Sea History 077 - Spring 1996

No. 77

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SPRING 1996

SEA HISTORY. THE ART, LITERATURE, ADVENTURE, LORE & LEARNING OF THE SEA

DOES THE

US MERCHANT MARINE HAVE A FUTURE?

Admiralty Models: The View from the Lower Deck A Scrimshander's Respect for the Ivory The Cape Hom Road Hudson River Schooner Wrecks

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ISSN 0146-9312

No. 77

SEA HISTORY

SEA HISTORY is published quarterly by the National Maritime Historical Society, 5 John Wal sh Boulevard, PO Box 68, Peekskill NY 10566. Second class postage paid at Peekskill NY 10566 and additional mailing offices. COPYRIGHT Š 1996 by the National Maritime Historical Society. Tel: 9 14 737-7878.

FEATURES 6

14 The Cape Horn Road, Part VII, Peter Stanford

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OVERSEERS: Charles F. Adams , Wa lter Cronkite, Townsend Hornor, George Lamb, John Lehman, Schuyler M. Meyer, Jr. , J. William Middendorf, II, Graham H. Phillips, John Stobart, William G. Winterer ADVISORS: Co-Chairmen , Frank 0 . Braynard, Melbourne Smith; D.K. Abbass, Raymond Aker, George F. Bass, Francis E. Bowker, Oswald L. Brett, David Brink, Norman J. Brouwer, William M. Doerflinger,Francis J. Duffy,John S. Ewald , Joseph L. Farr, Timothy G. Foote, William Gilkerson , Thomas Gillmer, Walter J. Handelman, Charles E. Herdendorf, Steven A. Hyman , Hajo Knuttel, Conrad Milster, William G. Muller, David E. Perkins, Richard Rath , Nancy Hughes Richardson, Timoth y J. Run yan , George Salley, Ralph L. Snow, John Stobart, Shannon J. Wall , Thomas Well s AMERICAN SHIP TRUST: International Chairman, Karl Kortum; Chairman , Peter Stanford; Trustees, F. Briggs Dalzell, William G. Muller, Richard Rath , Melbourne Smith, Edward G. Ze linsky SEA HISTORY STAFF: Editor, Peter Stanford; Executive Editor, Norma Stanford; Managing Editor, Justine Ahlstrom; Contributing Editor, Kev in Haydon; Accounting, Joseph Cacciola; Members hip Development & Public Affairs, Burchenal Green; Membership Secretary, Patricia Anstett; Membership Assistant, Erika Kurtenbach; Advertising Assistant, Carmen McCallum; Secretary to the President, Karen Ritell

America's Orphan-the US Flag Merchant Marine, David O'Neil

10 "He Sank Them in the Lowlands, Low," Walter Rybka

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Sea History, 5 John Walsh Boulevard, PO Box 68, Peekskill NY 10566.

OFFICERS & TRUSTEES: Chairman, Alan G. Choate; Vice Chairmen, Richardo Lopes, Richard W. Scheuing, Edward G. Zelinsky; President, Peter Stanford; Vice President, Norma Stanford; Treasurer, Bradford Smith; Secretary, Donald Derr; Trustees, Walter R. Brown , W. Grove Conrad, George Lowery, Jeanmarie Maher, Warren Marr, II, Brian A. McA llister, James J. Moore, Douglas Muster, Nancy Pouch, Craig A. C . Reynolds, Marshall Streibert, Loui s Trapp, Jr. , David B. Vietor, RaymondE. Wallace, Jean Wort ; Chairman Emeritus, Karl Kortum

SPRING 1996

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MODELMAKER ' S CORNER: Space Age Technology Takes Us Below Decks Aboard "Navy Board" Ship Models, Major Grant Walker

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MUSEUM PROFILE: Maritime History in America's Heartland: The Michigan Maritime Museum, Dorris Akers

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MARINE ART:

Respect for the Ivory, Nancy Mendelson

27 Remnants of Working Sail on the Hudson, Mark Peckham 32

VESSEL PROFILE: Catawissa: Last Deepwater Steam Tug on the East Coast, Norman Brouwer

34 Rigging a Sail Training Ship for the Indian Navy, Morin Scott

DEPARTMENTS 2 4 26 36

Deck Log & Letters NMHS News Marine Art News Shipnotes, Seaport & Museum News

37 American Merchant Marine Museum News 42 Reviews 48 Patrons

COVER: Embodying the optimism and energy of the nation for which she was named, the clipper ship Young America leaves New York for distant shores. A century and a quarter later, the US fla g merchant fleet is confronting its own extinction. (See page 6) Painting by William G. Muller, 30" x 48", oil on canvas. To inquire about the original painting, contact NMHS at 914 737-7878.

Join Us for a Voyage into History Our seafaring heritage comes alive in the pages of Sea History, from the ancient mariners of Greece, and Portuguese navigators opening up the ocean world, to the heroic efforts of seamen in World War II. Each issue brings new insights and new discoveries.

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LETTERS

DECK LOG The famous clipper Young America sailing so bravely across our cover was launched in 1853, when the republic she was named for was indeed young. Independence from Great Britain had been won just seventy years earlier. But a distinctive American style was evident in our architecture, our ways of talking and writing, and in the ships we builtand how we sailed them.

It is an amazing fact that at the height of the clipper era in 1851 , just two years earlier, the American merchant marine moved more of the world's cargo than the British merchant fleet, which served the largest empire in history. Innovative excellence in ship design and the driving determination of Yankee shipmasters and merchants enabled the young, still underdeveloped nation to pull off this feat, to the vast benefit of the American economy. Fortunes made in shipping went to build the American industrial base which changed not just American but world history in the next hundred years.

Today ourtrillion-dollarforeign trade is carried in foreign ships almost exclusively. The reasons for this flight from the flag are set forth by Dave O'Neil in the report on page 6, the first of four articles in which we'll be looking at the state of the merchant marine in the light of history. The American people are unaware both of the special role of the merchant marine in building America and of its recent exile from the oceans.

We conceive it to be part of our educational mission to get the story before more people to encourage informed judgment on the future of the American flag at sea. We are seeking ways to extend this effort beyond these pages, and we welcome your comment.

In History's Cause If the cause of history is a continuing one, so alas is its abuse. The opening letters in the adjoining column reflect on the extremely anti-historical perspective taken by the Smithsonian Institution in its "Enola Gay" exhibit, which used skewed statistics and statements directly contrary to fact in questioning the American decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945. Of course it' s important to question any decision of this gravity, but the distortions which characterized the Smithsonian exhibit were a disservice to history 's cause and to people seeking to understand the national experience.

PETER STANFORD

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Doctoring We Can Do Without I read with great pleasure the Autumn issue of Sea History, particularly the editorial regarding the historical doctoring of the past. I, along with many others, have been horrified at the liberties taken with historical events; it would seem that the voice of the participants has become increasingly weak as time wears on, and I shudder to think what the modem "historians" will concoct when the last survivor of a well documented event finally dies.

Another editorial on this subject suggested that when that day comes, some of the more liberal-minded historians might have the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor recorded as the unprovoked attack by US forces on a friendly flight of foreign airmen flying a mercy mission!

WM. H. WHITE Rumson, New Jersey

tug El Toro of the Southern Pacific Company. The tug was used in New York from 1924 until 1941, then sold to the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for use in the lower Chesapeake Bay. Renamed W.J. Harahan, she remained in use until retired in 1962. In 1971, as part of an unsuccessful effort to preserve the tug, the engine was removed and donated to the museum. It was restored by volunteers and placed in our Steamboat Building which opened in 1992.

The museum would be interested in knowing if your readers are aware of any other Sullivan engines. Also, we would like to locate a photograph of the tug while she still bore the name El Toro.

NORMAN H. PLUMMER Chairman, Curatorial Committee Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum St. Michaels, Maryland

"Wider View" Needs Wider Audience

No Steam to Spare

Your column, "The Wider View," in Sea History 75 so clearly and completely explains the situation at the end of World War II and today's thinking about that time, that it is a shame it isn't read by a wider audience. Sea History is certainly the forum for such retrospectives, but this column needs to enter the mainstream of current popular thought.

I recall reading in Adm . O'Kane ' s Clear the Bridge his discouragement on seeing firsthand, as a POW in Japan in the spring of 1945, the strength of that country and his belief that " ... Japan could only be defeated by invasion." In Jerome Forrest's article in Naval History magazine (August 1995), another firsthand observer details the strengths and intent of the Japanese to continue the war, even after the A-bombs!

enjoyed Philip Teuscher's article, "Tidewater Tugboating," in Sea History 76. Those of us working on the Banner boats longed to be fortunate enough to get a job on the elite Red Star, Moran or Turecamo boats. I was engineer on the tugboats Maple Leaf of Conners Marine, Seaboard of Tracy Coal Co. , and the McAllister Brothers of McAllister Towing.

The most famous of these Banner boats were owned by a Mr. Roe, and were all steam with the steam exhaust blowing outside by the top of the stack.

We said the puffing of the exhaust steam was saying "coal and water, coal and water." My uncle, known in that period as Wild Bill Leander, was a captain on one of Roe's boats. He told me he never blew the whistle because they couldn't spare the steam.

EMMETT ANGELL

WALTER LEANDER

Califon, New Jersey

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

In Search of a Sullivan

Liverpool Artist in Scottish Waters

Your recent issue contained several excellent articles on tugboats. "Tidewater Tugboating" briefly mentioned engines "built by Sullivan on East 8th Street," Manhattan, used in Red Star tugs.

The reference to "Sullivan" must be to John W. Sullivan & Company of 827 East 9th Street. Your readers might be interested to know that the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels; Maryland, displays a working model of a Sullivan engine, possibly the only one still extant. It was built in 1924 for the

Your story on the Liverpool ship artists in the Autumn 1995 issue was very interesting and informative, especially the comments on showing three views of the same ship.

Yesterday, after checking out Vermeer at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I wandered into a gift shop and saw an inexpensive print of a ship maneuvering off Greenock. I checked it and, sure enough, there were the three views. After I got home I looked at the print more carefully, especially the treatSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

ment of the water. I read your story again, and suddenly was struck by the similarity of technique between my print and Robert Salmon's painting of the packet ship "United States, 1817."

Sure enough , my print of the ship "Favorite maneuvering off Greenock ( 1819)" was also by Salmon. It is in the Paul Me ll on collection. Not only is the sea a dead giveaway but also the treatment of the thin pay-off-type pennant fl ying from the top of the mainmast.

And there is no doubt about the ship's name-it is heralded on another large pennant which flies from the mizzen truck. Of particular interest is the carefu l attention given to the houses and buildings on the Greenock shore. Many of the buildings could be identified still.

A complaint: the story makes the point that the exhibition will travel to New York's South Street Seaport Museum and Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia in 1996, but doesn't give any dates.

GEOFFREY W. FIELDING Baltimore, Maryland Dates are now available: "Across the Western Ocean: American Ships by Liverpool Artists" is scheduled to be at the South Street Seaport Museum from 20 May to 22 September and at the Independence Seaport Museum , 2 November through February 1997.-ED.

Square Rig is the Way to Go I was saddened to read the obituary of Peter Vanadia in the Autumn Sea History. I met Peter about fifteen years ago aboard Young America and we spent hours together talking about square rig and youth sail training.

It seems not a long time since you ran the obituary of another square-rig enthusiast, Peter Throckmorton , whom I also had the pleasure of knowing. I met him in Greece when he was involved in saving the bark Elissa, an effort which was eventually successful despite many setbacks along the way. I tried to get her brought back to England, but as that scheme fell through, I have been pleased to see that she was finally restored and is at sea under sail at the Texas Seaport Museum in Galveston.

