-be American heroes walked at the time between recognized naval operations and privateering. Corbett proves that the maritime history of the war was, indeed, worthy of in-depth study, and that the war was much more than just what happened on the felds at Yorktown and Saratoga.

John G alluzzo Hanover, Massachusetts

USS Bogue: T e Most Successful Anti-Submarine Warfare Carrier in World War II by David Lee Russell (McFarland & Company, Publishers, Je ferson, NC, 2023, 248pp, 197pp, illus, appen, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-1-47669-203-6; $35pb)

Winning World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic was a pre-condition for defeating the Axis Powers. When war broke out on 3 September 1939, German U-boats began attacking shipping essential to the survival of the British Isles. Ill-equipped to combat U-boats, the Allies su fered severe losses to the underwater threat that advanced the Nazi goal of starving Great Britain. While the success of Allied anti-submarine warfare (ASW) cannot be attributed to any one innovation, certainly one of the most important was the extension of air coverage over the entire shipping route between North America and Great Britain. Te 300mile gap in coverage, a gap that could not be reduced by land-based aircraft with their limited range, could be eliminated by carrier-based aircraft, thus the need for escort carriers. USS Bogue was one of the f rst escort carriers to deploy in the Atlantic as a foil to the U-boat.

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

David Lee Russell’s latest book, USS Bogue: Te Most Successful AntiSubmarine Warfare Carrier in World War II, is a detailed history of an unsung warship. Te history-making feats of the feet carriers in World War II in the Paci fc pushed the contribution of the escort carriers into the background, especially the history of escort carriers in the Atlantic. Ongoing studies of the con f ict have garnered more attention to the Battle of the Atlantic and the critical role of escort carriers for the Allies.

Russell has written what will likely be the def nitive history of the leading escort carrier of the war, USS Bogue. His book is in no way akin to Admiral Daniel V. Gallery’s book regarding the capture of U-505. Gallery wrote from f rst-hand experience about his escort carrier and its unique feat of capturing a U-boat, a vessel that was brought into US hands and remains on display at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. In Russell’s book, the author lays out endless facts, fgures, names, and dates, turning what might have been a Reader’s Digest-length account into a book-length history awash in facts, many of which are remarkable.

Drawing from the Bogue’ s ofcial log, Russell records exact times of sailing and arrival and docking locations, and reveals the arrival of orders from higher command. He also provides numbers of fights and refueling assignments with supporting destroyers. Te minutiae is interesting, but ofers little or nothing about the title ship. What is missing is information about the ship itself, its crew, how they ate, where they slept, how they stood up to the demanding routine. Bogue ’s mission comprised two commands: the ship itself and the crew that kept it in operation, and the aviation component with pilots, navigators, gunners and the all-important maintenance crews. Russell ofers no insight into the hundreds of men who

worked together to make the Bogue an efective fghting machine.

Hundreds of German prisoners were taken aboard the Bogue but Russell writes little about them. Te complete story of USS Bogue is somehow still not available eight decades after the ship went to the scrapyard. Russell’s account of the ship’s history is probably as good as can be expected. Notwithstanding , USS Bogue: Te Most Successful AntiSubmarine Warfare Carrier in World

War II is recommended only to readers already well familiar with the Battle of the Atlantic, readers who can ft the detailed account of the ship into that saga. Tose looking to learn the broader history of the Battle of the Atlantic will be better served with Gallery’s account or pertinent volumes in Samuel Eliot Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II

David O. Whitten, P hD

Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina

America’s First Aircraft Carrier: USS Langley and the Dawn of US Naval Aviation by David F. Winkler (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2024, 384pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-1-6824-7501-0; $39.95hc)

Americans tend to view the past through lenses that often distort or limit our understanding of history. For example, when we think about aircraft carriers and naval aviation, the baseline seems to be World War II and the essential role carriers played in limiting Japanese expansion in the Paci fc at Midway and then supporting island invasions in the Central Pacifc. By war’s end, carriers were fully established as America’s primary instruments of global power projection, and they remain an essential part of that capability today.

David Winkler, editor of NMHS’s Tuesday Tidings newsletter, adjunct professor at the US Naval War College, and the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair of

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Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, has produced a book that will greatly extend public appreciation for the birth of US naval aviation and the development of air power at sea, embodied in the development of the f rst American aircraft carrier, USS Langley (CV-1). His book is an important contribution to naval history because the ship receives long-overdue credit for its achievements, and it incorporates the important stories of the US Navy offcers and crew who were present at the creation of naval aviation.

Te vessel began its career in 1912 as a coal-and-oil cargo ship, USS Jupiter (AC-3). Te ship contained thirteen holds, capable of carrying up to 11,600 tons of coal and up to 3,075 tons of oil. It was the f rst turbo-electric-powered ship in the US Navy and was capable of making fourteen knots. In 1920 it was repurposed as an aircraft carrier and renamed USS Langley, in honor of aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley. Te former collier’s hull could accommodate hangars and workshops for aircraft maintenance, and the 536-foot wooden f ight deck, supported by a steel box girder framework, could carry up to 36 aircraft. Commissioned in 1922, Langley would take on the appropriate nickname “Covered Wagon.”

