Sea History 011 - Summer 1978

You may never need all 120 safety features in your Mercedes-Benz.

But its comforting to know they're there.

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The steering shaft and the steen¡ng wheel bub n1e cone type door locks open only by are designed to collapse on impact.

-----+- pulling and are equipped with an ___._ _ ____._ The steering box is located behind fro nt axle inertia medJanism designed to resist for added protection. accidental opening on impact.

f the 120 safety features built as standard equipment into every new Mercedes-Benz, those designed to meet U.S. safety standards represent less than half. Those designed to meet Mercedes-Benz safety standards represent the rest.

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The washboard principle For instance, the engineers wanted to keep the car's taillights visible in foul weather. Solution: taillight lenses ribbed like washboards. Wind tunnel tests showed that most dirt and slush tend to collect on the outer surfaces leaving the recessed grooves cleaner, longer.

Because a side impact might activate a push button and this in turn might pop open a door, the engineers designed push buttons out of the door handles of a Mercedes-Benz .

They will open only by pulling.

The engineers even found a way to make the mouldings that frame the windshield work in the cause of safety.

They are actually designed to deflect rainwater away from the side windows as you cruise along in the wet.

The windshield wipers , on the other hand , are aerodynamically designed to sweep across the windshield

with the airflow and thus resist "lifting;' even in high-speed turbulence.

Seeing is surviving Mercedes-Benz takes a dim view of styling that obstructs driver visibi lity; you can't avoid what you can't see .

Result: a Mercedes-Benz driver is surrounded by as much glass as possible- in the sedans, for example, by a sweep of 85 percent unobstructed visibili ty.

Notice that the fuel filler flap of a Mercedes-Benz is placed far ahead on the right rear fender, almost above the wheel. o random act: it leads to a fuel tank mounted so deep inboard that it sits above the rear axle - as far from exposure to a rear-end impact as possible.

Strong law, stronger locks You may be heartened to know that the door locks on a Mercedes-Benz conform not just to the letter of the law but to its spirit. They far exceed the strength demanded by .S. federal law.

No law dictates it, but "crumple zones" at the front and rear of a Mercedes-Benz body are designed to yield accordion-like, to absorb kinetic energy in a heavy impact and

Gas tank located over rear axle surrounded by metal bulkheads.

Corrugated filler-neck is designed to yield on side impact.

lessen its effect on the passenger compartment.

The steering box in a MercedesBenz sits behind the front axle, for extra protection. The steering column is designed to yield and collapse on impact. The steering wheel itself is deformable and its flat, padded center is meant to help dissipate the effect of a heavy impact over a large area.

Every new Mercedes-Benz is safety-padded in the usual places, plus some unusual ones: e.g., the underside of the instrument panel and the knob of the shift lever. The engineers didn't want the glove-box door to pop open on an impact and become a menace to the front seat passenger so the lock on the glove-box door isn't a push button but a sliding mechanism.

The search goes on These are some examples of the 120 safety features built into every new Mercedes-Benz. Imposing as that number may seem, it is by no means a final one. Safety research and development at Mercedes-Benz have not stopped- and it is intended that they never will. Š 1978 M ercedes -Benz

0

Preserving Our Marifime Heritage The Seafarers International Union salutes the numerous efforts to save ships which are symbolic of America's great maritime heritage. Especially worthy of support are projects to preserve two of the few remaining Liberty ships, the "ugly ducklings" of World War II. More than 2700 were built in the greatest mass production program the world has ever seen. They should become permanent memorials to American productive genius ... to the thousands of men and women who built them and the men who sailed them to the fighting fronts. Hundreds of Liberty ships were crewed in war and peace by our union.

We are also proud to support programs of The Ship Trust of the National Maritime Historical Society.

To all historic ship preservation efforts we wish "fair winds and following seas".

675 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11232

The S.l.U. has more than a token interest in the preservation of historic ships.

Used for training young seamen at our Harry Lundeberg School, Piney Point, Md., is the 250 foot S.S. Dauntless, war-time flagship of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and, as such, flagship of the entire U .S. Navy.

We have also preserved two C hesapeake Bay sailing ship types, the 77-year-old Dorothy Parsons, last of the rakish bugeye freighters, and the 40-year-old Joy Parks, one of the vanishing fleet of skipjack oyster boats. These vessels are available for public viewing at the school on the first Sunday of each month from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

SUMMER 1978

No. 11 4 LETTERS 7 IN CLIO'S CAUSE, by RADM Joseph M. Wylie, USN (ret.)

EDITOR'S LOG

10 TALL SHIPS IN THE PACIFIC, by Peter Stanford 12 CAPTAIN JAMES COOK, by Oswald L. Brett 19 THE CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW, by Francis James Duffy 20 LESSONS OF THE LIBERTIES, by Robert T. Young 24 ANCHORS AND ANCHORING 26 ALOHA, KA/ULAN!: PART III, by Arthur and Sewall Williams 27 TOWARD A SHIP TRUST, Report of the Ship Trust Committee 28 THE BEAST ON THE BEACH, by Peter Throckmorton 29 THE ELISSA, by Walter Rybka 30 SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS 30

SCHOONERS OLD AND NEW, by Charles Sayle, Sr.

30

NEW ENGLAND SCHOONERS LIST, by Beth Haskell

32

ERNESTINA/ MORRISSEY REPORT, by Michael Platzer

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A HEAD OF STEAM, by Frank 0. Braynard

36 MARINE ART: JOHN STOBART, by Maryanne Murphy 40 BOOKS 46 DIXON'S RETURN, by W.W. Jacobs SEA H JS TORY is the journal of the National Maritime Hi storical Society, an educational, tax-exempt membership organization devoted to furthering the understanding of our maritime heritage.

OFFICES are at 2 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY 11201; at the San Francisco Maritime Museu m, Fool of Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109; and Suite 643, 1511 K Street, Washington, D.C. 20005.

MEMBERSHIP is invited and should be se nt lo the Brooklyn office: Sponsor, $1,000; Patron, $100; Family, $15; Regular, $10; Student or Retired, $5.

CONTRIBUTIONS may be made for any recognized project. Make out checks" NMHSShip Trust," indicating on the check the project to which you wish support to be directed.

OFFICES & TRUSTEES are Chairman: Admiral John M. Will, Jr., USN (ret.); President: Peter Stanford; Vice Presidents: Karl Kortum , John Thurman; Secretary: Alan G. Choate; Trustees: Frank 0 . Braynard , Norman J. Brouwer, Robert Carl, Alan G. Choate, F. Briggs Dal zell, Harold D. Hu yc ke, Barbara John son, Karl Kortum, Edward J. Pierso n, Kenneth D. Reynard , Walter F. Schlech, Jr., Howard Slotnick, Peter Stanford, John N. Thurman , Shannon Wall, Barclay H . Warburton, Ill, John M. Will , Charles Witlhol z; President Emeritus: Alan D. Hutchinso n.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Chairman: Frank 0. Braynard, New York Harbor Festival; George Campbell, American Museum of Natural History; Frank G. G. Carr, Cutty

Sark Society; Harry Dring, San Francisco National Historic Park; Richard GooldAdams, Great Britain Restoration; Robert G. Herbert; Melvin H. Jack son, Smithsonian Institution; R. C. Jefferson; John Kemble, Pomona College; Rick Miller; Conrad Milster, Prall Institute, NY; Robert Murphy; John Noble, artist; Capt. David E. Perkins, USCG (ret.); Ralph L. Snow, Bath Marine Museum; John Stobart, artist; Albert Swanso n, Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Peter Throckmorton; Alan Villiers, sea man author; Alen York, Antique Boat & Yacht Club.

SEA HISTORY ADVISORY CO MMITTEE Timothy G. Foote, Time, In c., Oliver J ensen, American Heritage, Karl Kortum , San Francisco Maritime Museum; C lifford Lord, New Jersey Historical Society; J. Roy McKechnie, Ogilvy& Mather; Robert A. Weinstein.

SEA HISTORY STAFF Editor, Peter Stanford; Managing Edito1~ Norma Stanford; Associate Editors, Norm a n J. Brouwer, Francis J. Duffy, Beth Haske ll , Maryanne Murphy, Albert Swanson; Advertising Sales, David 0. Durrell ; Circulation, Jo Mei sner; Membership, Marie Lore.

At the sixteenth Annual Meeting of the National Society, held in Washington, DC on May 18, Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr., USN (ret.) announced his retirement as chairman effective July I .

The sure se nse of direction and selness dedication of his term as Chairman are writ large in the deck log of our voyaging and inscribed in the hearts of all who serve with him. He continues as trustee, and will be active in long-term planning for the Society.

Admiral John M. Will, USN (ret.) was subsequently elected Chairman, to serve a two-year term beginning July I. Admiral Will served as founding president of the New York State Maritime Muse um, and has been a long-time Advisor to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and Chairman of the Maritime Industry Committee of the National Society.

At this meeting report was heard of the impending return of the remains of the steel Down Easter Kaiulani to San Francisco, completing her round-theworld voyage from that port begun in 1941 , and of the return of the remains of the wooden Down Easter St. Mary to Maine, where they will go on exhibition in the Maine State Museum. These matters are reported in "Ships Notes" as is progress in the restoration of the immigrant schooner Ernestina/Morrissey in the Cape Verde Islands.

At this meeting the first report of the Ship Trust Committee was unanimously approved. It is published in summary form on page 27 of this issue. Reprints of that report are available for di sc ussion and comment-which we welcome!

Broad seas lie before us. But in the words of one of John Paul Jones's recruiting posters, we may find "Great Encouragement to Seamen" in the work to which we are dedicated.

PS

COYER: The US Coast Guard bark Eagle makes a memorable picture of men at sea in sail, rocking gently to the Atlantic swell on a training cruise ten years ago. Thi s year she follow s the sun-and tall. ships before her time-cruising westward lo join the American Sail Training Association's Tall Ships Races in the Pacific. Photo by George Silk, co ntributed for our cover by Time Inc.©

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY NEW YORK

WASHINGTON, D.C.

SAN FRANCISCO

LETTERS Ship Trust: Cooperation and Determination To the Editor: The National Sociey has my best wishes on the commencement of your Citizen's Ships Trust Committee. To the extent that the sea has always taught us lessons in cooperation and determination, it is indeed fitting that you should be gathered together as a band of citizens, united in the task of reviving our maritime heritage.

But despite the fact that support for maritime preservation has traditionally been private in nature, I believe that government support of your efforts, and of the efforts of others in the field, is vital at this time. As you are well aware, our maritime heritage is unique in that its few surviving fragments are all-toooften in danger of being lost forever. It is for this reason that I support an increased appropriation for hi sto ric preservation, earmarking the increase for the maritime field. Only in this way can we be assured that our most precious historic ships, once so proud in their mastery of the sea, will not be lost to it for all time.

Again, I commend you on your efforts.

EDWARD M. KENNEDY U.S . Senate

To the Editor: This should be a positive step in encouraging and assisting more preservation of this country's maritime heritage.

CHARLES C. CHADBOURN, Ill Naval War College Newport, Rhode Island To the Editor: SEA HISTORY and the whole program of the National Society is necessary and overdue. As one who has followed the sea under three different flags si nce World War II, let me offer congratulations on a noble, worthy venture and a publication that ranks with the world's best in the maritime field.

TREVORJ.CONSTABLE San Pedro, California

To the Editor: In "Toward a World Ship Tru st" (SH 7), Frank Carr of England speaks of the American maritime heritage as "an amalgam enriched by all the maritime traditions of all the seafaring peoples of the earth, whose forebears through the centuries crossed the ocean in ships to find that great free country in a New

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World that is the United States of America.''

Object of a major research and recovery project off Cape Hatteras, the USS Monitor is a testament to Mr. Carr's words. Of the Monilor's 106 known crewmen (58 sou ls assigned but due to high turnover at least 106 were to serve; there were five commanding officers in a span of a year), 12 were born in Ireland ; three in Sweden (one of whom was awarded the Medal of Honor for Monitor service), four were born in England, one in Scotland, two in Wales, one in Canada, one in Norway, one in Germany, and one spoke African in excitement as the Monitor sank. Several were escaped Southern slaves who honorably served, one being the chattel of CSA Col. Hill Carter who rowed out to the Monitor on the James River in the fog and was fired upon by the Monitor's men who feared boarding by the enemy who controlled both banks of the river. Monitor crewman and former slave Siah Carter would honorably serve aboard other U.S . Navy ships as well.

Perhaps one third of the Monitor crew's birthplaces are as yet unknown and all of American birth were descendents of immigrants. One, my kinsman 3rd Asst. Engr. Robinso n Wollen Hands was not born on the terra firma of any nation; born at sea, this young man of the sea died at sea as the Monitor foundered on New Year's Eve, 1862.

We want the Monitor resurrected from the deep as a living testament to our seafaring heritage. Mr. Frank Carr's Ship Trust Committee can help us do that, help us memorialize the skilled men who built her, the slaves who first found freedon aboard her, the men of America and the world who sailed her, and the men who died when she died. E Mare, Ex Urna Resurgam-"From the Sea, I Shall Rise Again from the Tomb."

JAMES A. MILLER, JR. D/ S Monitor Research & Discovery Foundation The 'Aiyassa To the Editor: Ms. Megalli's letter on the 'aiyassa in the Spring issue is a worthy one. For the past three years I have been compiling a dictionary of the world's traditional watercraft-a project which has grown beyond all manageable proportions, with over 6,000 types now recorded. I have recommended some publications to Ms . Megalli, and look forward to her MURIEL H . PARRY work.

Washington, DC

Hudson Heritage To the Editor: Each iss ue of SEA HISTORY is beautiful, but I am particularly pleased with the treatment of the subject of Hudso n River steamers. Your idea for the conference on the maritime heritage of the Hudso n seems quite a good one to me.

LAURANCES. ROCKEFELLER New York, New York To the Editor: Old times on the Hudson River deserve to be remembered, with the traffic of steamboats, towboats with their tows, the fishermen, and sloops and schooners. Rondout Creek is the place for a maritime museum devoted to these things, because of its many past connections with steamboating and marine activity on the Hudson .

An ideal site would be the Island Dock, right in the heart of the Creek, because the old Delaware & Hudso n Canal had its terminus there for storing and loading coal to be taken on barges and schooners to places all along the eastern sea board . It is now virtually vacant.

Rondout was the home port of the Hudson's most famous steamer, the Mary Powell, as well as the steamers of

Wate1fronr buildings on Rondout Creek

the Romer & Tremper Steamboat Company, which ran overnight steamboats from Kingston to New York as well as a daily freight and passenger service between Newburgh and Albany. Later, this company together with other steamboat lines were merged into the Central Hudson Steamboat Company and operated daily passenger and freight service to New York City pretty near the year round.

Rondout Creek also for decades was the home port of the largest towing company in the United States-the old Cornell Steamboat Company. At their peak of operations, they owned about 75 towboats and tugboats, using them on the Hudson, N. Y. harbor and Albany harbor. They had four or five towing vessels in operation just around Rondout Creek.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

At Kingston Point, at the mouth of the Creek, was one of the most important landings for the steamers of the Hudson River Day Line for the up boat to Albany and the down boat to New York. Kingston Point was also the terminus of the old Ulster & Delaware Railroad, where between May and October thousands of passengers would board the trains from the Day Line steamers to continue their journey to the many hotels in the Catskill Mountains.

Today, a concerted effort is being made to relocate Steamtown, U.S.A. from Bellows Falls, Vermont to Kingston and to build a new park on the Hudson at Kingston Point. If successful, it is hoped to utilize the old U. & D. tracks to operate steam train excursions.

I think Rondout Creek has the distinction of being the only place along the Hudson to have had two lighthouse stations at its mouth. On the south bank still stands the old foundation of the lighthouse that was built in 1861 and abandoned in 1913. The lighthouse built to replace it stands on the north dike.

Rondout Creek was the only place along the Huson that saw the operation of a steam chain ferry boat to cross a navigable body of water on a main high way of that day-the old Riverside, known locally as the "Skillypot." A large sidewheel ferry also operated to Rhinecliff across the Hudson from Rondout.

For all of these reasons I think Rondout Creek would be a most appropriate place for a marine museum. At Kingston they have the old Senate House and a State Museum. Unfortunately, they don't have too much on steamboats or the River, although they do have the pilot whee l from the Mary Powell, five fine James Bard steamer paintings and a recently acquired large collection of Currier and Ives Hudson river lithographs.

So many older people contact me and ask if I know of their grandfather, grand uncles or heard of others of their family who worked on such and such a steamboat. An incredible number of descendents of old boatmen live around this section. This area really was a hotbed of steamboat men.

CAPT. WILLIAM 0. BENSON Kingston, New York To the Editor: The Rondout at Kingston, home of the Mary Powell, is the natural place for the maritime cultural center proposed in SH 10. Kingston could indeed be a cultural transportation center. Nearby is

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

the Delaware & Hudson Canal Historical Society, and the county is trying to save at least ten miles of tracks along Route 28 for steam engine trips.

There are active marinas and a noating theater on the Rondout today.

Many Germans have told me our Hudson River is more beautiful than the Rhine. I would like to see docks at Tarrytown, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Kingston and Catskill that cou ld accommodate cruise ships such as those of the German Rhine Lines. What about 4-5 day cruises to visit the wineries, historic sites, possible steam engine railroad and other attractions? If state and/ or federal funds could provide such docks I believe our river would truly come to life again.

WALTER AVERILL Executive Vice President Hudson River Valley Ass'n Poughkeepsie, New York

Duggan's Dew-Alive and Well!

To the Editor: The reprinting of the Glencannon story (Fall 1977) reawakened my interest in a minor li terary puzzle. Exactly why did Guy Kilpatric consistently celebrate Kirkintilloch as the home of a Scotch whiskey to which his hero was particularly partial? At the denouement of many of the stories, Glencannon retires to his cabin and seeks inspiration in a glass or two of Duggan's Dew o' Kirkintilloch. The Jnchcliffe Castle and her company may have been creatures of the author's imagination, but Kirkintilloch is real enough. Lying on the Forth and Clyde Canal, northeast of Glasgow, it dates back to Roman times.

However, in Kilpatric's day, not only was there no distillery, it even lacked a pub. About a dozen years ago, the "wets" triumphed, and the dry era came to an end. If Kilpatric somehow knew about this, he might just have decided that the complacent burghers of Kirkintilloch were taking an indecent pride in their righteous abstinence, surrounded as they were, by municialities that were uproariously wet. This might explain an impish determination to immortalize this particular place as the source of Duggan's Dew. JOHN HARLAND Kelowna, B.C., Canada

Duggan 's Dew o 'Kirkintilloch is an actual Scotch! It's been around for 40 years and is imported into the U.S. by Duggan 's Distilleries, Yonkers, who sell it in the Northeastern States. -ED.

Netherlands Sailing Craft To the Editor: The watercolor on the cover of the Fall issue showed a bomschuit, one of the strangest of our seagoing fishing craft. With her 2 to l ratio of length to breadth and her rectangular form with almost no roundings she probably was the squarest ship in the world. The bomschuit was designed to run ashore on our dangerous coast with lots of sandbanks and no harbors, often with a full load and all sails set. These strongly built ships were of course very slow sailers (2.5-3 knots, 5 in a breeze) but on the other hand very seaworthy. In winter after the end of the herring season, the schuiten were laid up in line, high on the beach at the foot of the dunes. the bomschuit was built and used at Scheveningen, Katwijk, Noordw ijk , Zandvoort and Egword, a ll places without a harbor. This trade under sail ended not 50 years ago. It was not replaced by powered vesse ls but by other sailing craft, the zei llogger (sailing drifter). This keelship imported from France in 1866, and ot her keelshipss could on ly operate from harbors far inland on the banks of the rivers, until at the turn of the century harbors were dug on the North Sea coast and there was then no longer need for the slow and heavy bomschuit.

Two batters and 17th-centwy sea/ocks in Muiden.

The botter you mentioned is the fishing craft of the southeast, south and west coast of the Zu iderzee-a fast and elegant craft. The Zuiderzee fishermen had a hard time after 1932, when a dam was built between the provinces of Noord Holland and Friesland, changing the Zuiderzee into a freshwater lake named Usselmeer. But in spite of that and the fact that more and more land was reclaimed from the water, the last real sailing fisherman disappeared only in 1966.

5

Adverti,sement

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Concerned action becomes possible Increasingly, in communities throughout the nation, the difference between life and death or injury is the same: information .. . information made possible, and usable, by modern technology.

Information technology is IBM's business: providing products, from modern computers to advanced office systems, to record information, store it, process it, retrieve it and communicate it.

Declining costs spur wider use There are hundreds of companies in the information technology industry, and they are constantly developing new and better products-driving down the cost of using information technology at a startling rate. For example, just 10 years ago, it cost $25 per month to store a million characters of information in an advanced IBM direct access storage system. Today it costs 50 cents.

It is this kind of progress that has made it practical for many more fire departments, police departments, hospitals and other organizations to take advantage of information technology and put it to use in new and caring ways.

In its research, and in the stream of products that flows from that research , IBM is searching for-and finding- still better ways to help put information to work for people.

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IN CLIO'S CAUSE

LETTERS, cont.

To Go to Sea Under Sail By Rear Admiral Joseph M. Wylie, USN (rel.), Chairman, American Sail Training Association There is a growing awareness of our maritime heritage, whose concerns are twofold. One is appreciation and understanding our past through its history, its tools, its techniques and artifacts. This is the historical portion of the task, and it is on this base that we build for the future.

The other half of our maritime heritage is its continuing, living extension through today into tomorrow . It is this living half of our maritime heritage to which we of the American Sail Training Association devote our efforts.

We want to offer our youngsters the opportunity to learn for themselves the responsibilities, the trust in their fellows, the cooperation, the hardships, the hazards, and the intense personal satisfaction of serving in a ship well sailed in weather fair or foul. The challenge of a tough job well done breeds a pride that lasts a lifetime. We start from the premise that before there can be pride, there must be challenge.

This, the element of challenge, is the critical factor that our protective society seems, somehow, to be bent on blocking out of the process of growing up. We want to give back to our youngsters the privilege of meeting challenge. When they do that, they learn to understand and accept responsibility and develop the self-discipline and courage to stand accountable for their actions-qualities of character and leadership always so sorely needed in a free society.

In the ¡ simplest possible terms, we want to give our youngsters a chance to test themselves. And when this testing is met at sea, they can also gain an understanding of the vital role of maritime communications in all its facets, of the bounty of the ocean, and of the need to care for and protect the marine environment.

This is a heady task, and we can not do it all. But we can provide a start, an initial foundation on which to build.

And that is why we hold to our principal aim-to get youngsters to sea under sail. All else that we do, we do to forward that aim. w

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

"We start from the premise that before there can be pride, there must be challenge. ''

Pho!O, Roger Smith

1 was surprised to read that now a Netherlands Maritime Trust has been set up to keep such historic craft alive. In 1968 the Vereniging Botterbehoud was established, to preserve the batter and other original fishing craft of the Zuiderzee and Waddenzee. The fleet list of this society mentions 43 batters, 3 Vollendammer kwakken (the kwak is a large batter only used in Vollendam) 2 pluten, 1 Lemsteraak, I schouw, 5 Staverse jollen, 7 Wieringer aken, 1 Wieringer bol, 1 Wieringer schuitje and I blazer, all well restored under private ownership. Six other batters, one bonsje and two Wieringer aken are still under restoration. In summer there are batter races on the Ysselmeer-a magnificent sight, all these real sailing ships with their brown sails!

