Sea History 048 - Autumn 1988

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

No.48

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AUTUMN 1988

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THE ARMADA,

1588-1988

The Enterprise of England Art of the Armada Medieval Ship Graffiti The Last Drift , r

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ISSN 0 146-93 12

No. 48

SEA HISTORY

OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE WORLD SHIP TRUST

SEA HISTORY is publi shed quarterl y by the Natio nal Maritime Hi storica l Soc iety, 132 Maple Street, Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520. S e ~o nd cl ass postage paid at Croton-on-Hudson , NY 10520.

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COPYRIGHT © 1988 by the Nati onal Maritime Hi storical Soc iety. Te l. 9 14 27 1-2 177.

MEMBERSHIP is invited _Plankowner $ 10,000; Benefactor $5,000; Sponsor $ 1,000; Donor $500; Su staining Patron $250; Patron $ 100; Contributor $50; Famil y $35; Regular $25; Student or Retired $ 12.50. All members outside the USA please add $5 fo r postage. SEA HISTORY is sent to all members. Indi vidual copies cost $2.75.

OFFICERS & TR USTEES are Chairman , James P. McAlli ster; Vice Chairmen, Al an G. Choate, James Ean, Schuyler M. Meyer, Jr. ; President, Peter Stanford ; Vice President, Nonna Stanford; Secretary, Spencer Smith; Treasurer, Robert W. Elli ott , lll ; Trnstees, Henry H. Anderson, Jr., Alan G. Choate, Ro bert W. Elliott , lll , Karl Kortum , Richardo Lo pes, Robert J. Lowen, James P. McAlli ster, Schuyler M. Meyer, Jr., Richard l.

Morris, Nancy Pouch, Ludwig K. Rubinsky, Spencer Smith, Peter Stanford; Chairman Emeritus, Karl Ko rtum ; President Emeritus, Alan D. Hutchison.

OVERSEERS: Chairman , Henry H. Anderson, Jr. ; Charles F. Adams, Townsend Horn or, George Lamb, Cliffo rd D. Mallo ry, Schuyler M. Meyer, Jr., J. Wi ll iam Middendorf, I! , Richard I. Morri s, John G. Rogers, John Stobart.

ADVISOR S: Chairman , Frank 0 . Braynard ; Raymo nd Aker, George F. Bass, Francis E. Bowker, Oswa ld L. Brett, David Brink, William M. Doerflinger, Harri son J. Dring, John S. Ewald, Joseph L. Farr, Timothy G . Foote, Richard GooldAdam s, Walter J. Handelman , Me l Hardin , Robert G. Herbert , II. R. C. Je fferson , Irving M. Johnson, John Kemble, Conrad Mil ster, Edward D. Muhlfeld , Willi am G. Muller, George Nichols, David E. Perkins, Richard Rath , Nancy Hughes Richardson, George Salley, Me lbo urne Smith, Ralph L. Snow, Al bert Swanson , Peter Throckmorton , Shannon J. Wall , Robert A. We inste in , Thomas We lls, Charles Witthol z. American Ship Trust, Hon. Secretary. Eric J. Berryman.

WORLD SHIP TR UST: Chairman, Frank G. G. Carr; Vice Presidents, Henry H. Anderson, Jr. , Vi scount Ca ldecote, Sir Rex Hunt , Hammond Innes, Rt. Hon. Lord Lew in , Sir Peter Scott, Rt. Hon. Lord Shackleton ; Dep. Director, J. A. For sy th e : Ho n . Trea s ur er , Mi c ha e l C. MacSwiney ; Mensun Bound, Dr. Ne il Cossons, Maid win Drumm ond, David Goddard , Richard F. Lee, Al an McGowan , Arthur Prothero, Peter Stanford . Membership: £ 12 payabl e WST, c/o Dep. Di r., I 29a orth Street, Burwell , Cambs.

CBS OBB , England. Reg. Charit y No. 277751 .

SEA HISTORY STAFF: Editor, Lincoln Paine; Senior Editor, Peter Stanford; Mana ging Editor, Nonna Stanford: Editoral Assistant , Michael J. Netter: Advertising and Promotion: Sue Morrow Fl anagan : Accounting, Veroni ca Gnewuch; Membership Secretary , Patric ia Anstett ; Membership Assistallf, Grace Zere lla; Assistant to the President, Susan Sereni .

AUTUMN 1988

CONTENTS 4 7 10 14

16 18 22 25

26 30 31 33 34 35 37 39 41

EDITOR ' S LOG , LETTERS, QUERIES & CORRECTIONS THE LAST DRIFT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT, Philip T. Teuscher SEAPORT EXPERIENCE: MARITIME BRITAIN BY TRAIN, Michael Sheehan MEDIEVAL SHIP GRAFFITI, Lawrence Mott SAIL TRAINING: A NEW BARK BUILT IN 1906, H. F. Morin Scott THE SPANISH ARMADA: EUROPEAN NAVAL POWER IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Gerhard Ketels MEDINA SIDONIA AND "THE ENTERPRISE OF ENGLAND," James Terry LETTER WRITTEN ON 4 OCTOBER 1589, Francisco de Cuellar MARINE ART: ART OF THE SPANISH ARMADA , Lincoln Paine MARINE ART NEWS SHIP NOTES , SAIL TRAINING & MUSEUM NEWS NMHS PROJECTS: " HOW THE HELL DO YOU THINK I GOT HERE?" Michael Gi llen THE CLYDE PUFFER VIC 32, John Bunker AN INTERLUDE WITH FRANK CARR, Michael Badham THE NIAGARA LIVES! Timothy Runyan and Jan Copes MYSTIC SEA MUSIC FESTIVAL 1988, Robert Lloyd Webb REVIEWS: THE BOOK LOCKER

COYER: An English race-built galleon, sporting a lof ty topgallantsail on her

mainmast, sails into the attack, as fireships in the background drift downwind to disrupt the anchored vessels of the Spanish Armada off Calais, 7August1588. This seamanly portrayal of a critical moment in the history of the West is a detail of a painting by an artist of the Netherlands school, done around 1590, within a year or so of the event. Courtesy, National Maritime Museum , Greenwich.

The National Maritime Historical Society is saving America's seafaring heritage. Join us.

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DECK LOG The experience of the Spanish Armada isn ' t really over, because hi story isn ' t.

That 's what one feels as one lays aside the discussions, investigations and arguments that accompany bringing out an issue devoted to this tremendous historic confrontation.

One can hear Drake's call for the gentleman to haul and draw with the marinerechoed in Lord Harry Seymour's apology, writing to Walsingham from aboard the Rainbow on blockade duty off Dunkirk in June 1588, that his report was not written in hi s own hand because he 'd strained hi s hand " with hauling on a rope."

And one can hear, on another level , the dread might and purpose of Spain expressed in Santa Cruz writing to Philip after taking the Azores five years earlier, in 1583: " Now that we have all Portugal , England is ours." Well , as it turned out, not quite.

And the reason for that lay much in the concept of leadership Seymour expressed and in the terrific energies liberated by the English approach to seafaring, as most brilliantl y embodied in Francis Drake.

It was not the weather that defeated the Armada, it was the often frightened and divided (but stout-hearted) resistance of people defending their freedom s, and drawing not only fresh spirit from that, but innovative ways of fi ghting a power that had indeed, begun to seem invincible.

The magnitude of the victory they won is expressed in the famous conference aboard the San Martin after Gravelines, on the evening of 9 August.

Medina Sidonia later reported to hi s sovereign that the deci sion was to get back to Calais and Parma 's invasion army, if the wind permitted. But the only other witness to report on thi s conference says that " it was resolved they should set course for Spain." The Spanish courage and di sc ipline that had held the Armada together was what got its battered surviving ships back to Spanish ports.

So hi story lives on, sometimes terri fying, often bewildering, always challenging.

Our review of the new learning on the Armada, and there is plenty of it to hand, shows the rev isionists revi sed. The conflict was not just over loot or empire at its root, but was ideological , and it was won by the power of freedom , that endless ly generative, very positive force among people, which so often proves to be its own best defense.

PS .i,

4

LETTERS Seamen's Recognition Recognized As you are aware, both the Merchant Marine and the Army Transport Service (Transportation Corps-Water Division) were approved for veterans' status as of 19 January 1988. Although the case was essentia lly decided on the legal and historic merits, those of us who played key roles realize victory would not have come so soon without the support we received from many merchant marine oriented groups, including the National Maritime Hi storical Society.

Through the soc iety 's magazine, Sea History, a number of authors were able to direct their support toward our efforts. To name a few : Rear Admiral Thomas A. King' s guest editorial regarding my book Merchantman ? Or Ship of War (in SH41), related the concepts given in the book to hi s own experiences as a wartime shipmaster. Shannon Wall , executive vice president of MEA l/NMU (then president of the National Maritime Union) , wrote a fine account of hi s wartime activities on the steam schooner Barbara C., an Army Transport Service freight/supply vessel operating in the Pacific theater (SH41 ).

The paintings of Edward Schumacher graced the pages of Sea History44 in an article written by Robert Amon, ed itor of the NMU Pilot.

Harold McCormick wrote of being sunk aboard a Liberty ship in the South Atlantic, and Ian Millar of the Sons and Daughters of US Merchant Marine Veterans of World War II, wrote of the Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins, which fought back against the German raider Stier. Both these accounts appeared in the first "Seamen' s Recognition " iss ue of Sea History (SH35), which included widespread testimony from other merchant mariners.

The NMHS has long been a champion of the US Merchant Marine and the men who sailed the ships. Its co-sponsorship of Maritime Day remembrances in the Port of New York is the type of thing which helps focus public attention on our efforts over the years. Now that seamen of World War II have been recogn ized, the efforts that went into gaining that recognition are history.

If the nation ever again becomes engaged in hostile operations involving our merchant fleet, it is my hope that the men who man those ships will not have to suffer the same indignity and shameful neglect that was experienced by the seamen of 1941-45. It is incumbent upon industry leaders, specifically the maritime unions, to assure that steps are

taken to protect these seamen of the future. NMHS can play a role by focusing some proportion of its efforts on this potential problem.

CHARLES DANA GIBSON

Camden, Maine

What About the Armed Guard?

I've heard so much about the fantastic job the US Merchant Marine did during World War II, and indeed it was a great feat-but not one word about the Naval Armed Guardsmen serving aboard the same ships. They took the same risks as the merchantmen and put their lives on the line. The pay difference was a world apart. Merchantmen were able to pick their ships, but the Guardsmen were assigned to a ship whether they liked it or not. There were no bonus areas for them, just the Navy pay plus 20% sea pay regardless where the ship was bound.

I was a radioman sharing the watches with the ship 's operators. There was no overtime pay for checking batteries or other related work. On one tanker, I was older than both the ship 's operators and had more sea time-and I was all of twenty-two.

I 'm not trying belittle or deny the great job the merchantmen did , but T would like to hear a few kind words about the Naval Armed Guard. The man on the street never heard of us.

JoE SCHIENBERG

Middle Village, New York

John W. Brown Remembered I am interested in your work with the Liberty ship John W. Brown, which was named for my father. I now have a grandson named for his great grandfather and I would like to get a picture of the ship for the family . I always hoped to get my fam iIy to see the ship when it was berthed in New York as a schoolship, but it was not to be. Now my son hopes to get John William to Baltimore to see the John W. Brown when he is a little older.

MRS. EARLE A. GAINSLEY, SR. Old Mystic, Connecticut Born on Prince Edward Island, Canada .John William Brown immigrated to the United States in 1896. A joiner by trade, he became a union organizer in the 1930s and was active in maritime trade unions, the carpenters' union and the United Mineworkers ofAmerica until his death in 1941 . The John W. Brown was launched the following year. The move of the ship to Baltimore this summer, where she was rededicated as a living memorial and museum to the men and women of the American shipbuilding and seafaring community, is reported SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

by Michael Gillen on page 33.-Eo.

Lois Darling's article about the ship in which Charles Darwin sailed on his Donkey on the Wing historic voyage to South America and It was a pleasure to get my recent issue the Galapagos Islands appeared in of Sea History with its focus on the SH31. A four-color offprint is available Great Lakes. Congratulations on a series fromtheNMHSfor$1.75. Weforwarded Mr. Wentworth's query about the Charof fine articles and many thanks as well!

One small cavil-in the article on the les W. Morgan to Ben Fuller, curator at schooner J. T. Wing, Robert Fraser-Lee the Mystic Seaport Museum where the states that the vessel had no donkey Morgan is maintained as an historic engine to help handle the sails, but only ship today. He replies: As far as we know, the Morgan was a gas engine on deck forward used to operate the anchor windlass and bilge never port painted during her working pumps. The Wing did indeed have the career. It seems to have happened after she retired and was used in a few movie conventional donkey engine in the forward house with gypsies on either side shots. Certainly she was port painted to which the halyards were always led during hertime with Whaling Enshrined in New Bedford and was that way when for hoisting either of three main sails.

The same engine could, of course, be en- ¡ she came to Mystic. In our restoration gaged to the anchor windlass. I believe work we've painted out the ports. She now looks as she did prior to her Arctic Mr. Fraser-Lee had access to a 1987 article of mine describing a trip in the voyaging, the earliest period for which Wing to Spanish River, Ontario, in l 937; we have good documentation.-£0. but he may have missed this detail of Souvenir L'A venir how sails were set. This article was printed in both the Dossin Great Lakes Could you help me find the possible whereabouts, or demise, of a big squareMuseum 's Telescope and the Great rigger called L' Avenir? We boarded her Lakes Maritime Society 's Inland Seas.

H ENRY N. BARKHA USE in July 1935 in Mariehamn in the Aland Islands in Finland, during a trip to President Sweden.

Association for Great Lakes S ALL y l SELIN Maritime History Camden, Maine Jonesboro, Illinoi s L' Avenir, a 2853-ton,four-masted bark built in 1908 as a sail training ship, Painting Historic Ships earned a good name for herself sailing Having received my copy of "The in the Erikson fleet of Australian grain Voyages and Reconstruction of the ships based in Mariehamn. Two years Beagle," I offer you my thanks and after Mrs . lselin visited her there, appreciation for a worthy effort. It is a Hamburg-America Line took her up and great help to have all the details under refitted her as a sail training ship again, one cover when painting marine subunder the name Admiral Karpfanger. jects. The history is as necessary as the She made one passage to Australia with ship's plans. I must add my admiration 33 cadets and, weighing anchor on 8 for John Chancellor's painting of the February 1938, she stood out to sea Beagle. He has captured that momentary situation perfectly; I have never from Spencer Gulf "under a cloud of sail," as Alan Villiers described it in his studied a finer marine painting.

I also noted with pleasure your praise book Posted Miss ing. Apart from a couple of routine radio messages reof Roger Morris's book, Pacific Sail, in Sea History 46. I purchased the book ceived in March, she was never seen or and agree it is an excellent treatment of heard from again. She went missing with all hands, presumably somewhere the subject from artistic and historical viewpoints. However, in hi s well exe- off Cape Horn.-ED. cuted painting of the Charles W. Mor... and Pommern gan he has shown a white belt and black simulated gun ports along the sides of Captain Ralph W. West, "Loss of the her upper hull. Most certainly she has Pamir" (Sea History 46) mentions that been presented in this livery for exhibi- " In addition to the Passat, two other veterans of Fr. Laeisz's 'Flying P ' line tion purposes , but I can find no historical documentation that the Morgan was ever survive. The Kruzenshtern (ex-Padua) .. . and the Peking .... " I would like to painted in this manner during her years as an active whaler. Does anyone else point out that the four-masted barkPommern also survives as a museum ship in have an opinion on this subject?

J AMES W ENTWORTH the harb9rof my home town, Marieharnn, in the Aland Islands between Sweden Dover, New Hampshire SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

and Finland. She became part of the last fleet of great sailing merchant ships of Captain Gustaf Erikson, and was laid up there after her last voyage in the grain trade between Australia and Great Britain in 1946. She is probably the only one of these ships which survives in authentic condition without any alterations.

She is part of the Maritime Museum of Mariehamn , and is well worth a visit.

P ETER E. wAHLB ERG, MD, PhD Mariehamn Aland Islands, Finland

QUERIES

&

CORRECTIONS

I am writing you in hopes that someone can help me locate information and photos on the Liberty ship SS Meteor of the Cargo Ship & Tankers, Inc. My father was wiper aboard the SS Meteor on a voyage to India in 1964-65. I am hoping to hear from someone who may know something about her careers at sea.

M ARTIN V. McM uLLE 1821 East Bobe Street Pensacola, FL 32503 I am seeking anecdotes and other information by or about people who took part in the production of anti-U-Boat "Norden Broadcasts" produced by the Naval Intelligence Branch OP- 16-W (Special Warfare) . From January 1943 to May 1945 , LCdr. Ralph G. Albrecht recorded over 300 broadcasts as the voice of "Fregatte Kapitan Robert Lee Norden"hence the name Norden Broadcasts.

MR.

J. W A

ORES

624 Randall Way Matawan , NJ 07747- 1918 I am looking for information about men who served in the Small Ships of the Army Transport Service in the Papua/ New Guinea Campaign, in particular Al Meyers, of Red Bank, New Jersey, mate on the Jane Morehead (see SH44), and Lee Quick of Watertown, New York, who was my skipperon thecoastalcargo vessel FS 9A. Eo D ENNIS 1454 West 72 Street Hialeah, FL 33014 I am seeking information on the steamer Isaac Newton, which went down off Washington Heights, New York City, in the 1860s. And on a tug named th elacob Bell, which went down in the same area of the Hudson River (no date known).

D ANIEL RICH

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SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

The Last Drift Oral History Project

by Philip Thorneycroft Teuscher

"They were like gulls out there .... " 1 "Actually, it was a pretty sight, when I look back on it now, you knew everybody was working there. It was no easy work, it was a backbreaking job. But if you liked the outdoors and everything, I'd say ninety percent of the men that worked out there, you couldn't blast them out of that job with a stick of dynamjte. They wouldn't go ashore to work or any other place ... ."2 â&#x20AC;˘***â&#x20AC;˘

These are the words of two of Connecticut's last commercial windship sailors, the natural growth oystermen of Long Island Sound.

Amazingly, a way of life and the technique of harvesting oysters under sail, the origins of which predate colonial Connecticut, endured well into the middle decades of this century. In 1956, two ancient gaff-rigged sloops sailed out of the Henry Street Basin, Bridgeport, under the loom of factories and smoke stacks, in a last attempt to dredge oysters under sail on the once rich Bridgeport/ Stratford natural growth beds.

These "natural growthers" were watermen who harvested seed oysters under sail on the public, state-owned, natural oyster grounds. The seed oysters were sold to privately owned oyster companies who planted, cultivated and harvested these shellfish for market from their own oyster grounds.

The history of the natural growther is also the history of early and successful conservation measures to ensure an abundant supply of seed oysters for Connecticut's once booming shellfish industry. Connecticut had a monopoly as the source of these valuable seed oysters because of the ideal conditions along her coast. Due to the dilution of Long Island Sound ' s salt water by Connecticut's rivers, and the little propensity of"spats" (baby oysters) to "set" (anchor themselves permanently) in

certain coastal shallows, the regenerative source of seed oysters was assured only along Connecticut' s littoral.

In the late 1800s, when the more efficient steam-powered oyster dredgers began replacing sailboats, the natural oyster grounds were in danger of being overexploited. In order to conserve the limited supply of natural seed oysters, the Connecticut Shellfish Commission enacted laws stipulating that only "sail powered" vessel s with " manually hauled" dredges would be permitted to work the state-owned grounds. This farsighted legislation sustained the anachronistic technology of sail dredging well into this century. The colorful, free-wheeling and independent watermen who worked these beds under sail were referred to as natural growthers.

In the heyday of the natural beds, schooners and sloops worked the grounds, the sloop rig predominating.

These shallow draft, centerboard gaffriggers were a hybrid type known as "south-siders" from their origin on Long Island ' s Great South Bay. In later years, retired sandbagger racing sloops with cut-down rigs and a few converted yachts could also be found in the natural growther fleet. Some of these workworn vessels were almost half a century old at the final demi se of natural growthing.