Square rig is the way to go at sea. The occasional sail training vessel is still being built as a barkentine. The very large mainsail and mizzen are not good news sailing downwind . They make it difficult and dangerous to wear ship in strong winds, and that is often necessary SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

in waters like the Engli sh Channel in order to avoid large cargo ships and tankers which seldom, if ever, observe the matter of"steam" giving way to sail, especially at night. In this day and age it is quite normal for even big ships to have on ly one man on the bridge and in the "flag of convenience" ships the qualifications and experience of the man may be extremely limited!

MORIN SCOTI Paphos, Cyprus

Model A Version The recent American Neptune article on Constellation seems to indicate that the debate as to her origin will never end. I just reread John Lyman 's 1975 piece in Sea History ; he said it all back then , convincingly and conclusively. But, much like the debate between creationism and evolution, the issue will never die because the arguments are based on different paradigms: one spiritual, the other empirical.

Thanks to the diligent work of Messrs.

Chapelle, Lyman and Wegner, my job will be easier-the study of Constellation's physical history can begin with the 1850s rather than 1790s. So far, it looks like the most dramatic alterations to the vessel have been made since her arrival in Baltimore in the 1950s-the result of efforts to tum the sloop-of-war into the frigate she never was or, as Karl Kortum puts it, "to tum a Model A into a Model T." I was excited to hear that much of her original iron hardware, including railings and rigging fittings, was dumped in the lower hold when the revisionists did their makeover. There it all sits today , waiting to be catalogued and resurrected!

DON BIRKHOLZ, JR. Tri-Coastal Marine, Inc. New York, New York Don Birkholz and Tri-Coastal Marine are examining the Constellation for a National Park Service historic structure report, with future hopes for rebuilding her as accurately as possible .

USS Constellation Director Louis Linden is to be saluted for his determination to rescue the vessel from near destruction and return her to a place of prominence in Baltimore's harbor and in America' s maritime history.-ED.

It's About Time, Indeed!

It was with total amazement (and great pleasure) that I read your kind words about me in the new edition of Irving

Johnson's The Peking Battles Cape Horn. My biggest regret is that I never had a chance to meet Captain Johnson or, even better, to have been a part of one of his voyages.

I don ' t know about being a "shining light" in the sail training movement, as you call me, but I am certainly enjoying the sailing. I stayed with the Rose from mid-July until her down rigging in November, so I was on the voyage to Newfoundland and the French islands. My son Will went off to S¢rlandet in Norway and then returned to Rose to find me in his spot on the watch roster. We managed to coexist as a mother-son team for the rest of the summer. I can't say that I ever imagined working aloft with my own son!

I am now off to take a cram course for the AB exam and maybe the 200-ton mate 's exam as well. I plan to join the Rose's trip to England this spring, and I might as well prove that I am not just an idle dilettante playing at being a deckhand. Captain Richard Bailey is determined that the Rose is going to make this trip and be a part of the festivals at Bristol, Brest and Nantes---complete with American sail trainees of all ages. It is about time that we were represented at the big gatherings in Europe!

ALIX T. THORNE George 's Mills, New Hampshire

Catawissa-A Must!

As one who worked for Moran Towing for 10 years, I appreciate tugs. The Catawissa is a priceless gem. She must be saved!

FRANK 0. BRA YNARD, Curator American Merchant Marine Museum Kings Point, New York See story, pp. 32-33.

QUERIES

We have received many inquiries about the Jack Gray painting of the tug and barge in a snowfall near the Brooklyn Bridge, seen on the cover of Sea History 76. If any reader can help us locate this painting, please call us , or advise the owner that we would like to know more about the painting and the artist.

One of our volunteers is looking for information on joint actions of the US Army and Navy in the backwaters of Philippine rivers early in WWII. Anyone who was there or has information, please write Herb Saxe, c/o NMHS, PO Box 68, Peekskill NY 10566. J,

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NMHSNEWS Seafarers Join NMHS's Educational Mission In our work to educate Americans in their maritime heritage, NMHS is recruiting contemporary American seafarers as members and spokesmen. In a campaign led

by Tru stee Richard W. members , trustees and staff at Fort Schuyler: from Scheuing and funded by NMHS leji, Michael Daquila , Duncan and Steve Trueman , Richard NMHS supporters, cadets W. Scheuing , Russell Newberry, Burchenal Green , Norman at the five state maritime Carathanasis, Ellen Newberry, Andrew Strickler (R egimenacademies, the US Mer- tal Chief of Staff) , Peter Stanford, and James J. Moore. chantMarine Academy and the Coast Guard Academy have been enrolled as members, and we expect to add the Naval Academy soon.

On 9 February 1996, Peter Stanford led a group of NMHS members to visit NY 's state maritime academy at Fort Schuyler, in the Bronx, and to present members hips to the class of 1996. In remarks to the corps of cadets, Peter Stanford charged the new members with the Society 's educational mission, observing that nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth from enthusiastic participants. This charge was endorsed emphatically by Admiral David Brown, president of the SUNY Maritime College.

A Shared Concern NMHS trustee, the Hon . James Moore, arranged a joint meeting between NMHS and the New York Chapter of the Council of American Master Mariners-a national professional organization of licensed captains. Capt. Max Rand, in welcoming NMHS , dwelt on the Council's need to reach out and give citizens an understanding of America ' s interest in the maritime world. Peter Stanford gave a slide presentation on the outstanding achievement of American ships and seafaring in history and the present decline of the US flag merchant marine.

Most Americans, he said, know about seafaring through museums, libraries, sail training associations and the like, and it is that constituency which NMHS plans to develop. New contacts can be made everyday with museum visitors and with America ' s enormous boating industry. We are looking at ways to work with boat clubs and to reach new audiences, through our traveling display program, at boat shows and maritime festivals across America.

JA

Put On Your "Body-and-Soul Lashings" to View this Film!

The San Diego Maritime Museum gave a showing of"The Ghosts of Cape Horn" on 29 March-the first time the film has been shown in over ten years, outside of NMHS headquarters. Peter Stanford attended the event and introduced the film-a collaborative effort initiated by NMHS and Peter Throckmorton, who was inspired by the hulks he found in the Falkland Islands, the remains of tall ships defeated in the struggle to round Cape Horn. It begins with heart-stopping footage taken from a vessel caught in foul weather off the Horn and goes on to explore the world of the men who built the great sailing ships and took them on that challenging passage.

NMHS is looking towards the year 2000, a focal year for our maritime heritage as America's attention turns once again to the tall ships gathering along the East Coast. In preparation, we are working on programs that will go beyond the spectacle to get young people fully engaged in the challenge of our maritime heritage and to build a foundation for a continuing involvement in that heritage.

With this goal in mind, our copies of "The Ghosts of Cape Horn" will travel to the East Coast cities of Miami, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and to other venues on the West Coast to introduce groups to one of the most dramatic stories of the power of the sea and man ' s great adventure in it. For information about borrowing the video to show locally, cal 1B urchie Green at 914 737-7878.

JA

NMHS ANNUAL MEETING, Saturday, 4 May All members are invited to the Annual Meeting. This is your opportunity to meet trustees and staff and to have a voice in NMHS's future. Join us at the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, for the business meeting, lunch ($30) and Henry Keatts presentations on works in progress.

Let us know about any projects or programs we should discuss .

Our keynote address by Henry Keatts, Professor of Biology and Oceanography, will explore Uboats off the East Coast of the US. The speaker is president of the American Society of Oceanographers, an experienced underwater explorer and photographer and the author of numerous books in-

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eluding A Field Guide to Sunken U-Boats.

Other presentations will be given by: David O'Neil, chairman of the American MerHalve Maen chant Marine Museum, on the campaign to save the American merchant marine; Commo.

Henry H . Anderson on the World Ship Trust; and Schuyler M. Meyer, Jr., on the State Council on Waterways.

Tours will be available after lunch and the day will conclude with sea shanties and camaraderie on board the64' replica of Henry Hudson ' s Halve Maen.

Call us at 914 737-7878 for additional information.

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

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THE AMERICAN FLAG AT SEA

America's Orphan: the US Flag Merchant Marine

by David A. O'Neil

This report is the first in a series on the state ofthe US merchant marine and its current round of decline. The focus of these articles will be on problems of our fleet's competitiveness and on arguments for and against government intervention to maintain a US flag merchant fleet.

National security, economic and environmental considerations will also be addressed. It is hoped the discussion will raise awareness of the problem and even, perhaps, contribute to solutions.

ea History' s readers know , perhaps all too well, that America ' s peacetime merchant fleet always begins to dwindle shortly after every war. It seems that when a strong case for having an ongoing, vibrant US flag merchant marine is made to one generation, the lesson goes untaught to the next.

Priorities, incentives and opportunities naturally shift as the wartime emergency recedes. Thus, what President Eisenhower termed the "fourth arm of defense" remains out of the news, and the strategic and economic value of a home flag merchant marine becomes a cause only for a dwindling constituency.

Lack of public interest in the merchant marine is paradoxical when you consider that the US is the largest single national market for trade the world has ever known. US foreign trade is worth over one trillion dollars annually, which equates to nearly one billion tons of cargo. But the US is currently carrying less than 4% of its entire trade. Despite our leadership in world trade-and leadership in shipping technology-we are not primary participants in carrying this trade to and from our shores.

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of three post-WWII vessels. A check on this relative ship productivity is easily performed by comparing yearly cargo delivery rates. Fifty million tons were carried by 1400 US flag ships in 1950 and that rate (of tons carried per ship in a year) can be compared to the current productivity of 313 ships carrying 35 million tons. Today 's average cargo delivery rate-per-ship of about 112,000 tons-per-year is just about 3.1 times our 1950s average of 35,000 tons per year.

It must be remembered, moreover, that the reduction in the number of ships also reflects on shoreside jobs, not just

Despite our leadership in world trade--and leadership in shipping technology-we are not primary participants in carrying this trade to and from our shores.

Fewer Ships, Fewer Jobs In order to understand what contributes to the decline in American shipping, let's start with the fact that some decline in the numbers of ships needed to carry a given amount of trade is inevitable.

This is due to the use of the larger, faster, more efficiently loaded and crewed merchant ships of today. This means considerably fewer ships are required to do the same job as a few decades ago.

If we consider a 15-knot ship of the 1950s as our baseline, it would have a capacity of approximately 10,000 tons and spend about two more days in port than today's more efficiently loaded 20knot ship carrying at least twice the cargo on each of its more frequent trips.

Using these figures, we can estimate that one of today's vessels might do the work 6

in the shipping companies, but also in the shipyards and many interfacing businesses that are a part of a larger maritime infrastructure. In looking at the current demand for seafarers, we must consider that today ' s US flag ships each carry nearly half as many crew members as ships of the 1950s, although today 's ships have twice the capacity or more.

We employed nearly 60,000 mariners in foreign commerce then, compared to about 7,500 today (these numbers exclude seafarers in our domestic trades or working for the US Government). Just as important as the reduction in number of seafarers themselves is the difficultto-regain loss of their skills and knowhow. Also significant is the attendant abandonment of shoreside facilities and

the shutdown of organizations that took decades to build.

Loss of Market Share But America ' s diminutive role in carrying its own trade obviously accounts for more of the decline in US shipping than the use of more efficient ships. The fact is that worldwide competition for the carriage of our trade has sent our imports and exports galloping away from American ships.

The current round of maritime decline also exhibits the earmarks of change that may be just a smaller subset of events taking place in an "America in transition." The current maritime dilemma might be most realistically viewed in the perspective of the last half-century's rapidly changing times.

In Megatrends, John Naisbittcharacterized these changing times as a "time in parenthesis"-meaning that we are living in a transitional period between eras.

Without question, the country is moving from an industry-based economy to a service-based economy and an information society, just as surely as farm economies gave way to the industrial revolution. Wealth in our economy was generated from growing, mining or manufacturing things we could "reach out and touch." An electric shock is about all you 'II get if you touch "it" these days.