In the last 7 years we have had in Holland a revival of old sailing craft that once traded on our lakes, rivers and canals. Some were common to all the Netherlands and Flanders, but almost every region had their own type of sailing craft; some were specially designed for a particular canal or river. In the 1880-l 890s when iron shipbuilding became common these inland sailing ships were still built after the traditional boat lines, and fishing craft were still built of wood. In those years some new types were added, as for instance the one and two masted river clipper (klipperbarge).

In the 1930s and 40s lots of these iron and steel sailing ships became motorships and today a lot of people buy, rebuild and rerig these ships to their old condition. The klipperbarge and the tjalk are the ships most often restored.

In 1974 the Vereniging het Museumschip, a society for preservation of the sailing inland traders, was established. This society also has a large fleet list and one of its events is the yearly Enkhuizer klipper race, open for klippers, klipperaken and stevenaken.

The maritime trust here can help to coordinate and support new projects, as for instance the proposed restoration of the iron barkentine rigged steam gunboat Zr. Ms. Bonaire now under the name A be! Tasman an accomodation hulk in Delfzijl, (see SH 3, 4-5). The Maritime Museum in Amsterdam has started the restoration of their zeillogger. This ship was built in 1912, lengthened and rebuilt into a motorlogger in 1927, and now the ship will be restored to her original length and form as a sailing lugger.

RON VAN DEN BOS Amsterdam, Netherlands

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LETTERS Steamboat Heritage To the Editor: I thoroughly enjoyed William G. Muller's painting of the steamer Albany in SH ¡ w. Your caption might lead the reader to think that was her only name, but actually she was renamed Potomac on June 8, 1934, and kept that name as steamer and barge until renamed Ware River on April 16, 1952. She was dropped from enrollment in January 1968, her hull later being used as a breakwater at Portsmouth, Virginia.

In your Steamer List, Duchess was enrolled under that name in 1976. Her enrolled length of 201.7' is as of her 1941 rebuilding; previously she was 192.9 '. Her younger sister Mount Vernon was similarly rebuilt. Although carried in the Merchant Vessels List as Mount Vernon until exempted in 1972, her current owners (SIU) renamed her Charles S. Zimmerman on March 11, 1969. Provincetown was laid up in the fall of 1963, not 1964. The Ticonderoga was built in 1906, not 1926. Yankee's wartime name in the Navy was League Island, YFB-20. She was purchased February 24, 1941, and returned to the War Shipping Administration January 9, 1947.

HARRY JONES Waldorf, Maryland To the Editor: It is certainly true to sta te that Fishers Island was "converted to diesel, renamed ... ; '' but it does omit a substantial chunk of her war and postwar existence, when she was Col. John E. Baxter. The old City of Wilmington's present name, I believe, is not Dutchess (as in the county) but Duchess (as in Alice in Wonderland), and with a nautically illiterate The welded to her front end. The wording of the Mar/has Vineyard note suggests that she received that name and her diesels simultaneously-actually, the dates of change were 1928 and 1959. Mount Washington, when first launched into Lake Winnipesaukee (as Mt. Washington ll) in 1940, was a screw steamer, propelled by engines amputated from a steam yacht.

These were requi sitioned for some farfetched and Jorgotten war use, shipped overseas and torpedoed en route, leaving the Mount to sit powerless until she got her diesels after the war. Nobska was built as Nobska, renamed Nantucket at the sa me time Islander became Marthas Vineyard, and restored to her original nam e when the third Nantucket came out in 1957. Sabino was built as Tourist, vut capsized after a decade or

8

so and received her present name after rebuilding. Ticonderoga's building date, as given, is an obvious typo for 1906.

Even a partial list, it would see m, should include the still-active stea mer which represe nted the last, if not hugely sucessful, gasp of New England steamboating: the third Nantucket (now Naushon). Also, I would argue for inclusion of Greenport ex-New Jersey exPrincess Anne and Cape May ex-De/Mar- Va, still in floating lay-up at New Bedford, awaiting a summons to crosssound service which seems increasingly unlikely. Even though designed to carry the motori zed 20th-century passenger, with his wheels, these were, when built , very respectable specimens of the genus steamboat.

C. BRADFORD MITCHELL Brooklyn, New York

The Bowdoin To the Editor: Edmund Francis Moran' s letter (SH 9), on the schooner Bowdoin leads me to seco nd his request that Mrs. MacMillan take "pen in hand" and tell the story of the ship, the man and the boys. I know there is a lot there!

I have enclosed a picture of a diorama

recently built, showing the Bowdoin in Refuge Bay, North Greenland in August 1950. The model was built from drawings supplied by Mystic Seaport. The hull is of solid pine, pla nked with gum wood and decked with basswood. All the details are there-from complete winch gear to Boston Yacht Club burgee and the National Geographic Society flag. Commander MacMillan is seated on the wheel housing and Miriam MacMillan is at the port rail watching a harp seal on an iceberg (out of the picture). I have a special spot in my heart for this model-not only because I enjoyed doing it-but because of the opportunity to touch the history that the Bowdoin and her people represent. We here in the U.S. heartland have very little opportunity to brush with our coastal marine history so we have to rely on contacts such as I have had with the Bowdoin family and through publications such as SEA HISTORY. W. G. BALLENGER Chicago, Illinois

On Ethical and Moral Content To the Editor: The values and spirit Lance R. Lee attempts to expla in, enrich and impart in his Apprenticeshop (Sh I 0, p.3) are both importa nt and fragile.

We have evidence of this in the battering the ethical and moral content of our civilization has suffered in the last two d eca des. Inspiration which adds sweetness and beauty to the individual life through personal accomplishment and sustaining self-respect is missing from many of our endeavors.

Those of us who seriously st udy the shipwright's craft and the art and mystery of the sailor reali ze that the sea tests the human spirit and human capacities. We are fortunate in having in our midst a man who urges us to link the testing of the sea and the attitudes of the craftsman to yield spiritual well-being to the individual.

LAWRENCE C. ALLIN Orono, Maine

Old Salts Do Not Lose Their Savor To the Editor: It is always impressive to meet old sailormen, as we do in SEA HISTORY .

Shantyman Stan Hugill, was "only" 70 years old, when he was to have sailed with Mariners International in the brigantine Phoenix from England to Bermuda durin g Opsail '76. Our maste r objected on grounds of his age-so instead he joined us at Bermuda by air and sailed from there to Newport and New York in the Unicorn. Jacques Thiery told me he was up aloft before the boys had their feet on the fir st ratlines. I also knew a man I believe to be th e last bucanneer in the old tradition, Henry de Monfreid-a Frenchman although his paternal grandfather was American. He used to sail sc hooners and dhows in the Red Sea with cargoes of guns, pearls, haschich (and so me people wonder if there was not a whiff of slaving- but in fact hi s relations with the Arab slavers were far from friendly and a lthough he was give n or resc ued or otherwise acquired several slaves, he always gave them their freedom) and his memoirs read like the 1001 Nights.

I met de Monfreid through the French Explorers' Club and the last time I saw him was at a Club dinner where the guest of honor was Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut. When they were introduced it struck me as "Adventure of the Past shaking hands with Adventure of the Future." They are both dead now; de Monfreid died near ly four years ago as he had just completed the recording of

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

some sea shanties as so loist and he had just made a statement on the French radio, in connection with the bloody Ethiopian revolution, that he would not be returning to Ethiopia as long as the new regime remained in power-he was 95! I well remember also an old French sea captain who used to own a trading schooner in the South Seas before 1914 and a nother Cape Horn captain at St. Malo, completely blind, who was in vited on the Corch Fack and feeling the belaying pins sang out their names with tears in his eyes: the German naval captain was nearly as moved as the Old timer ...

Driving YLCCs across the oceansand occasionally up the beaches-is certainly not the same thing.

ERIK C. ABRANSON Mariners International London, England Overboard, Overboard!

To the Editor: Reading Capt. Philip Mohun's letter about the K. l. Luchenbach and trying to drift back to the years I spent on her, about 5 altogether, 2 years as chief mate, and searching my memory (I'm 86), I remember a funny incident. Coming into Puget Sound in the K. I., and getting ready to come alongside while rigging the starboard gangway we had a man Jacob Jacobsen, fall overboard.

Nice weather, no problem, ship was stopped a nd we picked him up. On the return voyage same trip while steaming toward Panama, and right off Cape San Lucas, I was on watch, in fact I had the wheel. It was common practice in those days for the mate to take the wheel and let the Q.M. work on the bridge. The mate came in and told me he was going to use Jacobsen, who was Q.M. to help put on a new boat cover.

So they put on the new boat cover, then the mate decided to put the old boat cover on the new boat cover so the new one wou ld not get soiled. So far fine. But in putting on the old boat cover they put it on wrong, the hauling part outboard instead of inboard. When Jabey hauled on the bellyband it carried away, and Jabey left the ship without permission-overboard again!

Signals were sounded, I stopped the port engine, put the wheel full left rudder and sent a man to the masthead. The boat was lowered and Jacobson was picked up.

The Captain was on the bridge, not sayi ng a nyt hing as everything was going along nicely. When the Ii feboat returned to the ship, he said: "What's the name of that man?" I said "Jacobsen sir!"

"Well, send him to my cabin and I will

SEA HISTORY , SUMMER 1978

give him a good drink. But if he does not stop this foolishness of falling overboard I' ll have to fire him."

As to me, I started in 1907 in the Navy and one way or another spent 51 years at sea before I thought it was time to let go both anchors. Only once did I see a man lost and recovered twice in one voyage.

CAPT. N.A. KRUM Oakland, Cali fornia

Mar Cantabrico To the Editor: I handled the survey of the fire and sinking of the Mar Cantabrico at Port Arthur, and on reading her story (SH 10), I pulled my file on her and reviewed this "constructive total loss." I attended the USCG hearings, and practically lived with the job for weeks. The fire was really spectacular, and it's a wonder that her old hull could withstand the tremendous heat generated by her many combustible (and diversified) cargoes. I often wondered if the hull survived the transAt lantic towing trip to the breakers!

R. K. HANSON Beaumont, Texas Save the State of Pennsylvania To the Editor: Now that SEA HISTORY has broadened its coverage to steamships and steamboats the magazine has become a "must" subscripti on for me.

Keep up the superb work!

Your readers should be advised about the State of Pennsylvania, a once handsome and well loved Wilson Line steamboat known to millions of Americans along the Eastern Seaboard. She is historically significant for the many technological advances embodied in her construction and design-and for the number of "lasts" that were hers, including the fact that she was the last passenger steamboat in regular operations on the Delaware. But more than design, technology or historic significance, the 236-foot State of Pennsylvania (known to many of her aficionados as the "Pennsy"), is one of a fast disappearing class of big excursion steamboat that once provided entertainment and transportation to millions of people of all ages . She was as American as apple pie or the "Pennsylva nia Polka," that so often resounded from her ballroom deck.

Laid up at Wilmington, Delaware, her birthplace, between 1960 and 1970, she was sold to a restauranteur in 1970 when she foundered by getting stuck in the muck of the Christina River at low tide.

There she has remained in a semisubmerged state, neglected but hardly forgotten. Although ravaged by neglect,

Pennsy's hull and superstructure, being of heavy steel, suggest that she is salvageable. Raising her' shou ldn 't be too much of a problem, and once she's restored, she would make a great setting for a museum of Delaware River steamboating and shipbuilding history, and perhaps double as a local convention center of sorts either in Wilmington or Philadelphia. While the hour is late, there's sti ll a glimmer of hope and while that exists efforts should be explored towards saving her. Accordingly, together with Pe.te Eisele, Editor-in-Chief of Steamboat Bill, Frank Roberts, steamboat historian and author of The Boats We Rode, and steamboat historian Harry Jones, I am trying to organize a full-fledged Committee to Save the State of Pennsylvania.

RICHARD V. ELLIOTT Tenafly, New Jersey

Interested readers are invited to write Mr. Elliott, author of Last of th e Steamboats, at 26 Hillside Ave., Tenafly, NJ 07670.-ED. Save a Liberty!

To the Edito r: I spent my Navy career as the Commanding Officer of the SS John Corrie, which carried ammunition from Locust Point in Baltimore and Caven Point in Jersey City to the European and Mediterranean theaters, including the Normandy invasion (Omaha Beach). Like most of the Liberty sh ips she was armed with a 3 11 50 forward, a 5 11 51 aft and eight 20 mm's in gun tubs forward, aft and midships.

The Corrie, built by the St. John's Shipbuilding Company in St. John's River, Florida, was the first all-welded Liberty and almost came a cropper for that reason. On its initial return trip to the United States from England through the North Atlantic (with the 1,500 tons of cinder ballast which is all the Engli sh could normally spare) the rigidity resulting from the all-welded construction caused it almost to break in half at a point just aft of the #3 hold, but happily it was able to stay afloat and limp into Reykjavik, Iceland where the damage was repaired by rivets.

I am greatly hopeful that your efforts to preserve the John W. Brown will be successfu l, so that there wi ll be at least one tangible reminder of the great fleet of Liberty ships which won the war!

MALCOLM WILSON Scarsdale, New York

9

Tall Ships in the Pacific

By Peter Stanford

Led by the Coast Guard sail trammg bark Eagle, the greatest fleet of working sailing ships to visit San Francisco in half a century will stream through the Golden Gate on August 11. This will be the high point in shore visits of what is essentially an oceanic event: the American Sai l Training Association's Tall Ships Pacific-1978.

Tall Ships Pacific begins with a 2300-mile race of bona fide sai l training ships from Hawaii to Victoria on Vancouver Island. These vessels carry a crew made up of at least half young people in trainin g in the disciplines of navigation under sail. After a visit to Seattle (see schedule in box) the ships proceed south in two deep-sea races from Vancouver Island to San Francisco, and San Francisco to Long Beach.

The races are held in honor of the third and final voyage of explorat ion of Captain James Cook, RN, in the Pacific world. This voyage of 200 years ago, in 1778, opened the American Northwest to navigation and trade. Cook himself was an adm irable and very complete man of his age, as revealed in Oswald Brett's account of his voyaging, which follows. He was dedicated at once to the well-being of his men, and, as he wrote in a memorable journal entry, to going farther than man had gone before him.

He was an early practitioner of what we now call ''sail training." One young man who had sailed with Cook found his examination in seamanship and navigation waived-it was enoug h that he had sailed with Cook!

Cook viewed with misgivings the impact of Europeans on the island races and cultures of Polynesia; in Mr. Brett's account, you will find him giving what is in effect a questioning answer to Ben Franklin's accolade to his voyage as to "the benefit of mankind."

His life ended in a scuffle over a stolen boat while he was wintering in the Hawaiian Islands, after his search for the mythical Northwest Passage from the coast of Oregon northward to the impenetrable ice shelf in the Bering Strait.

"When will Rono come again?" was the question the islanders asked when Cook was dead. "What will he do to us on his return?"

10

Drakes tall ships are welcomed in peace to California, 1579.

"As men ravished in their minds" The islanders' question may lead us back to the earliest days of Pacific navigation . Rono, Thor Heyerdahl tells us, is the old Polynesian word for a sailing raft. Heyerdahl voyaged in such a raft, built of balsa logs, from Peru to the Tuamatus in 1947, to re-enact the voyage of Kon Tiki, a chief who vanished over the sea with his people after defeat in shore battles. Tracing this people back to Central America, where their advanced Stone Age culture first abruptly appeared, he came to the conclusion that they had come there by sea from the Mediterranean world. He subsequently made a voyage running down the Trades Wind route from Africa in a raft made of reeds, to demonstrate the practicality of that voyage.

We may understand how the raft itself could become the symbol of hope and of the magic inherent in the beginning of things. Polynesian oral histories carry back only to the first landings that settled the islands, about 500 AD . But a peo-

pie with such voyaging in their inheritance, committing themselves to months of exstence in a universe of sea and sky, arriving at new lands quite different to any they had known, might well feel that the rafts that brought them to their islands were the beginning of life on their earth, and that beyond the sea lay an unknowable world to which they cou ld not return .. . though emissaries might come from it.

Two hundred years before Cook, Francis Drake in his voyage around the world touched on the West Coast, close outside today's San Francisco. There, in 1579, a generation before any lasting English settlement had been made on the East Coast of North America, he claimed New Albion for Queen E li zabeth, while Indians came to pay him homage.

These Indians were not voyagers. We believe, today, that these people had come from Asia by the land bridge that existed from Siberia during the last Ice Age, some thousands of years before .

But their awe at these Europeans in their tall ships-for so ocean-voyaging vessels were called in Elizabeth's day-and their reverence come to us movingly across four centuries. So we glimpse the Indians in the words of one eyewitness, "standing, when they drew near, as men ravished in their minds."

June 24 Race I-Hawaii-Victoria July 21-23 In-Shore Regatta-Victoria July 24 Cruise-in-Company to Vancouver July 30 Parade of Sail-Vancouver to Seattle August 5 Cruise-in-Company to Swiftsure Bank August 6 Race 2-Swiftsure Bank to San Francisco August 15 Race 3-San Francisco to Long Beach RACEI,

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Tall Ships Pacific 1978, Schedule

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

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The U.S. C. G. C. Eagle leads the Tall Ships Pacific fleet. Photo, Roger Smith.

"The World Encompassed" From our point of view it was a moving encounter too, that first encounter with tall ships in the Pacific. For in the heads of these voyagers, these small bands of men driving their chips of wood across wide seas that ha d divided it, out of the lust for booty and glory and perhaps deeper desires besides, a new concept of the world as one entity, united by its oceans, was born. The rounding of the great globe, celebrated in Drake's voyage as "the world encompassed, " was repeated and etched in the smaller globe that holds the human mind .

We have not, obviously, mastered all the lessons of the tall ships. Queen Elizabeth's language is spoken around the world today, and we have come to a new understanding in the last half millenium, of an old saw: "The sea is one." The trades that grew up in the wake of the early voyagers have brought us great wealth, and that wealth supports sciences that would astound th e old sea men. Whether we have met Ben Franklin's challenge, that the consequences of our voyaging be to "the benefit of mankind in genera~" is still unproven .

We have the wit, at least, to know that when we see these tall ships, we are seeing so mething extraordinary in man' s experience, so methin g that rightly troubles and inspires our minds. If we can relearn and learn better in each ge neration the lessons to be wrested from that experience, we shall have brou ght back from our sea faring so mething of far greater value a nd enduring reward than the wealth of the Indies for which the tall ships first se t out. <!> <!> <!>

SEA HISTORY , SUMMER 1978

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11

Captain James Cook, RN, FRS An Appreciation of the Man and His Voyages

By Oswald L. Brett When Benjamin Franklin represented the United States as Minister Plenipotentiary at the French Court in 1779, during the American Revolution, he issued a directive to all American captains and commanders, acting by commission from Congress. He "earnestly recommended" that they treat "the most celebrated navigator and discoverer, Captain Cook ... with all civility and kindness" should they encounter his vessels at sea. Franklin stressed that Cook's undertakings, being essentially scientific, were devoted to the "benefit of mankind in general." Earlier, the French in their esteem for Cook's scientific achievements, had also exempted his ships from molestation, although France also was at war with Great Britain.

Ironically, at the time Franklin drafted these instructions, Cook had already met his death on the Island of Hawaii. He had discovered this important island group, together with most of Alaska, during his third great Pacific voyage in the "sloop" Resolution and her consort Discovery.

During the preceding ten years Cook had virtually completed the stupendous task of committing the vast configuration of the Pacific Ocean to paper-a region comprising one third of the earth's surface. He had also solved most of its geographical problems which had engaged the attention and speculation of philosophers since the time of classical antiquity.

Such ancient Greek and Roman savants as Pythagoras, Aristotle, Cicero and Pliny believed that in a well-ordered and lawfully governed kosmos there must be a corresponding land mass in the southern hemisphere to balance the known lands of the north. Ecclesiastics, geographers and philosophers elaborated on this hypothesis, which persisted in one form or another till the eighteenth century. (The present continent of Australia-originally named by its Dutch discoverers, New Holland-is not the amorphous southern continent of the theorists, and proved singularly arid and unattractive to the early Hollanders.) The continent being sought was the reputed Terra Australis lncognita which ostensibly was to be found in the South Pacific stretching all the way to the Pole.

Ultimately it was James Cook, that 12

Captain Cook, from the portrait by John Webber, RA, reproduced courtesy of the Wardens and Brethren of the Corporation of the Hull Trinity House.

consummate sailor and navigator with his exceptional gifts of character, and independence of thought, who would, in the words of a contemporary, dispose of this "aerial fa brick of continent" during his second voyage in Antarctic and Pacific seas in 1772-1775. This was accomplished by his brilliant mastery of the new navigational techniques inspired

by Newton, which the mathematicians and astronomers had perfected during the scientific revolution of the preceding century. He also became proficient in the use of the new precision instruments of the optical and nautical instrument makers whose final triumph was the chronometer. This "watch-machine" made by Larcum Kendall, deriving from John Harrison's pioneer work with various marine time keepers, accompanied Cook in the Resolution in 1772, and 1776. This instrument, which Cook called "our trusty friend", simplified the earlier and involved method of determining longitude by "the measurement of lunar distances" from fixed stars.

A seriously limiting factor on any long ocean voyage was the crippling affliction of scurvy. Only fresh fruits and vegetables could furnish adequate levels of vitamin C in the diet of sailors, to prevent this terrifying disease.

Alexander Home, who had joined the Discovery as able seaman, being later promoted officer, gives a vivid picture of

how that anonymous assemblage, an eighteenth century crew, commented on Cook's including fresh greens of almost any description in their soup. He notes that "it was No Uncommon thing when Swallowing Over these Messes to Curse him heartyly and wish for gods Sake that he might be Obledged to Eat such Damned Stuff Mixed with his Broth as Long as he Lived."

But who was this James Cook, who introduced a new world in the Pacific to the generations succeeding him? He was born in the tiny village of Marton in the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire on 27 October, 1728. His father, also James (he would have pronounced it "Jam us" from the Celtic Shamus, and the Gaelic Hamish), was a Scottish farm laborer from Ednam in Roxburghshire, who had come south to England seeking employment. He" found a place," (as he would have said), and he "found a lass," Grace Pace from nearby Stainton, whom he wed on 10 October, 1725. They settled at Ormesby, later moving to Marton where Cook Senior worked for a local farmer, Mr. Newburn. They were sober, responsible, industrious folk.

Their son James was born several years later in a tiny "clay biggin", a tworoomed, thatch-roofed cottage.

When James was eight his father became "hind" or "bailiff" (farm manager) to Mr. Thomas Skottowe of Airyholm Farm, who belonged to the gentry. Recognizing young Cook's promise, Squire Skottowe paid for his attendance at the day school in nearby Great Ayton, locally pronounced "Canny Yatton." The Postgate School, run by Mr. Pullen in Cook's day, still stands in this lovely old village overlooking the lazily nowing brook, Leven. It was rebuilt in the 1780s and is now a Cook museum.