While interviewing old oystermen for an article about my first boat, the exsandbagger and oyster sloop Shadow (see SH36), I became convinced that the historically important and spicey recollections of Connecticut's last commercial sailors should be recorded and collected. Sponsored by the Norwalk Seaport Association and endorsed by the National Maritime Historical Society, I applied to the Connecticut Humanities Council and was awarded a grant to underwrite the first part of a two-stage project. The first stage is an oral history

At right, the schooner Anna Marie with Charles Island in the background on the Bridgeport/Stratford grounds about 1941 . Below, the fleet at work about 1940. Photo courtesy William Ciaurro .,

of Connecticut's natural growthers entitled "The Last Drift". A "drift" was whatthe natural growthers called a boat's pass over the oyster beds hauling dredges.

If funding can be raised for the second stage, I will crew the Norwalk Seaport Association 's vessel, Hope, the last oyster sloop built in Connecticut, with retired natural growthers. The technique of oystering under sail will be videotaped. Utilising excerpted oral history materials, archival visuals and video footage, I will create a documentary that illustrates both the human and maritime aspects of oystering by the wind.

With the help of Peter Stanford, president of the National Maritime Historical Society, and Professor Floyd Shumway of the New Haven Colony Historical Society, I made the acquaintance of scholars and advisors in the disciplines of maritime and oral history to assist me in realizing the objectives of "The Last Drift" with professional competence.

Maritime scholars Professor Benjamin Labaree of the Munson Institute at the

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Mystic Seaport Museum and author Jack Kochiss have assisted in the compilation of an oral history questionnaire, and Mr. Kochiss has participated in "The Last Drift" public lecture series. Oral hi storian Joyce Pendery coached me in oral history gatheri ng and she is transcribing the original tapes for archival preservation and dissemination .

"My old gent, why he wanted me to become a priest, so I run away and joined the army, fifteen-and-a-half. " 3 '"You have to take ancient hi story.' I says, ' I don ' t have to take ancient hi story because I don ' t li ke it. ' So I quit school. " 4 The independent character of the natural growther was apparent right from the beginning of the interv iewing. Most of the natural growthers traded the high school classroom for the hard school of hand-hauling dredges from the heaving deck of an oyster sloop.

"Well , it was a good experience, let ' s put it that way . You learned how to really handle a boat. Of course, Norm and I could handle boats since we were kids, so we had no problem. We jumped right in them sail boats and went right to work with them."5 Everyday hardships for the natural growther seem to harken from another age. "Frank Stromski, I think he was going agai nst the Jesse Johnson or something and he was trying to hold it off and the bowsprit come down and took the end of hi s finger off. .. "

"Well, we'd throw salt water on the deck and if it didn't freeze too quick we figured it wasn' t go ing to be too bad out there."6 The feeling of the oysterman for his hardworking sloop is expressed in terse, yet affectionate language.

"Oh , she'd walk 'em right down. This is where a boat the size of the Eaglette was good. The Teal, the Eaglette, the Suzy, the Hope and them boats. You could walk down with six, seven or eight dredges." 7 Each retired natural growther I interviewed has a unique story to tell, but they are unanimous in their enthusiasm fo r the fact that their story is being recorded. Each oral history is a composite part of the natu ral growther' s experience. The sum total of this collection will be a body of knowledge that speaks ¡ firsthand of the important part these last commercial sailors played in Connecticut ' s maritime heritage. .i..

An experienced deepwater sailor, "Captain Torture" has written on a wide range of maritime subjects from the Carib Indians to the steamboats of Istanbul. As we go to press, he is applying for backing for stage two of "The Last Drift" : a documentary film of oystering under sail.

1

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9

THE SEAPORT EXPERIENCE:

Maritime Britain by Train

by Michael T. Sheehan

Visitors to Great Britain often organize their holidays around a theme-cathedral towns, London's theaters, great country houses, Shakespeare's country and the like. What about a maritime theme? With a BritRail Pass (good for unlimited travel in England, Scotland and Wales) and two weeks' time, one can travel from the very south of England to the far north of Scotland taking in a wide variety of maritime museums, hi storic ships and working docks. You can do this with a combination of day trips from London and longer journeys via InterCity sleepers and ferries to more distant parts of the British Isles.

The place to begin is Greenwich, about a half-hour east from central London by river launch. Greenwich offers a rich variety of antique shops and bookstores with a vast assortment of items relating to the sea, but the centerpiece is the nation's- and arguably the world 'smost important maritime muse um, the National Maritime Museum. The museum's collections are housed in a number of distinguished buildings, most notable among them Queen's House, a Palladian mansion by Inigo Jones completed in 1635. The museum has several exhibition halls, conducts a variety of educational programs for schools and the public and maintains extensive archives and a research library covering all aspects of maritime hi story which serves as a central resource for scholars and other museums around the world. Facing the museum to the north is the Royal Naval College, and what was once the Dreadnought Seamen's Hospital occupied a site to the westward, where it had been established in 1763. Following the hospital 's recent closing, the premises have been empty until their future use is established. Those familiar with Sailors' Snug Harbor, on Staten Island in New York City will immediately recognize the architectural and philosophical model of that famous nineteenth-century American charitable institution.

Although the National Maritime Museum does not itself have any ships, the famous clipper of the China tea and Australia wool trades, the Cutty Sark (1869), rises over the Thames nearby, outfitted as a museum ship. The Cutty Sark Society, founded by Frank Carr, under the leadership of the Duke of Edinburgh, restored the ship and built the dock in which she is exhibited. She is now maintained by the Maritime Trust and she consistently earns a substantial surplus over and above her maintenance costs, some of which is used to send 10

young people to sea under sail.

Overlooking thi s Thameside scene of ships and maritime buildings is the Royal Observatory, where one may straddle 0° longitude (Greenwich Meridian), with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and the other in the western. Its galleries of navigational instruments and artifacts include manufactures of precise and workmanlike beauty, such as the Larcum Kendall chronometers with which the likes of Cook and Bligh traced their journeys across the broad spaces of the Pacific in the eighteenth century.

After Greenwich, probably the most popular tourist site for maritime history is Portsmouth, the home of England's oldest navy yard. Heading south out of Waterloo Station, the train reaches Portsmouth in a little more than an hour. A quick walk takes you to HM Naval Base, which boasts a steadily growing fleet of outstanding ship restoration projects.

Until quite recently, the first rate HMS Victory (1765) was the premier historic ship at Portsmouth. The oldest commissioned naval ship in the world, HMS Victory was Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, which establi shed the preeminence of the Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. The onboard tour led by sailors on active duty is a fascinating look at the social caste system maintained aboard a crowded ship-of-the-line during the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1982, she was joined by Henry YUi's flagship, Mary Rose. Considered by many the first battleship, the Mary Rose was built in 1510. Modified with the addition of a lower deck of cannon, she sank under Henry's eyes in 1535 while standing out to engage the French fleet in the Battle of Spithead. Lost for almost 430 years, her largely intact bottom and starboard side were raised from the Solent in 1982 and brought into Portsmouth for preservation, one of the most ambitious-and successful -ship saves in the history of maritime preservation . The latest addition to this hi storic navy is HMS Warrior, the armored steam frigate of 1860. Outclassing anything afloat when she was commi ssioned, she never fired a shot in anger; but she and her successors maintained the naval balance of power in England's favor for half a century, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The Warrior was restored over the course of eight years by a gang of shipwrights brought together in the North Sea port of Hartlepool, Yorkshire, as part of a job development scheme. Today, the Hartlepool Ship Restoration Company, Ltd., is

undertaking the restoration of the Bombay-built frigate Foudroyant (exTrincomalee) of 1817, which will also be homeported at Portsmouth.

The historic maritime towns of Cornwall and Devon in southwest England are well worth a visit, but if you are pressed for time, you should certainly make a point of stopping at Exeter. The city's seafaring activities flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but today the Exeter Maritime Museum is the home of one of the most unique collections of sailing and steam-powered craft anywhere in the world.

Founded almost twenty years ago by David Goddard, the museum 's fleet includes an astonishing-visually and nautically-array of vessels from around the world: a Venetian gondola, a proa from the Fiji islands, the famous English ocean racer Jolie Brise, born as a French pilot-cutter in 1913, an Irish currach, an Arabian pearling dhow, a Hong Kong junk and a xavega, a richly colored fishing boat with a sweeping stem, designed to be launched from the Atlantic beaches of Portugal. In addition , there are several steam-powered vessels, including the drag-boat Bertha, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1844. The museum 's philosophy is to preserve not only the vessels but also the knowledge of how they worked. "If an object is worthy of preservation," wrote Major Goddard in these pages a few years ago, "so surely is the knowledge of how it was used, but better still, the technique of actually using it." So, many of the boats are actively sailed by the museum 's staff and scholars intent on learning the truths of mankind's seafaring past and-in some cases-the seafaring present.

From Exeter you can continue north to Bristol on the Avon, near the Welsh border. For centuries the leading port in England's West Country, Bristol was the source of much late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century voyaging to Spain and America. The city's Floating Harbour has been the focus of an energetic rehabilitation effort for which the city was awarded the Europa Nostra award in 1984. Bristol is also the birthplace of the SS Great Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel 's famous iron ship of 1843 whose design revolutionized naval architecture and ocean trade. She began her careeron the Liverpool-New York route, then sailed as an auxiliary steamer to Australia (being stripped of her engines in 1882), and ended her days in the Falkland Islands as a storage barge and SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

finally a hulk. There she lay until 1970, when an intrepid team lead by Ewan Corlett succeeded in their monumental effort to bring her back to be preserved at Bristol, in the very drydock from which she was launched.

Shipbuilding and merchants made Liverpool one of the great ports of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today it boasts one of the finest and newest maritime museums anywhere, the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The museum has spearheaded the restoration of a major portion of the historic Albert Dock and Pier Head area, where many of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century shipping companies had their headquarters, and where the museum makes its home today. Its first major permanent exhibit is "Emigrants to a New World," a comprehensive look at the port through which more than 9 million emigrants from famine, religious persecution and poverty in Europe embarked on ships bound for Canada, the United States and Australia between 1830 and 1930.

Not a part of this tour, but certainly deserving of attention, are the various canals of Great Britain. At Ellesmere Port, across the Mersey from Liverpool, is The Boat Museum, which boasts an exceptional collection of inland vessels with many fine examples of narrowboats, canal steamers and dredges that worked the water links between England's interior and the seacoast. Here one feels the great historical attachment the English have for their waterways as both a means of transportation and commerce and, more recently, for recreation and tourism .

Proceeding north out of London, the high-speed East Coast train gets you to Yorkshire in about two hours. To the southeast of York lies Hull , a bust! ing port on the Humber River, a centerof the North Sea fishing industry and a port of embarkation to northern European ports.

The Town Docks Museum, housed in a richly ornamented Victorian building which was formerly the office of Hull's leading shipping and dock management company, records the maritime history of Hull , especially its heyday as a major whaling port in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The town docks have been enlarged and relocated to the edge of town , f~~ing the older waterfront area open to redevelopment for light commercial, recreational and residential uses. In one of the renovated warehouses is a first-class hotel and restaurant complex called the WaterSEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

front Hotel, a fine place to stay the night before continuing north to Scotland or Hartlepool.

About thirty miles south of Glasgow is the town of Irvine on the Firth of Clyde, and a major museum in the making, the Scottish Mari time Museum, headed by Robert Forsythe. The collection now boasts some thirty-eight boats , including an iron coaster, two William Fife-designed yachts and a Scottish puffer, the Spartan. The museum also maintains the Denny Ship Model Experimental Tank in Dumbarton, the first such tank built in Britain and still fully operational.

Thanks to the North Sea oil boom , the ancient city of Aberdeen (about three hours north of Edinburgh) is today Scotland's most active maritime city.

The Aberdeen Maritime Museum traces the seaport's role from the fourteenth century, when she traded with ports in England and the Low Countries, through the nineteenth century, when she was a major shipbuilding center for Clippers and other ships (the Elissa, restored to sailing condition in Galveston, Texas, was built at the Aberdeen yard of Alexander Hall & Sons), to her prominence in the North Sea fisheries and the oil and gas industry. If you want to visit the Shetland Islands, the ferry from Aberdeen is fifteen hours to Lerwick.

From Aberdeen, the railway runs northwest to Inverness, the business and intellectual center of the Scottish Highlands. Inverness is a lively place to pause for a day or so. Several times a day a train leaves to Kyle of Lochalsh on the west coast (where you can get a ferry to one of the islands in the Inner Hebrides or the Western Isles), or to Thurso in the northeast, where you may embark for the Orkney Islands. To round out your maritime tour, you might go to Wick, four hours north of Inverness near Thurso. Wick's sheltered harbor is always full of small vessels. Warehouses line the working waterfront, which is best seen from the bluff across from the, lighthouse marking the entrance to the harbor. The Wick Heritage Society maintains a modest exhibition of ship models and nautical memorabilia from the region. As you walk the streets, the Viking and Celtic traditions and the proximity of the sea permeate the town, the smell of the sea mixing with the peat smoke from fireplaces in the row houses of dark stone where sturdy Scots still look to the sea for their livelihood. MacKaye' s Hotel is a warm establishment on the harbor, just a few steps from the railway station and your return to London.

To plan your own tour, Maritime England (published by the British Tourist Authority) is a colorful and complete compendium of Britain's maritime heritage. Some other excellent guides are Robert Simper's Britain's Maritime Heritage (David & Charles, London & N. Pomfret, VT), Michael Stammers ' Historic Ships (Shire Publications, Aylesbury, Bucks., 1987), Veryan Hall, Britain's Maritime Heritage (Conway Maritime Press, London) and Alexander McKee's A Heritage of Ships: A Regional Guide (Souvenir Press, 1988).

.v

Formerly director of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, New York, and consultant to the NMHS, Mr. Sheehan is president of Oat/ands, a National Trust property in Leesburg, Virginia.

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13

Medieval Ship Graffiti

by Lawrence V. Mott

Look at medieval graffiti? The suggestion by Joana Palou, fine arts director for the Museu de Palma, had surprised me.

I had come to Palma, on the Mediterranean island ofMallorca, to study medieval ship representations, but I had not even considered looking at ship graffiti.

Joana was sure I would find the inscriptions interesting and introduced me to Elvira Gonzales, who was undertaking an exhaustive study of medieval graffiti in the Balearic Islands. The drawings were located in the windows of the bell tower of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca and Joana had made arrangements for me to see the graffiti the next day with Elvira and her two associates, Jaume Serra and Margalida Bernat.

As I sat in a cafe that evening, I was skeptical. The term graffiti conjured up visions of spray paint and vandalism with little if any social value. Yet on reflection I began to realize graffiti could provide important iconographic information about medieval ships. Visual evidence of such vessels is rare, and up to this point I had been limited to working with religious art work and illuminated manuscripts. If the graffiti were as detailed as Elvira suggested, they could be a unique source of data, especially if their creators had simply drawn what they saw.

The next day we met outside the cathedral, which sits on a hill dominating the harbor. The journey to the top of the bell tower and its graffiti required some effort. A tightly spiralled Gothic staircase climbs over nine stories to the cathedral roof where a foot bridge crosses over to the tower itself. The tower's interior is a vision of unadorned Gothic architecture supported by a network of large, seven-century-old oak beams.

After the long climb, my initial reaction on looking at the window sill was disappointing. Only a few deep scratches were visible. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the light, other lines began to stand out. What appeared at first to be a few randomly inscribed lines suddenly took shape as ships, providing in graphic detail a view of what the artist saw over six hundred years ago. Drawn with lines cut to various depths, a cog sits at a quay as cargo is hoisted on board with the ship's yard used as a crane. Beneath centuries of dust was another early cog showing such details as its rudder mounts. The graffiti are like medieval snapshots of the vessels that were in the harbor, revealing ship fittings whose functions are unknown, such as multiple groups of stays on the masts where normally only two or three stays were used.

14

It was obvious that the graffiti were important, but while all of the graffiti are in windows which face in the direction of the harbor, the view of the harbor itself is blocked by the cathedral. This baffled me until Elvira told me that the bell tower had been built before the cathedral. Construction of the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca began short! y after the conquest of the island in 1229 by Jaume I of Aragon. As was common practice in the arrangement of early cathedrals, the bel I tower was constructed first as an independent structure while the cathedral itself was being laid out.

Rising over 206ft above the harbor when completed in 1274, the tower afforded an uninterrupted view of the roadstead.

But the tower is on the north side of the planned cathedral so that walls eventually blocked the vista of the harbor to the south. Though the cathedral was not completed until 1601, the harbor view was probably blocked as early as 1367, when the walls of the nave aisles were completed. The panorama was definitely obscured by 1405 when the upper nave walls were completed. It has been generally assumed that the cog was not introduced into the Mediterranean until around 1300, and the earliest pictorial references previously identified are found in religious artwork dating from the 1320s. Yet one of the cogs drawn on the wall is of a type normally associated with the mid- l 200s. The combination of the ship type and the bell tower's history made this representation the earliest depiction of a cog in the Mediterranean.

Further research into the cathedral's history provided me with some insights into the possible artists. Based on the detailed renderings of the ships, it is very likely that the creators of the graffiti were sailors who had sought sanctuary in the cathedral precincts to escape arrest. On an island as small as Mallorca it was difficult to "get out of town" if one ran afoul of the law. The concept of sanctuary within a church was well established in medieval Europe, and the cathedral at Palma apparently had a large resident population offugitives from the beginning.

Looking down from the tower, the artist would have seen a harbor crammed with ships of every shape and size. With its perfect anchorage and strategic location, Palma served as major transshipping point for the emerging states in the western Mediterranean. From the Italian city-states there would have been merchant galleys either outward bound for Flanders or returning to Italy after stopping at Valencia or Barcelona. Giant

roundships carrying up to a thousand passengers each would have vied for space with their smaller cousins, the taridas, and the cogs which were beginning to steal the bulk trade from the roundships.

Since it is unlikely that the graffiti were made after the view of the harbor was blocked around 1370, they are especially important because they date from a period in which ships were undergoing a dramatic evolution. Prior to the fourteenth century, the bulk of medieval merchandise was carried by tubby vessels called roundships. With length-tobreadth ratios of less than 4: 1, these ships came in many sizes. They differed from their counterparts in northern waters in that the larger southern vessels generally carried two or three masts rigged exclusively with lateen sails. They also were steered with quarter rudders, and were of carve! construction.

Although these thirteenth-century roundships could carry large quantities of cargo, they were slow and hard to maneuver, and thus easy prey for pirates. In addition, the large lateen rig required a larger crew, which meant more expense for the owners. At this time a smaller ship type-the cog-was being introduced into the Mediterranean from the north. The cog differed from southern ships by virtue of its single square sail, stern-mounted rudder and its lapstrake construction. The introduction of the cog into southern waters had a dramatic impact on ship construction.

Other iconographic evidence from the period illustrates the rapid adoption of the square rig and stern rudder. But the degree to which overall construction techniques were influenced is much debated.

The graffiti not only provide data on characteristics of individual ships, they also reflect the variety of shipping in the harbor. The fact that the graffiti are only situated in windows which face the sea strongly suggests that the artists simply drew the ships as they saw them below, thus giving a reasonably accurate picture of ships calling at Palma. The renderings indicate that several divergent construction methods were practised, and that the issue of influence may not be as simple as northern versus southern tradition.

The graffiti in the tower reflect the dramatic shift in ship construction and touch on the important issue concerning the actual influence of northern vessels on the design of Mediterranean ships.

Several depictions are unquestionably of northern cogs, but several others show SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

The illustrations above show lateen-rigged roundship ca. 1250 common to the Mediterranean. The drawings at right depict northern cogs of 1242and 1329.

ship types which, though they have adopted the square rig and the stemmounted rudder, have characteristics reflecting a stronger southern influence.

One drawing shows a vessel with both a stem rudder and quarter rudders. Other ships have curved stem and stem posts, unlike the straight timbers of a cog. Such small but distinctive differences suggest that Mediterranean shipwrights simply borrowed what was useful and adapted it to their techniques.

The change in ship construction in this period is of great importance, for medieval ships were evolving into the vessels which would launch the Age of Discovery. This same evolution would spell the decline of Palma as a major port in the sixteenth century. As trade shifted to the Far East and the New World, the power of the Mediterranean city-states declined and, with it, the importance of Palma as a trading port. Still militarily important because of its location , in the following years the harbor changed hands several times between Spain, France and Great Britain; but its importance as a trading center had slipped into history.