Naval aviation had begun more than a decade before Langley appeared. Teodore Ellyson, Naval Aviator No. 1, f rst few in 1911 and worked with Glenn Curtiss to develop seaplanes, the Navy’s f rst focus. Te Navy also had to defend itself against Army aviation visionaries who believed that airborne bombers developed during and after World War I would make battleships obsolete. Langley, envisioned from the start as an experimental platform, could launch f ghters to defend the feet against air attacks and manage scouting, anti-submarine warfare, and other combat roles.

Winkler follows Langley’ s busy career in detail. He discusses the ofcers and men who served on board and produced the concepts, much advanced but still in use today, that enabled aircraft to take of and land on the carrier’s relatively small deck. In retrospect, these developments could seem comically primitive today, but this is not the case. Te author demonstrates the deadly seriousness of the accomplishments of the Navy’s airmen. He describes and explains the technological issues these innovators faced and prof les the pioneers whose courage and skill led the way. Too many low-number naval aviators, including Ellyson, lost their lives in fying mishaps. Many others went on to hold f ag rank in the decades to follow, leading the breathtaking technological advances that would create astonishingly e fective f ghter, torpedo, and dive-bombing aircraft, and incredible carriers that destroyed Japan’s WWII naval and air forces barely more than two decades after Langley entered service. Although many of their names are unfamiliar, the Navy benefted from conscientious, capable, astute, and prescient leaders who shaped a productive course through rough waters with little or no clear guidance.

In the 1920s and 1930s, CV-1 was a training ship, qualifying hundreds of newly minted naval aviators in carrier takeof s and landings. It trapped more than 16,500 aircraft on her deck. She also participated in fourteen feet problems, simulating warfare scenarios in the Caribbean and the Paci fc, demonstrating capabilities and limitations that required attention, and facilitating the Navy’s transition to modernity.

By 1936, however, four larger carriers were in service. Langley was converted again, this time to a seaplane tender (AV-3). Its f ight deck was reduced by half, serving only to support PBY Catalina patrol aircraft. It joined the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines and

Anne T. Converse Photography

Neith, 1996, Cover photograph Wood, Wind and Water

Nantucket

escaped Japanese air attacks on US ground and naval installations on 8 December 1941, steaming to Darwin, Australia. Just over two months later, while it was cruising toward the Dutch East Indies to support its air defenses, Japanese bombers attacked AV-3, killing sixteen sailors and leaving the ship dead in the water with a dangerous list. After the crew abandoned ship, other vessels shelled the tender to prevent its capture. Langley went down in the Indian Ocean, 75 miles south of Java.

Winkler’s superlative book is a f ne history of the foundations of US naval aviation that established it as a supreme, globally dominant strategic element today.

Dr . John R. Satterfield Middletown, Delaware

Kenneth Whiting: Remembering a Forgotten Hero of Naval Aviation and Submarines by Felix Haynes (Page Publishing, Conneaut Lake, PA, 2023, 310pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 979-8-88793-070-1; $22.95pb)

By happy happenstance, as I researched and wrote my recently published America’s First Aircraft Carrier: USS Langley and the Dawn of US Naval Aviation manuscript, Felix Haynes was proceeding with a parallel biographical efort to tell the story of that ship’s frst (albeit temporary) commanding ofcer, Kenneth Whiting. An Army veteran of the Vietnam War, Haynes had a successful career in community college administration, eventually serving as a president at three such institutions. Prior to this efort, he published historical-fction novels. Kenneth Whiting is his f rst work of non-fction, inspired by the legacy of his father, who served in USS Kenneth Whiting, an aircraft tender during World War II. Perhaps because of the lack of a previous track record in this genre, Haynes was turned down by presses that have a reputation for publishing naval history,

so he elected to self-publish. As such, what we have here is a diamond in the rough. Te text could have benefted from a good copy-edit (mine certainly did!), an index, and a subject-matter peer review.

T at being said, Haynes makes a substantial contribution to the historiography of this era of naval aviation, as his research draws from several untapped primary sources. In addition to obtaining Whiting’s service and medical records (he corrects the public record regarding the cause of Whiting’s death), Haynes gained access to the “Journal of Family Memories” that had been maintained by Whiting’s daughters.

Kenneth Whiting grew up in Westchester County, north of New York City, with a mother who was a successful interior designer. While he had visions of studying art in France, his mother had other ideas and used her

political connections to secure her son an appointment to the US Naval Academy. While demonstrating athletic prowess during his time at Annapolis, academically Midshipman Whiting just slipped by, graduating near the bottom of the class of 1905.

Fortunately for the Navy, Whiting was a late bloomer. As commanding ofcer of the submarine USS Porpoise in 1909, he once inserted himself into the forward torpedo tube, had the tube fooded and the outer door opened, and swam to the surface—to demonstrate a means of escape. He then turned to that other emerging technology of the time— aviation. Whiting would be the last naval ofcer to be assigned to Orville Wright for f ight training. He would be sent eventually to Pensacola, along with Cdr. Henry Mustin, to establish it as “the cradle of naval aviation.”