Airyholm Farm where young Cook lived from 1736 till 1745, acting as stable boy to his father, still nestles in the shadows of Easby Hitt and the peak of Roseberry Topping in the lovely rural countryside, between the Moors and Dales of North Yorkshire. On a warm spring afternoon in 1977 I was shown over this still nourishing farm by the friendly 13-year old farmer's son. He spoke with perhaps the same provincial turn of speech the young Cook used, though he covered the farm's dirt roads by means of a Honda.

At the age of seventeen Cook became

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

shop-boy to Mr. William Sanderson, grocer and haberdasher in the tiny fishing village of Staithes (or "Steers"), perched steeply, and precariously, between two towering headlands on the nearby Yorkshire coast. The shop, however, could not compete with the wider world upon which it opened-the panorama of coastal shipping in the offing, the endless sounds of the sea, and the beat of the wind redolent with salt and tar. The fishermen were another source of wonder, toiling interminably with their nets in their gaily painted fishing "cables." These small fishing craft and their colors are a legacy of the eighth-century Viking invaders and ideally suited to local shoal and beach conditions. It was doubtlessly in these boats that Cook first ventured afloat.

After little more than a year the amiable and sympathetic Mr. Sanderson took the restive young Cook to meet his Quaker friend, John Walker the shipowner, a few miles down the coast at Whitby. It was to Mr. Walker that Cook was bound apprentice as "a three-years servant" in the North Sea coal trade.

In the North Sea colliers out of Whitby, which hauled their cargoes of "black diamonds" from the northern coalfields to London, Cook became thoroughly grounded in the exacting demands of seamanship. He also mastered the three L's of navigation and pilotage; lead, log and latitude. A thousand vessels were employed in this great trade, four hundred alone hauling a million tons annually of Newcastle coals on the treacherous, tempestuous and unlit East Coast to the metropolis. In the winter months when the vessels were laid up, the apprentices boarded with the owner.

This gave Cook the opportunity to study mathematics, the theory of navigation, latitude determined with backstaff or quadrant, compass variation, and elementary astronomy. Perhaps he also dreamt of discovery in the fitful A 20-fool "coble" fishing boa! al Whilby, 1977. Brough! 10 northeast England by Vikings over 1,000 years ago, !he type survives, and is probably wha! Cook first wen! afloat in.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

candlelight of Mr. Walker's attic . After serving John Walker (formerly a shipmaster himself) for nine years as apprentice, able seaman, and mate in the ships Freelove, Three Brothers, and Friendship, with an occasional voyage to the Baltic and Irish Seas, Cook was offered a command by Walker. As a shipmaster Cook would have been exempt from naval service, and the attention of the press gang. Instead he volunteered his services at Wapping as able seaman in the Royal Navy "to take his future fortune that way."

The volunteer was sent to the 60-gun ship Eagle, with a crew of almost 500 men virtually imprisoned on board. A nucleus of her people would be naval seamen, and these would be supplemented by merchant seamen seized by the press gang. There were also landsmen similarly seized, and cruelly thrust into this alien, crowded world of a man o' war with its .incomprehensible language and strange usage. Others were criminals given the option of service afloat, to a jail term ashore. It was said that the Navy, like the gallows, refused nothing. The Royal Navy was on the eve of world conflict with France, and was being rapidly raised from a peacetime 16,000 to a wartime footing of 80,000 men. Discipline was ruthlessly maintained by the murderous cat o' nine tails wielded by burly, pig-tailed bosun's mates on the bare back of the transgressor, triced up to a grating at the gangway.

Such brutal conditions eventually erupted into the great naval mutinies of Spithead and the Nore in 1797, which shook the entire nation. These upheavals were part of the greater turmoil which engulfed the latter years of the eighteenth century, with industrial revolution in England, and political revolutions in France and the British North American colonies.

In the wartime Navy, desperate for men, Cook's superb technical training stood him in good stead. Within a month he was rated master's mate, and was later, for a time, boatswain. Cook saw active service in the English Channel and the Atlantic under the command of Captain Hugh Palliser (later Admiral Sir Hugh, comptroller of the Navy and Cook's admirer and patron). He took part in the brisk and bloody capture of the French East lndiaman Due D'Aquitain~, which despite 97 shot-holes in her side was enrolled in the Royal Navy as a 64-gun ship. After two years he was promoted master-responsible for the navigation and sailing of his ship, not in

command. He took part in the sieges of Louisbury at Cape Breton and Quebec in 1759, and finished the Seven Years War aboard the 70-gun ship Northumberland, flagship of Rear Admiral Lord Colville, Commander-in-Chief of the North American Station.

In London on December 21, 1762, Cook married Miss Elizabeth Batts who would live till 1835, surviving her husband by 56 years. Of their six children, only three survived childhood, and all died young. The two older boys were lost while serving in the Navy. Cook's house in Stepney was only demolished in 1959. It was here at Mile End that Boswell visited Cook in 1776, and not being early enough for breakfast had tea in the garden with Cook, where a blackbird sang. (When shaking hands, Cook said, "much obliged for your visit." Boswell noted that "it was curious to see Cook, a grave steady man, and his wife, a decent plump Englishwoman, and think that he was preparing to sail round the world.")

The following year, 1763, Cook returned to Newfoundland as a surveyor. Accurate charts of the island (Newfoundland lies athwart the Gulf of St. Lawrence) were deemed essential not only for the safety of trade and traffic in the St. Lawrence, but because of the island's strategic importance to the naval and fishing fleets.

During th'e next five summers, when Cook would also become known to admirals, politicians and scientists, he performed this professional task brilliantly.

The First Voyage: 1768-71 On May 25, 1768, Cook was commissioned lieutenant and appointed by the Admiralty to the command of H.M. Bark Endeavour to carry a scientific expedition to the South Seas, the purpose of which was to observe the Transit of Venus on the Island of Tahiti. This observation would be of the greatest scientific consequence since it would not only determine the distance of the earth from the sun, "by observing the passage A boy rides his Honda round the Yorkshire farm where Cook worked as s1able-boy for his father, who became "hind" or foreman of this farm about 1736. Author at left.

13

CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

HMS Resolution, a 462-ton Whitby ship taken up by the Royal Navy for Cook's second and third voyages, shown here off Cape Flallery on the evening of March 22, 1778.

Detail from Oswald Brett's painting on our back cover.

of the planet Venus over the disc of the sun," but would also establish the scale of the whole solar system. Cook was also appointed by the Councillers of the Royal Society to act as an observer, together with another astromomer, Charles Green.

Cook was now a man of 39, tough and resourceful, as well as being civilized, tolerant and sober. He is described as having a "vigorous and comprehensive mind, a clear judgment. .. and the most determined resolution; he pursued his object with unshaken perseverance; vigilant and active; cool and intrepid among dangers. He was a modest man and rather bashful; of an agreeable and lively conversation, sensible and intelligent. In his temper he was somewhat hasty, but of a disposition the most friendly, benevolent and humane."

Of the Endeavour herself, she had formerly been the four-year-old Whitby collier Earl of Pembroke and absurdly small by modern standards; of 366 tons burthen, a beam of 29 ', and length of 105 ' , she had a complement of 94 people, and was smaller than a modern harbor tug. However, she was the ideal vessel, since with her roominess and capacity she could stow vast quantities of stores and provisions for a two-year voyage (it turned out to be three) and keep the seas for long periods. Her shallow draught and great strength of construction made her suited to shoal waters.

With Cook sailed en extraordinary young man of immense fortune, and a passion for botany and natural history.

14

Science at this period was the province of the wealthy amateur, and Joseph Banks, later Sir Joseph, contributed greatly to the scientific success of the voyage. He took along as his assistant Dr. Daniel Solander, who had been a pupil of the great Swedish botanist, Linnaeus. With her naturalists, botanists artist-draughtsman (all Banks' retinue), and astronomers, the Endeavour was the first thoroughly organized and equipped vessel for a voyage of biological and scientific exploration . In the variety and volume of observed phenomena, Cook's first Pacific voyage anticipated today's ocean sciences of hydrography, meteorology, and oceanography . He would also pioneer those other sciences of botany, zoology, anthropology and ethnography. The Endeavour established the pattern for all such voyages in the future, both Cook's and others .

Cook sailed south into the "roaring forties," but with no indication of a southern continent, he sailed west to discover the east coast of New Zealand.

He circumnavigated and charted the 2,400 mile coastline of these two islands in only six months. Sailing west he next discovered the east coast of Australia.

After a week at Botany Bay, named for its exotic flora, Cook sailed north. The 2,000 miles of this coast was charted in only four months, and Cook named it New South Wales . On the northern coast "barricaded with shoals," he encountered a nightmare of navigation in the reef-strewn waters of the Great Barrier Reef. The Endeavour was almost lost when she struck a reef of coral rock and remained fast for 23 hours. (The six carriage guns thrown overboard to lighten her were recovered in 1969.)

Cook desperately notes in his journal that "was it not for the pleasure which naturly results to a Man for being the first discoverer, even was it nothing more than sand and Shoals, this service would be insuportable especially in far distant parts, like this, short of Provisions and almost every other necessary."

Cook's geographical names, always reflecting his gift of metaphor, indicate his ordeal; Cape Tribulation, Weary Bay, Hope Isles and Providential Channel. At Batavia where the vessel was later repaired, several planks for a length of six feet were found to have been destroyed to within a thickness of one eighth inch! Cook arrived home in July 1771 to find himself a national hero .

Cook was promoted to commander and had an hour's audience with King George III "who was pleased to express his Approbation of my Conduct in

Terms that were extremely pleasing to me." Cook applied for leave to visit his 77-year-old father at Ayton (whose home has since been moved to Australia and now stands in Melbourne), when he also took the opportunity to visit John Walker at Whitby, and other friends of his youth. When he arrived at the Walker home (still standing in Grape Lane) the old housekeeper, Mary Prowd, who used to provide Cook with table and candle for his studies as an apprentice, had been instructed to be properly respectful when the celebrated navigator arrived. Instead she rushed up to him and cried as she flung her arms around him, "Oh honey James! How glad 1 is to see thee".

The Second Voyage: 1772-75 A new voyage to the South Seas was planned by the Admiralty, and Cook this time got his own selection of two North Country colliers, the danger of sending one alone now being seen. The two vessels were renamed Drake and Raleigh, but as these names would be anathema to Spanish sensibilities, the more suitable names of Resolution and Adventure were finally adopted.

The Resolution, with a complement of 112, and the Adventure with 81, sailed in July 1772 on the voyage that set the seal on Cook's reputation as "the ablest and most renowned Navigator this or any country hath produced." The Resolution proved herself as one of the great ships of history, sailing 70,000 miles and crossing the Antarctic Circle three times, being the first vessel to do so. On January 30, 1774 she reached the farthest south-'-71 ° 10' S-anyone has ever attained by sea at that longitude at 106 ° 54' W. Cook made an unusually revealing entry in his journal on this occasion: I will not say it was impossible anywhere to get in among this Ice, but I will assert the mere allempting of it wou ld be a very dangerous enterprise ... I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting with the interruption, as it in some measure relieved us from the dangers and hardships, inseparable with the Navigation of the Southern Polar regions.

Cook planned the voyage to determine the existence of a southern continent, and would make his Antarctic traverses in the summer months, and Pacific tropical sweeps during the southern winter. Instead of the difficult rounding of Cape Horn to enter the Pacific, Cook decided to run his easting

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

down after departing from the Cape of Good Hope, and enter the Pacific by way of New Zealand, which would also offer refreshment for his people.

A midshipman in the Resolution, John Elliott, wrote: "I believe their never was a Ship, where for so long a period, under such circumstances, more happiness, order, and obedience was enjoy'd''. However, among the midshipmen, says Elliott, "There was likewise a Mess which Cook call 'd his black Sheep, who were at times apt to get too much grog and Quarrel in their Cups." And he notes: "Captain Cook made all us young gentlemen, do the duty aloft the same as the Sailors, learning to hand, and reef the sails, and Steer the Ship, Exercise Small Arms & thereby making us good Sailors, as well as good Officers."

Cook describes the hard sailing this well knit crew encountered going farther south than man had been before: "Our ropes were like wires, Sails like board or plates of Metal and the Sheaves froze fast in the blocks so that it required our utmost effort to get a Top-sail down and up; the cold so intense hardly to be endured, the whole Sea in a manner covered with ice, a hard gale and a thick fog; urn::ler all these unfavourable circumstances it was natural for me to think of returning more to the North."

John Forster the naturalist recorded a moment of horror when "a huge mountainous wave struck the ship on the beam, and filled the decks with a deluge of water. It poured through the sky-light over our heads, and extinguished the candle, leaving us for a moment in doubt whether we were not totally overwhelmed and sinking into the abyss."

But Cook describes the Resolution in a heavy beam sea under a press of sail; "she went at a great rate and altho we went in the trough of the Sea, which as I have just observed run very high, we ship'd no water to speake of, nor indeed has she done it at any other time. Upon the whole she goes as dry over the Sea as any ship I ever met with."

The Third Voyage: 1776-80 Yet another voyage to the Pacific was being prepared to discover the legendary Northwest Passage, which like Terra Australis Incognita, had long been the subject of much geographical speculation. An ice-free passage north of the Americas to the riches of Cathay had been a dazzling prospect since the time of the Elizabethans. The Resolution, again under Cook's command, and another collier, renamed Discovery, would accompany her in this great

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

undertaking for which Cook had volunteered.

After sailing dowh Channel Cook anchored in Plymouth Sound and noted in his journal that "His Majestys Ships Diamond, Ambuscade and Unicorn with a fleet of transports consisting of sixty two sail bound to America with the last division of the Hessian Troops and some horse, were forced into the Sound by a strong sw wind." Cook weighed and stood out of the Sound, and with head winds plied down Channel, then standing south into the Atlantic to begin the long voyage into the Pacific. He departed from the Cape of Good Hope in late November, 1776 with cattle, horses, sheep, goats, rabbits and poultry with even a peacock and hen for introduction into New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Cook expressed concern about the future of the Islanders by noting that: we debauch their morals already prone to vice and we introduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility they and their forefathers had enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they had had with Europeans .

The ships departed from Tahiti bound towards New Alb ion, which had been discovered by Drake in 1579, and is now the California coast north of San Francisco.

Cook made a landfall on the coast of Oregon which he named Cape Foulweather, the weather continued with gales of sleet and snow as the ships struggled north. Cook noted what he took to be "a small opining in the land which flattered us with hopes of finding a harbour, these hopes lessened as we drew nearer, and at last we had some reason to think that this opining was closed by low land. On this account I called the point of land to the North of it Cape Resolution's figurehead-a ta/bot, a dog noted for resolute hunting and tracking. Now in the Dominion Museum, Wellington, New Zealand.

Flatery ... it is in the very latitude we were now in where geographers have placed the pretended Strait of Juan de Fuca, but we saw nothing like it, nor is there the least probability that ever any such thing existed". De Fuca is a vague and dubious figure in history, and he claimed to have sai led from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and back again, while searching for the Strait of Anian while in the employ of the viceroy of Mexico in 1592.

It was late in the evening of March 22, 1778 when Cook named Cape Flatery, and after standing seaward, he intended examining the land again at daylight, but the weather deteriorated, and he made an offing in gales of rain and sleet from the south. A week later Cook came to anchor in Nootka Sound, on what is now Vancouver Island, where considerable work was done in repairing and refitting the Resolution's masts and rigging.

He sailed on north and west making a running survey of the North American and Alaskan seaboard of three thousand miles in only four months, with its many inlets and islands. In the eastern Aleutians the vessels were almost lost when coming to anchor in thick fog and, says Clerke were saved by "very nice pilotage, considering our perfect Ignorance of our situation." Cook sailed north through Behring Strait in fog and cold, finally being turned back by impenetrable ice at 71 ° 41' N. He then surveyed part of the Asiatic coast in early September, meeting Russian traders on the island of Unalaska, in the Aleutians.

Deferring further exploration in the Arctic till spring, Cook sailed south discovering more islands which he realized were part of the Hawaiian group. On November 30, the island of Hawaii was sighted and the vessels came to anchor in Kealakekua Bay. Cook was received by a multitude of ten thousand islanders in a thousand canoes. Cook had difficulties with his men refusing to drink sugar cane beer in lieu of brandy, and while he had done everything possible to prevent the introduction of venereal disease into the islands by his sailors, this proved an impossible task. Cook's arrival in the islands fulfi lled legend and prophecy that he was Lono, or Robo, the deity of peace and abundance, who would one day return to the islands.

It all ended on the morning of February 14 when it was found that the Discovery's cutter had been stolen (probably for her ironwork). Cook decided to go ashore with a party of

15

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marines and invite the chief, an old man, on board where Cook would hold him till the boat was returned. This had always proved effective in the past to recover deserters or stolen articles. The chief agreed to come on board with Cook, but on the beach one of his favourite wives entreated him not to go, and he sat down . At this moment word came that a chieftain had been shot on the other side of the bay , at which moment the large crowd of asembled islanders decided to attack. A Hawaiian threatened Cook with a stone and a dagger and Cook fired his musket, loaded with small shot, which was deflected by the man's woven armor. Cook then fired the other barrel, loaded with ball, and killed a man . In a rage the islanders attacked and as Cook turned to order the boats to withdraw he was struck from behind by a club and sta bbed many times as he fell face down into the water.

Four other men were killed aside from Cook. Some time later his dismembered remains were returned to the ship.

Captain Clerke refused to permit any reprisals . Upon occasion the sailors did behave savagely, although the Hawaiian girls remained on board throughout these disastrous events.

It was an American, Capt. John Gore, of Virginia, one of Cook's trusted lieutenants to whom would fall the melancholy task of bringing the ships safely back to th e Thames, on the death of Cook and then C lerke. Afterwards he filled Cook's berth as Governor of Greenwich Hospital till his death at 60 in 1790.

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"There are statues and inscriptions," writes the late Dr. J. C. Beaglehole of New Zealand, greatest of the Cook scholars; "but Geography and Navigation are his memorials." He cites John Elliott, who said years later that he could not look at Cook's writing on a chart "without feeling the deepest regret at the melancholy loss of so great a Man." Ther.e is the New Zealand chief Te Horeta, who when he was a boy met Cook on the crowded deck of his ship, a quiet man, and remembered him in terms of the Maori saying: "A veritable man is not hid among many."

"Geography and Navigation," concludes Beaglehole; "if we wish for more, an ocean is enough, where the waves fall on innumerable reefs, and a great wind blows from the south-east with the revolving world ." .t

Mr. Brett, a noted marine artist, is also a scholar and one of the founders of South Street Seaport Museum in New York.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

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"She acquired the most necessary ingredient for protection against the scrapyard: people who cared. "

Built in 1913 al Bath Maine, the Chauncey M. Depew still shows the jaunty lin es of that age. Below, the dining area aft on the main deck. Photos by Francis J. Duffy.

The Chauncey M. Depew

By Francis James Duffy Associate Editor We are concerned about sh ips that should be prese rved and lament the many lost to the breakers. Too infrequently we celebrate one that is saved.

The Chauncey M. Depew is a such a success story .

The Depew was born in the Bath Iron Works in 1913, launched as the Rangeley and placed in se rvice with the Maine Central Railroad operating out of Bar Harbor, Maine. The 185-foot, 652-tonner ran in Maine waters for the railroad for eleven years, with time out for government service in World War I, and then was so ld to the Hudson River Day Line. She was named for the famous New York Republican Senator, Chauncey M. Depew, a Republican who had the name of being the best after-dinner speaker around at the beginning of this century, an age when that art was in fuller flower than it is today.

The little white excursion steamer had a sma ll capacity- I, 100 passengers-but did well in the charter business, for gro ups go ing here or th ere on the water, and on occasion she took overflow crowds from the larger boats, a nd became a familiar and well loved sight in New York waters.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Depew again entered government se rvice . With little feeling for the veteran, the war shippin g Administration took away her name and gave her just a number: FS89.

On her return from war service she rega ined her nam e a nd continued her old e mployment, thi s time in the Chesapeake Bay area, runnin g bet ween

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Baltimore and Tolchester, Maryland. In 1950 the Bermudan gove rnment bought her and for the next twenty years she sa iled the green island waters as a tender, taking passe ngers from cruise ships ashore. Displaced by a Diesel tender in 1969, she steamed under her own power back to the Chesapeake Bay area.

There were plans to turn her into a restaurant, a story we hear more and more with ship preservation projects.

She ended up at a dock on the North East River in Maryland. In the winter of 1971 an inlet valve froze and split , and the boat tipped over and sa nk . A couple by the name of Repoleys fell under the spell of the Depew, and she acquired the most necessary ingredient for protection against the scra p yard: people who cared. Refloating her after the boat had spent almost two years on the bottom, the Repoleys reached the point of no return with money. Alfred Johnson, who bought and saved the Nobska, in Baltimore, came along and saved the Depew from going to the sc rap yard.

(The Repoleys could have made more money selling the boat for sc rap-but they cared about her!)

She next appeared in October I 976 in the Morris Ship Canal in the company of other unemployed boats. Work continued on her, under a plastic wrap, but no one knew where she was headed.

One spring day in I 977 two green tu gs of the Bronx Towing Company, the Bronx and the Colonial, towed the Depew, dressed in a coat of new white paint, from the canal. She was taken across the harbor she knew so well into

the Hackensac k River to her new home in Secaucus. Once an area of pig farms and junk yards, the marsh land now has a sport s complex and high rent housing, a perfect place for a restaurant. And the Chauncey M. Depew is now the Aratusa Supper Club, a first-class restaurant owned by David Cory and Gary Palumbo. Senator Depew would feel right at home boarding hi s namesake vessel on the canopy gangway, entering the turnof-the-century decorated rooms and seeing the expensive menu.

Ship prese rvation purists may feel that something is wrong when they note the absence of lifeboats and any rigging but a string of lights. Once aboard, they'll find the old boat 's engines have been removed, as well as everything else but a row of benches on the second deck, and the original staircase. The former pilot house is an office, and air conditioning and heating equipment take up most of the space on the deck by the bow . There are pictures of the Depew in the lower lounge, however, and patrons of the restaurant can read her history on the back of the menu.

The ship is well protected from fire with a sprinkler system and considerate of the environment with a sewage system. The parking lot is landscaped and the boat's former propeller has a place of honor there. And because she has a living, money-making use, she lives! w This article is from the book Waterfront,

to be published in 1979 by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, which Mr. Duffy is co-authoring with James Wagonvoord.

19

1

Braynard

The Lessons of the Liberties

By Robert T. Young Chairman American Bureau of Shipping

This article evaluating the role of one of America's most important merchant ship types, originally delivered as an address to the Propeller Club in 1974, was presented at the Liberty Ship Seminar held May 19 in New York by the National Society (see "Ship Notes").