Previously my attitude towards ancient graffiti had been one of indifference, but the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca changed my outlook. Too often graffiti are ignored or dismissed before they have been completely evaluated. While graffiti are only one source ofinformation concerning medieval ship construction, carefully integrated with the study of written records and other forms of iconography they can help us obtain a clearer picture of ships about which so little is otherwise known .

Mr. Mott is a master's candidate in underwater archaeology at Texas A&M University. In addition to his work in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca , he has conducted research at the Museo Arqueologico Episcopal de Vic, the Convent of San Francisco and the Museo de Arte de Catalunya.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

Above, the Cathedral showing the bell tower.

Below, a stone sill with a picture of a cog made between 1274 and 1370.

Below, the author's tracings of two graffiti ; the one at right can be seen in the photo above.

SAIL TRAINING

A New Bark Built in 1906

by Captain H. F. Morin Scott

At the tum of the century, Friedrich Middendorf-the wellknown designer of sailing ships such as Preussen-was commissioned to draw a new lightship for general duties in the North Sea and the Baltic. He chose a sailing ship hull to provide the most seaworthy and comfortable working platfonn for the sailors who were to man this lonely beacon of marine safety .

From 1906 to 1984 she dutifully performed her task of keeping ships from danger, until the advent of the automated lighthouse forced her into retirement. At this point, Captain Manfred Havener-the leading proponent of civilian sail training in West Gennany-managed to persuade the government to part with this elderly relic so that he could fulfil his dream of converting her into a sail training ship for the young people of Gennany. It was a long, hard task which finally resulted in the renaming of the vessel Alexander von Humboldt, after the famous German oceanographer.

By this time, her accommodation and engines had been refurbished and on deck she had received a bark rig setting some I 0,000 square feet of sai l, including a main skysail.

After completing engine and other trials, she sailed to Karlskrona to join the STA family gathered there for the 1988 Tall Ship Races. This year they took the form of a race from Karl skrona to Hel si nki , followed by a cruise to Mariehamn in the Aland Islands-the home of Gustav Erikson's fleet of cargo-carrying sailing ships which had continued operation up unti I 1948-and a final race back to Denmark. l was both honored and pleased when Manfred Havener invited me to sail on board for as long as I could spare the time in the hope that I might improve on perfection. Hastily finishing off some necessary but boring chores, I joined the bark in Hel si nki where she was lying alongside Mir, the newly completed Russian 3,500-ton, full-rigged ship, also on her maiden voyage. Alexander von Humboldt, at about 450 tons, was positively dwarfed, despite her dimensions.

Length, sparred: 63m (207ft) Length on deck : 51 m (l 67ft) Beam: 8.02m (26.3ft) Draught: 4.88m ( l 6ft) Engine: 560BHP Displacement sail area: l,010m 2 (10,872Jt 2) Complement: 45 trainees; 15 afterguard Busily training up professional crew (none of whom are paid any salary) and future watch leaders, there was great activity aboard at all times and all felt somewhat restrained at having to remain in port for four days to follow the program of "The Visit of the Tall Ships." There was a good selection present apart from Mir and ourselves. Ahead lay the Bulgarian barkentine Kaliakra (l 986), while outside her lay the beautiful ship Georg Stage (1935), the successor to the original vessel of the same name now berthed at Mystic Seaport Museum with the name given to her by Alan Villiers, Joseph Conrad ( 1882). Astern lay the magnificent Portuguese Grand Banks four-masted schooner Creoula, recently restored and on her maiden voyage as a sail training ship for young people.

For traditional reasons, Creoula still carries a few dories on deck, though not the thirty-six she sailed with to the fishing grounds. Outside her lay the Gennan Grossherzogin Elizabeth ( 1919), built as a trading schooner and retaining her original rig but now carrying cadets from the Merchant Navy Navigation School in Bremerhaven. Outside her lay the Polish Navy barkentine ORP Iskra (1984), likeKaliakra a near sister ship to the Polish civilian barkentine Pogoria. A few hundred yards away lay the magnificent Russian four-masted bark Kruzenshtern, ex-Padua (1926), the lastofFerdinand Laeisz's 16

Flying-P ships still at sea.

Across the harbor, moored in serried ranks, were the smaller vessels, the topsail schooners, ketches, yawls, cutters and sloops, down to 30ft waterline length, which made up the total entry of over 100 vessels for the race to start from Mariehamn to the finishing line in open water south of Copenhagen, where the vessels would berth in about ten days' time and where the prizes would be presented.

In this day and age, when international sport is so marred by politics, racial prejudice, hooliganism and even terrorism, it is heartening to find that in the Tall Ships Races more true Olympic Spirit is to be found than in the Olympics themselves, and in these 1988 races it is noteworthy that forty entries out of one hundred come from Eastern-bloc countries, with Bulgaria sending her entry on the long voyage from the Black Sea to the Baltic to participate. In harbor and on crew exchanges during the cruises in company from Helsinki to Mariehamn, the crews of all nations and political creeds, both sexes and many colors make friendships and find common interests which fill one with hope for more peaceful years ahead. Sadly, one or two countries are noticeable by their absence, and in the Baltic this year it was the East Germans who failed to join the party.

Departure from Helsinki on Tuesday, 19 July, was in the usual tall ships race fonn of a parade of sail, with all vessels "sailing" out in line ahead. However, as usual, the wind was contrary and so it became a motor parade with the square riggers bringing up the rear.

Once clear of the numerous islands surrounding the entrance, course was set to the westward in a light southeasterly wind. We had on board three Russian cadets from Mir, one from a Russian yacht, one from an English yacht, one New Zealander, one Dutch girl, two Poles, one Bulgarian and one Dane to augment our mainly German crew. A dozen of our crew were distributed around the fleet, not necessarily in direct exchange with the craft sending crew to us. Below decks, language was sometimes a problem in conversation, but on deck there appeared to be a general comprehension of what was required to sail the ship. Despite a knowledge of German which was limited to the names of the sails and ropes in a square-riggers, I kept a regular watch 0400-0800 and 1600-2000, as well as turning out for all hands on the occasions when that was necessary. It was far preferable to being a passenger and I soon had most of those in my watch speaking passable English.

Alexander von Humboldt is a mixture of traditional and modem ideas of square rig. Her masts are steel (the mizzen takes all engine exhaust and the water boiler flue to the mast head), while the yards, gaffs and boom are aluminum. Standing rigging is 19 x 1 galvanized with swaged terminals, and all the running rigging is German teryline, which hoists traditionally. This was my second time with such a modem innovation, and though it seems acceptable, I sensed that in strong winds (which we did not encounter) getting the sheets in properly could be hazardous. Even in the best conditions the gap of six to twelve inches between the clew of the sail and the yard arm below offended my traditional soul, although I doubt if it made any difference to the vessel's performance under sail.

We had a little bit of tacking and wearing before entering Mariehamn harbor under engine. It was a chance for our visiting yachtsmen to observe a square-rigger in action. Having to land a cadet for medical attention, we were allowed into the harbor on the evening of Thursday, 22 July, coming to anchor in a bay a mile from the town and sending the casualty off in the boat with the doctor.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

~

-:

.... ....: --'

-,.

-:

:

;-

...

-:::.

Above, the Alexander von Humboldt, newly rebuilt for sail training from the lightship of1906. Above right, the sleek new Russian 3 ,500ton full rigger Mir. Below right, the fleet in Copenhagen.

While the race from Karlskrona to Helsinki had been run with light to moderate southerly or southwesterly winds which favored the square-riggers, the race from Mariehamn to Copenhagen started off with fair light winds but ended in several days of hard head winds which prevented many entrants from finishing. Two interesting points emerge from an examination of the elapsed time of the competitors. The first is that in the race to Copenhagen, the Sail Training Association (UK) schooner Malcolm Miller, with a crew of young men, finished forty-five hours after her sister ship, Sir Winston Churchill, which was manned by a crew of young women. The other is that the four-masted schooner Creoula, a fore-and-aft rigged schooner, did not go as fast to windward in the race to Copenhagen as any of the square-riggers, except the little Georg Stage.

I hope this last point is noted by the many yachtsmen who scorn square rig and its windward ability. When you get up to this sort of size, fore...,and-aft rig does not work so well-and it is terrifying to gibe. Sailing a 500-ton square-rigger is not claimed to be better than sailing an ocean racer, or a catamaran or an old gaffer, it is just different. If you have not tried it once, it is certainly worth making the effort to have a go. The pyramid of sail to royal or skysail is awe-inspiring. The effortless power of 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 square feet of canvas is impressive. The ease with which such areas of sail can be handled by a relatively small crew with no winches is an eye-opener. The overall impression is inspirational.

The final ceremonies in the City Hall of Copenhagen, with the prizes presented by Prince Hendrik of Denmark, was a most impressive affair, and the cheering was loud and long when the Grand Prix-the Cutty Sark Trophy (a beautiful model of the clipper ship Cutty Sark in solid silver)-was presented to the sixty-year old ketch Urania from the Royal Netherlands Naval College. This was the second time she had won the trophy and the first occasion on which the trophy has .t> been won by the same vessel for a second time.

Captain Scott is no newcomer to sail training. A director of Square Rigged Services, Ltd. , "consultants on all aspects of design and operation of square-rigged vessels," his expertise has informed the development of a number of sail training ships, and their programs, including the Lord Nelson, Royalist and Young Endeavour.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

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17

European Naval Power in the Sixteenth Century

by Gerhard Ketels

History provides examples of two types of naval powers: those whose naval strength developed gradually out of their commercial role, as did that of Carthage, Venice and Holland, and those whose naval power appeared suddenly, like Athens, Rome and the Ottoman Empire. England belongs to the latter category. When Elizabeth the first came to the throne in 1558, her kingdom had an insignificant maritime force that was falling steadily behind those of its continental rivals. When she died forty-five years later, England was a leading sea power solidly embarked on an expansion that would, in the next three centuries years, carry it to the most distant parts of the globe. England's imperial ambition and maritime expansion were inextricably linked , and 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, can be seen as the year both were launched.

In the 1580s, Europe was dominated by three great powers: the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and France. France was in the midst of a religious civil war, and the Turkish tide had been slowly receding since the failure of their unsuccessful siege of Malta in 1566. But the Habsburgs seemed stronger than ever.

To the east, the Austrian branch of the family was the strongest force in Central Europe, and with the spread of the Counter Reformation its influence was increasing. At the head of the Spanish Habsburgs, Philip II ruled the world 's most far-flung empire. The Spanish army had been virtually invincible since the days of Fernandez de Cordoba, El Gran Capitan, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Spain's European hegemony embraced some of the wealthiest parts of the continent, including the whole Iberian peninsula, the Low Countries, most of Italy and parts of France.

England, on the other hand, ranked with lesser powers such as Denmark, Poland and, in the waning years of the Most Serene Republic, Venice. In some respects, England's situation in the latter half of the sixteenth century resembled its condition four centuries later. It had ruled overseas territories from which it had derived much of its power for centuries, and its foreign policy centered around them. In the Middle Ages the kings of England had controlled half of France; but the loss of Calais in 1551 , like the loss of her colonial empire in the twentieth century, forced England to undergo a massive reorientation. The twentieth-century analogy can be taken further: England's power in relation to Spain in 1588 was roughly equivalentto Britain's power in relation to the United States in the post-World War II era (though lacking the cordiality of the US/UK relationship). Philip's European territories were about four times as populous as Elizabeth 's and hi s revenues were about fifteen times as great. Spain had worldwide interests, whereas England's foreign involvements focussed chiefly on Ireland and Scotland, neither of which, despite centuries of effort, it had succeeded in conquering.

The relative weakness of England extended to maritime as well as political matters . In the sixteenth century, the distinction between warships and merchant ships was blurred. Although some ships were designed especially for war, most of the ships-both English and Spanish- i nvolved in the Armada campaign were armed merchantmen. Thus, an examination of a country's merchant shipping offers a good indication of its potential naval power. Although accurate figures regarding the size of merchant fleets of the time are-with the exception of England-sketchy, the following estimates for 1588 are available: Low Countries 230,000 tons 175 ,000 " Spain 160,000 " France 110,000 " Hanseatic League 67,000 " England 18

Not only did England have the smallest merchant fleet, in rate of growth it had been losing ground to the other major European fleets, with the possible exception of those of the Han sea tic League. The most rapidly expanding merchant fleet was that of the Low Countries, which in the previous century had been about the same size as that of the English, but which by 1588 was nearly four times as big. England would not surpass the Dutch until the eighteenth century.

In the late fifteenth century, under Henry VII, Parliament passed acts and negotiated treaties that began to ensure trade practices favorable to English shippers to bring them up to some sort of parity with their Hanseatic and Netherlandish rival s. In very limited numbers, English merchants began trading to the Baltic and Mediterranean, fishing in the North Atlantic and freighting the major part of English exports to the great Northern European entrep6t at Antwerp. Worthwhile as these interventions were, England was still too backward economically to take full advantage of the commercial benefits these measures promised.

Henry also took novel steps to define England's strategic interest in the English Channel and the North Sea. Work on the Royal Navy Yard at Portsmouth-England 's first-began in 1495. It was designed to ensure a ready source of supply and repair for the "Royal ships"-the genesis of the Royal Navy.

At his death, there were five Royal ships, two of which, the Regent and the Sovereign, could be counted among the most heavily armed warships in Europe. Balancing the necessity for a greater deterrent force in the event of foreign threat with the need for economy, armories were developed at Greenwich and Woolwich, where merchant ships requisitioned for the crown could be provisioned and fitted out for battle.

Although Spanish tonnage was less than the Dutch, the absolute figures are misleading. Spain's European trade was relatively insignificant, but throughout the rest of the world Spain was supreme at sea. In 1571 , a combined Spanish and Venetian fleet had annihilated the Turkish navy at Lepanto.

Much more significant, though , Spain was sending close to 200 ships a year to her colonies in the New World. Her American possessions (and her ships) provided most of the world's silver; and Brazil, which had come under Philip 's rule after Portugal was united with Spain in 1580, was an increasingly lucrative market spurred by the slave trade and the rapidly increasing European appetite for sugar. Spanish Basque fleets dominated whaling in the North Atlantic and were firmly established in the cod fi sheries off Newfoundland.

Trade with Asia employed fewer ships, but the cargos were extremely valuable. Thanks to the acquisition of Portuguese colonies such as Goa and Macao, as well as her own longstanding presence in the Philippines, Spain dominated trade between Asia and Europe, and a number of Iberian ships were engaged in inter-Asian trade. Iberian missionaries were spreading Catholicism in Japan, and an invasion of the decrepit Ming Empire was being discussed. The Spanish fleet was smaller than that of the Dutch, but its military potential was probably greater because of its global reach and its substantial proportion of large, well-armed ships suitable for warfare.

*****

England's maritime power grew considerably in the years before 1588. But as the following comparative figures indicate, England was scarcely a seafaring country when it faced the Armada. The vast majority of Englishmen had nothing at all to do with the sea, and the maritime sector was far less important than it would be a century later, or than it was in countries like Holland, or the United States at the time of the Revolution . In 1570, even the miniscule Adriatic city-state of SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

Ragusa (Dubrovnik) had a merchant fleet as large as England ' s.

England Netherlands England United States

Year

Population

Tonnage

1582 1670 1680 1795

4 milllion 2 million 5 million 5 million

67,000 600,000 350,000 900,000

Despite Henry VII 's measures to secure favorable terms of trade for English merchants, under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary , England lost much of the advantage he had tried to secure. When Elizabeth took the reins, the national economy was weaker than it had been since the previous century.

Specifically, there were fewer Royal ships than there had been in decades, and the growth of the merchant fleet was sluggish.

The decline of England's merchant fleet in relation to those of FRANCE - FRA NCHE Spain and Holland continued until the 1570s, but that decade COMPTE proved a turning point. Overall, shipping tonnage grew from 50,000 in 1572 to 67,000 in 1588, and the number of ships LOMBARDY carrying over 100 tons, an indication of the merchant fleet ' s â&#x20AC;˘ Genoa military potential , grew from 86 to 173. This trend would continue after the Spanish Armada, though comparatively slowly, with English tonnage exceeding 100,000 tons by 1630, and more than 350,000 fifty years after that.

Apart from Philip 's own admonition to Parliament, when he was Queen Mary 's consort, that England "must always remain strong at sea, since on this the safety of the realm depends," the Spanish inadvertently played a major part in promoting the expansion of English shipping. In the decades before the 1570s, England ' s trade had largely been funnelled Bizer1e Melilla Oran 86ne.,,.through Antwerp, the great commercial center of Northern Europe. The distance between England and Antwerp was short, and the ships sailing it were small. With the economic focal point of Europe on its doorstep, England needed neither a large fleet nor especially large ships. As Elizabeth's advisor Lord Burleigh observed, "One hoye will bryng as much in one Dark grey areas above indicate territories ruled by or allied with yere [from Antwerp and other nearby continental ports] as 10 Phillip II. 29 July, the Armada arrives off Plymouth . Howard and merchantes shippes war wont to bryng from the other places Drake warp their ships out of Plymouth that night. 30 July, the English fl eet gets to windward of the Spanish and engages the in two yeres."

Armada/or the first time. 31 July, the two fleets proceed up the Beginning in the 1560s, the Dutch began to shake off their channel fighting intermittently. The Spanish lose two ships-one Spanish masters. In 1572 a general revolt was put down; but through explosion, one by collision. 2 August, battle off the Isle of in 1576, mutinous Spanish troops sacked Antwerp, and the Wight. 6 August, the Spanish put into Calais, where they are to link city never recovered its economic dominance. No longer able up with Parma . During the night o/7-8 August, The English send to buy and sell at a nearby entrep6t, English merchants were eight fireships into the Spanish fleet, which is f orced to quit the virtually forced to develop direct connections with distant anchorage. 8 August, during daylight hours the English press home markets. Although Amsterdam soon replaced Antwerp as the their attack off Gravelines, firing from close range. Spanish lose 3 major trading center, the Dutch had temporarily relaxed their to 4 ships and are forced further up the channel. 9 August, setting grip on trade with the Baltic, and English interests acted all sail to southwesterly breezes , Medina Sidonia runs to the north. lord Howard decides to pursue the Spanish as far as the Firth of quickly, establishing the Eastland Company for trade with the Forth despite the depletion of his own supplies . 12 August, the Hanseatic port of Elbing in 1579. Almost concurrent with southerly winds hold and the Armada, now offEdinburgh, is heading these developments, the war between the Ottoman Empire and Venice (1570-73) weakened the latter's domination of for home, north around Scotland, as their English pursuers break off the chase.

Mediterranean trade. Again English merchants seized the advantage, and by the 1580s their ships were trading directly to Venice and Turkey. These longer voyages required larger ships . The doubling in the number of ships over 100 tons in the ten years after 1572 had a direct bearing on England's naval power as it stood out to encounter the Spanish Armada in the ships and superior guns. (German and French workers were brought to England to upgrade iron manufacturing, which was summer of 1588.

Of course the growth of English shipping was not solely the a crucial element of overall naval power.) Acts aiding domesconsequence of isolated external events. In these formative tic shippers were passed in 1532, 1541 and 1558, and these years, perhaps England 's greatest asset was a government helped reduce the role of the Hanseatic and Italian merchants based on the crown, its 500 paid civil servants, and Parliament. who had dominated England's trade in the Middle Ages. In During Elizabeth ' s reign especially, the government followed 1563, a very important act was passed closing the coasting a consistent policy of promoting the navy and the merchant trade to foreign ships. Without that law the Dutch, the most fleet. Elizabeth provided the navy with modem, effective efficient shippers in Europe, would have taken over the SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

19

With the economic focal point of Europe on its doorstep, England needed neither a large fleet nor especially large ships. rapidly growing coal trade between Newcastle and London.

The government also aided English merchants and shippers by chartering companies to trade with Russia, the Baltic countries, Spain, North Africa, Venice and the Ottoman Emp ire. Although these measures did not make England a great maritime power, they did at least ensure that English shipping was not swept from the seas by the technologically superior Dutch.