It is nearly impossible to utter the term "global economy" without linking it to both tradeand the world's emerging economies. Continuing our trade with and increasing our aid to emerging economies of the third world is laudableproviding, of course, that the new trade or trading systems formed do not decimate our own economy in the process.

"Free trade" is a keystone of the new global economy and it idealistically seeks to eliminate all external forces that would interfere with the control of trade other than by market forces alone.

The global economy's drive toward free SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

"Young America Leaving New York Harbor, 1853 ," by William G . Muller .

The Young America, famous clipper of 1853, leaves New York Harbor with a fair wind, twenty years into her long, prosperous career carrying cargos under the American flag. The young republic grew to greatness on its sea trades, but today the American flag is fast vanishing from the deepwater trades. Do we want this to happen? trade, however, has resulted in US industrial work being deliberately sent offshore to companies operating under business rules not burdened by US environmental, safety and fair labor regulations, and manned by lower wage workers. 1 But the decision makers-the real "free traders"-are not necessarily residents of the third world. Many of them enjoy Uncle Sam 's protection of their wealth and they enjoy it right here in the USA. Here they are permitted to adroitly lobby for even more freedom to compete for the business that Americans once took for granted. As result, "free trade" and the US problem of its "balance of payments" are coming into serious conflict.

In the 1970s, both survival and profit motives sent traditional northern manufacturing centers to our sun belt in search of lower-wage industrial workers and other concessions. This trend was soon extended to the export of high-wage, blue collar jobs overseas. Along the way, many businesses that didn ' t follow SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

the trend found themselves unable to compete. Both of these geographic employment shifts, like the trend to flag out (i.e., to register US-owned ships overseas and crew them with non-nationals), were in full swing long before the fuss and notice recently caused by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFT A). Despite early bipartisan support for that agreement, serious public discussion on this latest special interest adventure in globalization theory is conspicuously absent as new trade diffic ulties with Mexico emerge. Significantly lower-cost imports have also demonstrated their potential to ruin increasing numbers of domestic companies and even whole industries.

America's machine tool industry is one example. Global competition, on the other hand , must be credited with providing the "wake-up call" to such industries as auto and steel.

As we came into the last quarter of this century, the computer, its modem and the fax became unrversal business

tools. The shipping business uses computers to do everything from handling what used to be cargo "paperwork" to controlling ships' engines or assisting navigation. With such tools, certain business owners learned that high-priced American white collar workers could be as readily replaced as factory workers had been the decade before. Not only could the company port captain take his work home to New Jersey, but he could now even do his work from Singaporeat the prevailing local wage, of course.

Invest in America? Not Likely!

Any discussion of change on the American business scene cannot ignore recent approaches to investment management taught by our leading business schools, which are also undoubtedly instrumental in fanning the fires for more globalism. The financial community is highly pro-globalism and, therefore, strongly in favor of foreign investment and more free trade. This doesn ' t bode well for new investments in US shipping companies.Low-yield investments in long7

term projects, like building ships and new marine transportation companies, find less favor on Wall Street than only a few decades ago.

Last year, 1995, saw phenomenal 33.5% growth in the Dow Jones average, but there was sparse reinvestment in America. This is clearly because the rules of the game offer high corporate profits to capital invested abroad. Almost unnoticed in the touting of the necessity to be the "low cost provider" is the self-interest of other nations and the ploys of foreign-crewed shipping firms headquartered over here. Many lurk in the wake of weakened US shipping businesses, anxious to take over their routes.

American businesses in the 1990s have a wide range of choices that include hiring the lowest-paid workers on earth and then (1) lowering their prices to "survive," (2) pocketing the difference, or (3) buying other companies cheaply, moving them overseas, increasing their capital base with $2-per-hour labor and selling them off for a handsome profit. American shipping companies, however, can't do these things on ships crewed by Americans and flying the US flag. Some of the best US flag shipping companies left are, in fact, in a survival mode, highly leveraged and marginally profitable. Mixed signals from government that involve subsidies on crew costs hinder the ability of companies to plan wisely for their future.

American shipboard wages are a subject of considerable disinformation but are a driving force toward using foreign crews.

In a future article, we will see that American seamen's and officers' pay and benefits are not out of line with comparable Americans in similar jobs ashore.

US flag ships operate under strict Coast Guard standards, they are wellbuilt, well-maintained and crewed by well-trained officers and crew. Many of the foreign flag vessels they compete with are much more loosely regulated, often unsafe and manned by poorly trained personnel. In the past the US government has aided the merchant fleet to make up for such disparities and help US ships remain competitive.

But, over the past fifteen years the US maritime industry has been steadily receiving less and less help from government. Remaining US maritime industry "aids" are shadows of their former selves. Surprisingly, less than one-quarter of the remaining US oceangoing fleet is currently receiving Operational

8

Differential Subsidy (ODS), designed to make up the disparity between US and foreign costs. ODS pays an amount equal to about one-half of crew costs.

But much more than crew costs are involved. Most other maritime nations give support to their own shipbuilding and ship-operating industries in myriad ways, by granting concessions, preference, tax breaks and direct or hidden

Suppose, instead, we simply insisted on the "Golden Rule" in dealing with our two-way trading partners overseas . ...

Do we really run a serious risk that the world might thereupon stop selling their goods to us?

This hardly seems likely. subsidies. They do this on the presumption that they have a need to remain selfsufficient in the transport of their trade and their capability to build ships. They consider these to be important links in the chain that supports their economies.

Meanwhile, remaining government support for America's maritime industry is very seriously threatened and may soon be eliminated. This movement is coming primarily from two directions.

One involves the international interests and the "free trade" promoters, some of whom work at the US State Department.

It's too bad that our State Department doesn ' t consider giving Most Favored Nation status to the USA! The other great foe of maritime aid is the farm lobby. Since the Department of Agriculture receives about 150 times the tax dollars drawn down by the Maritime Administration, one has to wonder why farm belt representatives are so obsessed with killing maritime support.

Certainly farmers operate at American standard of living levels, yet their lobby vehemently begrudges the same living standard to American mariners.

"Protection"-or Cargo Sharing?

The "protective" policies of the past have notkeptthe wolf from the industry 's

door and, of course, they need to be reexamined. It may be a dangerous thing, however, to eliminate them altogether merely because some profess that all forms of protectionism are inherently flawed and are necessarily bad for all.

Flaws in the design of government maritime aid programs may have had far less to do with the current decline than insufficient federal funding, misapplications of policy, bureaucratic administration or political ravishment along the way.

One also has to keep in mind the identity and interest of both proponents and opponents of regulatory reform. The point of view of industry protectionists is entirely straightforward, but what is motivating the opposition isn't so clear.

Perhaps we should regard Federal payments to support US flag ship operations not as "subsidies" but "seed money"-that is, investment in the future of the US merchant marine, tying its growth to the growth of American foreign trade.

Growth in American foreign trade has been phenomenal since World War II. But in the same period our merchant marine has dwindled from world leadership to an insignificant role. Our foreign trade grew 7.8 times from 1950 to the present (averaging 4 3/4% per year) and it promises to keep growing by at least 3% in the short term. This growth in trade might presume a current requirement for about 3,300 modem US flag merchant ships in foreign commerce, granted the same share of the shipping trade the US had in the 1950s. In the 1950s America was the prime infrastructure survivor of WWII despite high wartime losses of American merchantmen.2 We then carried about 43% of our foreign trade.

Interestingly, in the late '70s a majority within the United Nations group responsible for trade policy attempted to pass a 40-40-20 cargo sharing agreement for the liner portion of foreign commerce (i.e., the UNCTAD liner code cargo reservation provision). The US State Department was the only significant holdout. If the agreement had been approved, the carriage of 40% of foreign commerce (i.e., nearly as much as our 1950s level) would have been reserved to each trading partner (the buying and selling nations) and the remaining 20% earmarked for competing cross-trade carriers. Today, the cross-traders are well on their way to carrying all of it.

Progressive trade missions and radiSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

cal trade agreements are readily sold to the media these days as "good news ."

Political leaders involved are hailed as working for the good of their nation. But serious questions need to be asked about whether they understand enough about the good of a nation-beyond t~e next election-when they tamper with the linchpins of economic security.

General H. R. Del Mar, a retired army logistics expert, aptly s.tate.d the importance of a merchant manne m the last decade when he said: "A nation that is blessed with ample raw materials and that is a major producer of manufactured goods, but cannot transport either to where they are needed, can hardly expect to maintain its position as a world power."

One also needs to question if US trade policy really needs to be so convoluted or require hoards of bureaucrat~ to admini ster. Suppose, instead, we simply insisted .on the "Golden ~ule" in dealing with our two-way trading partners overseas: that is, deal as you would be dealt with. Do we really run a serious risk that the world might thereupon stop selling their goods to us? Thi s hardly seems likely. For the world knows, though we may forget, that America remains the world's largest and most lucrative market for foreign trade. Fear of a trade war is whispered by those who fail to realize that we have been in one for two decades.

There is a cost to any measure that can be proposed to rev ive the US flag merchant marine. Putting American owned tankers under the US flag, fo r example, would increase the cost of gas at the pump--perhaps by as much as one cent per gallon. The economi~ ti:ut~ ~ s that transportation costs are an ms1gmf1 cant part of the final price of just abou t anything shipped today . .

But the question of who carnes th e cargos of the greatest trading nation o n earth is not insignificant, not to anyon e who cares for the security and well being of the United States. J, 'Defined here as a wage significantly lower than payments to Americans on welfare. . zour enemies knew that smk:ing our cargo ship s was the only way to defeat the Allies in World W ar IL As a result, the percentage of casualties amon g US merchant mariners was second only to those of the US Marine Corps.

Mr. O'Neil is president of the board oif the American Merchant Marine Museu m Foundation, president ofSeaworthy Sy sterns , Inc ., and a life fellow of SNAME

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

Sinking Highlights Foreign-flag Abuses

SAIL THE MAINE COAST

o

by John D. Smith The tragic news about the sinking of the ship Kathleen D with eight crewmen aboard after sailing from the port of Mobile on Jan. 7, 1996 further illustrates the continuing scandal caused by substandard foreign-flag cargo ships sailing . . . upon US waters.

The Kathleen D is not an isolated mc1dent. During recent years, more than 44 foreign-flag bulk vessels and tankers, operating far from the public eye, have gone down with the loss of more than 300 seamen. The BBC documentary titled "Scandal at Sea" shows the inadequate vessel maintenance practices and safety abuses encouraged by the international laws governing merchant ship operations.

And the problem is getting worse as some US shipping companies have begun to replace American cre~s with foreign crews. The Stars and Stnpes are also being replaced with flags of convenience due to commercial pressure and US Government inaction.

Runaway Vessels Flag-of-convenience ships, also known as runaway vessels, are those owned in one country, registered in another '1!1d crewed by mariners from mostly Thlfd World countries. They are attempting to dodge the taxes, military obligations and fair labor, safety and environmental regulations of the owner 's nation. These vessels, given the protection of international law for a small fee, sail without fear of regulatory constraint or government oversight.

Many of these same vessels are po~rly maintained and operate as bulk earners or crude oil and chemical tankers. They are environmental time bombs that often self-destruct and pollute the seas. These ships call at American ports every day .

Many have been condemned or detained by the US Coast Guard for safety violations, as was the Kathleen D . .

It is time to wake the pubhc, the shipping industry, and the federal govemment ... [to] the need to require US safety, environmental, and fair labor standards for all vessels trading in US waters.

-Mobile Register, 21 January 1996 Capt. Smith is director ofSave Our Ships, a non-profit group dedicated to saving the US merchant marine. SOS, PO Box 2585, Daphne AL 36526. Tel: 205-626-8394

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"He Sank Tliem in tfie Lowlands Low!n

by Walter Rybka

T

he above verse is well known as the end-of-chorus line in the old song "Golden Vanity" or "Lowlands," although the latter name is attributed to several songs.