The Patrick Henry slid down the ways and splashed into the waters of Chesapeake Bay on September 27, 1941. the day had been designated "Liberty Fleet Day" and during the nation-wide ceremonies 13 vesse ls of other types were launched, but the Patrick Henry was the first of the Liberty ships. In a message to shipyard workers on the occasion, President Roosevelt refrained from calling the Liberties "dreadful-looking objects" as he had done when announcing the emergency ship program in January.

The Liberties were 10,865 deadweight ton, full- sca ntling vessels, with a raked stem and cruiser stern, a deck house, and seven watertight bulkheads. Yet they were instantly dubbed "ugly duckings" and "sea scows." They were considered expendable, with a short service life probable, maybe making only one or two voyages under wartime conditions.

Should any survive the war, it was

20

thought they would be of doubtful use.

Their 2,500 horse power engines gave a speed of 10 to 11 knot s, too slow for commercial servi ce, or for escaping submarine attack. One critic predicted that a Liberty ship would "stand on a wave and the ends would shape like jelly."

However, so mething had to be done quickly, or the "defense effort", as it was being called, would fail. In April of 1941, for example. almost 800,000 deadweight ton s of shipping was lost, and the sea lanes to England were bein g gradually strangled. Even with a U.S. bui ldup starting in January of 1941, it took until the end of 1942 for construction to catch up with ship losses. Massive numbers of simplified , quickly-built vessels were absolutely necessary to avoid a military di sas ter.

All together 2,710 Liberty ships were built between 1941 and 1944. These ships changed the course of World War I 1, and made the eventual allied victory possible .

More than 200 were casualties of the war, sunk or only partly salvageable.

Almost all the rest have been se nt unceremoniou sly to the shipbreaker's yard after 20 to 25 years of uneventful economic life, like the Patrick Henry

itself. Some have been transfo rmed to new purposes, so me met stran ge fates in service, and a few are still tramping around the world.

Not a bad record for "emergenc y" ships conceived in desperation , built in great haste, a nd shoved into a hostile sea. The experience ga ined from this wartime e ffort proved a valuable legacy, whose lesso ns are still being studied and applied. One of the lasting truths is that what co unts is not how much yo u have but what you do with it, and this holds for nations as well as for individuals .

Without th e Merchant Marine Act of 1936 which crea ted the Maritime Commission, the price of victory in World War II might have been much, much higher. As it was, by the end of 1940 there were only 19 shipyard s in the U.S. with a total of 53 berth s capable of building ocean-going merchant vessels over 400 feet in lengt h . Of these, 7 were small, nedgling yards developed with the ai d of the Maritime Commission. Shipyard employment had doubled since mid-1939 to around 47 ,000 people working on co mmercial vessels. Most importantly, they were gaining experience on techniques for building C-type "s tandard " ships.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

At left an unidentified Liberty Ship put s to sea during World War II. At ri g ht, the launch of the Robert ÂŁ. Peary .

The coming of the war forced the development of the Liberty ship as an "emergency standard" cargo carrier which could be built in new yards because increased Navy building took over most of the established yards. This resulted in the construction of shipyards where you might see emergency ships being built while the yard itself was being completed.

In all, 18 mostly new yards containing 210 slipways, with a work force which swelled to over 650,000 people by mid1943, built the Liberties. The new workers included housewives, farmers, clergymen, thousands of unskilled persons who had never been in a shipyard before, and many with unrelated skills.

One former dam-builder was heard to ask, "When do we pour the keel?".

By training each worker in one or two tasks, using sub-assembly methods to the utmost, applying mass production technology, and building a series of identical vessels, enormous savings in slipway building times were achieved .

The Patrick Henry was built in I SO days from keel-laying to launching. On the average, the second Liberty out of a yard took only half the time of the first to build, and the tenth needed only onefifth the time . Some yards achieved a rate of about 17 days from keel-laying to launching, though this could be beaten on occasion . The Permanente Yard No .

2 near Oakland, California, set the record with the Robert E. Peary-4 days, 15 hours, and 30 minutes.

Such speedy completion was made possible by welding large sub-assemblies elsewhere in the yard and then bringing them together for final assembly on the ways, a technique daring in those days but today a standard shipbuilding method. Welding was a somewhat risky procedure since the first large "allwelded " merchant ship had only been launched in 1937 .

In the face of such uncertainty, each yard was allowed to choose its own assembly sequence and the amount of riveting used, though uniformity was encouraged . American Bureau of Shipping surveyors cooperating with the Maritime Commission assured quality of workmanship. From the steel mills to the outfitting docks ABS surveyors had to balance demands for haste and shortcuts against the need for seaworthiness and safety in the Liberty ships. Their judgement was called upon every day during the crucial period when every delay and failure was a serious blow, while the tide of war surged remorselessly toward our shores.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Collection of Francis J. Duffy

When the Schenectady, a new T2 tanker and not a Liberty, broke in two while tied up at the outfitting docks, panicky doubts about welded ships spread rapidly.

ABS was asked to investigate by the Maritime Commision. Recommendations were made after the Schenectady was repaired and subjected to severe hogging and sagging tests which it passed satisfactorily. We suggested some design and procedural changes in the Liberties intended to avert similar problems without delaying shipbuilding efforts. Looking back, in 1945 I wrote, "The record of these quickly built welded ships has more than justified the adoption of welding in view of the number of vessels built, their ability to withstand enemy action without fatal damage, and the comparative ease with which repairs can be made to them . In fact, considering 5,000 or more welded ships built under the most adverse conditions, the loss through structural failure of a half dozen is less to be wondered at than the entirely satisfactory service given by hundreds of them when they were urgently needed ."

The first Liberty ship to fall victim of the war was the John Adams, completed in March of 1942 at Permanente Yard No. 2. It was sunk in the Pacific in May of the same year. Almost 50 Liberties were casualties during their maiden voyages . One of the worst experiences for a ship during the war was the murderous Murmansk run.

Convoy PQ 17 sailed from Iceland in .June 1942 with 33 vessels, including 6 new Liberties heavily laden with vital war materials . The immediate escort included 4 cruisers, 2 submarines, and other vessels, covered by 2 battleships, a carrier, 3 more cruisers, and numerous destroyers in the general area . Even so, massive "air attacks decimated the convoy and the ships were forced to scatter when a threat of assault by enemy battleships developed. Only I I vessels, including the Liberty ships Samuel Chase and Benjamin Harrison survived the

ordeal. Winston Churchill called it "one of the most melancholy episodes in the whole of the war." The 39 ships in the next convoy, PQIS, fared somewhat better with a massively reinforced closein escort including antiaircraft vessels steaming inside the convoy columns, a special attack force of 16 destroyers and a heavy cruiser, and a screen of patrolling submarines. This time 20 battlescarred ships, including 5 of the 6 Liberties which started the voyage, reached Murmansk in September 1942.

The Liberty ship could at times be wickedly unobliging to would-be sinkers. The Christopher Newport was torpedoed by a plane and two submarines before it actually went down in the Barents Sea. The Richard Bland was hit by a submarine torpedo while in the Arctic Ocean and led its attacker on a 5-day chase almost to Iceland before it was caught and sunk. The William Hooper resisted all efforts by escort ships to sink it by shellfire after being disabled by enemy air attack in the Barents Sea. Later it was sent to the bottom by an enemy U-boat.

Though lightly-armed, several Liberty ships fought off or helped sink attacking submarines. However, they could not escape fast enemy surface warships.

Thus on September 27, 1942, when the Stephen Hopkins saw the powerful commerce raider Stier emerge from a bank of haze in the South Atlantic, the end of her cruise was in sight. The Stier's six 5.9-inch guns blasted the Stephen Hopkins, leaving her sinking and on fire within 20 minutes. But the Stephen Hopkins' single 5-inch gun had gotten off 40 shots before her sinking and 15 of the 31-pound shells had been hits, knocking out the Stier's engine room, torpedo tubes, and rudder, and turning her into an inferno. As the survivors of the Stephen Hopkins rowed into the midst towards Brazil they heard the Stier blow up.

The inherent strength of the Liberty ship's hull plus its watertight compartments made survival possible in the face of damage more severe than any pre-war merchant ship could have sustained.

The William Williams was in the Pacific in May of 1943 when a torpedo struck its port side near the forward bulkhead of No. 5 hold, shattering plates and frames and blasting a hole through the starboard side shell plating.

The shaft tunnel was smashed, the shaft pedestals blown away or damaged, and bulkheads crumpled . The William Williams settled deep in the water with

21

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her decks awash. Abandoned and later reboarded, she was ab le to reach Fiji with the help of a tug, where it was found that 55 feet of after shell plating was completely missing. The William Williams was repaired and returned to service.

The Robert F. Hoke was torpedoed in the Arabian Sea in December of 1943 but wou ld not sink. It was towed all over the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in search of repair facilities, and at one point was abandoned and left adrift in a storm for almost two weeks. It was towed to Bombay where it was used as a training ship before being discarded and beached four years after the torpedoing-still with a 40-foot hole in the side.

The Nathaniel Bacon fe ll victim to mines in 1945 and was declared a total loss , but six years later its stern was joined to the forepart of the Bert Williams 2nd and steamed for 12 more years of economic life as the Bocadasse.

Some Liberties met unknown fates, like the Chief Joseph which, under the name Hai Chang, disappeared off the coast of China in 1962 with cargo of silver and go ld ore. Some Liberties which were turned over to the other nations have never been clearly accounted for.

Whole Liberties or part s of them have been converted into barges, docks, fishprocessing plants, and storage containers in dozens of places around the wor ld .

In New York we have the John W. Brown, which has been used by the Board of Edueation for over 25 years for maritime training. One Liberty, the Charles H. Cug/e, even sailed right into the atom ic age, becoming the first floating nuclear elec tri c-generating plant, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and renamed Sturgis.

How was it possible for the Liberty ships, practically thrown together in huge numbers by the simplest and fastest way ava ilab le, built from unt es ted plans by thousands of inexperienced workers, to possess the quality and endurance they had? The answer may be indi cated by what Admira l Land told Congress in 1944. He said, "I would be a stupid ass to come up here and te ll you that we are running this with any degree of perfection. We are not. We are just doing the very best we can with the too ls we have . " And that may well be the most important lesson to be learned today from the Liberty ship era- do the very best you can with the tools you have.

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22

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

ul{ARINE

q/jidiW( 2 ~NGINEERS $ENEFICIAL dssOCIATION

Assoc1A TED

ult

ARITIME @rr1cERS

AFL-CIO Fair winds and following seas to the National Maritime Historical Society

RAYMOND T. MCKAY, PRESIDENT

Anchors ... an WISHING FOR THE DAY "But when the fourteenth night was come , as we were driven up and down in Adr ia, about midnight the shipm en deemed that they drew near to so me country ; and sounded and found it twenty fathom s. And when they ha d gone a little further, they sounded again , a nd found it fifteen fathom s.

Then , fearing lest we should have fa llen upon rocl< s, they cast four anchors out of th e stern, and wished for the day .

"And as the shipmen were about to fl ee out of the ship, when they had let down the boat into the sea , under colour as though they would ha ve cast anchors out of the fore ship, Paul sa id to the centurion and lo the soldi ers, "Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved."

- THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES

Thi s sto ne a nchor recent ly di scovered o ff Caesa rea is the kind the a ncient s used, and it s design suggests why, o n St. Paul' s voyage, they had to use four o f th em.

PROPER TEARMES "The proper tearmes belon gin g to Anchors are man y. The least a re ca lled Kedgers, to u se in calms weather in a slow streame, or to kedge up and downe a narrow River, which is when they feare the winde or tid e may drive them on shore. They row by her with an Anchor in a boat, and in th e middest of the streame or where th ey find e most fit (drop anchor) if the Ship come too neere the shore, and so by a Hawser winde her head about, then weigh it againe till th e like occasion; a nd thi s is

kedging.

"There is a lso a s/reame Anchor, not much bigger, to stemm e an easie stream or tide . Then th ere is th e jlrst, second and third Anchor, yet a ll such as a Ship in faire wea th er may ride by, and are called Bow Anchors.

"The greatest is th e sheaf Anchor, and never used but in great necess it y."

-A Sea Grammar CAPTAIN J.O HN S MITH , 1627

Stained glass window from a lower Manhattan mission, courtesy South Street Seaport Museum.

Catt me

nn Anchor.

" IF I LIVE I'LL ANCHOR." WHEN NELSON SAID "ANCHOR," HE MEANT JUST THAT Trafalgar was fought in light airs with a greasy swell rollin g in. Aft er Nelso n was shot, while he lay below deck s dying, toward midafternoon that October 21, 1805, he hea rd Hardy' s report that fifteen of th e Franco-Spanish fleet ha d been captured. "But I ba rga ined for twent y," said Nelso n. Then, thinkin g ahead ,o n the vulnerable position of th e fleet , in shatt ered condition on a lee shore, he said emphatica ll y: "A nchor, Hard y, anchor! " Hardy sa id the second-in-command, Co llingwood would decide that. "Not while I li ve-, I hope, Hard y," said Nelso n, half-ri sin g. "No, do yo u anchor. For if I live I'll anchor. " Co llingwood did not give the order to anchor till lat e that nig ht , with a full ga le blowing. Of the ultimat e eighteen ships ca ptured , only four were brought into port by th e E nglish victors. If Nelson had lived , he would have a nchored, a good idea today in a ti ght spo t.

- P ET E R STANFORD

The anchor is a symbol of hope in the Christian faith. One waterfront neighborhood pub we remember well had above it the "Faith Hope Anchor Mission." The pub and the mission flourished together until the bulldozer knocked them both down to provide "open space" in an urban renewal development. One wonders what people find on that empty, littered corner today, half so refreshing to body and soul as what they found there before this costly improvement took place. A pub near Greenwich, England, still stands, we trust, under this sign: "We Anchor in Hope. " Things like anchors come to us from time out of mind, their message is part of the world as we have learned to see it today. In these pages we plan to publish, from time to time, comment on such everyday objects of the seafaring experience and we invite contribution from readers on this.-ED.

(

td Anchoring TO ANCHOR H EAD TO WIND -W IND FREE. See that th e officers a nd men are a t th eir stat ions, and the strictest sile nce prese rved , as th e ship nears her berth; ta ke in all the studding sails, get the burtons off the yards, and th e jiggers off the topgallant yards; send the booms and sails down from a loft; ma n the fore clew-garnets, buntlines a nd leech lines; the mainsail is ha ul ed up as the ship is going free; topga llant a nd royal elewlines; lay aloft and sta nd by to furl the sails snug, and squ a re the ya rd s by th e lifts and braces; have hands by th e for e tac k a nd shee t, topga lla nt and roya l sheets, halliards, weather braces, a nd bowlines; up foresail, ii;i to pga lla nt-sails a nq royals; furl th e sails snug, and square the yards by the lifts and braces, hauling taut the halliards. Man the topsail-clewlines a nd buntlines, weat her braces, jib-downhaul, a nd spa nk er-o uthaul ; att end th e sheets, halliards, a nd spa nk er-b ra ils, ease down the helm , ha ul down the jib, ha ul out th e spa nk er, a nd when the topsail lifts, clear away th e sheets, a nd clew them up; th en let go th e ha llia rd s, clew down, and sq ua re a way the yards immedi ately; ha ul a fi the spank er-s heet, and when the headway ceases, strea m the buoy, stand clear of the cable; when she begins to go astern, let go th e a nchor, brail up th e spa nker, crotch th e boom, ha ul ta ut the guys, light -to th e cable, as fa st as she will ta ke it, until a suffici ent scope is o ut , when stopper. Furl sails, ha ul ta ut a nd stop in the ri gg ing, se nd the boats' crews aft, to lower th e boats down . Let th e boats.wain go ahead to squ a re th e ya rds-clea r up the decks.

- The Ked ge-A nc hor WILLIAM BRADY, 1850

Ca ked in th e mud of th e Riachuela, Waverlree's anc hor hangs in the sun on th e morning of her hi sto ri c passage to th e Buenos Aires Navy Ya rd in late t 968 . Thi s is the same a nchor she sa iled wit h from England 84 years ear li er.

WORRIED AT LAST On the eve ning o f th e third day it co mmenced to blow . The watches had been broken and o nl y o ne man and an officer kept watch a t ni ght. I was as leep in my cabin, when a bo ut I A.M. I was awakened by a rumbling so und which penetrated lo my room above the shrieking of th e wind in th e ri gging. It was the ship dra gging her a nch or.

A little later I hea rd the Mate knock on the Captain's door. " What is it," he said . " The ship 's dragging her a nchor."

"Well don ' t bother me, slack away the cable."

Subsequently, I hea rd the chain running out as the Mate slack ed away, but I co uldn ' t go to sleep aga in as the noise of the wind was too lo ud a nd co nstant.

About 2 A.M. the dragging reco mmenced with its acco mpan ying reverberation.

Again th e Ma te kn ocked on the Captain' s door.

"She is still dragging."

"Well, slack away more cha in , don't keep bothering me."

"Aye , Aye," said th e Mate.

More chain was slacked, an d aga in a period of qui et; but at more freq uen t intervals I hea rd the cab le being slack ed away; until fin a ll y th e mate again

knocked on the Old Man's door.

"Now what's up, " I heard .

"S he's still dragging," from the Mate.

"Well slack away more chain, slack away, yo u know wha t to do withou t pestering me." " I ca n't slack away anymore, it 's on th e bitter end ."

"Well let go the other anchor, you fool."

"Aye, Aye," said the Mate.

The seco nd a nchor was dropped, and th en at interva ls the reverberation a nd a so und of chain being slacked. The wind by now had taken on a new note, th e shrieking in the ri gging was th ere, but with it a hea vy drumming noise. Suddenly the ship took a list to port , a very noticeable one, whi ch brought the Capta in o ut of his room in a hurry. The sh ip was aground on one of the sa nd bank s.

In th e mornin g th e wind had dropped almost entirely, a nd we found we were surro unded with single piles, th e sh ip hav ing passed between two of them, and one of the ga rd en plots had sprout ed a full-rigged ship; listing over had brought sa nd into th e lee scuppers, backwash from the shoals, I suppose.

Now the Old Man was worried at last.

-Wavertree; An Ocean Wanderer GEORGE SP IE RS

25

ALOHA KAIULANI Part III: A Name that Lives In SH 9 we began our accounting of the National Society's trusteeship for the people of the United States of the remains of the bark Kaiulani, last American-built square rigger to carry sail. Here we continue with a memoir from two descendants of her builder, Arthur and Sewall Williams reporting how the name Kaiulani came to live in their family. (Nicknames have varied, we learn; the first Kaiulani Sewall, who became Kaiulani Sewall Lee, was always called Lani; her daughter Anne Kaiulani Williams Winter is called Anne; Anne's daughter, Anne Kaiulani Winter, is called Kai; Sewall Williams's daughter and the younger Kaiulani Sewall Lee are called Lani like their grandmother.)

Surviving correspondence shows that at one point the Sewalls wanted to have a figurehead of the young princess on the bow of the bark. In the end, however, this was not done.

We expect to continue with an account of the Alaska Packers Trade, in which the Kaiulani served under the name Star of Finland, and then a report on the vessel's last voyage (Christmas off Cape Horn in that voyage was reported in SH 5), back under her original name Kaiulani.-ED.

Kaiulani Sewall Lee examines the Kaiulani 's remains at Todd Shipyard, Seal/le in the spring of 1977. On Memorial Day 1978 these were brought 10 the vessel's home port, San Francisco, completing a voyage round the world beg w1 in 1941.

(See " Ships No tes, " p. 33.)

On October 16, 1875, the Crown Princess of Hawaii, Kaiulani, was born to Likelike and A.S. Cleghorn. This name, Kaiulani, meaning child from heaven or child from the skies, later became a prized name for children born in a New England shipbuilding family, as well as the name given to the last American-built square-rigged deepwaterman to sail tl)e seas.

The proud ship Kaiulani was built in Bath, Maine, in 1899, receiving her name at her launching in December, nine months after the death of the Princess in March. The Kaiulani was built by Arthur Sewall and Company for William Diamond and Company of San Francisco, to be used in trade between San Francisco and Honolulu. The 225-foot, steel-hulled, three-masted bark, painted white, became well known in the island trade and was a graceful tribute to the young Princess whose

name she bore.

In the same year, 1899, on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, Harold Marsh Sewall of Bath, Maine, and his wife Camilla Ashe named their daughter after the Princess. Harold Sewall, son of the "Maritime Prince" Arthur Sewall, was serving his country as Minister to Hawaii under President William McKinley and assisted in the disputed annexation of the islands by the United States.

Harold and Camilla Sewall's child Emma Kaiulani Sewall married John Winslow Williams of Baltimore, Maryland. They had three sons and a daughter whom they named Anne Kaiulani Williams. Their second son, Harold Sewall Williams, married Ann Sparrow of Englewood, New Jersey.

Their second child, a daughter, was named Kaiulani Cooper Williams.

Anne Kaiulani Williams married Edward Winter of New Canaan, Connec-

26

Kaiulani Sewall William s, daughter of Harold Sewall, the American Minister who hoisted the American flag over Hawaii in 1898. Her namesake ship Kaiulani is shown as she first voyaged, on our inside back cover.

ticut, and their first child was named Anne Kaiulani Winter. Harold and Camilla Sewall had another daughter, whom they named Camilla. Camilla married Walter E. Edge of Ventnor, New Jersey . Their daughter Camilla married E. Brooke Lee, Jr., of Silver Springs, Maryland. Their second child was named Kaiulani Lee. Four Kaiulanis are alive today.

Kauilani Sewall Williams, first daughter to carry the name of the Hawaiian Princess, died in 1949 and is buried in the family plot in Bath, Maine, with her father Harold Marsh Sewall and grandfather Arthur Sewall, builder of the bark

Kaiulani.

May this name Kaiulani live on with pride in the Sewall family in generations to come, remembering a lovely young princess and the last Yankee square ri¡gger to carry sail.

SEWALL and ARTHUR WILLIAMS

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

TOWARD A SHIP TRUST FIRST REPORT OF THE SHIP TRUST COMMITTEE THE NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY was founded in 1963 by citizens to help advance the maritime heritage. In 1964 the Society accepted in trust for the American pe9ple the hull of the Kaiulani, last American-built square rigger to make a Cape Horn voyage. Congress voted funds for her restoration, but the monies were never disbursed, and only th e remains of the ship were saved .

Members of the Society, however, led in founding major seaport museums in San Francisco and New York, institutions built around great historic ships that were saved by citizen vision and effort that sum moned the resources needed to do the job. A third major historic seaport center came into being with the active involvement of th e Society's leaders in Philadelphia.

These cities had no vestige of the maritime heritage on their waterfronts in 1950. Today they harbor the most extensive collections of great historic ships in the world.

Around the great ships, public involvement in the heritage has grown. Each center today sends forth ships in active sea training programs, and maintains the living continuity of maritime crafts in restorat ion and building programs ashore. The waterfronts of these seaportsand of other ports inspired by these and precedent examp les set in Mystic, Connecticut and San Diego, California-are rich centers of history, deeply inspired by the challenge and learning of the maritime heritage that first gave them life .

The Role of Government: Change is Needed In 1974, after the loss of the schooner Alice S. Wentworth in Boston, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massac husetts and Representative John M. Murphy of New York introduced in the Congress a bill for a National Ship Trust to save historic ships. This was set aside after vigorous representations made by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a government-supported agency, that they would underta ke the mission.