At home, there were a number of economic forces stimulating the new concern for England's navy . A gradual increase in population outstripped the food supply and gave a direct impetus to the fishing industry . A series of laws requiring Engli shmen to eat fish on certain days were enacted, and by 1600 about half the year consisted of "fi sh days." The effect was dramatic, especially in the southwest ports of Devon , Cornwall and Dorset, where the number of ships in the Newfoundland fisheries grew from 30 in 1574 to more than 200 in 1600. East Anglian ports, whose ships fished the Icelandic waters, experienced a comparable boom. The pressure of people on the land also led to deforestation as trees were replaced by fields and pastures. After the forests had been cut down, wood was no longer avai lable for cooking and heating. Coal replaced wood as the primary fuel, and between 1550 and 1600 shipments from Newcastle to London grew fo urfo ld , to 140,700 tons.

Although England was not a major maritime power in 1588, and though she was far weaker than Spain overall, she had a decided naval superiority. In sheer numbers, 197 ships manned by 14,500 sailors were pitted against 130 Spanish ships manned by 7,000. The importance of long-range cannon on the open seas had been known for at least seventy-five

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years, since the Portuguese had crushed the Gujerati-Egyptian fleet at Di u in 1509, and in armament England enjoyed an even greater edge over the Spanish, with about 1,000 long-range guns against 600. The Spanish fleet carried 17 ,000 soldiers which might well have proved decisive had they closed with the English fleet as traditional naval practice dictated, or had they been landed in England for a march on Londonespeciall y if they had been joined by Parma 's 17,000-strong army in Flanders. But during the campaign they were essentially worthless because the English kept their more maneuverable and better armed ships out of grappling range. The English had a quantitive and qualitative advantage. The Invincible Armada could more appropriately have been named the Inadequate Armada.

That England could muster a superior naval force against the Spanish in 1588 derived not from its being a seafaring nation confronting a land-based power, but from its wise political leadership. Although Spain commanded both the resources and the bureaucracy to mount such an ambitious undertaking as the Armada, from the outset the advantage belonged to the defender. Nonetheless, the defender was bound to act, and within the limits of the resources available to it. In circumstances similar to those faced in the 1940s, England mobilized her fleet as the circumstances of the moment, of a master plan, dictated. And she was forced to improvise tactics that prevented the enemy from achieving the upper hand on his terms. The crushing defeat of the Armada transformed England from a second-rate seapower to a great one, embarked on a centuries-long epoch of expansion. .ti

An historian, Mr. Ketels lives in Munich, West Germany.

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Medina Sidonia and ''The Enterprise

by James Terry

In July of 1588, the "Felici ss ima Armada" was assembling at La Corufia, Spain, to embark on King Philip H's invas ion of England. The Armada was commanded by Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, Duke of Medina Sidonia and Captain General of the Ocean Sea. It was not a commission Medina Sidonia had wanted or sought.

The Armada's first commander was the brilliant admiral, the Marqui s of Santa Cruz, hero of Lepanto. Although he was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the undertaking, Santa Cruz differed seriously with the plan ultimately adopted by Philip, and seems to have been disillusioned by the Armada's prospects when he died of typhus in January 1588, days before his fleet was scheduled to sail. Ultimately , another six months would pass before it did sail.

When Philip offered the command to Medina Sidonia, he refused on grounds of poverty, inexperience (he had never before held a maritime command) and a susceptibility to seasickness. Eventually , he was obliged to bow to the king 's wishes, and he took up the planning for the Armada with characteristic energy.

By July, Medina Sidonia had begun to sense the doubtful prospects of Philip 's "Enterprise of England" and the precariousness of his own position. In his last letter to Philip prior to the departure of the Armada, the duke made an earnest attempt to convince Philip to call the whole thing off: "To undertake such a great task with forces equal to the enemy's would be inadvisable; to do it with an inferior force, as ours is now, with our men lacking in experience,

would be even more unwise . .. . Your Majesty may believe me when I assure you we are very weak. " Though he tactfully skirted the issue in his letter, Medina Sidonia was aware that the Armada's weakness lay not only in men, ships and materiel, but also in the strategy Philip had ordered him to carry out. As the temporal leader of the Catholic world, Philip tended to view military success as a sign of God's favor. Reverses could just as easily be ascribed to the inscrutability of the Almighty 's will. The plan for the invasion of England certain Iy bears the marks of the monarch 's world view. As one of his commanders put it on the eve of the Armada 's departure, "We are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle."

It would indeed have taken something of a miracle to redeem Philip 's plan. In its final version, it called for a fleet of more than 130 ships, with 7,000 sailors and some 17,000 soldiers, to sail from Spain and anchor off Margate in the English Channel. Meanwhile, on the Flemish coast, a land force of 30,000 seasoned troops , under the command of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, was to await the arrival of the Armada.

Protected by the Spanish fleet, Parma's soldiers were to embark in flat-bottomed barges for England , land near the mouth of the Thames estuary and, reinforced by the army di sembarked from the Armada, march on London .

At first Philip had intended the invasion to catch the English by surpri se. But nearly three years of delay in assembling, arming, manning and victualling

the fleet ensured that Queen Elizabeth had time to make provi sions for England 's defense. Elizabeth mobilized 25 Royal ships of more than 100 tons, plus 95 privately owned ships of more than 100 tons, and 95 pinnaces, barks, flyboats, crayers and other small craft.

By July of 1588, the English fleet, under the command of Lord Howard of Effingham , matched or surpassed the Spanish in number and quality of ships and ordnance.

The Spanish Empire had been fighting a rebellion in its Dutch possessions since 1566. The junction of Parma and Medina Sidonia was rendered impractical at best by the lack of a suitable deepwater port under Spanish control in the Netherlands, and the fact that a large Dutch fleet under Justin of Nassau operated freely in the canals and coastal waters.

By dividing the command of the expedition between two noblemen, Philip created a nightmari sh communications problem and invited discord. In the exchange of letters and dispatches between the king and hi s two commanders, it becomes apparent that Parma was even less committed to the plan than Medina Sidonia. In the event, Parma was able to assemble a force of only 17 ,000, and was suspiciously dilatory in outfitting and provi sioning them and arranging for their transportation to the embarkation point. It has even been suggested that Parma, sensing a disaster in the making, never meant to risk his army at all.

In addition to these strategic considerations, Medina Sidonia had a number

Philip II.far left, believed deeply in the cause of bringing Protestant England and Holland back under Roman Catholic control. His was a tightly ordered world, where authority flowed directly from God to the Pope and the king , and through the hierarchies of the church and the nobility to the people. Don Alonso, Duke of Medina Sidonia , second from left, commanded officers chosen as much for their noble rank as their ancestry. The system allowed little flexibility and f ew options for king or commander. Elizabeth reigned over a people who had a free r and more open tradition. It was Francis Drake who had said, "/will have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner .. ." And he meant it. Drake himself(second from right) had come from modest beginnings and was advanced because of his genius. It was ideas from men like Drake and Ha wkins that led to the new design of English warships and their stunning effectiveness in action.

of England'' of tactical disadvantages which became evident in the first day of fighting off Plymouth.Ironically, Philip himself had anticipated these when he warned Medina Sidonia prior to departure that the English ships were "nimble" and were ¡ likely to "stand off' rather than risk a close engagement. According to prevailing Spanish tactical wisdom, the primary object in a sea engagement was to come to close quarters with the enemy vessel, grapple, board and capture it.

Spanish galleons and galleasses were designed accordingly. They were floating fortresses, with high poops and forecastles, from which gunners could train cannon, musket and arquebus fire onto the enemy's decks, or-in the event the ship was herself boarded-direct fire from small arms and swivel guns into herown waist. In the Annada campaign, successful execution of these tactics would have brought the vast Spanish numerical superiority in fighting men into play. Unfortunately for Medina Sidonia, the English did not cooperate.

Excerpts from the official diary kept aboard the duke's flagship, San Martin, give evidence of Spanish frustration. On July 31, afterthe skirmish off Plymouth, the diarist noted that the English ships "were very fast sailers, and so well managed that they did with them what they pleased." On 2 August, after the action off Portland Bill, the Spanish galleasses were "watching an opportunity" to board; but "the efforts of all were unavailing, for the enemy seeing our ships endeavored to bring on a close engagement, stood off to sea." And again, on 4 August: "This day we considered our being able to bring on a close engagement as certain, which was the only manner in which we could gain the victory ... [but] the wind began to freshen in favor of the enemy's capitana [flagship], whi~~ immediately stood away from us ....

Finally on 5 August, no doubt with a sense of mounting exasperation, Medina Sidonia sent a message to Parma

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3 Above, a detail from Hendrick C. Vroom' s i "Seventh Day of the Armada," showing Medina Sidonia' s flagship San Martin at Gravelines. Drake led the attack on the San Martin in the Revenge which is probably the ship shown at right, in a detail from an anonymous Dutch painting ofthe same event.

One can see how the sheer mass of the Spanish galleons must have intimidated any opposing fleet. But the day was won by the more maneuverable English design . Another innovation shown here, possibly for the first time, is the topgallant sail, seen furled on the mainmast of the English ship.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

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requesting forty flyboats, hoping to use them to disrupt English mobility enough to allow the Spanish ships to catch up and board. (As Parma did not provide the flyboats, we don't know whether this improvisation would have worked.)

As the diarist ruefully admitted, "by reason of the unwieldy size of our ships as compared with the lightness of theirs, it was found impossible to bring them to a close engagement in any manner."

To understand the causes of Spanish frustration, we need to look more closely at contemporary developments in warship design. In the 1570s and early 1580s, while Spain's Atlantic navy was still in its adolescence, a quiet revolution was taking place in English shipyards. The main instigators were Elizabeth's royal master-shipwrights, Matthew Baker, Peter Pett and Richard Chapman, and John Hawkins, Treasurer of the Admiralty. Starting with the launching of the Foresight in 1570, English warships began to take on a new look.

The epitome of the new English warship was Sir Francis Drake's Revenge, a three-masted galleon of 441 tons launched in 1576. Its design featured a greater ratio of length to beam (closer to 4: 1 than 3: 1), and a lower forecastle, set abaft the stem rather than overhanging it. Galleons built along these lines came to be known as "race-built" (referring not to their speed, but to the "razing" of their castles). By 1586, most of the English Royal ships could be described as race-built, though they fought alongside older "high-charged" galleonsSir Walter Raleigh called them "ships of marvelous charge and fearful cumber"such as the Triumph ( 1562) and Elizabeth Jonas ( 1559).

The race-built galleons offered a number of advantages. There was less wind resistance and therefore greater speed and maneuverability. Also, in a heavy sea the lower superstructure created less stress on hulls, fastenings and timbers. The advantages of the racebuilt ship were amply demonstrated on 31 July off Plymouth, when Drake and Howard, sailing closer to the wind than the Spanish thought possible, tacked around either wing of the Spanish formation to gain the weather gauge.

A concurrent development in gunnery added to the English tactical advantage in the Channel fight. As early as 1539, when Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose was rearmed, the English had devised and employed a shipboard guncarriage consisting of a flat wooden bed, two axles and four small wheels. This "truck carriage" was smaller and easier 24

DRAWING, DEBBY FULFORD.

COURTESY ARCH IVO GENERAL DE SIMANCAS.

At top is a modern drawing of an English gun recovered from the Mary Rose, presumably from her armament of 1539. Below it is a rendering of a Spanish gun mounted on a seacarriage from 1594. The English advantage was in the four-wheeled trucks which they had been usingfordecades and which permitted a faster rate offire than the Spanish were capable of maintaining.

to manage on a crowded gun deck than the longer, clumsier, two-wheeled Spanish version. Moreover, the Spanish carriage apparently did not recoil inboard after firing, making reloading difficult and time-consuming. A contemporary (though possibly unreliable) account suggests that the English warships could reload and fire three rounds for every Spanish round.

The two fleets that met on 31 July thus had very different capabilities coinciding with their different tactical approaches. In the tense week that followed, the English fleet probed and discovered the Armada's weaknesses.

Perhaps somewhat daunted at first by the high-charged, strongly-manned Spanish galleons, the English captains soon began to come in closer and strike more sharply. By 8 August their advantages in speed, maneuverability and firepower had become apparent. The English were confident of their ability to stand off within culverin range and bat-

ter the Spanish without risking boarding, and in the Battle of Gravelines, they delivered the telling blows.

The frustration of the Spanish soldiery at Gravelines is exemplified by the account (no doubt highly colored) of another witness, Pedro Coco Calderon, on board the San Salvador: "The enemy inflicted great damage on the galleons San Mateo and San Felipe, the latter having five of her starboard guns dismounted. In view of this, and that his upper deck was destroyed, both his pumps broken, his rigging in shreds and his ship almost a wreck, Don Francisco de Toledo ordered the grappling hooks to be brought out and shouted to the enemy to come to close quarters.

They replied, summoning him to surrender in fair fight; and one Englishman, standing in the maintop with his sword and buckler, called out: 'Good soldiers that ye are, surrender to the fair terms we offer ye.' But the only answer he got was a gunshot, which brought him down in

A detail from "The English and Spanish Fleets off Berry Head, and the Engagement Near Portland Bill," which took place 1-2 August. In the foreground , the nao San Salvador is shown burning after her powder magazine exploded,31 July, leaving her rudderless. English ships eventually towed her into Weymouth as a prize. This eighteenth-century engraving by John Pine is one of ten drawn from tapestries designed by Hendrick Vroom and were based on charts published with an account of the Armada by Petruccio Ubaldini , the substance of which derived from Lord Haward of Effingham' s own record of the campaign.

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the sight of everyone, and the Maestro de Campo then ordered the muskets and harquebuses to be brought into action.

The enemy thereupon retired, whilst our men shouted out to them for their want of spirit, calling them Lutheran hens and daring them to return to the fight."

Six days after the Spanish defeat at Gravelines, Thomas Fenner, captain of the English galleon Nonpareil, speculated on the Spanish retreat. "If the wind by change suffer them, I verily believe they will pass about England and Ireland to draw themselves home; wherein the season of the year considered, with the long course they have to run and their sundry distresses ... winter will so come on as it will be to their great ruin."

Though Fenner could not have known it, the fateful decision had already been made at a council of war on 12 August on board the San Martin. The result, as Fenner predicted, was the destruction of the Armada in autumn gales on the west coast of Ireland and Scotland.

Much has been made of the persistent southerly wind which, beginning on 9 August, prevented the Armada from returning to the Channel to fight again or retreat via the shortest route. But the wind was no more the cause of Medina Sidonia's ultimate defeat than the Russian winter was the cause of Napoleon's or Hitler's. Nor were the factors which brought Medina Sidonia to the threshhold of defeat simply an ill-considered, unworkable strategy and anachronistic, ineffective tactics. What did defeat the Armada (and the Grande Armee and the Wehrmacht) was not unworkable plans or out-moded concepts, but a stout resistance that revealed these flaws in the plan of attack.

Medina Sidonia survived the disaster.

After recovering from the privations of the terrible return voyage, he retired to his huge estate at San Lucar de Barremeda, where he lived on, surrounded by his sixteen children, for thirty years. It's a pity he never got around to his memoirs. We can only imagine how-from a perspective of three decades-he came to view the hideous ironies of the Armada campaign. Aware from the beginning of his own weaknesses and the likely outcome, Medina Sidonia was powerless to stop the rush of events. The "Enterprise of England" was a Shakesperian tragedy, with the duke cast-unwillingly-in the lead. .!I Mr. Terry, program director for the Association for a Better New York, is a student of early English history.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

The Spanish jettison their livestock off Scotland's Firth of Forth in an effort to save water for the long, arduous passage home. Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

An Armada Captain Reports to Philip II:

Letter Written on 4 October 1589

by Captain Francisco de Cuellar

The galleon San Pedro, aboard which I was, sustained much hurt from some big cannonballsthattheenemyshotintoher on every side, and though repairs were made immediately as well as could be done, some holes still remained undiscovered and much water leaked in. After the hard fight that we had off Calais on the eighth of August, which was the last of all and continued from morning till seven o'clock at night, we were drawing off and the enemy's fleet was following at our stem to drive us away from the English coast. After we were out of danger-it was now the tenth day of August-we saw that the enemy held off and some of our ships began making repairs and patching their injuries. On that day, for my sins, I was taking a little rest-for I had not slept or taken time to attend to the necessities of life for ten days-when my scoundrel of a mate, without saying anything, hoisted sail andputoutinfrontoftheAdmiral'sship a matter of two miles, in order to go on with our repairs, as other ships had done.

Just when he was lowering the sails to see where the galleon leaked, a tender came alongside and word was given me from the duke [Medina Sidonia] that I should go to the admiral's ship. Thither I went, but before I got there an ordey was given that I and another gentleman, Don Cristobal de Avila, who was captain of a victualler that had gone much further ahead than my galleon, should be put to death in disgrace. When I heard this severe sentence I burst into a passion, asking all to bear witness to the gross injustice that was done me, since I had served so well, as could be seen by written proofs. Of all this the duke heard nothing, for he was shut up in his cabin.

My lord Don Francisco de Bovadilla was the only one in the fleet giving orders; everything was directed by him

and some others, and their doings are well known. He commanded me to be brought to the judge advocate's ship.

Although the Judge Advocate Martin de Aranda was severe, he listened to me and made inquiry about me in private and found that I had served Your Majesty like a good soldier, and therefore he did not dare carry out the order that he had received. He wrote to the duke and said that unless he received orders signed by his own hand, he would not execute the sentence because he saw that there was no cause for it and that I was guilty of nothing. I also wrote a letter to the duke which made him think well of the matter. He replied to the judge advocate that he should not execute the sentence upon me, but upon Don Cristobal, whom they hanged with great cruelty and insuit, considering that he was a gentle: man and known to many ....

The judge advocate always showed me great kindness. I stayed aboard his ship, in which we underwent all the terrors of death; for from the storm that sprang up it leaked so much that we could not keep it pumped dry. We had no succour, nor any help except in God, for the duke still stayed below. The whole fleet scattered before the storm in such a manner that some ships went to Germany, others put into the islands of Holland and Zeeland, falling into the hands of our enemy. Some went to Shetland and still others to Scotland, where they were wrecked and burned.

More than twenty were lost off Ireland, with all the flower and chivalry of the fleet.

The ship I was in belonged to the Levantine squadron, and two other large ships sailed in company with us. The Colonel Don Diego Enriques, a hunchback, was on board one of them.

Unable to double Cape Clear in Ireland, 25

Art of the

by Lincoln Paine

because of the bad storm that arose in front of us, he was obliged to make for land with the three ships, which were very big, and to anchor more than half a league from land, where we remained for four days unable to make any repairs.

On the fifth day, up came a great storm upon our beam, in terrible hurly-burly.

Our cables could not hold, nor were the sails of any use. All three of our ships were driven up on a sandy beach surrounded on every side by great rocks, a most terrible spectacle. In the space of one hour all the ships were dashed to pieces and not three hundred men escaped. More than a thousand were drowned, and among them many persons of rank-{;aptains, gentlemen and others.

Don Diego died there more pitifully than was ever seen in this world. In fear of being swept off the ship, he took his tender, which had a deck, and together with the Count ofVillafranca's son and two Portuguese gentlemen, and taking more than sixteen thousand ducats' worth of jewels and crowns, he got down below the deck and had the hatchway fastened down over them and caulked. Immediately over seventy men threw themselves from the ship onto the tender. As it was drifting towards shore, a great wave came over it washing off all hands that were on it. Straightaway the tender went tossing with the waves hither and thither, until it stuck fast upside down, and by this mishap the gentlemen who got under the little deck perished within.

After the tender had been aground a dayand-a-half, some savages came to it and rolled it over in order to take out some nails and bits of iron, and breaking the deck they took out the dead men. Don Diego Enriquez breathed his last in their hands. They took all theirclothes,jewels and money, letting the bodies lie there without burial. Because it was a matter for wonderment and true beyond doubt, and so that people in Spain might know in what manner these men died, I have wished to tell it to Your Majesty. As it would not be just not to tell of my own good fortune and how I got ashore, I go on.

I commended myself to God and to our Lady, and went aft to the ship's poop. whence I looked out on a great spectacle of woe. Many men were sinking in the ships; others, throwing themselves into the water went down and never came up; some were on rafts and water casks.

Captains threw their money into the sea, and I saw some gentlemen clinging to spars; still others remaining on the ships cried aloud, calling upon God; and some were swept off by waves which took 26

them right out of the ships. As I was staring at this horror I knew not what to do nor what part to take, for I cannot swim and the waves and the storm were very great. Moreover, the beach was full of enemies who were skipping and dancing for joy at our misfortune. When our men reached land, two hundred savages and other enemies rushed upon them and stripped them of everything they wore and without any pity they beat them and ill used them. All this could be plainly seen from the ships.