This song has many variations of tune and lyrics, all of which tell the story of a brave and audacious cabin boy who saves his own ship, a merchant ship named the Golden Vanity, by sinking an enemy vessel. The boy dies when his scoundrel captain refuses to take him back aboard, in order to avoid paying the boy his promised reward.

According to The Oxford Book of Sea Songs, edited by Roy Palmer, the earliest printed version dates from 16821685. It is titled "Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing in the Lowlands." In this version the name of the ship is the Sweet Trinity. The story is the same, although in this earliest version, the boy survives to win his gold and silver, but not the captain's daughter.

Since the boy's method of sinking the enemy was to swim over and bore holes with an auger, the song is easy to dismiss as a fanciful tale of betrayal, set in impossible physical circumstances. Or so I thought for many years, until I heard the lyrics given below, which offer the barest possibility that the events described could have some basis in a true story.

These lyrics were used in a taped version sung by Tony Rose, and are as found in Stan Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London and Henley, England, 1961 ). Another popular version is sung by Gordon Bok on the "Ways of Man" album. While the two tunes are different, the lyrics are similar. Some of them are noted below as an alternate version.

There once was a Captain who was boas tin' on the key, Oh, I have a ship and a gallant ship is she, Of all the ships I know she is the best for me, And she's sailin' in the Lowlands low.

In the Lowlands, Lowlands, she's sailin' in the Lowlands low.

"Oh, well I had her built in the North Country, And I had her christened the Golden Vanity.

I armed her and I manned her and I sent her out to sea And she's sailin' in the Lowlands low."

(Chorus: Each chorus begins with "In the lowlands, Lowlands" followed by the last line of the verse.)

Then up stepped a sailor who was just returned from sea, "Oh I was aboard of the Golden Vanity When we was held in chase by a Spanish Piratee And we sank them in the Lowlands low."

Chorus NOTE: Alternate versions name the enemy as the Turkish Revelry, Rovaree, etc.

So the boy bared his breast and he plunged into the tide, He swam until he came to the rascal pirate 's side.

He climbed aboard, he went below, by none was he espied, And he sank them in the Lowlands low.

Chorus Well he bored her with his auger, he bored her once or twice, Some was playin ' cards and some were play in' dice, But when he let the water in it dazzled to their eyes, And he sank them in the Lowlands sea.

Chorus NOTE: Other versions do not mention climbing aboard but do say the enemy "lay along the lowlands" which implies being stationary. Also the number of holes varies from one to fifteen , in one version "nine all at once." Another alternate line is "some were in their hammocks and the sea was cold as ice." This might imply a night scene.

So then the cabin boy he swam unto the starboard side Sayin' "Captain takeme upforiamdrownin' in the tide."

"I'll shoot you and I' 11 kill you if you claim me child as bride And I'll sink you in the Lowlands low."

Chorus So then the cabin boy he swam unto the larboard side.

"Messmates take me up for I am weary with the tide."

They took him up so quickly but when on deck he died and they buried him in the Lowlands sea.

Chorus Yes, they took him up so quickly but when on deck he died They buried him in his hammock which was so strong and wide.

They said a short prayer over him and they dropped him in the tide And they sailed from the Lowlands low.

Chorus Here's a curse unto the Captain wherever he may be For takin' that poor cabin boy so far away to sea, For takin ' that poor cabin boy so far away to sea, And to leave him in the Lowlands low.

Chorus NOTE: In other versions the boy is left to sink and never gets back aboard.

Well we had aboard of us a little cabin boy, who said, "What would you give me if the galley I destroy?"

"I'll give to you my daughter, she is my pride and joy, If you sink them in the Lowlands low."

Chorus NOTE: Alternate versions also refer to gold and silver or "five thousand pounds and my daughter for a bride."

A galleass of the mid-1600s, by Gordon Grant.from Henry B. Culver's Book of Old Ships

10

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

Now let us examine this story . The ship is from England, a private ly owned and armed merchant vessel. The Lowlands are generall y thought to be the coast of Belgi um and Holland . From whence derives the enemy, the "Spanish Piratee," or "Turkish Reve lry ," as given in other versions?

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, the "Lowlands" were provinces of the Spanish empire , in rebellion for independence. (Remember, the Spanish Armada was sent forth in 1588 to pick up troops from the Duke of Parma 's army in the Netherlands.) Obviously, Spanish strategy would include a blockade.

In the shallow estuarine waters of thi s This 1590 print of the Battle of Lepanto in J57J depic1s the last great naval ba1tle fough t coast, ga lleys could be used to adv anby oar-dri ven ships. The Western fleet of 316 ships, including 208 galleys and 6 galleasses tage for policing and patrol. "Turki sh" defeated the O!toman Turks after three hours of close combat. In the left fo reground, a may have referred to the association of Western galley has rammed a Turkish vessel, while the six double-size galleasses dominate the battle.from the ce111er of the right side of the image 10 the top left corner. (From Lionel galleys with the Mediterranean. In fact, Casson' s Illustrated History of Ships & Boats) most European navies made use of them.

A more likely explanation may be galley e lects to anchor as we ll , retaining the weather gauge the presence on board of Turkish-appearing crew. The most and blocking the entrance. Perhaps they are awaiting reinnumerous people on board a Spanish galley would be the forcements, or perhaps an ebbi ng tide will hamper the ir slaves chained to the rowing benches. In thi s era they were maneuverability in making an assau lt. Better to wait till likely to have been pri soners of war, in this case Turks or daylight and determine the best way to capture the Golden Arabs captured from the Ottoman Navy. Lepanto was fought Vanity. She cannot escape as long as the onshore wind holds. only seventeen years before the Armada, and galley warfare The Golden Vanity may be safe for the moment, but she is against the Barbary States continued for centuries. This in a perilous position and all aboard know it. The cabin boy worked both ways, of course. The slaves rowing Ottoman doesn ' t fancy being killed or chained to an oar any more than ga lleys were often captured Christians. the rest of the crew. Being sma ll and acc ustomed to sneaking In thi s hi storical context, how like ly is the story? "He abo ut and hiding in odd corners (done it often enough to shirk climbed aboard, he went be low , by none was he espied .... " work!) , he has adaring plan. He a lso makes sure of his reward Thi s is the key. Other versions of the song make no mention of thi s and impl y the boy swam over and drilled holes in the before embarking on this dangerous mission.

Timing is crucial. In the cold waters of the North Sea he enemy vessel from outboard, a pretty imposs ible scenario. wi ll not last long, the distance must be covered qui ckly and How could he swim to a ship underway? Assuming he got with minimal exertion. If the galley has anchored just o ut of there undetected, how could he render fatal damage with range, the distance is abo ut a mile-a hard sw im in cold hand tool s while swimming? Even climbing aboard a ship water, let alone getting back. underway can be next to impossibl e.

The tide is the answer. A sw ift ebb, say four knots, wo uld My guess is that he didn ' t have to , the ships were at anchor.

Thi s is suggested by the version "as she lay along the carry him to the galley in fifteen minutes. He has onl y one lowlands." chance to grab hold of the anchor cable and get aboard, or be In a battle between a gall ey and a square-rigged sailing swept out to sea and die in co ld obli vion. The Spaniards are ship , the galley maneuvers better in light a irs, and decided ly so sure of their catch they are keeping a lax anchor watch, has the upper hand in a ca lm , which would leave the sailing always a big mistake!

In the darkness the boy, perhaps buoyed by a small cask or vessel helpless to maneuver. Yet sq uare riggers carried a bladder, and clutching an auger, succeeds in reaching the stronger broadside. Galleys typically mounted only a few enemy's anchor cable. He has just enough stre ngth and heavy guns in the bow. Their preferred tactic would be an adrenaline to overcome the onset of hypothermi a and c limb end-on approach wherein the sa iIing vessel's broadside cou ld up the cable and get aboard, e ither through a large hawsepipe not be brought to bear. In shoal waters, such as the Lowl ands, or over the bows. He makes it because the swift tide demands the sailer 's best bet may have been to anchor and rig springs a flat scope of cable, and the low freeboard of a galley makes on the cables for warping ship, to bring her broadsides to bear.

With this tactical pi cture in mind, let us imagine a scefor a short climb. In hi s chi lled cond ition a vertical climb up nario : Perhaps the Golden Vanity is on a lee shore, with a li ght a high-sided ship wou ld be impossible.

In the dark of the beak , he listens. The anchor watch are to breeze. She can neither beat offshore, nor outrun the gall ey.

The "Spanish Piratee" has the weather gauge and is overtakbe heard gathered about the dice game going on midships. ing, but a tidal river estuary with good anchorage is at hand.

The boy si lently fo ll ows the cable down the hatch into the It is evening , near nightfall. cable tier. Now he must wa it, and hope to avoid detection fo r a few hours. At least he may have dried off a bit and warmed The captain of the Golden Vanity sai ls in and anchors. He up slightl y. is in a trap, but at least in a position to best defend his ship . The SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

11

This cheeky, illiterate, unkempt . .. snot-nosed brat is about to become a hero ... !

Why the wait? Because he cannot return until the next tide.

Having arrived on the ebb, his only hope of survival is for the flood current to carry him back to the Golden Vanity. Crouched below the waterline and near the bow, the rushing water of the ebb is loud through the planking. At last the sound dies as slack water nears. The taut anchor cable goes slack and sags onto the deck above.

The wind is still onshore. At the tum of tide the crew set a sail to sheer the ship to one side lest she overrun her anchor.

As she swings broadside to the wind the boy feels her roll. The roll eases as she comes head to wind and tide. He hears the sai l luff and be lowered as the cable comes taut with a creak and groan on the bitts. Still he waits for the flood to make and the sound of rushing water to build at the bow. He is also waiting for the crew to leave the foredeck and the sound of the dice game to resume.

At last he can begin, and had better hurry.-Daylight is not far off. The galley is lightly built, her ceiling is not continuous. The boy has been feeling in the dark for plank seams and frame spaces. He is looking for slack seams, with the caulking banged through in tight bights and weeping into the bilge. A promising one is found. In the tapering spaces near the bow he sets to work.

Hard up against a frame he bores four holes with a large auger, the first just on a seam. The holes have just a sliver of wood in between them. As each gets through the planking, a jet of water dashes him in the face, which he slows to a lesser flow by stuffing in a rope 's end wrapped in rag.

The planks near the bow are narrow. Four holes leave just a connect-the-dots sliver of wood between each hole, to the lower seam. So far so good, but it will take many more holes than a tired boy can drill to create critical flooding. Besides, rapidly rising water in the bilge will inspire even the most lackadaisical crew to make a thorough search for the source!

In the lightly framed galley there is a good foot of frame space to the next futtock. The boy repositions himself, using the face of the next frame aft of the frame bay as a guide. Again he begins boring his row of closely spaced holes. The plank widens coming aft from the bow-it takes five holes to bridge from seam to seam on this side. It has taken nearly an hour to bore nine holes and staunch the flow of water around him.

The boy is tired and getting desperate. How much longer can he go undetected? How long before the watch sounds the well and finds water rising? How soon before dawn destroys his chance of escape? Will the flood hold strong enough to get him back to his ship? The critical time is now.

One by one he pulls the plugs and with his knife whittles the connecting wood away between the holes. The same blade picks at the oakum in the seams. The sea is rushing in around the four edges of the severed plank, but it is still in place.

Inserting the auger one more time into a hole, he throws his weight against the auger handle and the frame. The leverage is just enough to pop the plank section free. As it gives way the boy falls forward but is cushioned by the torrent now pouring into the rectangular gap, say half a foot wide and a foot long.