Since that time, the Maritime Preservation Committee of the National Trust has developed its program, which has served to date to channel funds raised by citizens in Operation Sail-1976 to various projects which apply for aid. Two conferences have been held, and some valuable technical surveys made. We support this program . But more is needed.

For in this time three great ships with valuable roles to play have been lost to us forever: the grain bark Champigny, the New York paddlewheel steamer Alexander Hamilton, the San Francisco Gold Rush ship Niantic.

Relatively small sums, put forward on an emergency basis, would have sufficed to save these ships; but such aid was not forthcoming , nor could citizens summon it overnight.

In this period also, however, the National Society secured another Gold Rush ship with the support of H . R.H. Prince Philip, the Vicar of Bray; with the help of the Republic of Cape Verde the immigrant packet schooner Ernestina/Morrissey is being saved; the FRANK CARR International Chairman KARL KORTUM San Francisco Maritime Museum

Galveston Historical Foundation reached out to rebuild the bark Elissa in Greece, which had been saved by the National Society's efforts for return to their city; and this year the National Society returned the remains of the Down Easter St. Mary to Maine, and the remains of the Kaiulani to San Francisco.

Clearly these unaided citizen efforts could have accomplished more under the aegis of a recognized Ship Trust with appropriate government support.

The Role of the Citizen: Support is Needed The National Society in March this year formed a Ship Trust Committee including museum, sail training, and mar ine archaeological interests, to look into a new form of the Ship Trust set aside in 1975 . Senator Kenned y has described its mission:

"To the extent that the sea has always taught us lessons in cooperation and determination, it is indeed fitting that you should be gathered together as a band of citizens, united in the task of reviving our maritime heritage. " Senator Kennedy, Representative Murphy and other leaders in the Congress have pledged their support to this effort. This we consider a proper and encouraging relationship.

The first finding of the Ship Trust Committee is that a Ship Trust is needed to advance the maritime heritage.

That heritage lives only as people bring their interest and their support to it-and these citizen efforts should be united in recognized form in a Ship Trust embracing historic ships, sea training and maritime arts and skills.

The Ship Trust would be affiliated with the World Ship Trust in London. The heritage of the sea is one-the heritage of man seafarer.

Second, we shall propose new laws and pr.ocedures to achieve these ends: • A Maritime Heritage Division in the executive arm of the government, to receive advice and focus supportive programs on high-priority undertakings .

• An emergency fund to be provided for saving imperilled ships which have a place in the maritime heritage.

• A national register for historic skills and arts in the maritime heritage.

• Revised laws to encourage operation and insurance of sail and other sea training vessels.

• Strengthened protection of und erwater artifacts in national and international waters.

Third, we believe that more important than anything we ask of the government is what we ask of ourselveswhat those dedicated to this work achieve in the field.

To this end, we invite all concerned citizens to subscribe to and join in the work of the Ship Trust Committee of the National Society.

It is our intention to accomplish the full foundation of the Ship Trust, with participation of all who subscribe, within one year of this date.

PETER STANFORD Chairman, Ship Trust Committee

GEORGE BASS Institute of National Archaeology

BARCLAY H . WARBU RTON, Ill American Sail Training Ass'n

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 2 FULTON STREET, BROOKLYN, NY 11201

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

27

The Beast on the Beach

By Peter Throckmorton Director, Falkland Islands Project

Fearless Throckmorton signals ship to tow off a small bit of St. Mary.

Smashed up in collision and storm off Cape Horn, the Down Easter St. Mary was wrecked in 1890 seeking shelter in the Falkland Islands (SH 4, 9, JO). Her riven hulk was the object last winter of a recovery effort mounted by the National Society. Report will be made in our next issue of other objects of the Falkland Islands Expedition, sponsored by South Street Seaport Museum with the National Society. This report from our Project Director records a critical step in the return of a section of the St. Mary to the Maine State Museum in Augusta.

Thanks are due Frank Carr of the World Ship Trust, Sydney Wignall of the Atlantic Charter Maritime Foundation, the Governor and Council of the Falkland Islands, the Argentine Government, the Falkland Islands Company, the British Antarctic Survey, Earthwatch volunteers, Dow Corning, Homelite and others who made possible the return to Maine of the St. Mary section.

We set off Tuesday mornin g (February 28) at 3 AM, aboard the Falkland Isla nd Company motorship Monsunen for the run to Pleasant Roads, where the remains of the St. Mary have been readied for pickup by o ur vo lunteer crew encamped on the beach. Skipper George Betts points out the mark s as we proceed through light fog-Kelp Islands towa rds Cape Pembrok e, whose lighthouse flickers vag uel y, Kelly Rocks, christened by another unfortunate Down Easter, the John R. Kelly, a nd then the infamous Billy Rocks, where the wreck of the City of Philadelphia lies atop a doze n others, scattered and smas hed by th e great gales that come roaring up from th e Antarctic.

After a four-hour run we a nchor off the beach. It 's raining lightl y as I a m put as hore. Small seas, but still big enough to fill one's boots, break on th e great lumps of timber nea rest th e water. We have 40 tons of this stuff to move, in a doze n pieces. One piece from the tweendeck s, two deck beams wide by ten feet long, is fearsomely heavy. We have christened it: " Th e Beast. " We have mumbled abou t cu tting it but always lacked heart to do that dras ti c thin g. It lurks in the soft white gritt y sa nd , scowling at us.

Mike Wallace, who has taken his vacation da ys to help us as tractor driver, helps me hook up a wire to one of the smallest pieces, the upper deck clamps, waterway a nd coverin g board. A nice easy one to start. The trac to r roars, bounces, bogs down. We can't budge it.

My confidence evaporates. We hold a

conference over coffee, and decide to get a line from the Monsunen, whose crew have fini shed the sy baritic break fast I smelled frying in the galley as I left.

They bring a line ashore. We start hooking up lumps, (after one near disaster in which tractor is nearl y towed to ea), and Monsunen tows them off. C rew drags wire about, I hustle to ri g up lumps so they will neither fall apart nor distort, an d so they'll tow properly.

It begins to rain more definitely. The seafarers offer us lunch, a proposi tion regarded with sco rn by the ragged, sandy mob of Spartans on the beac h. We are not envious as we watch th em disappear into their nice warm galley aboard .

We dig a nd ri g while they fill their bellies. The y bring as hore some love ly mutton stew and mashed spuds, which we eat. Resuming work, we have become a team of professionals. The big lumps sk id off the beach like gia nt sea turtles, one after the other, to be towed alongside Monsunen and hoisted in. By 6 PM, soa ked, exhausted, happy-, we confront the Beast.

We ri g the mon ster. Monsunen pulls.

The hawser break s. We dig, jack, sk id, rig tractor to push, hook on repaired wire. Beast mo ves, bounces over beac h, int o water and, unlike all th e others, sink s. Sea truck bumbles in vague circles, man in bow pokes gingerl y a t the spot whe re the lump disappeared.

After a series of conferences by radio, broken in on by distant Spanish fishermen discussing other catches, decision is made to haul sunken Beast in on Monsunen 's anchor winch. This works! The lump appears und er Monsunen's bow , derrick hook is rigged, derrick takes the strain a nd the little ship leans toward us as the weight came on her. The Beast look s enormous as it ri ses past Monsunen 's fore shrouds, dripping, black, menacing. I cross fin gers, spit, hope derrick will bear stra in. As we watch, the Beast disappears into Monsunen 's forehold.

"W hat did that damn thing weigh, anyhow?" I as k George Betts, sipping a Johnny Walker in dry clothes in Monsunen's ca bin at 8:30 PM. He grins, pushes the bottle across the table. "Not more than tw o tons, I shouldn ' t think . . . ! " .V

Monsunen, ,leaning over, swings the Beast aboard as dmy ends. Photos: George Cooper.

28

SEA HllSTORY, SUMMER 1978

Elissa is Re-launched, With Her Aristocratic Nose Restored-and Much Else Besides

By Walter P. Rybka Co-director, Elissa Restoration Galveston Historical Foundation

The effort to save the Elissa has spanned more than a decade. It began in the late 1960s, when Peter Throckmorton, who had kept an eye on the ship since 1961 from his home in Greece, was put in touch with Karl Kortum by the National Society. Kortum had sp ied her out separat ely, through the worldwide correspo ndence he maintains from the San Francisco Maritime Mu se um . Together, the two began plotting to bring her to San Francisco, and when her owners, who had run her in cigarette smugglin g, had a falling out with their crew and put her up for sa le in 1970, Throckmorton mortgaged his house and schooner to buy her. The San Francisco effort fell through. Efforts were made to put her in the City of Liverpool Museums-inclu ding an appeal made by the Society's president Peter Stanford on British TV in 1972. Then Kortum brought in David Groos, a wealthy Canadian Member of Parliament, who bought the ship to bring into Vancouver as a muse um. Hi s untimely illness and death ended that venture.

It would take a new effort to save her.

That effort bega n in 1974, when Michael Creamer, curator of the Model Shop at South Street Seaport Mu se um, came so uth to join in restorin g old build ings in Galveston. There he met John Paul Guido, a leading trustee of the Galveston Historical Foundation, who asked Michael what he thought of building a replica of a 19th-century sailing ship for the historic waterfront .

Michael suggested: Why not go for the real thing instead? The big four-ma sted barks Champigny (since scrapped) and Peking (now in South Street) were considered, with others, and dropped as too costly to restore. Besides, Peter Brink, director of the Foundation, insisted on a ship with real ties to Galveston. Elissa had bee n there-had traded extensively to Southern ports, in fact, and to New York and Boston as well. At 400 ton s she seemed manageable as a project. In October 1975 the Foundation bought the

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

vessel, and Creamer became Restoration Director with Guido serving as a very active comm it tee chairman to organize the effort. Donations of wood, steel, paint and equipment flowed in. In 1977 I joined as co-director to help manage the burgeoning project. In July that year we finally got to Greece, with four volunteers from Galveston to help clean out tons of junk and prepare the vessel for docking.

Dumped in a stran ge port with an incomprehensible mission, we were helped out immensely by a chain of individuals who had worked with Throckmorton.

Foremost among them is Nikos Pagamenos, an independent contractor working out of the yard where Throckmorton kept his schooner. With his help we hammered out a contract with the G. Koroneos yard, where Elissa was hauled out on October 6, 1977. Costos Sevastos joined as an Engli sh-s peaking manager and expeditor. Owner of a small caique, he run s a food importing business but spends only enough time in his office to fin a nce hi s cruising. He is one of the most amusing men in Greece and that se nse of humor was as important as the sk ill of the shipfitters or the advice of surveyors in seeing us through, for it was not an easy job.

Elissa is being rebuilt to Lloyd 's class.

Pla te after plate had spot s as thin as 3mm. Faults in the old iron so metimes led to under-readings in our ultraso nic gaugers- in creasingly we came to depend on a $3 hammer wielded by surveyors, and mechanical gauging by 300 drilled holes to supplement 3,000 electronic readings.

When it came time to bend the stem bar for reconstruction of the "Aberdeen bow," (part of the "aristocratic" look Kortum had noted in paintings of the bark under sa il) the yard proposed cold bending of the heavy metal, which is local practice. Lloyd' s insisted on a heated bend, to relieve stress that would otherwise be built into the metal. Discussio ns proceeded in the worst of two

The lovely bow, as 1he clipper yard of Alexander Hall buill ii in 1877, reslored. Michael Creamer's earlier repor/ (SH 4) gives drawings of !his lransformalion and a summary of !he bark's career under sail.

languages unt ii surveyor Brian Pierson came on the sce ne-he covered his eyes in horror at what the yard proposed.

Lloyd's prevailed.

After seven months on the slip, Elissa was launched again on May 13, 1978.

She is now afloat with 50 tons of her 200-ton structure replaced. A few more plates must be renewed in the topsides, and all deck s and bulkheads must be renewed for her return to Galveston this winter. Masting, riggin g and outfitting we expect to complete in th e United States, where it will support the development of local ship skills. .t

A quaner of !he "aristocratic bark" by weigh! was replaced, to fit her for 6, 000-mile voyage home under tow this winter.

29

New England Schooners List

By Beth Haskell, Assistant Curator Some are over 100 years old, some brand new ... and more are building. "Up till now," writes Captain Robert S. Douglas of Shenandoah, "1 have been unaware that any marine museum anywhere in the U.S. has cared one whit about the U.S. windjammer business-which has just about singlehanded been insuring a continuity of know-how in operated sizeab le sailing vessels." Here SEA HISTORY presents a first listing of twenty such vessels operating in New England waters. A fuller report is needed, but meantime, addresses are provided for further information on a particular s hip.- ED.

Lewis R. French (built 1871, Maine) 64' Box 482, Rockland ME 04841

Stephen Taber (built 1871, NY) 68' Box 736, Camden, ME 04843 Ramping off on a beam reach, the schooner Isaac H. Evans of 1886 shows her heels.

SCHOONERS OLD AND NEW

by Charles F. Sayle, Sr.

It is good to see the Ship Trust Committee shaping up. It was tough to lose the paddlewheeler Alexander Hamilton in a gale last November, and she looks pretty well lost without a miracle in some form.

It was tough losing the coaster Alice S. Wentworth in a late winter gale four years ago. I worked with the National Society on that one, and I am back at work now on plans for the new Alice they plan to build one day at Mystic Seaport.

Late this spring the people in Provincetown on Cape Cod are starting work on their replica of their fishing schooner Rose Dorothea, half size from just below the water line up . Hull 62' long and 87' over bowsprit and main boom.

Same idea as Lagoda only a bit longer.

There's a lot going on in wooden vessels.

Ernest Smith of Fairhaven is making canvas sai ls for new coaster John F. Leavitt that may be launched at Thomaston, Maine, in August. She is shaping up well. I saw the plans for a shoal draft 3-mast coaster drawn up for Ned Ackerman last su mmer, a beauty in the works for a future date. Pete Cu ller drew them and has the go-ahead to design a deepwater 3-master for a later date.

Herb Smith and family of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, are having a 65 ' schoon er pilot type built at the Gamage Yard in South Bristol, and are

30

advertising for paying guests to go on an 18-month trip around the world, starting in November 1978. Bud Hawkin's son Havilah is going to have a new schooner built, possibly at the Gamage and Stevens Yard at Boothbay. There is plenty of small wood boat construction going on to the east'ard. Work is to begin on the towboat Seguin, now hauled on the rebuilt north ways of the Percy and Small Yard at th e Bath Marine Museum.

They have been waiting for the ice to go out of the river to continue raising the old Laura Goulart at Bath, and if things work out she will be hauled out astern of the Seguin. The project to build the new Columbia is slowed down until a site can be found on the Gloucester waterfront for set up. The Gloucester Story Museum, which gives a fine picture of the old fisheries under sail, expects to move to Rogers Street on the harbor, where all visitors can find them.

*

*

*

1 hear the o ld Boston fisherman Virginia, now Buccaneer at Pensacola, Florida, is on the bottom. L.A. Dunton and America are st ill alive and we may hope the Laura Goulart will come up soon; all three were built 1921. The numbers of these old schooners are few.

We should treasure what we have, and it's good to see the real revival we're having in this kind of building. w

Mattie ( 1882, NY) 81' Box 617, Camden ME 04843

Isaac H. Evans (1886, NJ) 64.5' Box 482, Rockland ME 04841 Victory Chimes (1900, Del.) 132' Rockland, ME 04841 Richard Robbins, Sr (1902, NJ) 58' Box 722, Ridgewood NJ, 07450 Mercantile (1916, Maine) 78' Box 617, Camden ME 04843 Bowdoin (1921, Maine) 81' Box 696, Camden ME 04843 Nathaniel Bowditch (1922) 81' Capt Gib Philbrick Harborside ME, 04642 Roseway (1925, Maine) 112' Box 696, Camden ME, 04841 Adventure (1926, Mass.) 119' Box 696, Camden ME, 04843 J & E Riggin ( 1927 NJ) 89' Box 571, Rockland ME, 04841 Timberwind (1931, Maine) 69.5' Box 247, Rockport ME, 04856 Mary Day (1962, Maine) 83' Box 798, Camden ME, 04843 Shenandoah (1964, VA) 108 ' Vineyard Haven, MA, 02568 Mystic Whaler (1967) 100' 7 Holmes St., Mystic CT, 06355 Bill of Rights ( 1971 Maine) 125 ' Box 477, Newport RI, 02840 Harvey Gamage (1973, Maine) 95' 39 Waterside Ln., Clinton CT, 06413 Rachael and Ebenezer ( 197 5) 105' Box 200, Peconic NY, 11958 Mistress (new) 40' Box 617, Camden ME, 04843

w

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Ship Notes, Seaport & Museum News INTERNATIONAL Carrick, built in 1864 as the Australian passenger clipper City of Adelaide, was raised February 8 after sinking at her moorings in Glasgow, Scotland on January I\. Moored alo ngsid e a pier, with a deckhouse bu ilt over her, she had been used since World War 11 as a Royal Naval Rese rve Club. Th is 791-ton full rigger was built in Sunderland of teak over iron frame s, and is the last true cl ipper afloat. After immi grant packet service, she served in the A ustra li an wool trade with the former C hin a clipper Cutty Sark, five years her junior, which is now preserved at Greenwich. "Surely," says Mariners Int ernationa l, 'the clipper ship City of Adelaide deserves a better fate th an that of an unri gged clubhouse if not a foundering hulk.

HMS Discovery, wooden steam aux iliary bark built for Robert Falcon Scott's 190 I Antarctic expedition, is now offered to any suitable spo nso r at her Thames Embankment mooring in London, where she has lain since 1937 in service as a RNR headquarters a nd museum sh ip . Rebuilding estimated at $ I million or more is required to replace rotting timbers, a cos t so me new organization will have to take on. After Antarctic service she was so ld to th e Hudson 's Bay Compa n y, and served under charter to the Fre nch government carrying supplies to Russia in World War I. Sir Vivian Fuch s has noted that she represe nts "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration," and s he was a pi oneer in oceanographic and whale st udi es carried out in the Anta rcti c before her retirement. Frank Carr, World S hip Trust chairman, terms her a treasure of th e maritime heritage which "sho uld receive most favored treatment among our national m on uments."

Richard Goo ld -Adams, Chairman of the S.S. Great Britain restoration, reports that Brunel's great iron steamer of 1843 " really had a rather good 1977" in her builder' s dock in Bri s tol , de s pite ge ne rall y difficult economic conditions in England . The mainmast was stepped, a replica of the fl ying bridge was built, and work begun on the immense task of lay ing th e main weatherdeck.

Ahead li es th e building of a replica engine.

Polly Woodside, built at Belfast in 1885 and las t survivor of the square riggers laid up in Australian waters after World War 11 , was opened this sp rin g as a maritime museum in Melbourne. Full restoration is est im ated to take anot her two years, but her mas ts a re now stepped a nd rigged through the topga ll a nt s and quarterdeck fully res to red, in culmin a ti on of a ten-year campaign whic h involved the National Society through Vice Presid ent Karl Kortum.

Bonhomme Richard, John Paul Jones' s ship in his famous fi ght with the Serapis o n September 23, 1779, is the object of a new recovery effort led by Sydney Wignall, a

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Welsh di ver and hi storian involved in th e National Society's Falkland Island s project.

Thi s effort is financed by C li ve Cuss ler from proceeds of his best-selling book, Raise the Titanic. It is hoped that locat ion and identification of the remains of the Richard, which sa nk soo n after Jones transferred hi s flag to the captured Serapis, will lead to major recovery operations in 1979.

Tall Ships-Norway. Besides Tall Ships Pacific, many sa il training vessels wi ll be involved in activities in th e North Sea end in g in a Tall Ships Parade into Olso Harbor on August 15. Thirteen are expected to race from Gothenburg, Sweden, on Augu st 6, to Faerder Light at the entrance to Oslofjord by way of Scotland's Shetland Islands.

Operation Drake's t wo-year voyage around the world in the bri gant ine Eye of the Wind (SH 10, 21) will begin from Eng land October 22. This is a n official project of the National Society's Ship Trust Commi ttee , and we expec t in cooperat ion with the American Sa il Training Association to offer so me at-sea training for American stude nts accepted for the voyage. On the voyage, students (ages 17-24) will engage in projects ranging from underwater archaeology and oceanographic research to disease co ntrol a nd community improvement in lands visited en route. Inquiri es, applications and contributions to support thi s international undertaking may be sent to the National Society, marked "Operat ion Drake ."

NATIONAL Alvin Clark, Great Lakes topsa il schoon er of 1846, has been put up for sale by Frank Hoffman, the diver who found and raised her and tried for ten yea rs to restore her . Los t in a n a utumn ga le in 1864, she was discovered

by Hoffm a n in 1967 and ra ised in Jul y 1969.

"Local plans for a Great Lakes Marine Museum never materialized," notes Tom Avery, a citi zen who dedicated himself to s upporting Hoffman's effort s. "F und s to restore and preserve th e Clark eva porated .

Hoffman so ught help from the State of Michigan .. . from the Federal sources ...

But no help materialized!" Dried o ut in a giant oast co nstru cted by Hoffma n, the ship 's timbers are fast deteriorating today and a major co mmitm ent is now urge ntl y needed to redeem Hoffman' s devoted effort over the past decade, a nd to redeem for America and the world a recognized national treasure: a s hip with a ll her gear, her yard crossed, recovered whole out of the world she sa iled in over a century ago .

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A lvin C lark, photo, Norman Brouwer

31

SHIPNOTES, Cont.

Ernestina/Morrissey Report

By Michael Platzer Project Director New life is stirring aboard the immigrant tina. Wareham, home of Enrique Menpacket schooner Ernestina, born in 1894 des, owner of the Ernestina for 25 years of service in the packet trade, plans an as the Gloucester fishing schooner Effie Ernestina Festival July 2nd, in which the M. Morrissey. The Cape Verde Republic has rededicated itself to the repair and Hudson River sloop Clearwater wi ll take return of the vessel, hiring thirty carpenters and laborers for the rebuilding work. This work force will be gathered from around the Cape Verde islands and brought to Mindelo to replace frames and planking when the sh ip is hauled out this summer.

The young Dutch shipwright Frans Meijer, shown below aboard one of the schooners he has restored in Portugal, has been retained as supervisor for the rebuilding of the ship to complete the voyage she began to the United States in 1976-a voyage that had to be called off when she was dismasted en route in high winds and heavy seas.

An Ernestina Commission has now been established by the State of Rhode Island as well as Massachusetts .

New Bedford, Massachusetts, center of the Brava packet trade, has committed an initial $25,000 for a waterfront renewal project centered on the Ernes-

part. Last summer's sail training program, based in Onset and begun in anticipation of the Ernestina 's return, will be expanded this summer bringing in young people from a ll over the East Coast, with dormitory space being provided by the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The Ernestina/ Morrissey Committee has exceeded its goa l of raising $30,000 through community benefits and private contributions. A $5,000 gift by Lucille Langlois of Washington, D.C. has set the pace for the larger gifts that will be needed. The National Endowment for the Humanities has augmented its existing $10,000 grant with a second grant of $10,000 matching on a two for three basis the $30,000 received in private contributions. In Eng land, the Cummins Engine Corporation, through the interest of its Chairman, J. I. Miller, has donated parts and expertise for the engine, which is now in work in g order.