I went to the judge advocate-may God have mercy upon his soul. He was very sad and downcast, and I bade him try to do something that might help save his life before the ship broke up completely, as it could not last more than ten minutes; and in fact it did not. Most of the people aboard had been drowned before I cast about for a means to save my life. I got on a plank which had broken off the ship, and the judge advocate followed me, laden with crowns which he carried sewn into his doublet and hose. But there was no way to loose this plank from the side of the ship for it was fastened by some big chains. The waves and floating spars beat against it and inflicted upon us the pangs of death.

I tried another means of rescue, and that was to catch hold of a scuttle board, as large as a good-sized table, which the mercy of God happened to bring to my hand. But when I tried to get on it I sank six fathoms and swallowed so much I almost drowned. When I came up I called to the judge advocate and managed to pull him on the scuttle board with me; but as we were getting clear of the ship, a monstrous wave swept over us so hard that the judge advocate could not hold on and he drowned. As he went down he shrieked aloud calling upon God. I could not help him, because when the board was left with the weight only on one side it began to twirl around with me. And at that moment a log of wood almost broke my legs; but I mustered up courage and climbed well up on the scuttle, praying to our Lady of Ontanar. Four waves came, one after the other, and without my being able to swim, they carried me ashore, where I landed ....

The portrayal of ships and shipping, whether in peace or war, is an ancient art. Unquestionably the most famous maritime scene from the Middle Ages is the 70-meter long Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066.

Despite the lack of linear perspective typical of medieval graphic art, the tapestry is a remarkably sophisticated piece that combines a propagandistic celebration of the undertaking with a dramatic and detailed narrative-both pictorial and written--of the events leading up to the embarkation of the Norman army and William's ultimate victory at the Battle of Hastings.

In the four centuries following the Norman Conquest, artistic convention in northern Europe developed slowly.

Starting in the fourteenth century, artists in southern Europe began a systematic investigation of natural forms and to develop new ways of rendering perspective. By the early 1400s artists were beginning to render the reflective qualities of water for the first time. No longer was the sea portrayed simply by a succession of wavy lines. It took on a character of its own, at once reflecting and reshaping the objects around it. Nonetheless, though water, and ships, might be part of a picture's background, or convenient elements of an allegorical tale, they were rarely the chief object of an artist's brush.

The barrier between artist and the maritime world as a subject was no more or less than that between his audience and the sea. Until the beginning of the age of discovery in the fifteenth century, the ocean was a dark, forbidding realm offering neither hope nor promise. As men and ships began venturing out onto the seas, and returning from them, people's mental picture of the world began to change. The oceans became accessible; unique in their nature, but full of incident and drama. And as merchants and princes began to profit from their business on the great waters, they began to want pictorial evidence of their endeavors. In the paintings, portraits and tapestries executed after the Spanish Armada, one can see the development and synthesis of the dominant trends in marine art of the time.

After further misadventures in Ireland and Scotland, Captain de Cuellar made his way to Spanish territory in Europe, where he wrote his long narrative letter to his king. This excerpt is based on a translation by H. D. Sedgwick, Jr.,first published in 1895.

Paintings of unknown attribution comprise the majority of works surviving from the period; but their anonymity should not imply any uniformity of sophistication or style. They span the whole range of styles from heraldic, poster-like tapestries and Baroque por-

* * * * *

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

Spanish Armada traits of the principal figures, to wildly exaggerated apocryphal scenes and carefully constructed and detailed paintings of individual events. Probably the best known of the anonymous works is the Greenwich Cartoon, otherwise known as "The English and Spanish Fleets Engaged", a painting presumed to have been the design for a tapestry. It consists of a pleasant pattern of ships, equally distanced from each other and none overlapping, with gaily colored pennants filling the neutral spaces of sea between them. At the bottom of the painting, two English ships flank a Spanish galleasse.

None of the ships can be identified with certainty, although there are a number of different ship types rendered with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The salient identifying marks are the flags and pennants. Note especially the Papal key flying from the mainmast of the galleasse. As a piece of anti-Catholic Armada propaganda, this work is unmatched. On the deck of the galleassetumed-ship of fools , a tonsured monk and jester are seen at the head of group of courtiers and officers, while in the foreground a noble-perhaps Medina Sidonia-is seen cast adrift in a ship's boat. Elsewhere in the wreck-strewn sea a monk is seen swimming from his sinking ship. While there is drama in the profusion of ships, their guns carefully blazing in tight, stylized swirls of flame and smoke, it is an utterly unreal scene.

The ships toss to and fro on an almost invisible sea, while the omnipresent wind fills all their sails.

In contrast to this, an anonymous English painting entitled "The Spanish Armada" illustrates in one sweeping gesture nearly the whole course of the Enterprise of England, from an English view. The composition is fanciful in the extreme, showing three or four distinct scenes against a background whose sole

The Greenwich cartoon, courtesy National Maritime Museum, London,

Above, the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I by an unidentified painter, courtesy National Maritime Museum , London. Below, a celebration of the defeat of the Armada circa 1590, courtesy Royal Society of Apothecaries, London.

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Attack of the Fireships, anonymous, courtesy National Maritime Museum , London.

unifying element is the dramatic, cloud- and atmosphere. The natural elements swept sky. The lefthand of the painting are there: the offshore wind is strong, shows Elizabeth at the head of her army. and the sea is kicking up. Despite the The mountainous landscape is distinctly artist's ignorance of ship rigging (there un-English, and all that identifies it as are any number of missing spars and such is the system of warning beacons misplaced rigging), one senses the tenthat were erected to communicate the sion and confusion of battle. The ships news of the Spanish fleet' s arfrval off ¡ are not simply pasted in place with sails the coast. set, oars aligned and guns firing. They The artist's handling of perspective are joined in battle. is rudimentary: the more distant figures The anonymous "Armada Portrait" and cities are smaller and higher on the is one of the most powerful expressions canvas. The placement of the ships so of the greatness which Elizabeth attained close to land is like a sailor's bad dream. as a result of the Armada. The detail and But the depiction of the sea battle is iconography are rich and the trappings suffused with a real sense of urgency of corporate, national power clear. In the

Can you distinguish a $3000 handcarved ivory from a $30 imitation?

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two windows behind the Queen we see the launch of the English fireships against the Spanish fleet in its crescent formation, and the destruction of the Spanish fleet by storms- symbols, respectively, of the secular and divine interventions that secured Spain 's defeat. Elizabeth's hand rests on a globe, a symbol of the worldwide stature which England had gained through Sir Francis Drake 's circumnavigation of the world in 1577-80, and consolidated with the defeat of Philip II, the world power at the time. (A less discreet example of this pictorial assertion of world supremacy is a Spanish medal struck in 1585. One face bears the image of Philip with the legend "Phi lip II, King of Spain and the New World," while the reverse shows a globe circumscribed: Non sufficit orbis-One world is not enough.)

* * * art* as a distinct The father *of marine genre is generally thought to be Hendrick Comelisz Vroom (1566-1640), a widely travelled Netherlander who translated his sea-going experience (including being shipwrecked on the Portuguese coast) into accurate and lively renderings of maritime scenes. His two most important contributions to the pictorial record of the Armada are a series of tapestries which he designed and a painting entitled "The Seventh Day of the Battle of the Armada." The ten tapestries commissioned by Lord Howard of Effingham gave a daily narrative of the Armada bordered by medallion portraits of the principal participants. The tapestries eventually wound up in the House of Lords, where they were destroyed by fire in 1834. Our only record of them today is a set of engravings by John Pine made in 1739 (p24 ). Showing the various fleet engagements from an elevated perspective, the tapestries were modelled on a set of charts which illustrate the fleet together with symbols indicating the direction of the prevailing winds, sandbanks and other critical features. Despite Vroom's considerable talents as a draughtsman and his familiarity with ships, the tapestries were monumental in nature and formal in their execution. Neither the medium nor the style lends itself to a particularly robust interpretation of the events.

In contrast to these rather wooden depictions, Vroom 's "Seventh Day of the Battle of the Armada" is a highly charged and detailed rendering of an action between the Spanish and English fleets. Vroom' s contemporary and biographer Carel van Mander records that the painting "was seen with surprise and SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

MARINE ART warm approval by His Excellency Count Maurits and the Admiral Justinus," Prince of Orange and Lieutenant-Admiral of Zeeland, respectively. The painting is probably meant to illustrate more than one event. In the detail shown on page 27, Medina Sidonia's flagship San Martin exchanges fire with the Revenge and Ark Royal (out of the picture, to the right). Beyond, the Spanish fleet is seen fleeing the English fireships, and in the distance Vroom has accurately depicted the coast of the Low Countries with a profile of the city of Ostend. A comparable painting, thought to be by either Vroom or Aert Antonisz ( 1579-1620)but certainly by an accomplished marine painter, as the careful detail of the English race-built ship on the right attests-is the Attack of the Fireships.

The actual event took place at midnight, and it seems that in both Vroom 's painting and this one the artists have tried to paint a night scene, with the foreground dark and the middle distance washed in pale, reflected moonlight. A sense of depth and distance is achieved through the use of a vanishing point and a single viewpoint, and the treatment of light and air generally is very sophisticated.

While these paintings evince a heightened sensitivity and ability in the treatment of the sea and ships, they are nonetheless didactic interpretations of historic events. There is little of the personality of the artist; nor should we expect otherwise. These pieces were commissioned, and the artist's subject was determined by his patron. By contrast, one of the most dramatic images to come out of the Armada is Comelisz Claes van Wieringen ' s (c.1580-1633) portrait of the Spanish fleet off the Firth of Forth (p25). This painting reveals an awareness of the human drama of the battered Spanish fleet. While the ship in the center of the painting jettisons livestock in an effort to save water on the return voyage to Spain, pinnaces and small boats shuttle between the larger ships in the fleet, which makes its way under ominous skies on a darkening sea. The painting has a luminous, haunting quality not seen before: the panic of the guiltless horses foreshadows the fate of the men.

Though van Wieringen 's painting shows an Armada scene, it has a universality and appeal that is firmly in and of the humanist tradition. More than just a fragment of the historical record, "The Armada off the English Coast" is a seascape in its own right, depicting not the contest of bodies politic driven by their concepts of a partial deity, but the struggle between man and nature. u, SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

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MARINE ART NEWS

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Janus Lithographs have announced the release of two Mark Myers prints, both in editions of950, numbered and signed.

"HMS Squirrel" shows Captain George Anson's ship firing a salute "in Charles Town harbor as South Carolina Indian chiefs come aboard, much like visiting heads of state," as P. C. Coker writes in the caption to this painting in his Charlestown' s Maritime Heritage 16701865. (See SH46, marine art news, for more on this volume and its treasures.)

Mr. Coker looked to Mr. Myers again to illustrate Charleston' s privateer Decatur (above) leading her prizes HMS Dominica (which she bested in one of the bloodiest naval engagements of the War of 1812) and the merchantman London Trader up the Cooper River, 20 August 1813. The Decatur was a Charlestonbuilt ship manned by a predominately French crew under Dominique Diron.

Her good luck ran out in February 1814, when she went up against the 38-gun frigate HMS Rhin. Both images measure 14.5" x 21 " and sell for $95 ; $195 remarqued. (Janus Lithographs, PO Box 2150, Hilton Head Island, SC 29925 ; 803 681-4242) Australian marine artist Richard Linton has completed the second of his maritime lithographs executed in honor of the Australian bicentenary, "British Clipper Sobraon Loading Wool, Circular Quay, Sydney, 1871." Intended as an auxiliary steamer when she was laid down at Alexander Hall 's Aberdeen yard, the Sobraon attained celebrity as one of the fastest and finest passenger sailing ships ever to sail on the Australia-England run. In the 1870s, she called frequently at Sydney, which sailorman/ author Alex Hurst has described as "perhaps the most famous of all ports ... .

Probably there was no other port where one could see so many pedigree clippers, undiluted by more mundane vessels, at any time. " This is an excellent accompaniment to Mr. Linton's earlier, award-winning lithograph, "The Arrival of the First Fleet, Sydney Cove, 1788," and we look forward to seeing more (J)f Mr. Linton's pictorial record of Austrailian maritime history . (The Maritime A\.rt Shop, 30 Station Street, Sandringhaam, 3191Australia;03 597-0569) SIEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

•

Ship Notes, Sail Training & Museum News INVENI PORTAM Erik A. R. Ronnberg, Sr. (1909-1988) Erik A. Ronnberg, a former ship rigger in Gloucester died this June at the age of 79. A native of Vaxholm, Sweden, Mr. Ronnberg was a seaman and officer aboard a number of merchant ships, including the bark Abraham Rydberg, in which he sailed as second mate from 1938 to 1942. Discharged when the Rydberg was sold in Baltimore, Mr. Ronnberg married and moved to Boothbay Harbor, and then to Gloucester, where he became a rigger's assistant in 1945. His first job was to help refit the racing/fishing schooner Gertrude L. Thebaud. Going into business for himself, Mr. Ronnberg worked on a variety of vessels from fishing vessels and yachts to aircraft carriers. In addition to his work as a ship rigger, Mr. Ronn berg was an accomplished modeller, and made many ships-in-bottles, half-hulls and scale model s. A selection of these will be exhibited at the DeCordove Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

The American Tall Ship Syndicate have decided on a design for a three-masted ship of less than 500 tons to carry 35 cadets and 14 professional crew. This size and complemenl will permit them to use traditional technology in building the ship and allow for a wooden interior rather than one using only modem materials. Rather than search for a single corporate sponsor, they have decided to undertake a capital campaign for private and corporate funding. The syndicate have also agreed in principle to ally with the Maine Maritime Museum at Bath.

Under this plan, the hull of the ship would be built at a commercial yard and then towed to a stone crib pier at the museum for joinery, rigging and fitting out. The ship would be homeported at the museum , which is located on land occupied by two shipyards in the nineteenth century. (David C. Brink, Executive Director, SAIL, Inc. , 229 Washington Street, Bath, ME 04530; 207 443-6222) The Sea Education Association has announced a new twelve-week Maritime Semester for college sophmores and juniors. The course includes classes in maritime history and culture, literature of the sea, international relations, nautical science and an introduction to oceanography. The semester is divided into three sections. During the first four weeks, students will attend classes on the SEA campus in Woods Hole. They will then embark in the schooner WestSEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

ward for six weeks, followed by two weeks spent in the region under study. In 1989, the course will focus on New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Tuition for the course is $6000; room and board, $1750. Applications are due 1 February. (Susan E. Humphris , Dean, SEA, PO Box 6, Woods Hole, MA 02543; 617 540-3954) The US Naval Academy History Department has issued a call for papers for their ninth Naval History Symposium.

The symposium has been scheduled for 18-20 October i989. The symposium welcomes papers on all topics relating to naval and maritime history. The deadline for proposals is 1 February 1989.

(Wi lliam R. Roberts , Director, Naval History Symposium, US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD 21402-5044) The Presidential Yacht Sequoia is returning to service as a presidential yacht.

Built in 1925 at the Mathis Yacht Building Company in Camden, New Jersey, for Richard M. Cadwalader, she changed hands several times before being acquired by the Navy and "prepared forthe use of the President" at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1932. She served eight presidents from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter, who ordered her sold in 1977. She was acquired by the Presidential Yacht Trust, a non-profit, non-partisan group who gave her a massive overhaul and arranged for her transfer back to presidential service on 15 November 1988. Her maintenance is to be paid for through proceeds from a private fund established by the trust. (Peg Nicholls, USS Sequoia, Presidential Yacht Trust, 555 13th Street, NW, Suite 680 West, Washington , DC 20004; 202 785-6737) The North American Society for Oceanic History and the Society for the History of Discoveries have issued a call for papers and sessions for their annual meeting, to be held in San Francisco, 8-10 June 1989. The National Maritime Museum will co-sponsor the meeting. (Sanford H. Bederman, Department of Geography, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30303 ; or William M. Still , Jr. , Department of History, East Carolina University , Greenville, NC 27858-4353) The Museum Small Craft Association, formerly the Small Craft Curator's Conference, has assumed responsibility for developing a handbook on documenting watercraft up to forty feet in length. The handbook has received fund-

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SHIP NOTES, SAIL TRAINING

PACK YOUR SEA BAG! THE SOCIETY'S TRAVEL PLANS FOR 1989 ARE THE BEST YET! And, we don't want to go without you!

ANTARCTICA December 21, 1988 - January 11, 1989 February 20 - March 2, 1989 Cancel the newspaper, send the cat to the neighbors and come see summer in Antarctica. You '11 never forget it!

SCANDINAVIAN JOURNEY July 26 - August 7, 1989 Ancient cities, Viking ships, canals & medieval palaces Stockholm-the city built on fourteen islands connected by 4 2 bridges. A three day passage through 65 locks, 10 lakes and reaching an altitude of 300 ft Then, Gothenborg, Fredrikshavn, Aalborg, Aarhus, Odense, Roskilde and Copenhagen.

ADRIATIC/AEGEAN ODYSSEY October 5 - 17, 1989 Voyage back in history with Peter Stanford, President of the National Maritime Historical Society, from Istanbul and the birthplaces of western maritime civilizations to Venice and the powerful Italian maritime city states. Sail aboard the Illyria from Istanbul to Venice via Kusadasi/Ephesus, Rhodes/Lindos, Santorini and Dubrovnik/ Kotor. Ancient temples, whitewashed villages overlooking the blue Aegean, the soaring architecture of Istanbul and archaeological sites which tell tales of the great Ottoman and Byzantine empires-You won't want to miss this voyage.

CHINA AND THE YANGTZE RIVER September 1 - 17, 1989 in conjunction with Harvard Alumni An unforgettable journey into an extraordinary land!

You can experience the grandeur ofBeijing and its Forbidden City or visit the archaeological site of Xi' an, once the largest city in the world. On board the luxurious M.S. White Emperor, a National Maritime Historical Society lecturer will lead you on a journey through the fascinating realms of Chinese maritime history. You will cruise the historic Yangtze River from Chongqing to Wushan or "Witches' Mountain" Gorge- a spectacular 20-mile gorge.

See for yourself legendary Shanghai, cosmopolitan, yet deeply rooted in Chinese history and culture.

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ing from the National Trust for Historic Preservation' s Services Fund, and applications for grants have been made to the Trust's Critical Issues Fund and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The MSCA is also assisting in the compilation of a List of Small Craft in North America. Individual membership is $15, institutional membership $50.

(Hallie E. Bond, Treasurer, MSCA , Adirondack Museum , Blue Mountain Lake, NY 12812; 518 352-7311) The Oswego Maritime Foundation have embarked on a program to build a two-masted topsail schooner to sail in programs for the Education Through Involvement program , which emphasizes educational activities pertinent to the Great Lakes. As yet unnamed, the ship was designed by Francis MacLachland of Kingston, Ontario. Although the ship will sai l as a goodwi ll ambassador for the City of Oswego, her primary mission is to serve as a floating classroom, taking students on three-hour sails to study the hi story, ecology and culture of the Great Lakes, as well as to learn basic sailing skills.The building project is to be financed through the sale of $10 certificates; the first to be sold were the keel bolt certificates-the keel was laid in May. The next will be for planking, decking, rigging, etc. (J. Richard Pfund , Director, Oswego Maritime Foundation, McCrobie Building , Lake Street, Oswego, NY 13126; 315 342-5753) The three-masted ram schooner Victory Chimes has been purchased by Domino 's Pizza, Inc. The company plans to use the ship as an incentive tool to entertain franchises, store managers and corporate employees. Domino 's already owns two motor yachts and Olde English, a 45ft steam launch built in England in 1900. Victory Chimes was built, also in 1900, by Col. George K. Phillips of Bethel, DE, for use as a coastal cargo vessel, and is the last ram schooner still sailing. (Capt. Paul DeGaeta, DPI Marine Div., Domino 's Farms, 30 Frank Lloyd Wright Dr., PO Box 997, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0997; 313 668-4000) The City Council of Two Harbors , Minnesota, is seeking funds to display the 92-year-old steam tug Edna G. in the city's Paul Van Hoven Park. Built at Cleveland for the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway Company, herentire career was $ pent in the iron ore shipping port of Two> Harbors, about 25 miles east of Duluth <On the north shore of Lake Superior. \W"hen retired from service in SEA I-HISTORY , AUTUMN 1988

NMHS PROJECTS:

& MUSEUM NEWS

"How the Hell Do You Think I Got Here?"

by Michael Gillen

1981 she was the last active steam tug in the country. It was then that the city of Two Harbors purchased the Edna G. from Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range.