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When the United States entered World War I, Whiting was sent to France in June 1917 aboard the collier Neptune to lead the First Aeronautic Detachment to France. Once in France, Lieutenant Whiting found himself punching well above his paygrade level, making training and basing arrangements with the French to expedite getting Americans into the fght. Eventually, ofcers at that higher pay grade would arrive to build on his groundwork. While in Europe, Whiting witnessed Royal Navy aircraft carrier development.

Upon returning to the States, Whiting would be a key witness in the Spring 1919 hearings held by the US Navy’s General Board on the future of naval aviation. Te General Board was considering converting a former passenger liner, as the British had done for one of their carriers. It was Whiting, recalling his experience transiting the

Atlantic aboard a collier, who recommended converting Neptune. Eventually, the General Board recommended Jupiter, a turbo-electric-powered ship, due to her faster speed.

Both Haynes and I document the critical role Commander Whiting played serving as Langley ’s commissioning commanding ofcer and settling in as the executive ofcer during the carrier’s formulative stages. Haynes then follows Whiting as the Navy’s go-to guy for the planning, development, and construction/conversion of other early carriers: Lexington, Saratoga , Ranger, Yorktown , and Enterprise. Captain Whiting would also return to Langley for a command tour, going on to command Saratoga and several naval air stations.

With such an impressive resumé, Whiting would seem to be a slam-dunk to make f ag rank. What happened? Whiting’s “Sea Daddy”1 was the Bureau

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of Aeronautics chief Vice Adm. William Mofett, who perished when the dirigible Akron went down of New Jersey in April 1933. T ree years earlier, however, Whiting, in command of Naval Air Station Norfolk, had run afoul of the rear admiral in command of the Fifth Naval District, who accused Moffett’s aviators of fying recklessly during a Navy Day airshow. T at rear admiral would take Whiting to task for not disciplining any of the aircrews. Haynes argues that without Mofett available to champion Whiting, this blotch on his record would prove fatal before future selection boards.

Haynes also points towards Whiting’s declining health as a potential factor. I suspect that it could have been an underlying factor, along with his known reputation to imbibe. Haynes closes by arguing that Whiting should be ofcially proclaimed as the father of the aircraft carrier, posthumously promoted to fag rank, and have an aircraft carrier named for him. With his narrative, he has made a strong case!

David F. Winkler Alexandria, Virginia

Tracking the Franklin Expedition of 1845: Te Facts and Mysteries of the Failed Northwest Passage by Stephen Zorn (McFarland & Co., Jeferson, NC, 2023, 201pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 978-1-476-69219-7; $39.95pb)

Several years ago (2014 and 2016), Parks Canada, following a lengthy, extensive, and expensive search, discovered the sunken wrecks of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus in the frigid waters of Arctic Canada. Tese two ships made up the Franklin Expedition of 1845— a British efort to discover the fabled Northwest Passage (which—spoiler alert—they did not f nd).

1 Te term “Sea Daddy” is navy vernacular to de f ne a more senior ofcer and mentor who has your back.

Mr. Zorn’s e fort is, in the light of these recent discoveries, very relevant to anyone who has an interest in such events. His book, however, brings nothing new to light, rather acts as a collection of others’ research and discoveries. While his own original research is lacking, he has performed a valuable service by collating and organizing in a most readable format the known facts, and, further, he of ers some insight (a.k.a. speculation) into that which, as yet, is unknown about the disaster, the identi fcation of found remains, and how the loss of the expedition unfolded. He discusses the “knowns,” and, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase—the “known unknowns”—i.e., what we don’t know but may come to learn after further research and exploration of the wrecks in Canada is carried out. Tose “unknowns” occupy the majority of his book, along with voluminous speculation, unproven theories, and a healthy and refreshing dose of cynicism.

Te summer diving season in the Arctic is exceedingly short, thus severely hampering the ongoing on-site exploration of the two shipwrecks. In fairness, however, his subtitle for the book is “Facts and Mysteries of the Failed Northwest Passage Voyage,” and while there are few facts, per se, there is plenty of speculating on what might have happened, and many more mysteries to unravel. To those with a historical bent, there is hope that many of these mysteries will be revealed once further “in-depth” (sorry!) diving reconnaissance of the wreck sites is accomplished.

Zorn spends an inordinate number of pages on totally ridiculous premises, including a mutiny (absolutely zero proof), causes of death of the crew (total speculation), and identity of several “found” bones and graves (mostly unproven). To his credit, his annotations and notes are well done, in depth, and complete, ofering further insight

to anyone willing to track down some of his sources. Regarding sources, he seems to have avoided any primary sources, preferring instead to rely on the work, premises, and conclusions of others. A f nal comment: the typeface in the hard copy of the book is so small it was barely readable, causing me to actually buy the Kindle version so I could get through a readable-size print. Tese criticisms aside, I do recommend

this book (get the larger-type version!) to readers who have an interest in the Franklin expedition. While his original research is lacking, Zorn has pulled together all the relevant preceding works into one volume, which is made more enjoyable by his underlying cynicism seasoned with a touch of sarcasm.

William H. White Bonita Springs, Florida

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