And Shell Oil has pledged fue l for the vessel's return voyage. This community undertaking is thus coming to reality with the help of many hands. Additional help in donated materials and tools, funds, mailing lists, foundation contacts are urgently needed for the work ahead.

Contributions and inquiries may be made to the National Society marked "Ernestina." .t

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32

Thomas F. Bayard, New York pilot schooner built in 1880 in Brooklyn, was recent ly su rveyed in Vancouver, British Columbia , by Captain Harold D. Huycke, Trustee. He found her in basical ly sound condition but in need of much work. Her owner, J. Park Mackenzie, has been forced by ill health to abandon hi s long-term project to restore the vessel, and she is currently for sale. In her long history she rounded Cape Horn for the Klondike Gold Rush , and later served as the first lightship on Canada's West Coast. (See SH 8, 26-7.)

Kaiulani completed her voyage around the world, on which she set out 37 years ago, as her remains were unloaded over Memorial day weeke nd at Pier 44, San Francisco. Her keel and bow and stern sections were brought down as a contribution by Crow ley Maritime Corporation on a barge from Seattle. Last of 17,000 American-built square riggers to set forth on a commercial voyage, she was the ship the National Society was formed in 1963 to hold in trust for the American people. A report of Christmas off Cape Horn in the bark is reported in SH 5, pages 35-37; a report on her full career was begun in SH 9, is continued with a family memoir in thi s issue, and wi ll continue through future iss ues.

Harry Dring, Fleet Captain of the Historic Ships Park in San Francisco, was donkeyman on the 1941 -42 voyage, and led the effort to bring her remain s back from that voyage.

A national conference on the Monitor, held in Apr il 2-4 at Raleigh, North Carolina, reviewed th e case of the Civi l War warship sunk off Cape Hatteras and lately rediscovered (SH 9, 10-12). Theodore Ropp, noted maritime historian of Duke Un iversity, Philip Lundeberg of the Smithson ian Institution, and other leaders including Lars Barkman of the Wasa Nationa l Maritime Museum in Sweden spoke on the overwhelming hi storic and technological importance of the ship. Caution was repeatedly urged in any recovery effort. One Federal spokesman said any such effort would compete at too great a cost for the limited $45 million historic preservation budget; a spokesman for the citizen-based Monitor Research & Recovery Foundat ion sa id perhaps a little competition is a healthy thing for the field . No firm conclusions or agreements were reached; we hope to presen t a review and recommendations in our next issue.

Nationa l Marine Education Association will hold a conference dealing with man's uses of the sea at Evergreen State Col lege,

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

NIANTIC IS LOST: A COMMUNITY MOURNS Olympia, Washington , on August 9-11.

Regi stration ($30 or $25 to members) closes June 30 but perhaps you ca n be a la te entr y.

Write NMEA, 56B Pres idio Bl vd. , Sa n Francisco CA 94129 or ca ll (415) 561-3221.

Liberty Ship Seminar held by the Nation a l Society in New York on May 19 included farranging testimony on the value of th e Liberty (see Chairman Robert T . Young's remark s, page 20 thi s iss ue) . Among panelists were Dr. Mel vin Jack so n, new Director of th e US Merchant Marine Academy Mu seum, a nd representatives of groups working to save th e Jeremiah T. O 'Brien in San Francisco a nd John W. Brown in New York . Send $ 15 (Members $5) to join Project Libert y Committee, rece ive co nference transcript and Save-a-Liberty kit.

Niantic, a Gold Ru sh ship deeply imbedded in the hi story and m ythology of San Francisco's founding, was uncovered thi s sprin g in the course of excavations for a new 19-s tor y office building at the corner of Clay a nd Sansome Streets in the heart of the city's fin a ncial di st rict. She was put ashore th ere in 1849 on what was once the shore of Yuerba Buena Cove, and became a hostelr y advertisin g "Res t for the Weary and Storage for Trunks." The fire of May 4, 1851 burnt her upperwork s and the Niantic Hotel was built upon her low er hull. In 1907 a new buildin g was erected on the site, and it was thought th e Niantic had vanished forever . But on Ma y 2 the timbers of her bottom through the turn of the bilge, admirably preserved in th e muck of landfill, were identified by the San Franci sco Maritime Mu seum, who had been called in by J. Patrick Mahoney, developer of th e new building.

On May 11, after a d es perat e, ten-day effort to save her , bulldozers broke up the remain s of the ship. Saved from this di sas ter were an 8-foot section and part of the stern donated to the Museum by th e deve loper , together with man y artifacts stored in the hold , including a book bindin g press, two cases of champagne, two pistol s, a rifle a nd other relics of Gold Rush San Francisco.

Estimates of th e cost of recovery, which bega n at $ I million , had been sca led dow n to

around $600,000 in day-a nd -ni ght studies and barga inin g ca rri ed on by the mu seu m and the develo per with various contractors and engin eers. Toward the end the developer said a ny seriou s mon ey on the table, even $25,000, wo uld have ma de it poss ibl e to save the ship and rai se funds for ultimate repay ment.

The National Trust for H istoric Preservation, appealed to in thi s matter, paid for a photogra mmetri c survey and subsequent stud y to develop th e ship' s lines.¡ The National Trust claims also to have " made available" $ I00-150,000 toward recovery.

They further state that while the hi storians may have gone "down with the ship," as one newspaper account headlined , the National Trust did not go down with the ship.

As to our position, we feel we did go down with the ship , becau se we have failed as yet to get a na tional program for ships, including an emergency fund for just such cases as the

Niantic.

We mourn with the people of San Francisco, who carved hol es in the fence with penkni ves just to glimpse the most famous of th e ships that built their city. We echo the appeal of our vice president Karl Kortum, director o f th e San Francisco Maritime Museum, to bring home the Vicar of Bray, the other survivin g Gold Ru sh ship, now in the Falkland Island s. Said Kortum: "Maybe now the co mmunit y ca n get together. " PS

A Head of Steam Tall Ships a re a t sea on both coasts in strenuou s races thi s summer. Tall Ships Pacific, the main effort , is desc ribed in our lead article. The East Coast effort will see a bout 30 vessels rac ing from Baltimore to Norfolk , th ence to Philadelphia, Newport , a nd Boston, where th ey will be welcomed in th e Boston Harbor Harbor Festival on July 2.

The Philadelphia Maritim e Mu se um' s 157 'ba rk entine Gaze/a Primeiro, built in 1883 a nd th e la st squ a re ri gge r to trade in the At la nti c, head s a fleet includin g Myst ic Seaport's Brilliant, th e Pride of Baltimore, th e Tampa Sea Scouts' brigantin e Unicorn a nd th e Sea Edu ca tion Association's sc hooner Westward.

Only 1/ 10 of one percent of the la st yea r's $45 million Interior Department hi storic preserva ti o n budget wen t to a ship . Far more support has flowed from Federa l programs und e r th e Co mpreh e nsiv e Employment Training Act a nd the National E ndowment for th e Humaniti es than from the hi storic preservat io n program. In the wake of the Alexander Hamilton's sinking last fall, th e National Society's Ship Trust Committee was invited to Washington to help brea k thi s logjam and get funds to preserve ships. A progra m ma ndating $5 million for s hips has now been proposed with our backing, open to all projects applying with state hi storic preservation o ffi ce support. Even if adopted, work will be needed to adapt procedures to the need s of ships. Inquiri es on these e ffort s may be directed to the S hip Trust Committee at th e National Society.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

By Frank 0. Braynard Ever since Horace Greeley said those historic words: "Go West young man, go West," Americans have been preoccupied with the absorption of our vast Continent. New trails, new towns, new roads, new cities made us forget our heritage of the sea, our dependence on ships and seamen. But now America is turning back toward the water. Operation Sail did much to speed this trend.

Before Horace Greeley, the American seaman was a leader of his comm1:mity, the shipowner a "merchant prince ." In those early days our maritime enterprise saw no limits . America created the steamboat that turned the rivers of the world into broad highways of commerce. Our maritime genius built the little Savannah of 1819, the first steamship ¡to cross any ocean. Native sons pioneered in the concept of the packet ship, a vessel which would sail on schedule whether she had cargo "full and down" or not, thus revolutionizing world trade and shippin g. Our clippers brought. fame .to American ship designers the world around. Operation Sail set into motion a return to these historic maritime values of our earliest years.

Our new appreciation of our waterfront comes at a crucial time both for New York and our nation. It comes just

as our entire port is undergoing the most dramatic change in its 400-year history.

The arrival of the containership, the "Lash" Ship, the supertanker-all these recent developments have made most of our hundreds of miles of so-called "improved waterfront" out of date. Our five boroughs are rimmed with unused and decaying piers-with a few notable exceptions. Huge new container ports have more than taken up the slack but remain largely unknown to the big public. What is to be done with the miles of abandoned pier areas? This is the big question in our seaport city today! Will we be far sighted enough to rebuild this potentially magnificent public asset for general use by the big public?

The 1978 Harbor Festival in New York will take place in all five boroughs.

Water oriented, it will include many shoreside events. A parade of ocean liners will highlight the four-day weekend from Saturday, July I through Tuesday, July 4. To be called Operation Liner, this will set the stage for an even larger event in 1979, on June 30th . Other 1978 events will include a parade of historic sailing craft down the East River and around the Battery and up the Hudson, parades of historic sailing ships, power boats and many other wateroriented displays. .t

33

SHIPNOTES, Cont.

EAST COAST Maine State Museum now has o n di splay

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Glen Oaks , NY 11004 Bargemusic Ltd . in vites you to att end its chamber music concerts Sundays, April th rough Jul y at 4:00 p.m. on the Barge- Fult on Ferry Land.ing, Broo kl yn, NY $5.00 per concert -for reserva11 ons

call (212) 624-4061 Different progra ms arc presented by a quin tet o f Juillia rd g rad uate mu sic ia ns.

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Bargemusic is a no1-fo r-pro f1t fo unda 11 on.

findin gs from th e three year recovery of a rtifacts fro m th e Defence, sunk to avoid capture in th e ill - fa ted Peno bscot Ex pedition o f 1779 . A furth e r a rchaeo logical exhibit sc heduled to o pen la ter thi s yea r will present a secti o n o f th e Dow n Easter Sr. Mary, recovered by th e Na ti o na l Society's Fa lkland Isla nds expediti o n, repo rt ed elsew here in this iss ue.

Bath Marine Museum has ann o unced the dona tion o f hith erto-sec ret pl a ns o f th e fa stest J -class rac in g yac ht eve r built , the Ranger. Above , Direc to r Ra lph L. Snow loo ks o ver a sheet o f plan s with La wrence A .

Co uture (a t left) who work ed o n the boat when she was built a t Ba th Ir.o n Work s in 1937.

Strawberry Banke, in P o rtsmouth , New H a mpshire, p roposes to build a Pi scata qua gunda lo w o ver th e nex t two summ ers. th e 69 ' cra ft, to be built o f tra dition a l ma terial s in th e Ba nke' s resto ration yard , would ply the ex tensive ri ver trade rout es se rved by her predecessors, to edu cate th e public in Piscataqu a Ri ver Hi s to ry.

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34

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Hudson river stea mer Peter Stuyvesant, vi ctim of the Februa ry 6 storm th a t cost li ves a nd boats in New Engla nd, was swept o ff her cradle, ha lf ro lled over a nd sunk a t her Boston H a rbo r berth. Own er Antho ny At ha nas pla ns to resto re her to her success ful caree r as sta ti ona ry a dj unct to hi s Pi er 4 restau rant.

American Shipcarvers' Guild has fo rmed a new cha pt er in Pl ymo uth , Massachusett s, ca lled th e Nath a ni el Winso r C ha pt er a ft er a n impo rt a nt loca l ca rver. Masterca rver Pa ul Sa les heads th e cha pt er a nd ca n be reae hed a t 7 H ow la nd St ., Plymo uth , MA 02630 (Te l.

(61 7) 746-8503). Int e rest is deve lo ping in a New Yo rk c hapt er to meet a t th e Na ti o na l Society's Broo kl yn head q ua rt ers-ca ll or writ e Beth Ha s kell.

The Wareham Historical Society (M assac husetts) re po rt s t ha t the I 8th-centu ry ho me o f Ca pta in J o hn Kendric k, sea hero of the Revolut io n a nd leader o f the fa mo us voyage of th e Columbia to the P ac ific No rthwest in 1787-90, is to be o pened to th e publi c thi s summer a ft e r a four-year res to ra tion proj ec t.

Built in 1745 , th e house will becom e a maritime mu seum .

Mystic Seaport's new Directo r, J. Revell Ca rr , repo rt s o n th e new co mprehensive exhibit , " New E ngla nd a nd th e Sea ," in th e la test M ys ti c Log. In th e ea rl y 1970s th e Mu seum bega n to rea li ze th a t visit o rs " were hav ing a n int eres tin g time, a nd were learning ma ny th ings a bo ut o ur ma ritime herit age," he says, but : "we were no t fulfillin g o ur ob li ga tio n to help peo ple understa nd the bas ic story o f the rela ti o nship of th e peo ple o f New Engla nd with th e sea." Accompli shed during Mr. Ca rr' s seve n-year tenure as cura to r, th e ex hibit seems to us to li ve up well to th a t o bli gati o n ."

U.S. Merchant Marine Academy a t King's P o int , New York , has a ppo inted Dr. Melvin H . Jackson , fo rm er cu rator o f Ma rin e Hi story fo r th e Smith so ni a n, as direct o r.o f it s new maritim e museum , whi ch is ex pected to o pen la ter thi s yea r. Dr. J ackso n, a n Advisor o f the Na ti o nal Soc iety, is we ll known for hi s work with mu seums a nd resto ration effort s a round th e country.

Hudson River Sloop Clearwater proudl y a nno un ces th e ar rival o f two small sisters of their pa rent sloop. Do ne to designs by Cy rus H a mlin , des ig ner o f Clearwater, they are th e 32' fe rry s lo ops Woody Guthrie, la unched April 23 a t Rondo ut C reek, Kingston , New Yo rk , as shown a bove, a nd Sojourner Truth,

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

SHIPNOTES, Cont. building in Maryland. Guthrie is built of traditional Catskill oak, Truth of 5/ 8" fer rocement. " Th e ferry sloops are c hunkier, to give stability and sa fet y," says Pet e Seeger, a t whose lead the boat s were built , "but they'll be sturdy, friendl y looking craft, a nd we believe they will know their way with the winds and waves of rivers and bays as well as the Clearwater does."

SHIP MODELS

South Street Seaport Museum's Wavertree was hauled on May 2, beginnin g a major restoration effort supported by a grant of $160,000 in Operation Sail funds, transmitt ed throu gh the National Tru st. Thi s dr ydoc king, the fir st si nce she was hauled in Bue nos Aires ten years ago prior to her trip north, revea led hull plating in excellent condition.

Calvert Marine Museum, at Solomons, Maryland, ce lebrated its third anniversary by dedicating the Drum Point Lighthou se on June 24, a notable beacon to add to it s growing co ll ec ti o n which now includes local sma ll craft.

The Maryland Dove, whose keel was laid in St. Mary's C ity, Maryland, in Jun e 1977 , is completing for fall com mi ss ioning. The 65 ' vessel is of the sa me type as Lord Baltimore's Dove, which helped found the colon y of Maryland in 1634. She'll be the first major exhibit of a new outdoor museum a nd colonial settlem ent at St. Mary' s City .

Jamestown Park is hauling it s ships thi s year for rebuilding and refit on a s pecially constructed railway, which will become part of the publi c di splay at the Park, six miles outside Co lonial William sburg in Virginia.

They are, from left to right a bove, the 100-ton Susan Constant, 40-ton Godspeed, and 20-ton Discovery, built 20 yea rs ago as active sa iling replicas of the ships that founded Jamestown in 1607.

The Mariners Museum of Newport News, Virginia, has announced an International Model Ship C raft sman Competition-open to both professionals and amateurs, that closes Jun e 1980. Write th e Mu seum, Newport News, VA 23606 for in formation.

WEST COAST San Francisco Historic Ships Park, now part of the Golden Gate National Recreat ion Area, report s that volunteers at work on th e 1907 ocean steam tug Hercules are forming a society of stea m engine enthusiasts-who wi ll also work on the giant walking-beam engine of the ferry Eureka, and the triple-ex pan sion engine of the 1915 sc hooner Wapama of the era of Cappy Ricks. With Friends of the Alma covering the sailing side, we s hould see new citizen energies flowing into the ships at th e Hyde Street Pier. The Cape Horn square ri gger Balc/utha should soon be amalgamated with thi s fl eet, bringing her own volunteer crew and th e energies also of the Friends of th e Eppleton Ha ll , under direct ion of th e trustees of th e private San Fra nci sco Maritim e Mu seu m.

Encouraging beginnings for what may become a National Maritime Museum (West Coast ), under the National Park Service!

Volunteers apply Historic Ships GGNRA, Fort Maso n, San Francisco CA 94123.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Friends of Eppleton Hall (see SH8) steamed their 1914 Tyne paddle tug out to meet the liner QE 2 on the liner' s first visit to San Francisco on April I, leadin g a fl eet of welcoming craft which in clud ed the Ha fen polizei steam launch Burmah Queen. Crews of the two British steamers exc hanged visits and engineering information, a nd th e Eppie saw her younger compatriot sa fely out of harbor again as the day's fes tivities ended.

"After a six-month layup for boiler overhaul." report s Bill Burgess, "we kept our promi se to ma ke thi s date a t the very last minute. It was worth it! " The eve nt inaugurates another summer' s stea ming for the famous old tug, which will include visits to the river port of Petalum a a nd other ventures in the Bay. Virgina V, built in 1922 and last survivor of the Mosquito Fleet, the steamboats that once thronged Puget Sound, is being restored to operating condition by the Virgina V. Foundation, Inc., in Seattle. Also in Seattle, a Maritime Heritage Task Force is working with Northwest Seaport and Hi storic Seattle Authority to es tabli sh a regional hi storic sea port. Virginia V may join th e coasting schooner Wawona and other vessels in thi s long-planned , mu ch-needed facility.

From our own workshop: finest quality wood ship kits-clippers. schooners, fr igates, Iankers. freighters-30 in all. Beautiful fittings; no lead or plastic . Also plans. books. Iools, materials. fittings and marine prinls. At better dealers or sen d Sl. 00 (refundable) for big illustr-ated catalog .

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LAKES & RIVERS

Schooner St. Peter, which sa nk on Lake Ontario in 1898 , is being investigated by the Wayne County and Putneyville Historica l Societies and the Rochester Mu seum. Artifact s recovered will be carefully handled; no hasty recovery is planned.

Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen, an organization that has been sav ing and preserving artifacts from American riverboats for 15 years, has co mpleted restoration of the pilot house from th e steamer Tell City at the Ohio Ri ver Museum in Marietta Ohio .

Their excellent j ournal The Reflector also report s the restorat ion of the Trillium, a stea m sidew heeler that takes charters out of Toronto, Canada.

Mary Elizabeth, a stea mer known at "Proud Mary" from a so ng by Credence Clearwater Revival, has been docked at a pier in Memphis for two years now. She is rusty and her deckhou se is fire- damaged but her owner still wants to restore and run her for c ha rter in the Memphi s area if money can be found. The Mary Elizabeth was built in Newburgh, NY in 1905 and originally used to ferry prisoners to Sing Sing pri so n.

You can help keep us a nd our readers informed of maritime news in your area by sending clippings or a short note to Beth Haskell , NMHS, 2 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NY 11201.

1-;.~ S-;;amship H~~al Societ~;;;m~i~ I~. l [ Please send me further information.

I Name

I Address

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City

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I --1 -----_ _ State

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I I

35

John Stobart Discusses His Art "I've always been restless, and had to get things done," says John Stobart. For a moment his ever-moving hands are still, a bright-eyed gaze confronts one from under quizzical brows. After many talks with John Stobart, the artist who may be said to have taken the marine art world by storm after the first showing of his work in this country at Kennedy Galleries in New York in 1967, this account of his work was gathered, in his words, while he talked and thought about his art. If the word "I" occurs often, it was because I was asking questions meant to be answered that way, in personal terms!-M.M.

Above, John at work in his Georgetown studio. After his first "South Street, " John came hack to the subject to create "South Street by Gaslight," the inviting scene below, full of the life of waterfront shops and pubs and of the great ships stirring in their berths after a rainstorm, under a clearing sky.

By Maryanne Murphy Marine Art Editor Where was I born? In Leicester, England, on December 29, 1929. I went to school in Derby. Derby is in the middle of England, about as far away from the water as you could get. But I visited relatives in Newcastle, and my grandmother in Liverpool. When I was eight or so I would spend all day, I remember, riding the overhead railway which had an exciting view of over 30 miles of bustling harbor, and I found I could also ride the Mersey ferry a ll day by buying a one-way ticket and hiding in the ladies room during dock inspection. My visits to Liverpool were enticing, and when I returned to Derby I was starved for the excitment of the harbor. I think that the starvation of the subject rather than everyday involvement gave me this restless fascination I have for ships, sea and man .

Somehow I could never quite concentrate in school. I enjoyed geo metry, art, and geography and did well in them, but I couldn't apply myself to English, and didn't get my school certificate. I was much more interested in the war. I was fourteen at the time I did a fantastic drawing of the Bismarck, every rivet was in place! I would also spend hours making ship models, and when I was thirteen I made a canoe. My friends and I would race our canoes on the Derwent River. I later built a 16-foot fishing boat.

My father, who was a chemist, recognized my interests and had the good sense to enroll me in the Derby College of Art. 1 had a brilliant teacher who concentrated on the fundamentals of drawing, and the traditional ways of painting. We were taught to paint with a pallet of five colors using fatty oil paints. The colors? French ultramarine, burnt siena, cadmium yellow, windsor red and permanent green.

We used only these five colors to insure the continuity of colors on the canvas. You would be in trouble if you used fifteen different colors, so mething wouldn't blend somewhere. We were also told to go down to the museums to look at the paintings to see how the masters did it. (The Barbizon painters were my favorites-I like very romantic paintings.) Painting is a craft which you have to learn like woodwork or metalwork. You have to have the intention and the staying power. I had a very disciplined childhood, which no doubt prepared me . Well, I learned to draw and paint, and having accomplished that believed the world to be at my feet.

After four years at the Derby College of Art I received my diploma and a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art in London where I studied for five more years. My schooling wasn't completed until 1956, when I was 27. While 1

"Pillsburgh, the Monongahela Wa1e1front in 1900," throbs with activity, fro111 the small craft in the foreground to the passenger s1ea111ers beyond, and vividly illustrates our dependence on the waterways, which only diminish ed in this century. A I right, a closer look at the Francis J. Torrence.

was attending the Academy I took some paintings I did of the Thames River into a gallery on Bond Street and was surprised to find that they sold very well. I was thrilled to find out that I could make a living from producing paintings of something I truly enjoyed. I started to exhibit my paintings at Royal Society of Marine Artist exhibitions in 1951, and was elected to membership in 1956.