Alarmed voices come from around the ship; the catastrophe has been di scovered. The flicker of candle lanterns appears in the hatchways, and the boy dives behind a coiled tier of cable. The terrified crew desperately search for the source of the rapidly rising, icy water, but a candle lantern in a dark hold crowded with stores and cable does not shine very 12

far. Besides, the boy has chosen well. The plank he cut lies low and is already well below the rising level of the bilge. The force of the tide at the bow adds to the rate of flooding.

In the dark confusion the boy leaps for the ladder and dashes for the main deck. Dawn has come, yet with the terror below having the attention of all hands, he makes it over the side unscathed. As the tide sweeps him back toward the Golden Vanity, he sees the galley settling lower rapidly.

He has destroyed the galley, but what of his own survival?

The flood is not so strong as the ebb; it takes longer to reach the ship, and the cold is getting to him. At last he reaches his own ship 's cable, but is too weak to ascend it.

It has been a tense night aboard the Golden Vanity. The boy swam off hours ago, to what must have seemed dark, cold, certain death. Now in the dawn the galley founders! The shrieks of her crew are carried down the wind as they cling to wreckage or the masts protruding up from the shallows.

Suddenly the cabin boy, nearly blue with cold, appears under the bow to the astonishment of all. Especially the captain!

The captain has been delivered from death, or at least enslavement and financial ruin, by this boy. Yet his relief is short-lived. Cabin boys are the lowest form of life on board.

This one was on the run from the law when he stowed away and has been barely tolerable as a servant. How embarrassing to be in his debt!

Worse, the captain doesn ' t have ÂŁ5000 ready cash. He is still in debt for the construction of the vessel. The only way to pay off the boy will be to cut him in on ownership.

And his daughter! He had hoped to marry her off to a rich man, or even a member of the nobility and improve his chances of a knighthood someday. Not likely for someone who got rescued by his cabin boy!

This cheeky, illiterate, unkempt, unwashed, foul-mouthed, work-shirking, petty-thieving, oft-kicked, snot-nosed brat is about to become a hero, his son-in-law, and part owner in the family business! Inconceivable! That a boy with this much courage and enterprise might be worth something escapes the captain.

With cocked pistol the captain threatens the boy and holds the crowd on the foes 'lat bay. Before he can fire, the boy lets go of the anchor cable and begins to drift aft down the side.

He is now out of sight of the captain on the bow, who is ringed in by an angry crew. His faint cries are heard as he makes a last desperate effort to swim and keep from being swept away by the tide . A few hands run below and pass a bight ofline out a lower deck gun port. They catch the boy just as he is about to be swept past and haul him aboard.

But it is too late. The brave boy spent the whole night shivering aboard the galley, and has now been too long in the icy sea. The last of his energy and body heat have been expended and he is lapsing into shock. His shipmates have no knowledge of hypothermia. They very likely finish him off with a well-intentioned but medically disastrous belt of spirits. And so on ,deck he died.

This song, in its many variations, has been telling a story of daring courage and cruel betrayal for several centuries.

The tune is memorable but the endurance is in the drama of the story , however fanciful and impossible its details seem.

Yet it just might derive from an actual event. J,

Captain Rybka is master of the US Brig Niagara, based in Erie, Pennsylvania .

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

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13

THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART

VII

Portugal Opens the Ocean Doorway to a Wider World

by Peter Stanford

T

he evening light, filtering through sullen cloud banks to the west, reached across the sea. It touched the whitewashed faces of the buildings ashore with a faint blush.

Watching the play of light across the dark intervening water from the decks of the cutter Iolaire, one had a strong feeling of the many ships which had come this way and of the varied scenes the houses of the fishing village of Lagos had looked out on. Once the ships of Prince Henry the Navigator had sailed from here! And before his time, unnamed others, brave seamen all.

The moment passed, and standing in along the coast, close-hauled against the vagrant light airs in the lee of the tall hills to the north, the Iolaire took a tack to the southward, to clear Cape Saint Vincent before standing out into the night ocean before us. Passing the cape a little before midnight in continuing light airs, we heard the deep-throated roar of the ocean swell crashing against the rocky headland as though it were alive with the sea monsters the ancients so persistently filled it with in their picture of the world.

As the expected north wind came up at daybreak, the Iolaire picked up her pace and went on to complete her passage home to Portsmouth, on England's south coast, in fourteen days. We met no sea monsters but a series of gales, leading the Spanish deckhand Jose Cerda to comment "Mucho viento!" (lots of wind!) in urging us to take in sail. One took a more understanding attitude about this after learning that he had been in a trading schooner that capsized in a Caribbean squall. Jose was an able sailorman and sewed beautiful patches in the aged cutter' s weathered canvas sails, but he took some time to appreciate the power of the deep ballast keel that kept the vessel on her feet in dusty going. The indomitable Iolaire still sails deepwater today, nearing her hundredth birthday.

"The Monster-filled Ocean" Sailors had been rounding this outermost comer of Europe for three thousand years or so when lolaire came by this way in the spring of 195 l. The first such intrepid souls we know of were the Phoenicians, pressing forward from their settlement at Cadiz, around the comer from the Straits of Gibraltar, entrance to the Mediterranean world they came from. They would have come this way to track down, in southwest England, the source of the tin they needed. But as we've seen in a previous installment, even when they'd found the source, these Mediterranean seamen apparently relied on an Atlantic breed of ships and men to bring the tin into Cadiz, which remained their main Atlantic base.

Cape St. Vincent kept its role as a gatepost to the stormlashed North Atlantic, as though planted at Europe's most seaward comer to warn navigators they were entering upon a new oceanic realm, one wider and harsher than the landlocked Mediterranean world. Long after the Phoenicians came by this way, the Romans , who controlled the Atlantic shores of both Europe and North Africa, still thought of the cape as the end of the world. Writing in 350 AD , the geographer Avienus wrote of St. Vincent as "Europe's last outpost, losing itself in the salty waters of the monster-filled ocean."

As Europe regained lost energies and organization in the High Middle Ages , the awakening Germanic kingdoms of the north came by St. Vincent the other way, to crash into the Mediterranean in the Crusades. This extraordinary series of military campaigns, beginning just before 1100, gathered up men and, on one lamentable occasion, boys, to fight the Muslim power in the Middle East and win Jerusalem and the 14

Holy Land for Christianity. The promise of conquest and the refinements of life in the Muslim Middle East added their own appeal to the call of the Christian cause, and men were spurred on by the knightly wish to prove themselves in battle and come home rich and famous.

The popes in Rome, leading the Western Christian Church, were the prime organizers of the Crusades. The Italian maritime republics, led by Genoa, eagerly got into the act by transporting the crusader armies that came by land from Italy to the eastern end of the Mediterranean. There Christian nobles succeeded in setting up small Crusader kingdoms, though they soon lost Jerusalem, which they had seized in the first rush. Venice diverted the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to wrest control of Constantinople from the Eastern Orthodox Christian state of Byzantium, establishing a puppet Western regime which didn ' t last long-but the venture, which gained Venice exclusive trading rights in Europe's richest city, did weaken Byzantium as a bulwark against the Muslim East, leading to the eventual fall of Constantinople and also much of southeastern Europe. Later the Muslim Turks were driven back, as Greece regained its independence, in the 1800s, along with the rest of the Balkan States. But the religious divisions which resulted have brought terrible violence to the region in our own time.

As the Crusaders came south by sea, the Italian republics began to sail their ships out of the Mediterranean and up the coast to the English Channel. Ultimately, they developed for these long voyages a new breed of ship called "great galleys," more sailing ship than rowing galley and far better suited to encounter the surge of the Atlantic swell. Ships of the Italian maritime republic of Genoa are reported in the English Channel in the later 1200s, and soon after they began periodic sailings to the wool market in southern England and the far bigger markets across the way in Bruges and Antwerp in the Low Countries. There they met the iron grip of the German Hanse merchants, who barred southern venturers from the North Sea and Baltic, so that trade with these regions began and ended in the Hanse-dominated entrepots. The southerners, for all their fine wares and sophisticated ways, got no farther into Northern Europe.

This did not hold back the enterprising Genoese. Naval operations in the Black Sea were mounted in support of the Khan of Persia. This effort was followed by an abortive attempt to set up a naval squadron in the Red Sea to blockade Egyptian seaborne trade with the Far East and force that highvalue commerce into the Persian Gulf. And Marco Polo, citizen of Genoa's great rival Venice, came upon Genoese ships in the 1270s traversing the landlocked Caspian Sea in Central Asia, providing an inland maritime link on the age-old caravan route to China.

And as early as 129 l they actually sent the brothers Vivaldi out into the Atlantic to find the sea route to India. The Vivaldis never returned from this voyage, and a long-lived tradition maintained that they settled in Africa. Indeed, by the early 1300s, one of the Canary Islands, 100-odd miles off the bulge of West Africa, had acquired the name Allegranza, after one of the ships in the Vivaldi voyage. Genoese merchants went on to set up trading posts south along the African shore as their Phoenician predecessors had done more than two thousand years before them.

Genoese maritime activity, carried out at first in oared vessels closely dependent on the shore (as the Phoenician SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Cape or Good Hope -

Henry the Navigator's sea imperium formed an ocean picket line in the Atlantic islands of the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries. The Canaries were ceded to the Spanish, but the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde Islands are Portuguese-speaking to this day.

voyages had been), seems to die away as the 1300s wear on, followed by the Iberian breakthrough into the ocean world in the late 1400s. Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror calls the 1300s the "calamitous" century, and with nearly continuous wars in France and Italy and the scourge of the Black Death in the latter half of the century, Europe 's population was reduced (it is now reckoned) by more than half. Surely there was calamity and to spare. This perspective was widely expressed at the time and was evident in extensive social disorders, even as the Renaissance was beginning to spread its wings in new learning and trumpet a new vision of the world in transcendent art.

I've long been puzzled by the apparent failure to follow up these brilliant early Genoese initiatives at sea and am still not fully satisfied with the "calamitous century" rationale. It is important to note, however, that we next find Genoese merchant-adventurers working through the nascent nations of Portugal and Spain. They were deeply involved in the efforts of the Portuguese kings to make the new-minted, threatened nation survive-an experiment in "nation-building" that really worked. In 1317 King Dinis named Manuel Passagno (Pei;anha, in Portuguese), as admiral of his navy. It should come as no surprise to know that this able citizen came from a wealthy Genoese merchant house. Engaged in the Lowlands trade, their ships stopped in Lisbon, where a considerable Genoese colony had taken root since the expulsion of the Muslim overlords. This Genoese admiral proved successful, and relatives of hjs family were still commanding the Portuguese Navy into the 1600s, long after Portuguese admirals and seamen had proved their unexcelled abilities at sea.

At this point it is well to remember how the nascent nations of Portugal and Spain came into being to replace the ad hoc entrepreneurialism of the Genoese with the new nations' SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

emerging state policies. The Germanic tribes which swept into the Iberian peninsula as the Roman Empire came apart toward 500 AD had themselves been overrun by the stunning surge of Muslim forces, which conquered all North Africa and almost all of Iberia in the early 700s AD and had swept on north in a headlong advance which was only turned back deep in central France at the Battle of Tours in 732.

From their mountain fastnesses in northwestern Iberia, the Christianized Germans fought back, and in a centuries-long grueling drive which came to be called the Reconquista, won back control of the Iberian peninsula, district by district. By the mid1200s, the Portuguese had secured the borders the nation has today. The kingdoms of Leon, Castile and Aragon-that were to unite to form Spain-had still to conquer the southern region of the peninsula. But Spanish and Portuguese power was dominant in the period from the mid-1300s onward. And it was on the map with world-changing results to follow.