Total funding required for the move is estimated at about $200,000. Some funds have already been appropriated by the State Historical Society of Minnesota.

(Chester Bianco, President, Two Harbors City Council, 610 Second Avenue, Two Harbors, WI 55616; 218 834-5631) The International Commission for Maritime History and Society for Nautical Research will present a series of semi nars at King 's College, London, through March of 1989. On 24 November, Geoffrey Scammell (Pembroke College, Cambridge), will speak on "European Shipping in Portuguese Asia 15001700," and Catherine Manning (King's College, London), "The French in Asian Trade in the Eighteenth Century; " 8 December, Philip de Sousa and Wendy Bracewell, "Piracy in the Classical and Early Modern Mediterranean;" 12or19 January, David Syrett (City University of New York), "Procurement of American Built CVEs by the Royal Navy in World War II;" 9 February, David M. Williams (University of Leicester) , "The Seaman's Skill: A Matter of Victorian Concern;" 16 February, M.S. Partridge, "Osborne Naval College Remembered , 1910-22;" 16 March , Kenneth R. Andrews (University of Hull), " Sailors and Mutiny in the Reign of Charles I." (David Proctor, National Maritime Museum , Greenwich, London, SElO 9NF; 01 858-4422) The Glasgow sludge disposal ship SS Shieldhall has been transferred to the Solent Steam Packet Company, a charitable trust established to preserve the vessel in steaming condition. Built by Lobnitz & Co., in 1955 as a sludge tanker, the triple-expansion steamship worked on the Clyde until 1977, when she was moved to Southampton. In addition to being a sludge boat, the Shieldhall always sailed to a charitable purpose, being licensed to carry up to eighty passengers, mostly elderly pensioners and the poorer children of Glasgow. This tradition has its origins in World War I, when convalescing soldiers were embarked on the ships during their daily runs down the Clyde. It is carried on today by the Strathclyde Regional Council's Dalmarnock lI and Garrock Head. (Valerie SomertonRayner, Solent Steam Packet Ltd. , Thatchways , Quarley nr. Andover, Hants SPl 1 8QB, England; 0264 880-331) ..v SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

Launched 7 September 1942 from the ways of Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield Yard in Baltimore, the John W. Brown was one of some 2750 Liberty ships built in the emergency shipbuilding effort of World War II. On Labor Day, 5 September, she was rededicated as a merchant marine memorial by Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, in the presence ofover 1000 supporters of Project Liberty. "It was a frightening time," said Representative Bentley.

"But the ships sailed, and the men who sailed them, they won the war." Michael Gillen reported on the project (see also SH41and35), and recounted the following tale of Howard Bethel, one of the project's most dedicated volunteers, who sailed the dangerous seas of World War II. In recognizing the absolutely tremendous job that Brian Hope 1 and so many other dedicated volunteers have done in Baltimore to bring in the Liberty ship John W. Brown, it would be wrong to overlook the vital role that so many hundreds of project members throughout the nation have played: Merchant Marine and Armed Guard veterans, the former shipyard workers and others who were involved in keeping the Liberty ships rolling down the ways and across the seas during World War II, and the next generation-the sons and daughters of these people who are also members of our organization-as well as others whose connection with the project is a keen sense of history and an interest in our maritime heritage. All these people have kept this dream alive.

But what is it all about, really? I always think it 's about a friend of mine, God rest his soul, a merchant seaman named Howard Bethel who was one of the first subscribing members of Project Liberty Ship. Howard , a member of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, died at sea a few years ago. He once told me about an experience he had in World War g during the invasion of Sicily. Going ashore from the Liberty ship Isaac Coles, Howard was thirsty and went in search of a drink of water. The city of Palermo was in a shambles, the water mains destroyed, and the only drinking water to be had was being dispensed from giant bladders mounted on tripods on the beach. Howard approached a lady at one water stand.Bustling up to the counter, she refused to serve him, saying, "This is for our boys fighting the war!"

Howard replied, "How the hell do you think I got here?"

Steaming into dangerous seas, outboundfrom New York on 15 October 1942, the John W. Brown is deep laden with cargo for the Persian Gulf, including US Sherman tanks on theforede ck-tanks that may well have joined the battle then raging in Stalingrad. Courtesy Steamship Historical Society , University of Baltimore Library.

The woman did not understand that merchant seamen were fighting the war, too, though they were technically civilians. She couldn't know that the Merchant Marine would suffer a casualty rate in the war second only to that of the Marine Corps. And if my friend Howard had stayed around long enough to tell her, that woman would have learned that he had already been torpedoed twiceonce in the Caribbean, and once on the Murmansk run in Convoy PQ18. 2 The problem then, as now, was one of ignorance-the kind of thing our memorial museum aboard the Liberty sh ip John W. Brown can help to correct. The museum will serve to reinforce the memory of the significant contributions and sacrifices made by the Merchant Marine in the war; and to explain to people whn do not otherwise know that civilian merchant seamen contributed significantly to the war effort, as did the unsung members of the US Armed Guard and the civilian shipyard workers.

Ours will be a living memorial-a museum with an important educational mission, teaching future generations about those who sailed and built the Libertys of World War II, about our maritime and labor heritage, and about the vital role our workers and maritime industry must continue to play in our nation's future. ..V

Aformer merchant seamen and founder of Project Liberty, Mr. Gillen is editor of its newsletter Liberty Log. NMHS members can subscribe for $15, others for $25. (Project Liberty, PO Box 3356, Rockefeller Center Station, New York, NY 10185; 212 775-1544) 1 Captain Hope' s painting of the John W. Brown is shown in the Masters , Mates and Pilots advertisement on the back cover of this magazine. 2 Nor could she know that more than four decades after the fact , Congress would grant veterans' status to merchant seamen who sailed during World War II. (See letters.)

33

The Clyde Puffer VIC 32

by John Bunker

MUSEUM QUALITY

The VIC 32 on the Caledonian Canal, Scotland. Photo by Captain Bill McKelvey/ Canal Captain's Press.

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One of the last of the famous Clyde steam "puffers" has been preserved and is now going strong as a passengercarrying holiday boat on the Caldeonian Canal and other waterways of Scotland.

Restored from a near derelict condition by her owner-skipper Nick Walker, this unique little ship is VIC 32, one of some fifty victualling inshore craft built during World War II along traditional puffer lines. They served the fleet with ammunition , food and other supplies in home waters and the Mediterranean.

Squat and stub-nosed and with coal smoke belching from her stack, VIC 32 attracts photographers and steamboat buffs wherever she goes. Captain Walker fi gures she has carried close to 2000 passengers in her nine years of service.

She cruises twenty-six weeks during the year and has accommodations for ten , plus a crew of five. Passengers are free to handle lines, take the wheel, shovel coal and oil the engine if they so desi re.

Nick and hi s wife, Rachel, found the VIC 32 beached on the mud flats at Whitby in Yorkshire. "It was an instant love affair," Nick recall s. "I climbed all over her. There was water in the hold and junk in the engine room and her stack was full of old bottles and cans, but I decided she could be brought back to life and steam again."

The owner was a wealthy sportsman who had turned down many offers for the vessel , but Nick's was accepted, maybe because the owner was in the mood, but more likely because Nick operated a boatyard and had some of the practical know-how to tackle a restoration job. Even at that it might have been too much if he hadn ' t met Bob Adams, who had restored an old steam tug.

Adams recruited a crew of steamboat buffs and they took on the VIC 32 with enthusiasm. They swarmed all over her on weekends, mucking, chipping and painting. They took the engine and auxi liaries apart and reassembled every

piece, polished and oiled. In the spring of 1977, the boiler was fired up, steam was fed into the engine, and everything worked to perfection. After the sea trials and a compass adjustment, VI C's volunteers helped to sail her on a four-day voyage to St. Katharine 's Dock in London for final up-grading, including new plating that was welded over the original rivetted plates.

Before being fully fitted out for passengers, the rehabilitated steamer stood down the Thames with a bagpiper playing "The Road to the Isles," and crewed by her loving volunteers she crossed the English Channel and steamed proudly up the Seine to Rouen. Some months later she went "deep sea," from London to Whitby and up to Edinburgh, plunging and rolling through a full North Sea gale, but with her seasick proud of having experienced her staunch sea-keeping qualities.

The VIC 32 was built in 1943 by Richard Dunston of Thorne, Yorkshire.

She has a 1931 model Crabtree compound (or double-expansion) engine. Unlike older puffers, which had no condenser and exhausted-that is , puffedsteam into the atmosphere, VIC 32 has a sea water-cooled condensing system.

The boiler is 15ft by 6in in diameter, with a firebox crossed by 5 tubes at various angles and level s, and works at 1220 pounds of pressure. Similar to other vessels of her type, VIC 32 is 68ft long with an l 8ft beam and a draft of 6ft. The dimensions of the Clyde puffer were determined by the size of the locks in the Caledonian Canal, where many found .V employment for almost a century.

Mr. Bunker lives in Florida and recently spent a week cruising the canals of Scotland aboard the VIC 32. For further information, contact Highland Steamboat Holidays , The Change House, Crinan Ferry, Lochgilphead, Argyll, Scotland PA3 1 BQH. SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

An Interlude with Frank Carr

by Michael Badham

In I947, Frank Carr was appointed director of the National Maritime Museum, London. Carr was an experienced yachtsman and aficionado of traditional rig who as a young man had shipped out in commercial sailing barges. When he took the helm, the museum had a staff of33 with a budget of less than ÂŁ2I ,000 per year. When he left nineteen years later, these figures had increased dramatically, attendance had risen ten-fold, and the museum was unquestionably the foremost resource for maritime historians and scholars in the world.

In the meantime, Carr took on the preservation of the China tea and Australia wool clipper Cutty Sark (built in I869), in an effort that set the standard against which subsequent ship restoration efforts are measured. He has also contributed his guidance and exemplary understanding ofthe historic ships movement to the establishment of, among others, the Foudroyant Trust, the Norfolk Wherry Trust, the Thames Barge Preservation Society, the Ocean Youth Club, the Exeter Maritime Museum and the World Ship Trust, which he has served as chairman since I979 and from which post he is stepping down this year. Whatfollows is an excerpt from an interview conducted with Michael Badham in I985.

I was in London interviewing Frank Carr, chairman of the World Ship Trust.

At one point, I quoted a portion of a letter from Lord Lewin, a trustee of the World Ship Trust, to Peter Stanford, a fellow trustee and president of the National Maritime Historical Society: "As the rotten oak in her [HMS Victory's] hull is replaced, we are using Borneo teak-which is much more resistant to attack, but is something like 1.25-1.5 times the weight. We were considering off-setting the strains that this extra weight would impose by substituting for some deck beams aluminum girders, cased in wood to look solid."

What, I asked, did he think of costsaving expedients like this in hi storic ship preservation?

"It's not a question of cost saving, I think ," he started, "so much as what is practically feasible and possible. You see, I think that in nearly every case of any historic craft being preserved, it requires a combination of modem techniques and materials, with traditional techniques and materials. You cannot say that one is excluded in place of the other, I think you need both.

"Now take the Great Britain, for SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

~

the public.

~ " And the second reason is that I want ~ the child to go aboard the Cutty Sark and

~ be able to stand by the wheel there on the

poop deck, and imagine-because young ~ people 's imaginations are very keen;;; to imagine her at sea, to imagine climb13 ing aloft at sea, because of the pictures s: he 's seen in the hold and so on; laying example. Everything, as far as I know, out on the fore yard, stowing that sailwith regard to masts and spars and decks giving them something of the atmosand fittings and cabins and the planking phere of the days of sail. That is why, to of the deck, and all that sort of thing, is me, historic ships preserved, if they are as traditional , as exact, as it can be. exhibited with imagination, are the caEverything that remains of her, like her thedrals of the sea .. .. " propellor and so on-as far as possible, I inquired whether a purist, a traoriginal material is being used. But they ditionalist, might not, in a ship where want to demonstrate what her engines twentieth-century preservation materials were like. And it' s not a practical thing have been used, be bound to disagree.

"He might," said Carr, "but I should to build the engines as they were. Therefore they are being made in fiberglass disagree with him, that's all. The Cutty and things like this, so that they' ve got Sark is the outstanding example of sucthe appearance of the originals .... But cess in ship preservation because from does it really matter whether the the beginning she has generated the enormous great chain drive she 's got for income that is necessary for her permathe screw is not real as long as you see it nent preservation. Without the exhibits as it was? on board, without cutting a hole in her "Now there are those who are gener- side so that people can walk in , she is ally against ship preservation, unless the whole. And I think that the Cutty Sark ships are preserved exactly as they were. visitors get a very much clearer impresThey're against the Cutty Sark being sion of what a clipper ship was like and fitted out for visitors, having exhibits in what she must have been like at sea, than the hold and things like that. They would any pictures and models and books they like to see the focsle exactly as it was; are likely to read might give them ." they would like to introduce bedbugs, He returned to the subject of twentithey would like to have the filth , proba- eth-century materials and techniques, bly not too clean heads-everything just illustrating with two striking examples as it would have been at sea, and not how shipbuilders of yesteryear appear spruced up in port. to have known a thing or two that con"But I take the view that if you try to temporary man does not.

"With the very sharp curves round exhibit ships like that, first of all you would get terrific deterioration taking the stem of the Victory ," he said, "the place, because they must be kept well new planking is laminated, because they painted, they must be protected from the cannot bend the thick timber. How they weather, and they must be looked after if did it when she was built, God only they are to continue to exist. And I know knows, but it was done. And again with of at least two vessels in Europe that Warrior, which stillhasher4.5inofiron were preserved in that way and which armor plate, backed by 14in of teak, sank at their moorings for want of main- which was impenetrable by any projectenance. They had been preserved ex- tile they could fire in the l 860s-that actly as they were in their working days, 4.5in armor plate was made by rolling run down as they were likely to be as down sixteen I.Sin thick plates. Now they get towards the end of their time. how, in the 1860s, were they able to heat My own view is that it is much better to and roll sixteen l .5in plates to make have a ship like the Cutty Sark or the 4.5in armor plate? Nobody has ever been Balclutha attracting sufficient people to able to answer that question that I can visit the ship to ensure, firstly , that the find out. People don ' t know. It hasn' t sums they pay to go aboard her will been recorded. How did they do it? It 's provide the income that is necessary to there. Naval architects and so on just meettheexpenditureofkeepingthe ship don ' t know how it was done." .i, in perfect condition in perpetuity, not for just ten years or twenty years but for Mr . Badham served in the Royal Navy three hundred years. So that you have a during World War II , and leaving the clipper ship three centuries hence, which navy in 1960 , took up ocean sailing and you wouldn ' t have if you didn ' t attract charter work. He lives in Maine. ui

35

50 Year Old America's Cup Prints The final one hundred of Ernest Clegg' s 1934 full-color print, A Chart of the Waters, from the Rainbow/Endeavor J-boat races will be sold on a first reply basis. These original 22" X 19" prints are in uncirculated condition. Each numbered print contains a capsule Cup history, showing all the defenders and challengers fromAmerica to Rainbow.

To order postpaid, send $125 check or money order.

AndrewJacobson Marine Antiques Box 255, Arlington, MA 02174 617-648-5745

36

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

The Niagara Lives!

by Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes

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The three-pronged American attack on British Canada was repulsed with disastrous results for the United States in the first year of the War of 1812. It was not until Oliver Perry's stunning victory on Lake Erie that the threat of a British advance from the north was effectively destroyed. The Niagara has recently been reconstructedfrom the remains ofthe original by a team led by renowned naval architect Melbourne Smith. Here, a Great Lakes history team tells the Niagara's story.

The vessel whose launch was celebrated at Erie, Pennsylvania, this 10 September earned her place in history in the space of a few moments on a fall afternoon 175 years ago. With her sister ship Lawrence disabled, it was the US brig Niagara whose guns fired the decisive shots that forced a British surrender at the Battle of Lake Erie on 10September1813. Yet her story before and after that crucial engagement is equally remarkable and no less fascinating. For the Niagara is a ship that almost wasn't built, almost didn ' t make it onto the lake and almost missed the battle entirely.

A string of British victories over American forces in 18 12 had threatened the very existence of the fledgling United States in the Northwest Territory. The US government knew that it needed a fleet to challenge the British for control of the Great Lakes, and efforts to build one began at Erie in late 1812.

In February 1813 , Lieutenant Oliver Hazard Perry was assigned to complete and command the fleet. The task facing Perry was a formidable one, for while Erie had a safe harbor and an unlimited suppl y of timber, it had virtually none of the other material s required to build ships. Perry faced shortages of men and materiel, and he had to send as far as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and even New York for the craftsmen and supplies he needed. Everything other than timber that went into the ships had to be transported hundreds of miles over terrain in which roads were poor or, in some cases, nonexi stent. A chronic shortage of iron meant that Perry's carpenters had to use trunnels instead of iron nails, and the seams of his ships often had to be caulked with lead for lack of oakum and pitch. The carronades for Perry's ships came from Washington, DC, and Sackets Harbor, New York, and took months to transport, and when hi s ships were finally completed, he could not sail them because the anchors had not yet arrived from Pittsburgh. The obstacles to building a fleet under such conditions seemed insuperable, yet six of the ten ships that eventually met the British at Put-in-Bay were built in Erie.

Having built and launched the Niagara , the next task was to get herout of the bay and onto the lake. The shallow sandbar which protected the ships while they were being built now hemmed them in; and once clear of the bar there was the threat of the British fleet, which had blockaded Perry off and on all summer. In early August, the British commander Robert Barclay broke off the blockade briefly, but boasted that he would return and destroy the American ships as they floundered across the bar. His boast was not an empty one, for in normal circumstances the sandbar was about six feet below the surface, and Perry's brigs drew nine feet. In 1813 , though, SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

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COURTESY OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HI STORICAL SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS.

the water level had fallen , so that the bar was only four feet below the surface. Getting the ships across involved attaching huge empty boxes called camels to them, filling the camels with water, and then pumping them out so that they would rise, and with them the ships.

As promised, the British fleet reappeared just as the Niagara was trying to cross, and it looked as if Barclay's prediction might come true. But the British declined to attack. The Niagara , in spite of difficulty and danger, again beat the odds, and was on the lake.

Perry 's fleet sailed west to Put-in-Bay to await the inevitable confrontation with the British, which came shortly after noon on 10 September. Perry assigned each of his ships to oppose aBritish vessel. Under his own command, the Lawrence would engage the British flagship Detroit; and the Niagara, under Captain Jesse D. Elliott, would fight the Queen Charlotte. But the Niagara fell behind the other American ships, thus allowing the Queen Charlotte to join the Detroit in battering the Lawrence. For 175 years, historians have arg ued about what happened . Did Elliott fail to follow the Lawrence because doing so would violate the order to preserve the line of battle? Or was he unable to increase the Niagara's speed to that of the Lawrence because of the lead in the seams or the lightness of the wind? Did Perry fail to communicate adequately with hi s subordinate? Or did Elliott fail to support his commander?

All these theories have been advanced, and the debate is ongoing. The fact remains, though, that when Perry transferred his flag from the disabled Lawrence to the Niagara, he faced a battered British fleet with a fresh American ship, and fifteen minutes later, he saw a white flag. While the Lawrence and Perry's gunboats had seriously weakened the British, it was the Niagara that finished them off.

The Niagara's accomplishments were not confined to that afternoon. She later helped the American army pursue and defeat the retreating British and while on patrol in the spring of 1814, she captured four British ships. But there is little doubt that the Battle of Lake Erie was the turning point in the War of 1812. By removing the British presence from theGreat Lakes, Perry 's victory enabled the American army under General William Henry Harrison to retake Detroit and defeat the British and their Indian ally Tecumseh a month later at the Battle of the Thames River. It ended British designs on the Northwest Territory and removed British obstacles to United States westward expansion, where so much of America's .t. future was at stake.

Mr. Runyan, professor of history at Cleveland State University, is president of the Great Lakes Historical Society and coauthor (with Archibald Lewis) of European Naval and Maritime Hi story 300-1500. Ms. Copes is a staff assistant with the Great Lakes Historical Society.