In 1957 I left England for Montreal, Canada. I realized that if I really wanted to succeed al being an arti'st I had to leave England. The English class system is detrimental to someone who is trying to come up from the bottom. In this country, if you are good at what you do there is nothing that can hold you back .

I still had a home in England and spent part of the year in England in order to fu lfill commitments I had there, and spent the rest of the year in Canada. In

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

doing this 1 made 21 trans-Atlantic crossings, which gave me the chance to observe the motion of the sea and wave formation. At this time I was painting ocean freighters for steamship companies. I must have done 400 paintings of this sort. But in 1965 I took a year off from painting steamships and did five paintings of sailing ships, wrapped them in brown paper English style with string hanging off and got on a train to New York.

I had no idea where I was going to take these paintings when I got there, but I was on an overnight train which came from Toronto to Buffalo, and the last thing it did was pick up commuters bound for New York. A fellow took a seat next to me, and I noticed that he was looking at art literature, so I asked him where he thought I could take my paintings. That's how I wound up at

Kennedy Galleries, right off the street, looking a little worse for wear after an overnight train ride. Rudolph Wunderlich took a look at my paintings and offered me a show right then. I just couldn't believe it! It took me two years to put together my first exhibition, which was held in 1967. I did 21 paintings averaging between $3,000 and $5,000 in price. The show sold out in three weeks.

The most memorable painting from that group was "South Street by Daylight," which was my first port scene, and the start of my present-day dedication to document important port scenes that were never painted in their heyday.

In 1970 I decided to move to this country and took up residence in Darien,Connecticut. In 1974 we moved to San Francisco because I wanted to do a painting of the Gold Rush era. I ultimately did a major port scent of the

37

MARINE ART

"Black Ball Packet Orpheus Leaving East River N. Y." catches the vessel ho ve- to off the Battery to pick up her boat prior to setting out on her lransA tlantic passage to Liverpool, on a breezy northwest morning 150 years ago. Courtesy Kennedy Galleries.

Vicar of Bray in Yerba Buena Cove during the Gold Rush, November 1849. I had the steamer New World painted in.

Then the librarian from the muse um came over and told me that the New World hadn't arrived here until man y months after the Vicar. Well I had to take the whole bloody thing out, and after some more careful research painted in the sidewheel steamer Senator. She was there all right, and I believe in getting a thing right. I feel that if I don't have it right, then it' s not worth doing.

In 1975 we moved to Potomac, Maryland, and I acquired a st udio in Georgetown. Our home isn ' t on the water, but gardening is a passion of mine, and the soil is very rich. I also love to fish, and the Chesapeake isn't very far. And of course there is the business of making prints of my paintings-a business I run myself. Thus I am totally responsible for the quality and ethics of my prints. High-quality fine art prints are never produced by accident. In order to produce prints that convey the varying characteristics and textures of each individual painting a select number of color plated , custom-made paper, and specially formulated inks are used, under the direction of the master

38

ASMA NEWS

printer. The credi tabilit y of the prints is kept through a strictly limited edition, made under these controls, after which the plates are destroyed. I sign and number each print. "South Street By Daylight " and "The Schooner Yacht America" are sold out and the collectors price is $1000. I like to think this is good busi ness for the buyer, as well as myse lf!

Painting is my first love, and I hope that I can maintain my momentum. I have n't reached my peak yet. I've really got to loosen up . I want to achieve a loose free-flow feeling while !T)aintaining accuracy. Incidentally, I make all the frames for my paintings. I enjoy working with the wood and making a frame that is really suitable for the painting.

What next? I wa nt to get outside and paint, I've been too long shut up in this damn studio . And I think I'd like to teach th at kind of painting. As a st udent , I was tau ght to go outside and paint, where everything is happening.

There are very few people today willing or able to teach the fundamentals of drawin g, perspective and art expressed directly from life. The loser is the aspiring young a rtist.

Maybe the Society of Marine Artists will do something about that! .t

The American Society of Marine Artists now exists as an independent nonprofit corporation, under the pres idency of Charles Lundgren . This new organization, which found its beginnings through the National Maritime Historical Society, is dedicated to public education, setting standards and offering opportunity to aspiring artists in this most lively field.

Charter memberships at $25 are invited, from both art ists and those who enjoy marine art. Charter membership does not, of course, constitute acceptance as an Academician or Artist Member. These determinations will be made followin g the Society's First Annual Exhibition, to be held at the U.S. Customshouse Exhibition Gallery in the World Trade Center, New York, from October 16 through November 15.

A most successfu l marine art show was held with the co-sponsorship of the National Society as a highlight of National Oceans Week in Washin gton D.C. , April 16-23 . Thirty-four paintings were exhibited, ten of which are now on loan for a revo lvi ng ex hibition in the House Merchant Ma rine and Fisheries Committee Room , through the courtesy of Congressman John M. Murphy, who spoke at the opening recep tion .

Inquiries and membership applications may now be sent to ASMA, P.O. Box 211 , Mamaroneck, N. Y. 10543.

MARYANNE MURPHY Executive Director

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

Interested in Purchasing Eskimo Material Ivory, Wood, Bone or Related Items Collected During Early Arctic Trading Period.

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DUNCAN McFARLANE Built al the J ohns ton Yard, Wiscasset, Maine , 185 4 Oil o n canvas. 2 4 x 3 6 inches Signed lo w e r ri gh t , and dated 1860

VOSE l@nedy r;Jalleries JOHN STOBART

Whe n in Myslic visil the

TRADEWINDS GALLERY 43/ 47 W. Main, Mystic , CT 06355 Tel. 203-536-0119

19th & 20th Century Art M arin e Subjects and Regional Scenes , Marine Antiques , Oriental Art and Objects.

C urrently we offer works by S Aalund, R . Deis, C. D. H odges.

W . Homer , A . Jacobsen, M . Johnson.

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SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

"A.G. Ropes in New York Bay," 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas

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39

The Book Locker

By David 0. Durrell Publications Director

SEA HISTORY PRINTS

A collection of important harbor and river views during the heyday of the merchant sailing ship by the renowned marine artist

JOHN STOBART ALEXANDRIA, C INC INN ATI, DARIAN, GEORGETOWN, NANTUCKET, NEW ORLEANS, NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, SANTA FE, SAVANNAH

Published as limited edition collector's prints. Prices are $200.00 signed and $400.00 remarqued, except for New York, Savannah and Nantucket which are rare prints with prices subject to the dictates of the collector's market. All prices are subj ect to conti nued availability and are liable to increase.

Through the generosity of the artist, half the price of the prints will go to benefit the work of the National Society. Orders and inquiries sho uld be sent to: NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY 2 F ulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 Tel: 212-858-1348

OPSAJL WEST 1978

ON SALE SOON

NEW YORK OPSAIL 1976

ON SALE NOW!

The bQok section of a newspaper or magazine is esse ntially a one-way conversation about new and relevant books.

Its editor's primary function is to choose titles tha t are important enough to command review space. He then engages the reader in the aforementioned o ne-way chat, or farms the book out for so meone else to do so. What the rev iew says, then, is only one person' s unrefuted opinion.

Savvy readers are aware of the nature of this exchange, and place more importance on a book's subject matter , the amount of space allocated to the review, and the prest ige of the reviewer to whom it is ass igned than to what he has to say about it. These things publishers have learned b y watching sa les resu lts. And everyone has a current story to tell about a book whose sales increased dramatically after a particularly vic ious critical assau lt!

In all of this, the reader is unfortunately cut off from one of the more interest ng aspects of the world of books .

As a rule he has no opportunity to speak with the author whose work is, after a ll , what this exchange is abou t.

We have decided to ho ld a ga min th e Book Locker for you and an aut hor (or authors) whose work is relevant to SEA HISTORY . We hope in this way to bring yo u, the reader, to the cabin tab le where the talk goes on. Captain Irving John so n, author of The Peking Battles Cape Horn, has offered to heave to and come over in the longboat for the first session. We invite your q uestions, whether about his career, his beliefs, regrets, second thoughts or new aspirations-whatever. Send in your queries to the Book Locker! This is yo ur turn.

SHIP LORE GALLERY PRESENTS

KIPP SOLDWEDEL Two hundred thousand people throughout the world enjoy Kipp's Soldwedel 's full color prints of the NEW YORK TALL SHIPS of OPERATION SAIL. We can 't give you the scene of OP.SAIL WEST (Vancouver, B.C., July 20, 1978) before it happens, but we can offer both signed prints for $75.00 and guarantee delivery six weeks after the event occurs.

We offer this opportunity to you to save you money and reserve your print.

Remember, it's a signed print, and signed prints increase in value.

r----------------------------------1 Okay to charge it. Fill in credit information.

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( SHIP LORE GALLERY

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40

Sailor Historian: The Best of Samuel Eliot Morison, ed . Emily Morison Beck (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 43 1 pp., $15).

What can one say, confronted with the best of a man so unique ly gifted, so completely dedicated, so full of achievement, and of humor, a ffection, occasio nal (but unmistakable!) anger, and ultimate sc holarly balance and hum ane app reciation as Sam Morison? World War I private, Wor ld War II Rear Admiral (by special comm ission of Presider'lt Roosevelt, to ensure that the sailorhisto rian would both experience and write the war at sea), his life work dominates our maritime histo ry as we know it toda y. But if this superb vol um e leaves o ne impression, it is not of dominance, but the engaging qualities of

SEA HI STO RY , SUMME R 1978

BOOKS a very great writer who succeeds again and again in enco uraging you to share in the sm a ll and great truths of our experience at sea .

Hi s anger emerges in Jovian style , or the style of that o ther Sam, Sam Johnson in 18th-century London who argued by firin g a pistol and then throwing the pi stol in yo ur face; and it is directed at uncannily similar ta rge ts: above all the slipshod , the pretenti o us, th e tediously self-se rving. Fo r the careless or merel y thou ghtless he had a merely frost y style that I remember well as student ; it sent one sc urrying back quite literall y to one's book s. (In later yea rs, typicall y, he was generously supportive of the work this stud ent fell into.)

Somehow 1 think it is as biographer that Mori so n's work will most live.

What a rare gift , to enter so fully into the li ves of men so different as Columbus, Commod o re P erry (his finest biograp hy, I think , tossed off almost as a n extra, in ap preciation of a man of warm a nd ge nerous charac ter acting successfully in strict Nava l mold) , or that irremediable ge nius and scapegrace John Paul Jones? Clio, put up yo ur pen : we have th ese su bjects now, and with them, so mething very precious of the spirit of th e ma n who best knew them because he was sailor as well as savant, and of stro ngly humane bent a nd impulse himself.

The sea is not the whole world, nor was it Moriso n's-a point nicely illustrated in work both charming and profound to be found in this volume.

But it is good to think, in this dedicated, deeply rewarding life that began in 1887 a nd ended in 1976, that Morison's seafaring, pursued into his final years, broug ht him rewards on some scale comparable to those it brought and will ever bring hi s readers.

PS The Battle of the Atlantic, by Terry Hughes and John Costello (New York, Di a l Press/James Wade, 1977. 342 pp., illus., $ 14.95 ).

H ere is a st irring account of th e immense a nd highly costly st ruggl e on the hi gh seas, the behind-the-scenes politi ca l st ru ggles a nd the vital contributions made in the ship ya rd s, factories, a nd fa rms, to win the Battle of th e Atlantic in World War II. This struggle was, in th e word s of Winston C hurchill, " the dominatin g fac tor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that every thin g happening elsew here , on land, a t sea or in the air depended ultim a tely o n its ou tcome." It was a fiercely contested ba t-

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

tie, the magnitude of which is revealed in these few staggerin g statistics: more than 30,000 Allied merch ant sea men, thousands of Allied naval personnel, anp some 28,000 German U-Boatmen perished before the surrender signal was finally se nt out by U-Boat Command on 4 May 1945. No fewer th a n 2,603 merchant ships were sunk (over 13 Y2 million tons), as well as 175 Allied naval vessels and 784 U-Boats.

I must confess that I was looking for so me bias from the British authors of this fine account of ¡a huge, 5 Yi year st ruggle . What I found, in fact, was a good criti cal balance. It is noted, for example, that the Commander-in-Chief of th e U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest King, st ubbornly refused to introduce a convoy system for American ships, even a fter being offered-and refusing- addition a l escort vessels by the British.

This resulted in heavy American shipping losses in early 1942. Those schooled in th e Samuel Eliot Morison interpretation of the Battle will surely find such criticism distasteful. And Hughes and Costello pull no punches when describing the British role, especially their prewar failing to recog ni ze th e importance of a ircraft in anti-submarine warefare.

Indeed, the British naval commanders seemed to think that the technology of '' Asdic,' ' an underwater detection system, would take care of the submarine menace, ignoring the fact that subs could operate on the surface at night and thus avoid "Asdic" detection .

The attention of the British naval leaders before the wa r was, as the authors note, "directed principally to ensure the survival of their precious battleships." Or, as one British naval officer put it later on : "The bloody gunnery officers came to th e top between the wars so that we had to spend the first two yea rs losing the next one whilst we got rid of them!"

With a well written text, including many eyewitness accounts, and an excellent blend of photographs and clearly drawn charts, the Ba ttle comes alive in the mind's eye in this work.

I recommend it highly .

MICHAEL GILLEN

Mr. Gillen, a former merchant seaman, holds a master 's degree in history and serves as interpreter at South Street Seaport Museum, and as coordinator of the National Society's Liberty Ship Project.

His father and an uncle served on convoy escorts in the Battle of the A I/antic.

Beken of Cowes World's Foremost Studio of Marine Photography and Publishers of "The Worlds Most Beautiful Calendars" announces their all new

1979 Calendar of Tall Ships Featuring an extraordinary collection of brilliantly reproduced new color photographs-US Eag le, Kruzenshtern, Nippon Maru, Bill of Rights, Sagres, and 7 more. A studio sized 22 "x 15 " parade of classic vessels over a read¡ able, 4 language date format. Shipped flat in gift box. Full refund if not pleased.

Quantity and custom imprint prices on request.

---------------------------------Force Four Marine Graphics 250 Springfield Ave. Cranford , NJ 07016 Please send: _ _ _ 1979 Beken Tall Ships Calendars @ $10.95 ppd . $._ _ _ __ _ __ 1978 Beken Tall Ships Calendars @ $ 9.95 ppd. $. _ _ _ __ _ _ _ sets of both 78 and 79 Tall Ships @ $17.95 set ppd . $._ _ _ __ _ _ _ free color brochures on Beken prints, posters, etchings NAME ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

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check enclosed _ VISAIMaster Charge ca rd# exp. date,_ _ __ New Jersey residents add 5% tax. No overseas orders please.

41

BOOKS The World Encompassed: Francis Drake and His Great Voyage, by Derek Wilson (New York, Harper & Row, 1977, 240 pp., illus., $12.95).

With scholarship worthy of his subject-Drake's epochal voyage around the world in 1577-80-and with considerable insight into the complex, immensely powerful character of the central actor in the tale, Mr. Wilson offers us a gripping yarn of Elizabethan seafaring in this work.

Politics both high and low take their place in the tale, which brings the fell necessities and knotty problems of the voyage to life for the reader; Mr. Wilson does admirably with this, though at times one could wish he produced a little more of the record and a little less imaginative reconstruction of what was going on inside the actors' heads. One senses a little weaknesses in dealing with shipboard scenes and the realities of navigation, but Wilson makes up for this in his sure sense of character, and his ability to get to the heart of a scene in a manner that takes you there and makes you share in its truth.

Raymond Aker, our leading Drake scholar, writes us high praise of Wilson's "marvelous insight into of Drakes character and the events that transpired," in a voyage that changed the shape of the world, and that lives on in the Western imagination which it so PS deeply affected at the time.

The Dhow: An illustrated History of the Dhow and Its World, by Clifford W. Hawkins (Lymington, England, Nautical Publishing Co., Ltd., 1977, 143 pp., illus., ÂŁ18.50).

Looking beyond the superb and moving photographs in this finely produced volume, one may follow the author in his dedicated pursuit of the dhows which for centuries have made the history of man under sail in the Indian Ocean.

That ocean is the dhow's world, and Mr. Hawkins has tracked the type and its evolution on all its shores.

An Indian Ocean current chart helps make clear the roots of the immemorial voyaging of these distinctive vessels, and a chart of several pages illustrates the (to the Westerner) bewildering geographic variations in type, from the balams of the Arabian Gulf and the batels of Northwest India, to the zaimos and zarooks which navigate Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and South Arabian waters.

"Just as the pattern of dhow trade is progressively changing so too are the dhows themselves," Hawkins notes.

"Gone are the handsome Maldive and

42

Ceylonese kotias. Extinct is the Arabian and Iranian baghla and following close in the wake of these craft to extinction are the ganjas and bedans. As each season comes to a close these, and indeed other dhows as well, are so much closer to the end of their sea road." PS Search for the Tall Ships, by Frank 0.

Braynard (New York, Operation Ship Ltd., 1977, 144 pp., illus., $18.50).

Again Operation Sail-76 is memorialized, this time by the driving force behind OpSail. Frank Braynard, managing director of the spectacular visit of the world's sail training ships to New york harbor on July 4, 1976, now brings us an insider's view of the more pleasant aspects involved in organizing OpSail, that is, his world-wide travelling in pursuit of the magnificent sailing ships that dazzled New York, Newport and the nation. In a casual and personal manner, Braynard relates his adventures in this sketchbook, and transmits his unflagging excitement and kid-like wonderment at the foreign lands he toured. His sketches, often drawn with a traveller's haste, range in subject from the Tall Ships themselves to the "Windjammer Room" of the Royal Viking Sea, from the slums of Acapulco to the Sputnik monument in Moscow, from the focs'le head of the four-masted bark Kruzenshtern under sail to a birds-eye view of a modern cruise liner creating a wake like "the jet stream of a 747."

Though pivoting on the Tall Ships, this book is more a miscellany of impressions of a world-ranging tourist, a modern example of the genre of the quick and impulsively compiled scrapbook-guides popular a century or two ago.

JOHN KORTUM

Mr. Kortum, veteran of the Atlantic crossing of the paddle Tug Eppleton Hall, and of many hazardous ventures in unlikely craft in San Francisco Bay, is a cabinetmaker when ashore.

Ships, by Enzo Angelucci and Attilo Curari (New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1977, 336 pp., illus., $24.95).

Beginning with the most primitive attempts at boatbuilding, Ships takes up the development of the shipbuilder's art to its current state in detailed text and with more than a thousand illustrations, in color and black and white. Side trips from this central theme of ship evolution capsulize oceanic explorations, locate and describe the world's naval museums list the large sailing ships still afloat, and provide 59 pages of technical data about warships.

There are, however, some important weaknesses: illustrations, though beautiful, are innacurate as to detail, scale and color; perspective is often distorted, apparently for artistic effect,and the black-and-white drawings compound this by being uneven in quality and style. And there are textual inaccuracies (Sagres is of course not the former German Horst Wessel) and omissions (Constitution, Constellation and Star of India are unaccountably among the missing in the listing of large sailing ships still afloat). But it is fair to say that Ships is a beautiful presentation of the parade of vessels man has sailed through the ages.

DOD Lone Voyager, by Joseph S. Garland (Rockport, Mass., Nelson B. Robinson, Bookseller, 1978, 307 pp., illus., $4.95).

On a cold January day in 1883 doryman Howard Blackburn appeared off the coast of Newfoundland after five days of rowing through the brutal cold and storms of this dangerous Northern fishing ground. His dorymate was dead.

In order to retain his grip on the oars, Blackburn had purposely frozen his hands into claws around them. He lost all of his fingers and thumbs from both hands, but he brought in his boat-and he survived!

Thus begins a fascinating tale of a seaman who refused to give in to the sea.

After many years ashore as storekeeper, saloon keeper, and husband, the call of the sea proved too strong for Blackburn, and his improbable career as a singlehander began. A 62-day voyage to England was followed by another of 39 days to Spain in the sloop Great Republic (recently restored and on exhibition in Gloucester).

Joe Garland is the great chronicler of Gloucester men and ways, and his fine biography of Howard Blackburn is now back in print, with new material including an introduction, appendix, photographs and maps.

DOD The Boats We Rode: A Quarter Century of New York's Excursion Boats and Ferries, by Franklyn B. Roberts and John Gillespie (New York, Quadrant Press, 1976, 100 pp., illus., $5.95).

Ferry boats, excursion steamers, floating hospitals, sightseeing "yachts," and hydrofoils, are among the subjects of this examination of the way we got around the water in New York. The text serves mainly as a series of captions to the photographs that make up this introduction to New York City's passenger harborcraft of the twentieth cen-

SIEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

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On the cover is "Old Ironsides." Inscribed inside is "The Ship 1 Never has she failed us." Charcoal on parchment, 3" x 2", $125. Add tn x where npplicnl1/e. Del., /1dlg. & i11s., $2.

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TALL SHIPS IN THE PACIFIC 1978 Tall-masted ships from around the world will sail from Hawaii to the West Coast in the summer of 1978 in a race organized by the American Sail Training Association . After the race they will call at Sea Festivals in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. This book will give a guide to the race, list of ships taking part, with photographs of each and details of ships and their histories, local programs of events, the story of Captain Cook's voyage, the bicentennial of which this race will celebrate. A book to keep as a souvenir and to use as a guide on the West Coast during these spectacular Sea Festivals.

96 pp. $4.95 65 photographs

ALSO AVAILABLE

GUIDE TO NORTH AMERICAN PASSENGER SHIPS More and more people are travelling today, and although the airlines rule in the category of point-to-point travel, there is no doubt that the passenger liner, as a vehicle of holiday, is far from dead.

Cruising is the mainstay of many steamship lines and a great multitude of ships find some North American port as base. As more and more ships are marketed in North America, the travel agent and traveller have that much more to know. It is for these individuals that this GUIDE was written.

162 pp $9 .95 62 photographs

NAUTICAL PUBLIS HERS & BOOKSELLERS

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

NEV ASA PUBLICATIONS LTD. P.O. Box 86715 North Vancouver, B.C. V7L 4L2, Canada Tel: (604) 688-4116 43

BOOKS tury. This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive account. Each vessel included is accompanied by a good photograph, three or four paragraph s of text, and where appropriate a list ing of sisterships in harbor service. All the information is lively, accurate, suggest ive of past and future.

DOD Cruising Designs from the Board of Thomas E. Colvin, by Thomas E. Colvin (New York, Seven Seas Press, 1977, 3rd ed. 102 pp., illus., paperback $4.00).

Cruising boat enthusiasts are familiar with Mr. Colvin's work in the monthly magazines. Here he reviews twenty of his boats (10 ketches, 7 schooners and 3 junks), with sail plan, inboard profile and arrangement plan, and additional joiner sections for most of the larger boats, with photographs and sketches also provided .