Outsiders were involved in the explosive mixture of forces that formed the new nations of the Reconquista. Less than a hundred years after the Muslim onrush of the 700s, the French king Charlemagne came storming into Spain as part of his plan to establish a universal empire of the Germanic tribes. He succeeded in western Germany, all of France, northern Italy and a small enclave in northern Spain. The Muslims--or Paynims as the Christians called them-were too strong for the Franks to wrest back the whole Iberian peninsula. The French nalional epic, the "Song of Roland," is based on the annihilation of the rear guard of one of Charlemagne's expeditions into Spain, whose leader was too proud to sound his horn for help in the face of overwhelming odds.

As the Crusades got under way 300 years later, northern fleets of German and English knights stopped off at Lisbon on their way to the Holy Land at the far end of the Mediterranean.

Here these "have sword will travel" types were welcome to join the practically continuous battle against the Muslim rulers, for loot and glory and to serve their God. Among the English who stopped there was John of Gaunt, son of the formidable Edward III who had launched the Hundred Years' War with France. John stayed on to repel a Castilian invasion with the support of the English archers who were winning battles throughout France at this time. Thjs assured the national independence of Portugal. In true chivalric style John 's daughter Philippa, a strong-willed person, was then married to the Portuguese King Ferdinand.

Philippa, who introduced English customs to the court, made a contribution of unanticipated value to her new home when she gave birth to Prince Henry, known to history as Henry the Navigator. Henry was to launch Portugal on the new nation's oceanic mission.

Henry the Navigator Disappointed in ambitions at court, where his elder brother Edward ruled successfully as king, and perhaps wearying of the pursuit of the bubble reputation, so eagerly sought out by medieval nobility, in disastrous campaigns against the Moors in Africa, Henry began to concentrate his considerable intellect and energies on sailing ships out to the Atlantic islands reconnoitered in previous centuries by the Genoese, who had sailed at fust on their own account and later, evidently, under 15

Portuguese national control. Henry tried to contest control of the Canaries with the growing power of Spain, but he gave that up and concentrated his attention first on the Madeira archipelago farther to seaward, but actually closer to Portugal than the Canaries, and then on to the Azores lying far out to sea directly to the west of Portugal. These ventures were richly successful, and both of the oceanic island groups came under Henry 's sovereignty. By 1450, in his mid-fifties, Henry was styling himself as "senhor das ilhas"-or "lord of the isles."

As a leading student of these ventures, Charles Verlinden, has pointed out in an incisive recent essay, 1 Henry, the sainted knight of legendary fame, "appears here as a successful capitalist," who invested his gains in real estate and such flourishing industries as the great sugar plantations and refineries in Madeira. In the Azores, he landed cattle in the islands before sending settlers, making sure of a food supply which stood not only settlers but Atlantic sailors in good stead for centuries to come. His ultimate achievement, Verlinden concludes, was that as a consequence of his enterprise in the archipelagoes the Portuguese got used to sailing the high Atlantic.

Let us pause on that assertion to think fora moment on what that achievement meant. Henry had early set up his court in Sagres .on the headland of St. Vincent, far from the sophisticated capital city at Lisbon, overlooking not city streets or broad farmland acres, but the open vista of the Atlantic to the west and south. The sea winds sweep unhindered over the barren headland, and the sound of ocean seas breaking on the rocks below is never out of one's ears-the same sound we heard in lolaire , sailing by in fitful night airs decades ago.

Henry 's mother Philippa had sworn Henry and his brothers to devote their lives to the glory of God and to smite His foes unremittingly in defense of the Christian faith. Henry, hardheaded entrepreneur on one hand, was also a visionary, and he set out to accomplish his mother's final bidding with a vision that, in retrospect, seems extraordinary.

He would systematically drive southward across the sea that glinted in summer sunlight around his aerie and raged in autumnal storms, and make contact with Prester John , the legendary Christian ruler of an African kingdom whose location had never been precisely determined. No matter that there was no Prester John that we know of. For Henry there was.

And his story, as told in his biography written in Henry 's lifetime by the courtier Zuarara (undoubtedly at Henry's behest), radiates the spirit of this chivalric quest. This was the legend the bachelor prince wished to leave to the world, and it carried its own truth with it.

Clearly, like Columbus later on, Henry wanted to master the riches of the Indian trade, which then came to the West only through Muslim middlemen. Unquestionably, he wanted to win this trade for the greater glory of the God he served.

And, like Columbus, he undoubtedly saw no wrong in sharing in the glory and the wealth for himself, as God's Joyal servant.

The notion of that simple feudal relationship may provoke 'Charles Verlinden, " Background and Beginnings of Portuguese Maritime Expansion," in Maritime History, Vol. I, TheAg eofDiscovery,edited by John Hattendorf (Krieger Publishing, Malabar FL, 1996)

16

-~;

knowing smiles today, but it would be unhistorical to deny its reality to people at the time, and it would miss a basic truth to deny the sincerity of their commitment. That sincerity, which could produce earth-shaking results , also carried the seeds of great evils in it, as the world was to see and the Christian Church itself was to learn the hard way.

Scholars debate how Henry 's academy at Sagres actually functioned. Legend has it that he summoned the leading navigators and savants of his time to find out how to make his dream of oceanic strategy come true. Scholars today tend to feel he just mustered the best advice and people he could get to conduct the southward voyages he sponsored, voyage by voyage. Scholars also question if Henry even knew on which side of Africa Prester John's kingdom lay. Ethiopia being, of course, on Africa's east coast, it was reachable by sea only around the Cape of Good Hope. Even the skilled and venturesome Arab navigators in the Indian Ocean seem not to have been aware that there was open sea to the south of Africa and that you could get from one ocean to the other by rounding Africa's southernmost cape. And the Cape of Good Hope was not rounded until 1488, a generation after Henry's death.

In short, did Henry even know what he was doing when he set out to find Prester John 's kingdom and the all-sea route to the Indies? I believe on balance the answer to that question is yes, he did know. He had a firm suspicion that there was an allsea route to the Indies, and he sent his ships south to find it and link up with Prester John's Christian kingdom along the way.

Down the African Coast Progress down the African coast was slow, compared to the initial thrusting voyages of the Genoese which had reopened the Canaries to Europe 's ken. Working south along a strange coast, the fair winds and south-flowing current seemed to be an inhibiting factor. At Cape Bojador, south of the Canaries, the current speeded up, rippling across offlying shoals, and the headland became a mental obstacle to sailors who did not want to go on along an increasingly hot, desolate coast without the surety of a safe route back home. But in 1434 the Portuguese explorer Gil-Eannes broke through past Bojador, and ten years later the Cape Verde Islands were discovered by navigators who increasingly put out to sea to make their ocean voyages, avoiding the adverse coastal winds and currents. Henry's death in 1460 put an end to these voyages for a time. There was little to show but contact, up the Gambia River, with the internal African gold trade centering on Timbuktu.

More gold, much more, was found in the region that became known as the Costa da Mina when the southward push SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

A caravel comes into Sao Jorge da Mina, to join an anchored sister caravel and a more burdensome full-rigged ship some time after the Costa da Mina was settled in the late 1400s. (From Cogs, Caravels and Galleons: The Sailing Ship, 1000-1650 (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1994))

was renewed in the 1470s under the great navigator king John II. Here also was the center of the trade in African slaves, seized in the endemic tribal warfare of the region. The dominant chieftains struck bargains with the Portuguese, securing guns and iron weaponry to strengthen their grip on the conquered tribes. This situation is spelled out at the restored fortress of Elmira in Ghana today-a story of man's inhumanity to man which the Portuguese incursion only reinforced. While Europeans ended the slave trade in the 1820s, slavery continued as a way of life among Africans into the present century.

In the southward push of the Portuguese, they had been using, since at least the mid- l 400s, a new kind of ship, the caravel. In this ship the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope in his famous voyage of 1487-thus at last threading the Atlantic and Indian Oceans together with the white wake spun across the sea by his sure-footed caravel.

The Best Ships that Sail the Seas The lithe and able caravel-evidently developed from a Moorish fishing vessel which survived in Portugal's Douro and Tagus Rivers until recently-was a fine-lined, shallow open boat of 16 to 20 feet in length, suitable for rowing but propelled by the tall lateen rig, brought into the Mediterranean world by sailors, who had developed it for close-winded sailing in the Indian Ocean.

The Venetian Ca' da Mosto, sailing for Henry the Navigator in 1456, had called his caravels "the best ships that sail the seas." By then, the little fishing craft had grown into a remarkably fast and weatherly ship, able to head close to the wind and claw her way back from a downwind run. In these ships the Portuguese developed the "Guinea Tack"-a long close-hauled leg to sea, returning from Africa through the Northeast Trades. When the trades fell off, the ships picked up the brave west winds of the North Atlantic and rode them home to Portugal. In time, more burdensome square-rigged ships were able to use the wind patterns the lively caravels discovered, keeping the sea for weeks and even months at a time-and learning how to measure their north-south position while far out on the trackless ocean as the great Portuguese historian Admiral Teixeira da Mota has pointed out.

Recent research in Arab sources has shown that a group of caravels seeking to follow up Dias 's voyage were lost sailing in a bad season in the Indian Ocean. There followed a hiatus in the effort, as John II entered into intense diplomatic negotiations to secure Portugal's dominion of the sea following Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492. But in 1498 Vasco da Gama, leading a mixed fleet which included caravels built under Dias 's direction, reached Calicut in India, having picked up a skilled Arab pilot in Africa. So when the English Francis Drake came into the South Atlantic in the next century, he picked up the Portuguese pilot Nuno da Silva.

Dias never achieved the recognition given to da Gama and other military leaders who followed in the wake of his caravels, and he himself died at sea in 1500 when his caravel went down in a squall off South America, en route to India. But it is he whom the seafaring world remembers, and the Portuguese sailors today look up to as the master mariner whose caravel proved to be the key that unlocked the ocean world.

What Was It with These Portuguese?

Why were the Portuguese sailors the first to open up the sea highway that connects ocean to ocean, right on round the SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

world? Those great deepwater seamen, the Arabs had been sailing direct from the Hom of Africa to India, a 1400-mile stretch of open sea, for over 1000 years. They sailed always with fair winds, using the seasonal monsoons. They knew the Western world, for Muslim conquests ran clear across Africa to Spain. But they made no sustained effort to reach the West by water, ending their voyages far short of the southern tip of Africa. They apparently believed that there was no return possible from the southbound current that ran past Madagascar, as the Portuguese had believed of Cape Bojador.

The Chinese under Zheng He built ships of advanced design in the 1400s, which they took in great convoys from China to India, Arabia and Africa. But this voyaging was abruptly halted by imperial command just 55 years before the Portuguese burst into the Indian Ocean. China turned her energies to offshore fishing and building an impressive network of canals to serve the economy of the Middle Kingdom, under the philosophic conviction that the crude barbarian peoples of the outer world would have to come to China, the world's center, if they wished to trade.

In due course the outer world did come to China. When they did come they built Europeanized cities in China's major seaports. And they seized control of the age-old Arab trade routes along the way.

Why the Portuguese-why did they lead in this breakout into the ocean world? There's no good short answer to this question, but everything we know seems to point to a sense of mission in their sailing-a mission nourished in the Reconquista and enriched by the participation of many nationalities in Portuguese national development, from Genoese sailors to English knights. This sense of mission carried the Portuguese past Bojador and, indeed, all obstacles. This made them leaders among the hard-bitten mariners of the Atlantic world. In their national mythology, they went back to those great mariners, the ancient Greeks, to find their own ancestry in Lusus, boon companion of Bacchus, the god of wine, after whom their epic bard Cam6es named these intrepid voyagers Lusitanians. And they hailed the far-wandering Odysseus as the founder of their capital city, Lisbon, a seafaring center where Columbus, among others, came to learn the hard-won truths of Atlantic seafaring.