37

"We Are Not Alone'' Signs of Intelligent and Not-so-intelligent Life In the Starry Firmament of the Maritime Heritage Preservation News, the monthly newspaper of the National Trust for Historic Preservation ( 1785 Massachusetts Ave. , NW, Washington, DC 20036), has a wonderfully refreshing story in their August issue about the dedicated and highly skilled work of a team of35-yearolds in Annapolis, Patti Sachs and Victoria Fabian, who specialize in restoring hi storic windows. The story notes their encounter with an older man whose name is legend in the maritime world: "While starting a job at a riverfront house, they met a remarkable man who eventually changed their approach to crafts. The late Eric Steinlein, Sr., a naval architect, was working on his sailboat Tarry Not, when he observed the two women preparing the surface of a house for painting. ' Are you trying to beat the paint off that house? ' he inquired with undisgui sed sarcasm. What follows was the first of many lessons in the use of tools and preparation of surfaces from the man Fabian and Sachs fondly dubbed ' the Futz. '" Eric Steinlein, who died last year, was, of course, the originator and principal executorofthe Historic American Merchant Marine Survey (HAMMS) which recorded vanishing American vessels in the late 1930s (see SH35 , reviews).

"For you, it probably was a 'sentimental journey,"' said Jayjia, the Chinese-born wife of Robert Shaplen as she and he li stened to a 1940s jazz band pound out the song of that name in a Shanghai cafe; "but for me," she continued, "it was more like the China sturgeon coming back to the Long River after years at sea." The Long River, known to us as the Yangtse, is the third longest in the world (behind the Nile and the Amazon) but sustaining and affecting the lives of far more people than any other river in the world. Fully 350 million people, a third of China 's population, live within its watershed. Shaplen, famed correspondent and scholar of things Chinese, made a tour of the river provinces and cities, from remote, mountainous Chungking (nowadays spelled Chonqing), wartime capital of the Kuomintang, to the noisy , semiEuropeanized city of Shanghai at the river' s mouth, using a proposed giant dam to be built at Three Gorges as a theme to discuss with all sorts of people the history, ecology and future of this river. One unique Chinese creature threatened by smaller dams already built is the giant Chinese sturgeon, a fish that

38

grows to ten feet long and comes back after years adventuring in the China Sea to spawn and die in the inland reaches of the Yangtse, where it was born. Its survival can apparently be assured only by changing its brain-encoded instructions-a matter Shaplen goes into in some depth , since cultural survival and adaptation in a changing land are the heart of his story. It is a soul-stirring yam, rich with the writings of early travellers and the philosophic outlook and ways of life of party and government officials, farmers, entrepreneurs, navigators and scholars-a worthy Ave atque vale for Shaplen, who died after completing it. It appears in the August 8 issue of The New Yorker(25 W. 42 St. , New York, NY 10036) And in the August 15 issue of The New Yorker is a typically thorough-going account by Paul Brodeur of the origins, development and ultimate outcomes of the disastrous archaeological raid made by treasure hunters on the broad beamed British naval brig (former Dutch Sloop) De Braak, which went down in a line squall near the entrance to Delaware Bay in 1789. Reaction to this despoliation, as thearticle notes in passing, helped assure adoption of the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act, which gets underwater archaeological finds out of the realm of salvage and challenges the separate states to protect wrecks of historic value. But, the writer, plunging deep into the jungle of personal ambitions, greed and even familial nostalgia which activated the participants and those who clustered round them (including the voyeuristic media) , failed to look beyond the bickering, bought-off archaeologist collaborators and their gun-toting macho entrepreneurial sponsors, to see the real hero of the underwater scene, or the nature of the tragedy taking place before him. The real hero is the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA), which battles to preserve our common and irreplaceable heritage in underwater wrecks; the tragedy is that theDe Braak was tom apart and looted with no one to stop it, and with an educated and presumably civilized New Yorker writer more interested in tracing the chicanery and boobery of the looters than in protesting the destruction taking place under his eyes.

Speaking of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, its founding president, George F. Bass has published a memoir ofits Mediterranean beginnings, entitled "Return toCapeGelidonya," in the June

1988 issue of the INA Newsletter (Vol. 15, No. 2). Bass has an enviable ability to get the facts and guiding principles of his activities across in coloquial, storytelling prose, and here we find vintage Bass, indeed , as he narrates a visit to the site of his first underwater dig a quarter century earlier. Along the way we get a capsule history of the movement and its principal actors, and how it all came together over the past few decades to the great reward ofus all. (INA, PO Drawer HG, College Station TX 77840; 409 845-6694) The founding of another valued institution in our field, the American Society of Marine Artists, is remembered in lively fashion in the June 1988 issue of ASMA News (ASMA, c/o Stiles, 91 Pearsall Place, Bridgeport, CT 06605). James E. Mitchell , president of ASMA during some of its tumultuous but characterforming early years, notes the founding as an independent institution in 1978.

Prior to that, it had existed as a project of the National Maritime Historical Society, as Mitchell recounts. He calls the roll of founding members who have died since the first "stormy " membership meeting when ASMA set out on its own, among them our dear friend and the first president, Charles J. Lundgren, the passionately loyal and tirelessly helpful Mark Greene, the richly talented and devoted Charles Stanford, and the universally beloved and very able Bob Skemp. Soon after Mitchell wrote, Fred Freeman also slipped his cable. He too was a founder and well known for his unstinting help to aspiring artists and students of history like the undersigned.

PETER STANFORD

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U.S. Brig Niagara plans Naval architect Melbourne Smith's meticulously researched building plans for the War of 1812 brig Niagara, restored and launched Sept.

10, 1988, are on sale for $16.

Also, near perfect editions of the Perry Victory Centennial from 1913 celebration of Battle of Lake Erie - including many photos of re-floated, original Niagara - are on sale for $25. Send check or rmoney order to: Flagship Niagara League, P.c:>. Box 862, Erie, Pa. 16512.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

Mystic Sea Music Festival 1988

by Robert Lloyd Webb

Sea music festivals have grown in popularity during the last decade. Not only in the United States, but around the world from Australia to Poland, the songs and the lore of shellbacks, fishermen and others who toil on the waters have begun to be celebrated. Among the best and most informative of these events is the Sea Music Festival sponsored each June by the Mystic Seaport Museum. This year's edition, the ninth, was no exception to Mystic's continuing excellence in the field. A weekend of demonstrations, workshops and concerts highlighted the role of song in the working lives of deepwatermen, fisherfolk and others connected with the rivers, lakes and oceans past and present.

Chanteyman Stan Hugill made his annual pilgrimage from Wales. At eighty-one, Hugill is perhaps the last chanteyman sti ll publicly teaching and demonstrating sea music as sung in square-rigged commercial ships. He began his sai ling career in the 1920s, serv ing in the four-masted bark Gustav, and he is thought to have been the last man to sing a sea chantey aboard a British-registered square-rigger, the bark Garthpool,just before he and that vessel were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1929.

Hugill subsequently devoted much of his life to the study and collection of real sai lors' songs, and hi s efforts were eventually published in four books. The best known, Shanties from the Seven Seas, has been reprinted in several editions and is considered the modem chantey singer's bible. He is also a painter of maritime subjects, and his depictions of square-rigged ships are much in demand.

Stan Hugill 's exciting and traditional presentations were supported and augmented by an all-star, but no-star, cast of younger men and women who demonstrated an almost infinite range of sea songs. There were more than two dozen individual performers and groups, totalling more than forty musicians altogether. They came to the festival from the Pacific coast, the south, the Great Lakes, from Canada and the United Kingdom, and of course from around New England. Two evening concerts featured their particular talents, and a happy audience of several hundred attended each. In addition, many of the performers were featured in their own half-hour "mini-concerts" during the festival Saturday and Sunday. For those who came to dance, a proper New England country dance was held at nearby St. Patrick' s Church in downtown Mystic.

SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

In addition to the musical events, the annual sea-music symposium provides a venue for scholars to offer the results of their recent research into the origin and development of the music of the waters. This year the performers shared ideas and music at a variety of public workshops on topics in seafaring songs, such as "Whaling Songs," "Squeezebox" (concertina and accordion), "Contemporary Songs of the Sea," "Music of the Rivers, Lakes and Canals," "A Woman's Perspective" and "The Blood Red Flag-Songs of War at Sea." A specialty of the Mystic Sea Music Festival, one which sets it apart from most similar events, is the demonstration of sea chanteys during actual work sessions on board the museum 's two square-riggers, the bark Joseph Conrad and the New Bedford whaleship Charles W. Morgan. Since the chanteys were originally used to coordinate heavy mechanical tasks such as raising anchor and setting sai l, it is most appropriate to see these songs actually "at work," and such on-board demonstrations go a long way toward educating Mystic's visitors about sea music and sea life in general.

Aboard the Joseph Conrad, a oneton boat was hoisted on the davits with only the help of a capstan chantey and some strong arms manning the capstan bars. Then a yard was hoisted, using a strong crew and a halyard chantey. Later, the same yard was lowered and hoisted again to demonstrate thepeculiar"walkaway" or "stamp-and-go" chantey, during which a member of the crew hauls the halyard along the deck, hands it off to a receiving crew member, and runs forward again to grab hold of the next length of line, all to the rhythm of the song. In former years, two crews have worked side-by-side hoisting two yards aboard the Morgan, and thi s doubled sail-handling has been particularly exciting to watch.

Every event, except the evening concerts and dance, is open to Seaport visitors as part of their regular admission,.

The public is welcome aboard the vessels during these demonstrations, and many more visitors watch from the wharves. The festival is held around the Seaport's spacious grounds, as if the musical moments were an integrated part of life in a New England seaport village-as indeed they are. The singing can even be heard across the Mystic River to the beautiful historic homes on the other side.

Today there are sea festivals on both coasts of the United States and Canada, as well as in England, Poland, France

and elsewhere. Many of their organizers are looking at Mystic's success as a model for their own events, and this is to be encouraged, since the Mystic festival is highly organized and almost unique in its mission to both teach and entertain with the ancient art of shipboard music. ..J,

Mr. Webb is an accomplished folk and sea musician and author of a history of banjo music. He is curator of Maine Maritime Museum in Bath.

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SEPA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

THE BooK LOCKER: The Spanish Armada The pre-eminent figure of the struggle by sea which culminated in the defeat of the Spanish Armada was Francis Drake--0r Sir Francis, as he was known after Queen Elizabeth kni ghted him on the decks of hi s world-girdling Golden Hind in 1581 . Picking up a sword , E lizabeth told all present-and they were a multitude-that King Philip had demanded Francis Drake 's head. The sword was then used to dub him Sir Francis, in a gesture that made the sailing of the Armada seven years later practically inev itable.

To most peoples of the Western world today, and to the English, the sea-girt Hollanders and the landbound Bohemians at the time, the struggle against Spanish dominance was to assure the deliverance of a pluralistic, individualistic future for Europe, as opposed to a dogmatically ideological , rigidly administered, totalitarian imperium. And the means by which the gate was he ld open to that future was the nascent sea power of England. Drake 's role in forging and exercizing that power was well summed up by Juli an S. Corbett in hi s classic Drake and the Tudor Navy (Gower Publi shing Co. Ltd., Aldershot, UK & Brookfield, VT, 1898 repr. 1988). "The English," he said, "had invented a new art; they had created a new machine to put it into execution; by hard and long service in the open sea they had trained hands to work it; and over all , to direct its untried energy there had arisen a master spirit of the highest order."

Reissued recently with a percipient new introduction by R. B. Wemham, Corbett's work remains the standard account of the era in which England embarked on the long sea road that deli vered what we call today the free world through all subsequent perils. Kaiser Wilhelm H's sabre rattling had begun when Corbett wrote, and the shadows of the war that would end the century-long Pax Britanni ca lengthened as he went on to complete his work on British naval policy in The Successors of Drake, England in the Mediterranean, The Trafalgar Campaign and Some Principles of Maritime Strategy which, publi shed in 1911 , did not create much of a sti r at the time. A century dominated by world-engu lfing wars has changed all that, and a generation informed by Bernard Brodie's viewpoint (expressed in hi s standard Guide to Naval Strategy) looks to Corbett as our principal interpreter of Neptune's trident.

Each generation reads history in the light of its own hopes and fears, and the idea of Garrett Mattingly 's The Armada SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

(Houghton Mifflin, Boston; Penguin Books, London, 1959 repr. 1988) came to him, as he confesses, in June 1940, when England stood alone against allconquering Germany and Italy, and , as he says, "when the eyes of the world were again turned to the shores of England and the ir surrounding seas." Mattingly remarks that in the peaceful years before 1914, when the first of the world wars broke upon the world, the prevailing historical sentiment was that wars were about material interests and not values and ideas. "The men of 15 88 did not think so," says Mattingly. "To them the clash of the English and Spanish fleets in the Channel was the beginning of ... a fin al struggle to the death between the forces of light and the fo rces of darkness." Certainly Drake so saw it, though he did not feel impelled to put captives to death or bum peopl e aliveas the Spanish did under Philip II-to prove thi s.

What he did do, and is regularl y and roundly criticized for today (he even did it in the midst of one of the Armada battles in the Channel), was to tum aside from a military operation to sweep up a rich prize as booty. A case in point rec ited by Mattingly with telling effect is Drake 's abandoning the highl y effective blockade of Spanish coastal traffic he maintained with hi s squadron off Cape St. Vincent in 1587. Drake quit this vital mi ssion to get just one prize, the carrack San Felipe, inbound from India with a cargo worth some £ 114,000.

Was it worth trading off a vital national security operation for less than Donald Trump spends on a yacht nowadays?

Well , in this case, yes it was. Mattingly tells us the real value of the San Felipe to England's cause. Her cargo was worth three times all the shipping Drake had burnt in his widely celebrated raid on Cadiz ("the singeing of the King of Spain's beard," as he called it). The London merchants who sponsored some ships in Drake's fleet took their share, half the loot. That meant they ' d tum ou,t again to finance further forays. Drake took hi s £ 17,000. And the Queen took over£40,000. And together with the raid on Cadiz, the Cape St. Vincent blockade sufficed to delay the sai ling of the Armada by one year. Butjustwhatdid the Queen's £40,000 mean? It was enough, says Mattingly, to put an army in the field , or to build more than a dozen galleons , the first-class battleships of the day. The scrawny English economy just couldn 't provide that kind of capital for Elizabeth 's limited-power monarchy.

A fitting companion volume to

Mattingly's is Dav id Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story (Penguin Books, New York, 198 1).

He describes an empire "choking to death on paper," skirting bankruptcy , and committed by unswerving ideological conviction to a crashing encounter with the emerging realities of what we now call the modem age. And .. .he describes Philip in human, practically novelistic terms, summoning back to life the splendid Spanish court, the animating convictions of medieval theology, and the disastrous results of appl ying a certitude of righteousness to the problems of fa llible and multifario us humani ty. Phi lip, says Howarth, was "appallingly sincere." And Howarth is haunted by the fact that the fl eet carried wi th it sealed orders-to be opened only when j unction with Parma was effected-that vitiated its mission .

"In the mi ssion," says Howarth , " not even [Philip] could define in any reasonable words the motive for which the Armada was sent to sea and the whole immense tragedy was endured."

Felipe Femandez-Armesto's The Spa nish Armada (Oxford Uni versity Press, New York, 1988) offers, along with a wealth of information about the conditions under which the opposing fleets were fi nanced, outfitted and sailed, quite a different view of things than Mattingly or Howarth . He maintains that the Armada campaign was not an Engli sh victory, and that the victory the English didn ' t win didn't make any difference anyway. This may go down well with a rev isionist generation, but it would have been hard to sell the first of these propositions to either the captains of the routed Spanish fleet, glad to escape somehow , anyhow, to the northward after Gravelines, or to the bay ing English sea dogs who pursued them. And it wou ld have been simpl y imposs ible to sell the second proposition- that the non-v ictory didn ' t matter anyway-to either Philip II or Elizabeth . Brooding, intense Philip, seized of the ideo logical rectitude and inev itable hi storic triumph of hi s cause, was said never to smile again (well , he never smiled much, anyway). Eli zabeth, on the other hand , knew that thenceforth she would reign in freedom , and in the hearts of her people-where, indeed, she continues . to reign today, 400 years later.

Femandez-Armesto's lack of "feel" for what is going on and how it moves the people who live through it is magnified by the author's ignorance of ships and seamen. In hi s glossary, leav ing as ide the always debatable definition of ship types, one finds di sabling errors in 41

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a majority of the definitions given. Could he find no sailors to review these within all England?

The Campaign of the Spanish Armada (Penguin Books, New York, 1981) is the noted naval historian Peter Kemp 's contribution to the scene. This relatively brief, colorfully illustrated narrative is an excellent introduction to the subject, and a refreshing review for older hands .

He notes that the "the long grumbling war" rumbled on for another two decades after the Annada. Kemp, like Corbett before him, feels that England failed to reap the full fruits of the Armada victory. That was left for a later age, when admirals of Drake's tradition established the Pax Britannica in all the world 's oceans.

Armada 1588-1988 (Penguin Books, London , 1988), by M. J. RodrfguezSalgado and the staff of the National Maritime Museum is a treasure chest of Annadiana, paintings of ships and their encounters by sea, portraits of the leaders, photographs of recovered objects from chalices to cannon, all carefully studied and placed in historic context.

Rodriguez-Salgado 's introduction looks at the campaign from Philip II 's point of view. In reading Philip 's stream of communications to his agents and commanders in the field, one is reminded of Hitler's Fuhrer conferences of World War II. There is the same warped genius for war and mastery of technical detail. He knew, for example, that he needed bigger guns for his ships, as Hitler knew his tanks needed upgrading with higher velocity guns. There are the same paranoic suspicions and unshakable iron will , the compulsion to out-argue commanders, the same obsession with minutiae and the same self-imposed isolation in Spartan quarters where schemes were elaborated to the destruction of the hapless .warriors who served both dictators.

The work also furnishes authoritative discussions of the technical questions as to what was actually going on in the confused, and confusing, encounters . Hitherto obscure questions of English versus Spanish gun types and gunnery are clarified on the basis of new and re-evaluated data by Colin Martin.

Ian Friel contributes valid and insightful mini-essays on various aspects of the campaign on the English side. His comment on Howard's role tells much of the English command structure and style: "Although Howard had high social rank and, theoretically, absolute powers of command, he wisely heeded good adv i ce when it was offered, and managed to hold together the largest SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

English fleet seen for decades. " A fleet, he might have added, of unusually independent-minded and imaginative commanders!

Co Ii n Martin 's and Geoffrey Parker's The Spanish Armada (Hamish Hamilton , London , 1988) opens brilliantl y on scenes aboard the victorious English ships, their captains crying aloud for powder and shot to deal with the still formidable strength of the foe they had chivvied up the Channel and wounded badly but not destroyed. Their account from the outset thus brings us aboard the ships and close to the action-a closeness made poss ible by fresh investigation of the incredibly detailed Spanish state papers, re-evaluation of the Engli sh sources and by actually boarding eight of the more than thirty Armada ships lost on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, these eight being the wrecks examined by marine archaeologistsincluding Dr. Martin, who directed the excavation of the big Venetian La Trinidad Valencera on the Irish coastover the past twenty years.

And , at last, a map that shows the whole shape of the Spanish position ashore in Europe, a map that shows how the Spanish, holding key territories in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, and strategic territories in Central Europe, were able to dominate the continent's communications and i'ntervene to bend its politics to their will. "Philip II attempted to inv ade England and failed disastrously because the defensive effort of England and her Dutch allies prevailed," the authors conclude. But they add that Hawki ns, Howard and Drake knew wel Ithat "Philip II ' s 'grand design' against England in 1588 came within an ace of success .. .. " Peter Padfield 's Armada (Naval Institute Press, Annapoli s, 1988) g ives a meticulously researched and studied account of the conflict, from the perspective of a distinguished naval historian whose multi-volume Tides of Empire traces the impact of naval warfare on the development of modem Europe (a projected four volume series of which two have been published). Besides hi s close-in attention to tactical and technical detail , seen in the broad context of evolving ideas and means of execution, Padfield brings to the occasion his own personal knowledge of the nav igation of the era, having served as a crew member in Alan Villier's famous Atlantic crossing in the Mayflower II. The original Mayflower was probably built only a decade after the Armada sailed.