Mr. Colvin is an individualist whose design solutions are not always conventional, but usually work much better than the conventional, in terms of the boat in question. This is exemplified by the information that he and hi s wife are currently on a world cruise aboard a 48-foot steel junk of his own design and construction, the second vessel of this type he has designed and built for his own use . (For anyone interested in Chinese sailing junks, this book is a good starting place. An extensive bibliography is included to aid in further study of these vessels.) A very informative discussion of various boat.building materials and methods is included .

DON MEISNER

Mr. Meisner is a designer, much involved with planning and program for South Street Seaport Museum and the National Society in New York.

Time and the Flying Snow, Songs of Gordon Bok, by Gordon Bok (Sharon , Conn., Folk-Legacy Records, Inc., 1977, 88 pp., illus., paper $6.95).

Gordon Bok 's circle of friends and listeners has been burgeoning since he was mate aboard Clearwater on her first trip. He knows people and the sea and his songs reflect this. His performances are balanced with musical narrations like "Saben the Woodfitter" and "Peter Kagan and the Wind." This rewarding book includes these and portraits of the people he has known and worked with, such as Threeboot Philbrick, Frankie Wiley, Cleon Stuart, and Joanie of "Turning Toward the Morning." As he sings to and about us, he folds his empathy around us, taking us to hi s world of the New England coast. Much that is

44

di sappeari ng from our lives is embodied in this work, illustrated with Bok's own excellent woodcuts.

ERIC RUSSELL 1978179 Guide to North American Passenger Ships, by William D . Miller, Jr. (Vancouver, Canada, Nevassa, 1978, 156 pp., illus., paper $9.95).

This compact and compendious guide to ships that visit of sail from North American waters makes a fascinating presentation of a way of life drawing inexorably to a close. Each entry includes a full list ing of the ship's particulars, including her routes, measurements, owners, amenities and accommodations, along with a capsule history and other data. Each has a full sized photograph of the ship. Short histories of each company are also provided.

Merchant Ships: New Building, ed. D.T. Hornsby (New York, N.P.Nichols, 1977, 256 pp., illus., $14.95).

Listing over 1500 new ships of 1000 tons and over built in 1976, this valuable annual provides detailed technical information, with many photographs and line drawings that should be of interest to serious modellers and marine artists concerned with modern craft.

Talbot-Booth's Merchant Ships, Vol. I, ed. E.C.Talbot-Booth (New York, Nichols Publishing Co., 1978 , 280 pp., illus, . $25).

This volume provides visual identification and basic technical data on some 3500 ships and classes, indexed to 10,000 named ships. Future volumes will cover the balance of the world's merchant fleets, and supplements will be issued to keep this invaluable refere nce work up to date .

Beautiful Swimmers, by William W. Warner (New York, Penguin Book s, 1977, 304 pp. , ¡illus., paperback $2.95).

Callinectes sapidus Rathbun is the scientific name for the Chesapeake Bay blue crab. Cal/inectes is Greek for "beautiful swimmers," the title of this Pulitzer Prize winning book. Warner has created a comprehensive and well researched work on the life of the blue crab and those who hunt it , that Is delightfully entertaining, informative, and human. He develops our understanding and sympathy for the blue crab by relating not only its biology but its life and death at the hands of the Chesapeake Bay watermen. Telling of his experiences with such watermen as Rud y Thomas and Lester Lee, Warner gives us

the insight of those perso nally involved with the crabing industry, backed also by the knowledge acquired through solid scholarly research. His experience and knowledge blend in the book to create an engaging picture of the watermen's life and the life of the crustacean with BH which hi s is so much tied up.

Historic Ships of the World, by William C . Heine (New York, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977, 155 pp., illus., $12.95).

Mr. Heine' s selection of 22 ships from Leningrad to Honolulu to Yokusuka, Japan, makes a sti rring, survey of what we have saved from our experiences at sea. No replicas are included; all are real ships with real histories to pass on, ranging from archaeological finds like Vasa to naval ships like the Buffet, to merchant ships like the whaler Charles W. Morgan or the Falls of Clyde. Recent history is also represented by the U.S.S. Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier. The book covers as wide a range of ships as you could ask for.

The history of each ship, and of the effort that saved her is given in some detail, making the book enjoyable to read, as well as valuable for reference.

Since the work was a product of Mr. Heine' s interest as amateur and of his travels to various parts of the world, one should not complain too much of scholarly failings, but in an otherwise thoughtful, and at times exciting work, it is sad to note many minor errors.

TED MILES

Mr. Miles works aboard the Moshulu in Philadelphia, and is past assistant curator of the National Society.

Passage East, by Carlton Mitchell (New York, W. W. Norton, reprint of 1953 ed., 248 pp., illus., $10.95).

The return of this classic to print after an absence of some 20 years will be welcomed news to followers of the sea.

More than the account of a small boat race from Bermuda to England, Passage East weaves the lore and learning of thousands of years of seafaring around a single gripping voyage.

With the skill of a poet, Carlton Mitchell evokes the moods of the sea whether in storm, calm or exhileration of a fair wind on a clear day. Numerous photographs-some of superb qualitycapture the action of deep-sea racing, proving Mr. Mitchell an artist with his camera as well as with his pen.

DOD

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

There is a port of no return, where ships roa)? riae at anchor for a liHle space Gna then, some starless night, the cable slips, i!eat?ing an eaa-e at the mooring place . .

The Great Days of Sail Some Reminiscences of a Teaclipper Captain

by Andrew Shewan Captain Andrew Shewan, 1849-1927, was one of the best known of the skillful, daring captains of the clipper ship era. He and his father and his grandfather before him lived and worked in a fabled age of great ships, fierce rivalries and high adventure. When Captain Shewan, as the last of the Teaclipper captains, set down his experiences in The Great Days of Sail, he created a unique reference work and an incomparable picture of a vanished age.

He knew the ships whose names became household words; his knowledge and judgments were forged from first hand experience. He was on board almost every one of the British clippers he mentions and raced with many of them on the high seas. And he knew the men who sailed and owned them - the great· captains and the men who understood that to be first was everything and second nothing.

1973/240 pages/ Illustrated/$ I 0. 75

The Medley of Mast· and Sail A Camera Record This book covers a wide variety of rigs, ranging from praus, junks, and various fishermen and barges, through coasters, small traders, and big square riggers . .

Presented in the form of a photograph album with commentaries on each photo, Medley of Mast and Sail includes a large number of ships which might not be familiar to many readers. As in any good family album, many of these pictures are old; taken to preserve scenes as well as ships. Thus the ships are presented as they really were.

As the famous, the infamous, and the unknown sailed and moored together in decades long past, they come together once more in these pages.

1976/ 330 pages/ Illustrated/ $21.95

NOW AVAILABLEthe NEW Thirteenth Edition of

DUTTON'S NAVIGATION & PILOTING

By Elbert S. Maloney

1978/ 960 pages/Illustrated/$21.95

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Anion Olto Fischer- Marine Arlisl, whi ch has received world-wide acclaim, 288 pages illustrated in color and black a nd white. Regular editi o n, $46.95. Magnificent de luxe edition, bo und in goatskin , signed by a uthors, limited to 150 copies at $215 .00. Also avai lable fro m Teredo Books Ltd . at £24-15 (de luxe £105.90) inc. p. & p. Please add 85p. to all remi ttances to Engla nd in currencies other than sterling.

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Obtainab le fro m same U.S. distri butors at $46.00 o r fro m Teredo Books at £2390 (i nc. p. & p.).

Ships a nd Memories, by Bill Ada ms, now considered to be th e greatest of all sq uare- rigger reminiscences. $30.00 fro m U .S. distri but ors o r £1 5-60 from Teredo Books (inc. p. & p.).

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A swashbuckling legend comes to life! " Morgan the Pirate" has dominated Caribbean tales of Spanish galleons and golden cities for hundreds of years . In this exciting , definitive biography, Dudley Pope, the distinguished naval historian and author of the popular " Ramage" novels, reveals the true Sir Henry Morgan, a daring soldier and masterly strategist who was one of the greatest military men of his time . Illustrated with photographs and maps. $11.95

?<Lnf The Biography of the Notorious

Sir Henry Morgan

1635-1688 DUDLEY POPE

46

Reprinted f rom W. W. Jacobs' Snug Ha rb o r (Charles Scribner 's Sons, 1903), a collection of stories about sailors ashore. His Mas ter of Craft is another classic of skippers in the coasting trade under sail at the end of the 19th century .

These inimitable sketches lay before us a valuable and now largely vanished way of life.

It was sur prising wo t a little differen ce George Dixo n ' s being aw a y made to th e Blue Lio n. No bod y seemed to miss ' im mu ch , a nd thin gs went on just the same as afo re he we nt. Mrs. Di xon was a ll right with m os t peo ple, a nd 'er relati o ns ' ad a very good time of it; old Bu rge began to put o n fles h a t such a ra te that the sight of a la dd er made ' im ill a' mos t, and Charlie a nd Bob we nt a bo ut as if th e place belo nged to 'em.

T hey 'eard no thin g fo r eight mo nths, a nd th en a lett er come for Mrs. Dixon fro m her ' usba nd in which ~ e said that 'e had left the Seabird after 'aving had a time whi ch made 'i m shi ver to think of.

He said that th e men was the ro ughest of the ro ugh a nd th e officers was wo rse, an d th a t he 'ad hard ly ' ad a day witho ut a blow from o ne o r the o th er since he' d been a board . He' d been kn oc ked do wn with a ha nd-spike by th e second ma te, a nd had 'ad a week in his bunk with a kick give n ' im by the boatswain . He said 'e was now o n th e Rochester Castle, bou nd fo r Sydn ey, a nd he 'oped fo r better ti mes .

T ha t was a ll they ' ea rd for some mo nths, a nd th en they go t a no th er letter say ing th at the me n o n the Rochester Castle was, if a nyth ing, wo rse tha n those o n the Seab ird, a nd th a t he'd begun to thin k th at ru nnin g away to sea was diff' rent to wot he'd ex pected, a nd tha t he supposed 'e'd done it too late in li fe.

He sent ' is love to 'is wife a nd asked 'er as a fa vo ur to send Uncle Burge a nd ' is boys away, as 'e d idn ' t wa nt to find them there when 'e came home, because they was the ca use of all his suffe rings. " He d o n' t know ' is bes t fri ends," ses o ld Burge . " ' E's go t a nasty spe rrit I do n 't lik e to see. "

SE A HI STOR Y, SUMM E R 1978

"1 'll 'ave a word with ' im when 'e does come home," ses Bob. "I s'pose he think s 'imself sa fe writing letters thou sands o' miles away."

The last letter they 'ad came from Auckland, and said that he 'ad sh ipped on the Monarch, bound for the Albert Dock s, and he 'oped soon to be at 'ome and managing th e Blue Lion, same as in the old happ y days afore he was fool enough to go to sea .

That was the very last letter, and some time arterward the Monarch was in the missing list, and by-and-bye it became known that she 'ad gone down with all hands not long arter leaving New Zealand. The only difference it made at the Blue Lion was that Mrs. Di xo n 'ad two of 'er dresses dyed black, and the others wore black neckties for a fort night and spoke of Dixon as pore George, and said it was a funny world, but they supposed everything was for the best.

It must ha' been pretty near four years since George Dixon 'ad run off to sea when Charlie, who was sitting in the bar one arternoon reading the paper, things being dull, saw a man 's head peep through the door for a minute and then disa ppear. A 'most direckly arterward it looked in at another door and then disappeared agin. When it looked in at the third door Charlie 'ad put down 'is paper and was ready for it.

"Who are you looking for?" He ses, rather sharp. "Wot d'ye want? Are yo u 'aving a game of peep-bo, or wot?"

The man coughed and smiled , and then 'e pushed the door open gently and came in, and stood there fingering 'is beard as though 'e didn't know wot to say.

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

"I've come back, Charlie," he ses al last.

"Wot, George!" ses Charlie, starting .

"Why, I didn ' t know you in that beard.

We all thou ght you was dead , years ago ."

"I was pretty nearly , Charlie," ses Dixon, shaking hi s 'ead. "A h! I've 'ad a terrible time since I left 'ome." " You don't seem to ha ' made your fortune," ses Charlie, looking down at 'is clothes. "I'd ha' been ashamed to come 'ome like that if it 'ad been me." " I'm wore out," ses Dixon, leaning agin the bar. " I've got no pride left; it' s all been knocked out of me. How' s Julia?"

"She's all right," ses C harlie . "Here, Ju--" " H'sh!" ses Dixon , reaching over the bar and lay ing his 'and on his arm.

"Don't let 'er know too sudden; break it to 'er gently."

"Fiddlesticks!" ses Charlie, throwing his 'and off and calling, " Here, Julia!

He' s come back ."

Mrs. Dixon came running downstairs and into the bar. "Good gracious!" she ses, staring at her 'usband. "Whoever'd ha ' thought o ' seeing you agin? Where 'ave you sprung from?"

"Ain't you glad to see me, Julia?" ses George Dixon .

"Yes; I s' pose so; if you've come back to behave yourself," ses Mrs. Dixon. "what 'ave you got to say for yourself for running away and then writing them letters, telling me lo get rid of my relations?"

"That's a long time ago, Julia," ses Dixon, raising the flap in the counter and going into the bar. "I've gone through a great deal o' suffering since then. I've been knocked about till I

'adn't got any feeling left in me; I've been shipwrecked, and I've 'ad to fight for my ti fe with savages."

"Nobody asked you to run away," ses his wife, edging away as he went to put his arm round 'er waist. "You'd better go upstairs and put on some decent clothes.''

Dixon looked at 'er for a moment and then he 'ung his 'ead.

"I've been thinking o' you and of seeing you agin every day since I went away, Julia," he ses. "You'd be the same to me if yo u was dressed in rags."

He went upstairs without another word, and old Burge, who was coming down, came down five of 'em at once owing to Dixon speaking to ' im afore he knew who 'e was. The old man was still grumbling when Dixon came down agin, and said he believed he'd done it a-purpose.

"You run away from a good 'ome," he ses, "and the best wife in Wapping, and you come back and frighten people arf out o' their lives . I never see such a feller in all my born days ."

"I was so glad to get 'ome agin I didn ' t think," ses Dixon . "I hope you're not 'urt."

He started telling them all about his 'ardships while they were at tea, but none of 'em seemed to care much about hearing 'em. Bob said that the sea was all right for men, and that other people were sure not to like it.

"And you brought it all on yourself," ses Charlie. " You've only got yourself to thank for it. I 'ad thought o' picking a bone with you over those letters you wrote .''

"Let's 'ope 'e's come back more sensible than wot 'e was when 'e went away," ses old Burge, with 'is mouth full o' toast.

By the time he'd been back a couple o' days George Dixon could see that ' is going away 'adn't done any good at all.

Nobody seemed to take any notice of 'im or wot he said, and at last, arter a word or two with Charlie about th e rough way he spoke to some o' the customers, Charlie came in to Mrs . Dixon and said th at he was at 'is old tricks of interfering, and he would not 'ave it.

"Well, he'd better keep out o' the bar altogether," ses Mrs. Dixon. "There' s no need for 'im to go there; we managed all ri ght while 'e was away."

Do you mean I'm not to go into my own bar?" ses Dixon, stammering.

"Yes, I do," ses Mrs. Dixon. "You kept out of it for four years to please yourself, and now you can keep out of it 47

DIXON'S RETURN to please me." " I' ve put yo u out o' the bar before," ses C har lie, "a nd if you come messing about with me any more I'll do it agin.

So now you know."

He wa lked back into the bar whist ling, and George Dixon, arter sitting still for a long time thinking, got up and went into the bar, and he'd 'ardly got the foot inside afore Charlie caught 'old of 'im by the shoulder and shoved 'im back into the parlour agin . " I told yo u wot it would be," ses Mrs. Dixon, looking up from 'er sewing.

"You've o nl y got your interfering ways to thank for it."

"This is a fine state of affairs in my own 'ouse," ses Dixo n, 'ard ly ab le to speak. "You've got no proper feeling for yo ur hu sband, Julia , else you wouldn't allow it. Why, I was happier at sea than wot I am 'ere."

"Well , you'd better go back to it if you're so fon d of it," ses 'is wife. " I think I 'ad, " ses Dixon. " If I can't be master in my own 'ouse I' m better at sea, hard as it is. You must choose between us, Julia- me or your relations. I won't sleep under th e same roof as them for ano ther ni ght. Am I to go?"

"P lease yo urself," ses 'is wife. " I don ' t mind yo ur stay in g 'ere so long as you behave yourse lf, but the others won't go; yo u can make your mind easy on that." " I'll go and look for another ship, th en." ses Dixon, taking up 'is cap. " I'm not wanted here. P'r'aps you wouldn't mind 'aving some clothes packed into a chest for me so as I can go a way decent."

He looked round at ' is wife, as th o ugh 'e ex pected she'd as k ' im not to go, but she too k no notice, a nd he opened the door softl y and went ou t, while o ld Burge, who 'ad come into th e room and 'eard what he was say ing, trott ed off upstairs to pack 'is chest for 'im .

In two hours 'e was back agin a nd mo re cheerful th a n he 'ad been since he 'ad co me 'o me. Bob was in the bar and the others were just sitting down to tea, and a big chest, nicely corded, stood on th e fl oo r in the corner of the room .

"That's right," he ses, looking at it; "t ha t's just wot I wanted ." " It 's as full as it can be," ses old Burge. " I done it for you myself, 'Ave yo u got a ship?" " I 'ave," ses Dixon. "A jolly good ship. No more hardships for me this time. I' ve got a berth as captain."

"Wot?"ses 'is wife. "Captain? You!" "Yes." ses Dixon, smi ling at her.

"You can sail with me if yo u like."

48

"Thankee," ses Mrs. Dixon, " I'm quite comfortab le where I am."

"Do you mean to say you've got a master' s berth?" ses Charlie, staring at ' im.

"I do," ses Dixon; "master and owner."

Char li e coughed. "Wat's the name of the ship? " he asks, winking at the others.

"The BL UE LIO , " scs Dixon, in a voice that made 'em all start. " I' m shipping a new crew and I pay off the old one to-night. You first, my lad."

"Pay off," ses Dixon, leaning back in 'is chair and staring at ' im in a puzzled way. "Blue Lion?"

"Yes," ses Dixon, in the same loud vo ice . "When I came 'ome the ot her day I thought p'r'aps I' d let bygones be bygones , and I laid low for a bit to see whether any of you deserved it. I went to sea to get hardened-and 1 got hard.

I've fought men that wou ld eat you at a meal. I've 'ad more blows in a week than you've 'ad in a lifetime, yo u fat-faced land lubber."

He wa lk ed to the door leading to the bar, where Bob was doing 'is best to serve customers and li sten at th e same time, and arter lock ing it put the key in 'is pocket. Then 'e put his 'and in 'is pocket and slapped some money down on the table in front o' Charlie.

There' s a month 's pay instead o' notice," he ses. "Now git."

"George!" screams 'is wife. "' Ow dare you? 'Ave you gone crazy?" " I'm surprised at you," ses old Burge, who'd been looking on with ' is mouth wide open, and pinching ' imself to see wheth er 'e wasn't dreaming. " I don't go for your orders," ses C harlie, getting up. "Wot d'ye mean by locking that door?"

"Wot!" roars Dixon. "Hang it! I mustn 't lock a door without asking my barman now. Pack up and be off, you swab, afore I start on you."

C ha rli e gave a grow l a nd rushed at ' im, and the next moment 'e was down on the floor with the 'ardest bang in the face that he'd ever 'ad in 'is life . Mrs. Dixon screamed and ran into the kitchen, follered by old Burge, who went in to tell 'er not to be frightened . C har lie got up and went for Dixon agin; but he 'ad come back as 'ard as nails and 'ad a rushing style o' fighting that took Charlie's breath away. By the time Bob , 'ad le ft the bar to take care of itself, and run round and got in the back way, Charlie had 'ad as much as 'e wanted and was lying on the sea-chest in the corner trying to get 'is breath.

"Charlie had 'ad as much as 'e wanted and was lying on the sea-chest."

"Yes? Wot d 'ye want?" ses Dixon, with a growl, as Bob came in at the door.

He was such a 'orrible figure, with the blood on ' is face and 'is beard st icking out all ways, that Bob, instead of doing wot he 'ad come round for, stood in the doorway sta rin g at 'im without a word.

"I'm paying off," ses Dixon . '"Ave you got any thin g to say agin it?"

"No," ses Bob, drawing back.

"You and C har lie' ll go now," ses Dixon, taking out some money. "The o ld man can stay on for a month to give 'i m time to look round. Don ' t look at me that way, else I' ll knock your 'ead 0 ff."

He sta rted counting out Bob' s money just as o ld Burge a nd Mrs . Dixon, hearing all quiet, came in out of the kitc hen. " Don't you be alarmed on my account, my dear," he ses, turning to 'is wife; " it 's child 's play to wot I've been used to. I' ll just see these two mistaken young fe llers off the premises, and then we'll 'ave a cup o' tea whi le the old man minds the bar."

Mrs. Dixon tried to speak, but 'er temper was too much for 'er. She looked from her 'usband to Charlie and Bob and then back at 'im agin and caught 'er breath. " That' s right, " ses Dixon, nodding his 'ead at her. " I'm master and owner of the Blue Lion a nd you' re first mate .

When I'm speaking yo u keep quiet; that' s dis-s ipline."

*

*

*

I was in that bar abou t three months arterward, and I never saw such a chan ge in any woman as there was in Mrs. Dixon. Of all the nice-mannered , soft-spoke n landladies I've ever seen, she was the best, and on'y to 'ear the way she answered her 'usband when he spoke 101 'er was a pleasure to every married man in the bar. w

SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1978

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY SPONSORS ANNENBERG FUND J ACK R . ARON JOSEPH CANTALUPO C H ARLES F. C H APMAN MEMORIAL

WILLI AM W. D URRELL EVA GEBllARD-GOURGAUD FDTN. FUND FOR Tll E CITY OF NEW YORK

w.

R . GRACE FOUNOATION

PA UL R. H ENRY CEC IL H OWARD CHAR fT ABLE TR UST

R . C . J EFFE RSON IRVING J OHNSON

J.

M . K APLAN FUND

A. ATWATER K ENT, JR .

L UC ILLE LANGLOIS )A MES MACD ONA LD FOU NDATIO N NAUTILUS FOUNDATION NAVY L EAGUE MI CH AEL PLATZER

MR . & MRS . PETER SEEGER H OWARD SLOTNICK MR . & MRS. P ETER STANFORD ADM. J OHN M. WILL, USN (RET.) T. H . WRI GHT, JR.

PATRONS

Bark Kaiulani off Hawaii, c. 1900. From a painting by the San Francisco ship portraitist W. A. Coulter, in the collection of H. Sewall Williams.

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Two hundred years ago Captain James Cook opened the Pacific Northwest to trade and navigation . The American Revolution was then in progress, but Benjamin .F ranklin asked that Americans allow Cook's ships to pass in peace since his voyage was for "the

benefit of Mankind." Cook's landfall at Cape Flattery in HMS Resolution is shown in this painting by Oswald L. Brett. His voyage is honored this summer by the American Sail Training Association's Tall Ships Pacific races .

Sea-Land Service salutes America's maritime heritage /

SEA-LAND SERVICE,ÂŽINC.