* * * * *

I was aboard the big square-rigger Sea Cloud on a delivery trip to the Mediterranean one brilliant spring day when the westerly wind sang a solemn anthem in the rigging and the narrow strips of the upper and lower topsails and a bulging, lifting forecourse drove the great ship shouting for joy upon her way--or so it seemed among the clamorous seas. Ahead the Azores sprang up over the horizon and on the skipper's decision we tore in between a couple of the islands, incredible encampments of emerald green pastures dotted with the descendents of Henry 's cattle who hardly looked up at our passage, though the Portuguese herdsmen waved their red knit caps. A few days later we raised St. Vincent, low on the northern horizon, the first outpost of the sea-besieged Atlantic coast of Europe.

What a wide, wild ocean! What a thing it is to roar and stamp one's way across it in a great ship under sail! And what a strong will and binding sea culture planted those Portuguese herdsmen and their Lusitanian cattle out there in the midst of the Atlantic surge.

MODELMAKER'S CORNER

Space Age Technology Takes Us Below Decks Aboard ''Navy Board" Ship Models

by Major Grant Walker, US Army (Ret) he United States Naval Academy Museum is engaged in a longterm project to explore the interior spaces of the Museum' s pristine 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century British "Navy Board" or "dockyard" ship models with the aid of laser light and fiber optics surgical instruments.

The USNA Museum ' s curator of models , Robert Sumrall, and I were captivated when introduced to the world of fiber optics several years ago by Simon Stephens of Britain 's National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. Simon, John Franklin, Alan MacGowan and others in England had pioneered the successful use of small industrial borescopes, which use laser light to peer into pipes where neither the naked eye nor a standard 35mm camera could ever hope to see, to explore the interiors of a number of models in Greenwich and elsewhere.

Upon our return from England in March 1992, Bob and I eagerly set about

T

Fiber optics technology now makes it possible for the first time in centuries to view the below-decks portion of mankind's first attempt to steer a great ship of war by means of a wheel.

This photograph of part of the starboard side and upper works of Model Number 7 shows the fully-rigged ship's wheel situated just abaft (here , to the left of) the hole for the mizzen mast. Thanks to the model's open-deck construc tion , the lines wrapped around the wheel's axle can clearly be seen dropping through slots in the quarterdeck and continuing downward to and through the upper deck.

There, however, they disappear completely from sight.

By gently lifting the lower deck gunport lids and inserting a fiber optics probe into an open gunport, the rest of the rigg ing assembly can at last be observed in stunning detail.

Other avenues into the model's interior include the mast holes and the spaces between the deck or hull frames, but in most cases the best views are obtained via the gunports.

This is one of the most important finds we have enjoyed thus far. What you see here is the rigged tiller located in the gunroom of the Academy's Model Number 7, an authentic dockyard model of an English 70-gun two-decker ji-om about the year 1705. Two decks above, the tiller ropes wind around the axle of the ship's wheel, located on the quarterdeck. Presumably , if the wheel were turned the rudder would respond, though no one is about to risk damaging the 300-yearold original line to test the theory!

The wheel replaced the whipstaff in the early years of the J8th century. Evidence of its introduction in the Royal Navy is provided primarily by a handful of models such as this one in Annapolis. Fiber optics technology now makes it possible for the first time in centuries to view the below-decks portion of mankind' s first attempt to steer a great ship of war by means of a wheel.

18

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

Here you see the exquisite wardroom pantry fitt ed inside the Na val Academy's two-century-old model of the British 2d Rate Princess Royal of 1773 (HHR Model #70) . This remarkable view was captured by inserting a laparoscope into one of the nearby middle deck gunports. Note the astonish ing intricacy of the lattice work, which in reality reaches just over a half inch in height.

Turned and chamfered pillars support the massive beams of the upper deck above.

Deck planking has been left off to reveal the beams, ledges, and carlings of the deck frami ng beneath. Just like the real pantries fitt ed to Royal Na vy line-of-battle ships beginning in the late 1700s, the example on the model is made in two parts: the smaller, aftermost pon ion served the wardroom , while the much larger fo rward part was reserved f or the captain.

ra

Note the astonishing intricacy of the lattice work, which in reality reaches just over a half inch in height. Turned and chamfered pillars support the massive beams of the upper deck above.

Let into the upper deck of the model thought to represent the Sussex of 1693 (Model Number 8) is what is known as a "rowle" fo r a whipstaff. Evidence of the whipstaff is quite rare. It was the means by which large ships were steered in the 17th century. A long vertical pole (the "whip") passed through the hole yo u see in th e center of the rowle, joining the f oremost end of the tiller a deck below. The helmsman turned the rudder by pulling the whipstajfone way or the other. The line dra wing at right shows the design of a whipstaff and rowle on a Dutch galleon of the 1590s. (From Bjorn Landstrom's T he Shi p (Doubleday & Company, Inc. , 1961 )) Sadly, the model' s original whipstaff has disappeared, but this entrancing digital picture (below left ) showing the ro wle nonetheless leaves a strong impression of how an actual large twodeckerji¡om the William and Mary period looked below decks. The dark rectangle in the photo' s center is an open gun port on the f ar (s tarboard) side. Just f orward (left) of the rowle is a beautifully carved bell staircase. Each step measures about JI16 inch high. Th e digital image below right is a close-up looking down at the rowle.

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

19

The author, assisted by Ja ck Hudok , prepares to examine the J 7thcentury model thought to represent the 80-gun Sussex. He is about to insert thefar end of the laparoscope into a port-side gun.port. At the same time, Mr. Hu dok will cast more light into the model' s interior by placing a flexible fiber optic cable through a different gunport. Someallendees at the USNA Ship Model Society's September 1995 Colloquium on dockyard models observe the proceedings direct ly , while others watch one of several TV monitors placed in the Mu seum's Class of 195 1 Gallery of Ships.

obtaining fiber optics equipment for the USNA Museum in order to examine the interiors of the almost fifty British dockyard models in the Annapolis Collection. Happily, Dr. Stephen Faust of the nearby Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Center put us in touch with the firm of Smith & Nephew Dyonics (now Smith

Until we placed an arthroscope through one of the port-side upper deck gunports of the Sussex model (Number 8) of 1693, we had no idea that it contained evidence of past mistreatment. Apparently someone attempted to force an object through the hole for the bowsprit , perhaps in an attempt to fit a bowsprit to the model.

What ever was pushed through the hole gouged out a portion of the athwart ship beam beneath the upper deck, leaving it splintered.

& Nephew Endoscopy) of Andover, Massachusetts.

Since 1993 three Smith & Nephew representatives-William¡ Hahn , James Keating and , currentl y, Mark Gisterhave been kind enough to lend us, on seven different occasions, the very latest array of surg ical fiber optics equip-

Here we are looking at the upper deck of the most recent addition to the USNAM Collection , a contemporary dockyard model of a British 36-gun , 18-pounderfrigate of th e Perseverance/in constant class. It seems to represent the Leda of 1783, but could be the very similar Phoenix of the same year .

Once again, a laparoscope literally brings to light details of th e upper deck normally hidden ji¡om sight by the quarterdeck. In this view from the waist looking aft you can see that the modeler chose to fashion each of the ten pillars surrounding the main capstan from pieces of bone (probab ly beef). Part of the deck planking has been left offto reveal theframing beneath . The guns are ofdoubtful origin.

ment for sessions lasting several hours.

Together, we have examined the interiors of 15 model s, or nearly a third of o ur coll ecti on, usi ng both fiber optics and gelatin-filled cabl es, laser li ght sources, and laparoscopes, arthroscopes, hys teroscopes-all manner of Space Age surgical instruments designed totransmit color images of startling clarity to surgeons observing nearby tel ev ision monitors.

B y carefull y inserting the various scopes and light cables into open gunports, hatchways, even the holes for the mas ts and bowsprit, we have di scovered heretofore hidden ladders, shot lockers, capstans, inlaid floors, rigged wheel s, pencilled handwriting, and countless detail s of framing and decking that otherwi se are all but imposs ible to see. In addition to digital prints, we hav e also recorded several hours of videotape showing still more detail s of the spaces below decks that in some instances have not been viewed since they were built two or even three centuries ago .

We hope to examine the last feasible model in the Naval Academy Collection within the next year or two . But we see no end to the exciting poss ibiliti es posed by di gital fiber optics technology for the further exploration of these beautiful time capsules from the Age of Sail. .t

Grant H. Walker spent the last six years of his twenty-year Army career as an In structor of History at the US Naval Ac(ldemy in Annapolis , Maryland. Fo llowing his 1993 retirement, he turned his fu ll attention to the Naval Academy Mu seum' s collection of British dockyard ship models. He soon hopes to publish a book on the collection .

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SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

MUSEUM PROFILE

Maritime History in America's Heartland: The Michigan Maritime Museum I.

by Dorris Akers

M

aritime history is alive and well in the heartland of America.

Michigan 's 3200 mile s of Great Lakes shoreline and its other waterways have seen the development of a varietyofmaritime activities, from Native American fishing camps to industrialized cities with their myriad waterrelated businesses.

The European-based fur trading industry and immigrant-led commercial fishing activities helped define Michigan's culture. The state's wooden boat building tradition rivaled that in other parts of the country. Lumber companies supported settlement, and sail and steampowered boats were seen in a host of roles in hundreds of Michigan harbors.

One very active steam trade was the delivery of thousands of passengers to Michigan 's thriving vacation destinations in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The Michigan Maritime Museum presents this story of diverse activities in its facilities in South Haven, an inviting harbor town on southern Lake Michigan across the state from Detroit. The harbor is mainly taken up with recreational activities-marinas, dock builders, charter fishing and tour boats, boat launching faci Ii ties, and boat repair businesses.

Public sugar sand beaches and twin piers jutting into Lake Michigan bring people to the waters to swim, to fish and just to watch the lake and sunsets.

A strong sense of direction and carefu l attention to building its collections have helped the Museum become an enlightening attraction for all visitors.

Boats (all ships are called boats in the Great Lakes), and other maritime artifacts, are housed in both permanent and changing exhibitions . Main gallery exhibitions tell chronologically the stories of the many people who have built and used boats in the state.

The Marialyce Canonie Great Lakes Research Library was developed to back up the Museum 's mission of education.

It is the only library and archive in the

state to collect and share information on the whole scope of Michigan's maritime history, including information on the health and ecology of the Great Lakes, as well as texts, serial s, boat logs, photographs and slides, oral hi story tapes, videotapes, maps and boat plans. Many other types of documents, such as transportation company records, US Lighthouse Board correspondence, train and passenger ferry schedules and original lighthouse engineers' drawings bring researchers from all over the country.

Of the many hi stori cal subjects that make up the Michigan maritime experience, the Museum has given special attention to three: the building and use

of small boats, the US Life Saving Service/Coast Guard, and the commercial fishing industry.

The Museum 's permanent exhibit about the Life Saving Service and Coast Guard includes three restored boats that were common in Michigan stations in the first half of the 20th century. The 26foot pulling surfboat, the 26-foot motor surfboat, and the 36-foot motor lifeboat are warmly and often affectionately remembered by the retired "Coasties" who used them. The boats are displayed in a boathouse built in the manner of l 9thcentury Great Lakes life sav ing stations.

In addition, photographs of Michigan ' s 46 stations add an architectural dimen-

MICHIGAN M ARITIM E M USEUM/C. JENSEN COLLECTION MI CHIGAN MAR ITIM E MUSEU M J. HERM ANSON COLLECTION

Above: The typical commercial fishing tug ElsieJ. enters Black River in South Ha ven in the 1940s. Below: The Great Lakes lumber hooker George C. Markham is tied up at an unknown dock in 1912.

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

21

... making a dugout canoe; touring research boats and historic sailing boats; hearing the saga of around-theworld solo sailboat races; building a $69 boat; and learning to clean, preserve, cook and eat Great Lakes fish-all these activities give participants insights into the maritime world of the past and present.