Padfield offers a sure understanding SEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

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LIGHTS AND LEGENDS A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO THE LIGHTHOUSES OF LONG ISLAND SOUND, FISHERS ISLAND SOUND, AND BLOCK ISLAND SOUND

By Harlan Hamllton, edited by Jullus M. Wilensky, $12.95, 188 pages, 6 11 x 9", paperback. Describes all 39 lighthouses still standing in these waters. including complete histories. as well as stories and legends associated with them. Photos of each lighthouse. Includes development of lighthouse construction and complete information on how lighthouses work, with some rare original sketches and plans.

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BOOK LOCKER of the particular advantages of the weather gauge, which the Engl ish commanders exp lo ited so brilli antl y in the ir "stand-off' tactics- a lesson in how to maul the e lephant witho ut getting trampled to death. He shows how Gravel ines, the culm inati ng action where the Eng li sh fe lt sure enough to come to close quarters (w ithout ri sking the medieval board ing acti on which the Spani sh were set up to win), is simple: the action was decisive. It rendered moot any question of hang ing out to link up with Parma, or of the great fleet fi ghting its way back into the Channel--courses of acti on which would not have been imposs ible, as some hi stori ans have has til y ass umed, but wo uld surely have been suicidal as Padfield clearly demonstrates.

Padfie ld 's work consistentl y describes obscure and confused situations with a sure grasp of the rea liti es. In the tactics of the conflict, what was go ing on at gun point, he has given us what must be reckoned the authori tati ve account.

Ireland's Armada Legacy (Gill and Macmill an, Dublin , 1988), by Laurence C. Flanaga n, keeper of antiquities at the Ulster Museum in Be lfas t, Northern Ire land, cata logues the Armada ho ldings of the museum-fu ll y 95 percent of

the world 's authenticated Armada material! Material, that is, recovered from the wrecks of Armada ships cast away on the wild coasts of Ireland. The book describes the excavati on of the wrecks in recent years. One of the most interesting was the wreck of the big Veneti an La Trinidad Valencera. In 1971 , members of a di ving cl ub in North Donegal, long on the lookout fo r the wreck, came upon some guns. One was marked "Philippus Rex ," with the date 1556, and the rest was history--0r rather, a rich haul for the cause of history. The excavation, directed by Co lin Martin of the Uni versity of St. Andrews (co-author of The Spanish Armada noted above), was well fi nanced and fi lmed by the BBC, and became a model marine archaeol ogical operation. The fi nds from these and other ships have all been preserved in the Ul ster Museum rather than being sold off to the highest bidder as has happened with wrecks of Spani sh ships in the Americas and e lsewhere. Fl anaga n's ri vetting account of how the museum 's collection came together is supplemented with chapters on the ships and shipboard life, as well as an apprec iation of the campaign that brought the ships, ultimately, to their terribl e endings on the

rocky shores of Ireland .

* * * * *

The new Engli sh fi ghting force that had, with its Dutch allies, shattered and turned back this whole tremendous "Enterpri se of England " was, all hands agreed at the time, largely the work and practi cally an embodime nt of the spirit of Franci s Drake. When the Duke of Medina Sidonia made hi s way overland from Santander, where hi s battered SanMartfn had staggered in , to his home in the south , unrul y youths gathered outside a house where he had stopped to spend the night and chanted "Drake, Drake, Drake is coming."

But to most people at the time, and most people since then, Drake's coming is not a n annoyance but an inspiration.

The myth that he would return , like King Arthur, in Britain 's hour of need did not seem so unreal when a few hundred Hurrica ne and Spitfire pilots held off the massed hordes of Europe under a later tyrant. Mattingly, perhaps the most distinguished of our authors after Corbett, affirm s that the defeat of the Spanish Armada was indeed decisive in the farreaching impact of its myth , its ultimate value that "It rai sed men's hearts in dark PETER STANFORD hours .. .. "

A Great Saga of Teamwork and Courage

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This is the firs t tellin g of wha t was, a t th e time, the longes t ca noe tri p in his tory, a n eig hteen-month , 7,865 - mi le saga of two yo un g men and a canoe named Muriel. Shell Taylor and Jeff Pope ! ~ ft Ne w York on April 25 , 1936, spent th e fo ll owj ng winter in the Canadian Northwest Te rritori es, a nd the fo llowi ng ¡sp ring con tinued the ir trip to Nome , Al as ka. They arri ved a t No me on August 11, 1937 . This is old-fashi oned hi gh adve nture.

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REVIEWS The Sea Remembers: Shipwrecks and Archaeology, ed. Peter Throckmorton (Weidenfeld and Nicolson , New York, 1987, 240pp, illus, $29.95hb) Instrumental in the development of underwater archaeology as a legitimate scientific discipline, Peter Throckmorton has been involved in maritime archaeology and ship preservation for over thirty years.

In projects ranging in location from the Mediterranean to the Falkland Islands, and on ships dating from as early as the 1200BCE wreck at Cape Gelidonya, Turkey, to the bark Elissa of 1877, which he found and identified in a Piraeus shipyard in the early 1960s, Throckmorton combines considerable sea sense with scientific and historical inquiry to explain and preserve our seafaring past.

Against this broad background, he has undertaken to portray the wide scope of maritime archaeology being done around the world today . He is aided in this by twenty specialists who have contributed essays on completed and ongoing archaeological projects and what they are contributing to our knowledge of our seafaring past.

The book opens with a look at the beginnings of the recovery of submerged artifacts from the sea, and the first scientific excavation of a shipwreck, the one at Cape Gelidonya, begun in 1960.

Throckmorton learned of this wreck from Turkish sponge divers and later worked with local authorities and a young archaeologist named George Bass-now archaeology director at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology-to study this Bronze Age wreck. This was the first time that archaeological methods developed for terrestrial digs were applied to a site on the ocean floor. The objective was to learn about the people who sailed the ships by understanding the surviving material record, rather than-in Throckmorton ' s own words-"to recover a lot of stuff." Thi s excavation led the way in shipwreck archaeology.

One often neglected offshoot of excavation archaeology is experimental archaeology, in which scientists try to interpret the activities of an earlier time by duplicating them. This area of study has grown up side by side with underwater archaeology . The most comprehensive such effort to date is the Kyrenia ship, a merchantman of the eastern Mediterranean dated to about 388sCE. Turkish and American divers and archaeologists working under the direction of the Institute for Nautical Archaeology's Michael Katzev recovered and recorded approximately 75 percent of the original vessel. ResearchSEA HISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

ers made exact scale models of every plank and structural member found . This allowed a full-scale, twelve-inches-tothe-foot replica to be built. Such a meticulous recreation of a vanished ship type opens a huge window on our seafaring past. We learn a great deal about the arts of the shipwright, the vessel' s capacity and the method of stowage-just as we learn the nature and origin of cargos from their remains. In sai ling the replica, we learn how close to the wind these vessels could sail, what their seakeeping qualities were, and what routes were available to ancient traders.

The replica also affords us a fresh interpretation of texts, pictures and statues which we have been unable to interpret precisely before.

The second section offers a conci se overview of Mediterranean trade during the Roman and Byzantine Empires, creating a composite picture of the development of trade and navigation from a few select sites. There are two particularly eloquent pieces of interpretation based on biblical narrative and specific ship finds . The first is Throckmorton 's use of information gleaned from a shipwreck site in Southern Italy to interpret St. Paul's shipwreck on Malta described in Acts . The other concerns the Kinneret boat, discovered on the Sea of Galilee in 1986. The excavation was overseen by Shelley Wachsmann of the Israel Department of Antiquities. Only 27ft long , this simple fishing/transport vessel dates to the first century and is the on ly vessel known to have survived from the time and land of Christ.

If there is a weak link in The Sea Remembers, it is the section on conservation. This is a crucial element in all archaeology , but in underwater archaeology it takes on whole new dimensions.

It is estimated that the ratio of the cost of shipwreck excavation to that of conservation and curation is 1: 12. Only four pages are given over to this subject; but the author, Victoria Jenssen of Parks Canada, gives some idea of the problems the marine conservator faces in preserving highly complex materials ranging from wood and other organic materials to ferrous and non-ferrous metals, glass and clay, which may have been preserved for millennia in environments ranging from a bog to salt water.

Dr. Colin Martin, well known for his work on shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and Angela Evans of the British Museum, offer a succinct appreciation of how archaeology on land sites (such as the burial ships at Gokstad and Oseberg in Norway) , underwater sites

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46

(such as the ships at Roski lde, Denmark) and wet-site wrecks (s uch as the Graveney boat in Kent) has contributed to a unified picture of the development of navigation in a clearly defined geographical area and time frame .

The maritime history of the Indian Ocean and Asia has, until recently, received relatively scant attention, and maritime archaeology has fared no better. (A comparison of maps showing the disposition of the countless underwater wrecks in the Mediterranean , with one showing only six between Bangkok and the South Korean peninsula bears this out.) Jeremy Green , curator of the Western Australian Maritime Museum, describes the development of trade and navigation in the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and China. He discusses some of the excavations that have been undertaken, particularly in the Gulf of Thailand. There is also a discussion of Kublai Khan 's invas ion of Japan in 1271 and the artifacts (but no ships, yet) recovered from the sunken invasion fleet by fishermen and divers.

While we take it for granted that we may know very little about our ancestors of 3000, 2000 or even 1000 years ago (and as many miles or more away), we might be shocked to realize how little we really know about our more immediate ancestors of onl y 200 or 300 years ago.

Some archaeologists have estimated that there are 40 ships beneath the streets of San Francisco, 300 beneath New York, 600 beneath Stockholm and as many as 1000 beneath London. In 1981 , a developer named Ronson was excavating for a new building in lower Manhattan when the remains of an eighteenth-century merchantman were discovered. The developer funded a project led by Warren Riess, a colonial maritime specia list, to excavate the site and record the surviving timbers. Ultimately , the bow section of the ship was preserved .

Whi le The Sea Remembers does not pretend to be exhaustive, it provides a coherent picture of the state of maritime archaeology today. What makes it partic ul arly important is that the authors come from a variety of sub-discip lines and each has a significantl y independent outlook on hi s work and the fie ld in general. Many well designed maps and illustrations bring the text vivid ly to life.

The bibliography is helpful and will point the reader in the right direction for further research.

K EV!

FOSTER

Mr. Foster, historian for the Maritime Preservation Program of the National Park Service, History Division, has

worked on a number of wrecks, including the CSS Chattahoochee.

Last Passage Through the Ice, produced, directed and photographed by Carl Kriegeskotte, written by Conrad Milster, 25 minutes, color, $39.95/Beta or VHS). This film takes us aboard the 1927 Canad ian bu lk freighter Birchglen as she and her crew race the ice and weather through the Welland Canal in December 1985 to deliver her cargo before the intense cold of winter closes the Great Lakes . The focus of interest throughout is the Birchglen's tripleexpansion steam engine, an endangered species which we learn abo ut via the authoritati ve text written by Conrad Milster and through the recorded voice of the ship 's chief engineer. The camera lingers lovingly on the engine in action and on the well maintained engine room with its gleaming dials and neatly painted details. Now and then there are glimpses of oilers , deckhands and the helmsmen , and we have a few short interviews with Captain Jack Hartley , in which we come to realize that these men, too, are an endangered species. But this is really a film abo ut steam power made for steam buffs, and the star of the show is the engine itself. It is a well filmed document, crammed with facts and a pleasNS ure to watch.

Maritime America: Art and Artifacts from America' s Great Nautical Collections, ed. and introd. by Peter Neill (Harry N. Abrams, 1988, 255pp, illus, $29.95) Paintings, photographs, navigational instruments, scrimshaw, and yes the ships themselves of our seafaring heritage as preserved in fifteen of America 's leading museums and nautical societies are brilliantly presented in this colorfully illustrated work by Peter Neill , president of South Street Seaport Museum.

The purposes and scope of the collections in each of these great institutions is discussed with authority by the director or curator of each, in essays that are themse lves worth the price of admi ssion in this thank-heavens-not-overpriced book. Chief among these essays is Neill's own introduction to the who le splendid show. Neill finds , in the vigor of activities in the field today, from antiq ue yacht rallies to waterfront development schemes, "an increas ing awareness of the need to preserve our country 's rrich nautical patrimony."

This vitmlity of public awareness is a dominant ttheme of the book. The ships SEA IHISTORY, AUTUMN 1988

in the collection of Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut fairly glow with the care lavished on them, and significantly the very process of ship-keeping are not hidden away but celebrated at Mystic today, as Andrew German points out in hi s live ly, fact-filled essay on the institution that is generally rated No. 1 among our maritime museums. The Philadelphia Maritime Museum has assembled a notable collection in a city that had turned its back on the waterfront from which it grew- and worse, cut it off with a superhighway! The Museum played a vital role in the waterfront redevelopment that became Penn 's Landing, and in bringing to the port the magnificent Grand Banks barkentine known today as Gaze la of Philadelphia.

Philip Foster Chadwick Smith contributes a fine essay on the origins of the institution and what its founders and strong supporters brought to the splendid inshore museum that exi sts today, with an active waterfront program maintained aboard a barge on the Delaware waterfront , where small craft are restored, and living skills taught.

Neill's appreciation of the museum at South Street where he pres ides is conveyed in broad brushstrokes, by contrast, conveying well his vi sio n of a city built by water. Here and the re errors of detail creep in- the port 's function considerably antedated the official settlement of the 1620's, and hi s museum was incorporated in 1967 not 1968, but his purpose is not to develop historic or institutional detail , but rather their fit of the museum and its collection, notably its ships, into the life of the city which grew up on the trades that flourished in South Street, the street of ships. Commerce is part of the present purpose as it was in the past, but Nei 11 hold s firmly to the governing educational purpose by which thi s, and all these museums, most PS valuably serve the future.

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The Queen's Corsair: Drake's Journey of Circumnavigation

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FRANK D. PAULO MILES & NANCY PETERLE PETERSON BUILDERS . INC. DONALD PEITIT HE RY PETRONIS F. N. PI ASEC KI NORMAN PLUMMER MR. & MRS. WILLI AM T. POPE PORT ANNAPOLIS MAR INA HENRY POWELL HEINO H. PR AHL FRANCIS C. PRATI G. A. PRATI JOHN D. PRATI FRA NK C. PR INDLE QUIC K & REILLY. INC. ALBERT F. QUINTRALL BEND. RAM ALEY SA M L. RAMBO CA PT. JOHN W. RAND ARV I E. RATY COL. ALFRED J. REESE RAY REM ICK FREDERIC K REM INGTON A. E. RENNER P. R. J. REY NOLDS MR . & MRS . F. B. RICE W. MARK RIGGLE EDWARD RITIE NHOUSE CAPT. JOSE RIVERA SAMUEL A. REA E. D. ROBBINS. MD JAMES L. ROBERTSON CHARLES R. ROBINSON JOSEPH D. ROBI NSON PETER ROBINSON MARK ROM ING ELIH U ROSE DAVID ROSEN LESTER ROSENBLATT PHILIP ROSS EDM UN D RUMOW ICZ CDR. KENNETH RUSSELL S. M. RUST. JR. DAVID R. RYAN M. J. RYAN WILLIAM R. RY AN R. D. RYDER C HAR LES IR A SACHS JAMES M. SALTER. 11 SAN DIEGO YAC HT C LUB NORMAN SA RGENT E. W. SASYBOLT & CO .. INC. H. R. SAUNDERS. J R. FANNErfE SAWYER SCANDINA VIAN MARI NE CLA IM S OFACE. INC. H. K. SCHAEFER CARL H. SCHAEFFER JOHN 0 . SC HATVET DAV ID & BARBARA SC HELL DENNIS A. SCHULD HELEN M. SHOLZ CHARLES E. SCR IPPS ROBERT SELLE WILLIAM R. SEYBOLD HUG H R. SHARP. JR. MICHAEL T. SHEEHAN ROBERT P. SHEEHY RIC HARD J. SCHEUER STEPHEN A. SCHOFF KEN NETH W. SHEETS. JR. S HIPS OF T HE SEA MUSEU M SIG NA L COM PAN IES. INC. FRA NK SIMPSON GEORGE SIMPSON LTJG J. C. SINNEIT EDWARD M. SKANTA FRANCIS D. SKELLEY EASTON C. SK INNER DAV ID L. SLAGLE C HARLES R. SLIG H. Ill C. HAM ILTON SLOA N STEPHEN S LOA N MR . & MR S. EDGA R F. SMITH HARRISON SMITH HOWARD SMITH MRt. & MRS. LARRY D. SMITH ROBERT C. SMITH MR . & MRS . EDWARD W. SNOWDO N E. P. SNY DER MAX SOLMSSEN JOSEPH SONNA BEND CONWAY B. SONNE JOS EPH W. SPAULDING. JI DR . JUDSON D. SPEER WILLIAM A. SPEERS T HOMAS R. SPENCER F. N. SPIESS JOHN S. W. SPOFFORD ALFRED STAPLETON PH ILIP ST ENGER SUS IE STENHOUSE RODER ICK STEPHENS W. T. STEVENS CAPT. JACK T. STILLMAN-I LT. H. L. STONE. Ill ROB ERT A. STRANGE MARSHALL STR EIBERT ST. CLAIR STRONG DANIEL R. SU KIS WALTER J. SULLI VAN GORO SUZUKI CAPT. JOHN 0. SVENSSON BRUCE SWEDJEN LCDR THOMAS L. SW IFT EUGENE SYDNOR J.C. SYNNOTI HEN RY TALBERT DAV IS TAYLOR DR . JAMES H. TAYLOR GEORGE R. TOL LEFSEN PETER G. T HEODORE C. PETER THEUT CLARK THOMPSON JIO H N B. T HOMSON. JR .

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LAURENCE WILLARD BETII E Z. WILLIAMS ROBERT WI LSON CAPT. J. M. WINDAS JOH N F. WING THOMAS J. WING JAMES R. WIRTH WULLIAM F. WI SEMAN WILLI AM H. P. WIT HERS WALTER G. WOHLEKING EDWARD WOLLENBERG WOME ·s PROPELLER CLUB. PORT OF BOSTON WOMEN'S PROPELLER CLU B. PORT OF NEW YORK RICK WVOOD DORAN R. WRIG HT J. L. WRIG HT KIRK YOUNGMAN W. J. YUENGLII'ING DONALD ZUB ROD WILLIAM C. WYGANT JAMES H. YOCUM CA PT. ALEN SANDS YORK JOHN YOUELL HENRY A. YOUMA NS THOMAS R. YOUNG

â&#x20AC;¢MODEL SUCCESS STORY' "The Maritime Preposition ing Ship prog ram is a mod el success story, and I couldn 't be more pleased. MPS is on schedule and proving to be an extremely valuable strategic asset."

- General PX. Ke lley Commandant U. S Marine Corps

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DISTRICT 2 MARINE ENGINEERS BENEFICIAL ASSOCIATION -ASSOCIATED MARITIME OFFICERS AFFILIATED WITH THE AFL-CIO MARITIME TRADES DEPARTMENT 650 FOURTH AVENUE BROOKLYN, N.Y 11232 (718) 965-6700

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RAYMOND T. McKAY PRESIDENT

JOHN F. BRADY EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

USNS Sirius {T-AFS 8) . Another IOMM&P Vessel.

This Is MM&P Country The USNS Sirius (T-AFS8) one of the Military Sealift Command support fleet returning from Mediterranean Duty commanded by MM&P member Captain Edwin Rudder and manned by MM&P Deck Officers, is one of the original UNREP vessels under the MSC Atlantic Command.

Formerly the RNA Lyness of the British Royal Navy Auxiliary, the Sirius is 524 feet in length powered by 8-cylinder direct drive Sulzer diesels and cruises at 16 knots. She has UNREP Stations. When operating with the fleet she transfers supplies and spare parts from a 17,000 Navy line item inventory. The Sirius is computerized for the supplies operation. She also carries two Boeing Vertal H-46D helicopters for vertical replenishment operations.

ROBERT J. LOWEN

F. ELWOOD KYSER

International President

International Secretary-Treasurer

International Organ ization of

Masters, Mates & Pilots 700 Maritime Boulevard , Linthicum Heights, MD 21090 •Tel : (301) 850-8700 •Cable: BRIDGEDECK, Washin gton , DC• Telex: 750831