MICHIGAN MARITIM E MUSEUM

sion to the story .of the people in this remarkable serv ice.

Michigan's native and non-native commercial fishing industries are being explored for the Museum by students at Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo, ¡who are taking part in the first Great Lakes maritime studies course offered in the state. They are examining several Michigan fishing communities that thrived from the middle 1800s to the 1970s and are talking to the families that are sti ll fishing today. For course credit, WMU students conduct oral hi story interviews, collect photographs and learn about the boats used (and often built) by the fi shermen and their families.

Material s amassed from the WMU effort will become part of the Museum' s library and the information collected will help create a permanent exhibit on Michigan 's commercial fishing history slated to open in 1999.

Recreational boating history was the focus of a 1995 exhibit about Michigan 's successful Chris-Craft Company. Establi shed in the 1890s, the company was founded by Christopher Columbus Smith and later involved dozens of other family members. Chris-Craft, along with the Truscott Boat Company of Benton Harbor, Hacker Craft and Dodge Boat & Plane Company of Detroit, Gar Wood Boat Company of Algonac, Century Boat Company of Mani stee, and many others, highlights Michigan 's contribution to the yachting and recreational boat building industry.

Museum programs range from simple and fun, to sophisticated and fun . One favorite program for young children is painting the harbor with its many boats.

Chi ld-sized easels are placed in the Museum 's riverfront park, and the young artists go to work. Another program invites children for docent-guided tours into all parts of the Museum . Touring without parents or school classmates makes the children feel special and helps them develop an interest in preservation, history and museum work. Another popular activity is a simp le game called "s ink or float. " Children of all ages try out the floating capacity of objects and the poss ibility of the objects becom ing boats. Children are taught the Boy Scouts (top) light fires in a log in a hands-on project to make a dugout canoe.

Below: Dugouts and bark canoes are f eatured in the Museum' s main gallery exhibit on "Nati ve American Traditions. "

22

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

Law of Archimedes and have fun seeing how much water is displaced by the weight of a toy boat.

The Museum's more complex programs have included an annual day on a Great Lakes research vessel for high school seniors with an interest in marine biology. Taking sediment and other samples and studying them under microscopes gives students first hand experience and thought for possible careers. Other research boat tours have been given to school classes. Teacher workshops are conducted by university research sc ienti sts prior to these tours.

The Work Boat Rally , a gathering of Great Lakes working boats, enlightens the public about the many jobs performed by such boats and their crews on the lakes today . Learning to build wooden boats; paddling fur-tradingsized "grand" canoes; making a dugout canoe; viewing classic wooden boats in waterfront events; touring visiting research boats and historic sailing boats; hearing the saga of around-the-world solo sailboat races; building a $69 boat; and learning to clean, preserve, cook and eat Great Lakes fish are activities which give participants insights into the maritime world of the past and present.

One of the most popular Maritime Museum programs was the study of a I 9th-century shipwreck of the 106-foot, two-masted schooner Rockaway, 65-feet down in Lake Michigan 's waters off South Haven. This project was the first full-scale study of a shipwreck site in the Great Lakes. In addition to an artifact research collection, the project resulted in a traveling exhibit seen by nearly 500,000 viewers (and still available for a modest rental) , a manual of conservation procedures for artifacts from fresh water environments, exhibitions at the Michigan Maritime Museum and the Michigan Historical Center, and a video documentary. The final report will be published in 1997 by the Michigan Historical Center as a popular text and will be available from the Center and the Maritime Museum.

Collaboration is a byword at the Michigan Maritime Museum. At present, the South Haven Flotilla of the US Coast Guard Auxiliary meets monthly at the Museum. TheMuseum 's directorofeducation is an auxiliary member and liaison to the Museum. Auxiliarists aid the Coast Guard in teaching and promoting public recreational boating safety, and they help the Museum maintain the Life SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

Above, a boathouse, designed in the manner of early Great Lakes Life Saving Service stations.features a US Coast Guard exhibit including the 36-foot motor lifeboat (at left) and a restored26-foot motor surfboat shown here. Below , items inthe Marialyce Canonie Great Lakes Research Librmy. (Photo: Wayne Dennis)

Saving Service/Coast Guard exhibit.

The Museum sponsors an active Sea Explorer Ship, teaching small boat building and handling skills, maritime stewardship, citizenship and self confidence.

Explorers work closely with members of the Southwest Michigan Chapter, Traditional Small Craft Association. The adult/ youth mentoring program is mutually beneficial and furthers the Museum's mission to provide an educational opportunity to the public.

The Southwest Michigan Preserve Group meets¡ regularly at the Maritime Museum. The group exists to explore underwater cultural resources along the southwestern Lake Michigan shore.

Based on the findings, the Group is applying to the State of Michigan forthe

es ta bl ishment of an underwater preserve (like an underwater public park), the tenth in the state. The Museum curator works closely with the Preserve Group.

The Michigan Maritime Museum is open year round, Wednesday through Sunday, lOAM to 5PM. Call for Monday and Tuesday hours. There is a nominal admission fee. For more information, contact the Museum at Dyckman Avenue at the Bridge, PO Box 534, South HavenMl49090; 1800747-3810,FAX: 616 637-1594. ,t

Dorris Akers, director of the Michigan Maritime Museum for 14 years, now serves as director of education. She is also president of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History.

23

MARINE ART

Respect for the Ivory

by Nancy Mendelson Robert Weiss and I have known each Bering Strait. They are the only people other for about seventeen years, having allowed to dig for fossil walrus ivory, met when he was a graphic designer and which they do every year around August I wrote for a national magazine. About and September when the permafrost softnine years ago, a mutualfriend moved to ens up. Once they sell it, you can resell it Nantucket and sent us each a gift. I with no restrictions. received ten pounds of sea scallops and When I receive a piece of ivory, I Bob received a scrimshaw kit. While my might have an idea for it right away. But gift altered my waist line, Bob's altered I' ve had pieces sitting on the shelf for as his life: what began as a hobby is now a long as five years before I say "Yes, full-time occupation. that's what goes on this piece." I get Today Robert Weiss is recognized as pieces of tusk that are different sizes and one of the country's top scrimshaw art- shapes, and what would work on one ists, and his work is shown by the Mystic piece won ' t work on another. It also Maritime Gallery in Mystic, Connecti- . depends on how the piece is mounted: cut; the Big Horn Galleries located in some are mounted vertically , others Fairfield, Connecticut, and Carmel, Cali- horizontally. fornia; and several other galleries on the For example, I did a piece with a sea East and West Coasts. monster-the one and only time I've In both 1994 and 1995 Bob received ever done anything like that. But it was the Rudolph}. Schaefer Maritime Heri- such a weird looking piece of ivory, sort tage A ward at the Mystic International. of dark and corrugated, kind of torn up, It is the first time in the twelve years since interesting looking and ominous. In a its inception that this prestigious award way , it just spoke to me and said "sea has been won two years consecutively by monster. " Some pieces just speak to you the same artist or gone toa scrims hander. like that. You ' II think, " Oh, that piece The following is from an interview I almost looks like a sperm whale," and a had with Bob about his work as a pod of sperm whales will go on it.

A lot of the pieces I've been doing scrimshander and how iJ has broadened his life. I began by asking him about the lately are on slabs of mammoth ivory with gift from Nantucket. formal mounts. Those almost invariably end up being portraits of ships or historical I was fascinated by the gift. Here was a figures , because the format lends itself to tiny sperm whale tooth. It was raw and I that so well. On the back, I engrave all the had to polish it first. That got me in- pertinent information about the subject. volved with the medium- with the When I decide on a subject, it usually ivory- right away. Then I just started starts with a feeling. Once that light bulb scratching on it and fell in love with goes on inside and I' m sure that ' s what I scrimshaw. I worked on polymer for want to do, I involve myself totally in the almost a year, just to get used to the tools research of the subject. Whether it is a and to train my hand. I was experiment- clipper ship or a humpback whale, I' ll ing with different tools and even making research the subject thoroughly until I'm as familiar with it as possible, to bring my own tools for a while.

It took about a year to feel comfort- every bit of realism to it that I can. able to the point where I wanted to start What also helped me tremendously working on ivory. I picked the name of a was studying portraiture and figure paintsupplier out of a book and I got lucky, in ing at the Reilly League of Artists. I saw that Ken Fredericks is a master crafts- a dramatic change in the quality of my man. He not only selects the ivory, he work. It became firmly grounded in the polishes it and then makes fine hard- classical principles of picture making, wood mounts. I started with small pieces and that freed me up to really express from him and just began scratching away. myself. For instance, I went through that It was about another year before I started picture-making process with the sea monster piece: Here's a group of guys in a exhibiting my work.

Thanks to the support of my wife, I 5th-century carrack out in the ocean Gail, I was able to "quit my day job" and during a storm , when this huge sea monturn to scrimshaw full-time. Gail has an ster rises up out of the water. The sailors incredible eye and has always been my are terrified! I wanted it to be a terrifying piece, reminiscent of those scary things toughest critic-and my biggest fan.

Ninety-nine percent of the ivory used that used to hide in the closet when you is mined and dug up by the Yupik people were a kid. of St. Lawrence Island just south of the I ' ve learned a lot about history, and

24

Above, "Leviathan. " Fossil walrus ivory on a mount of goncalo al ves, ebony and abalone.

At right , the artist Robe rt Weiss.

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SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

I

Above, "Dutch Whalers off Spitzbergen, 1684." Fossil walrus ivory on a mount of East Indian rosewood .

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"Sailing Day Portrait" was awarded the prestigious Rudolph J. Schaefer Maritime Heritage Award at the 16th Annual Mystic International in September 1995.

Matching fossil walrus tusks on an ebony and ivory mount.

"Ahab and the Harpooneers. " Mammoth ivory and fossil walrus ivory on a cocabola mount.

J

the whaling industry in particular. Scrimshaw really came into being with the Yankee whalemen in the 1700s. Before that whaling was very much a coastal industry. They killed a whale and brought it back to shore for processing. But when they discovered sperm whales, that changed. The sperm whale is not a shore creature; they had to keep going further and further out to hunt it. Eventually they had to process the whales aboard ship, and voyages soon became longer and longer, from weeks, to a few months, to three to five years.

The average size of a whaling crew was about thirty men on ships that could be handled with a crew of six to ten men.

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

It could be months between sightings and there was a lot of spare time, so they turned to fashioning objects from whale parts. The early whalemen made thousands of utilitarian objects like sail needles, mallets, knives, forks, spoons, water dippers with whalebone handles and hollowed-out coconut shells. They made pie crimpers and swifts_--elaborate contraptions for winding yam.

As for the medium, the pieces of ivory are so interesting to work with.

They are also rather expensive, so they ' re not something you just do a sketch on. I put my heart and soul into it. Each piece of ivory is an ancient thing and I respect it. It came from a living creature. The

woolly mammoth has been extinct for thousands and thousands of years, so it is not like working on a piece of paper or canvas.

Fossil ivories are not a renewable resource. Within the next ten years or so, it's going to be a lot harder to get and a lot more expensive. As this happens, I believe only the most dedicated artists will stay with the medium.

That's why I want every piece I do to be better than the last. It comes back to a respect for the ivory. This stuff has been lying in the ground for thousands of years and through chance or fate it has ended up in my hands. It's up to me to do something worthy with it. !,

25

MARINE ART NEWS ported strong interest and brisk sales for the show which featured 70 pieces from 40 artists . Among those well received If you had walked into the spacious Big were northern California coastal landHom Gallery in Fairfield, Connecticut, scape painter June Carey and featured in February, you may have found your- artist Loretta Krupinski, who playfully self chatting with scrimshander Bob applauded her contemporaries as " the Weiss and watching as he stippled an Mighty Marys" of marine art. image of a dolphin painstakingly onto a "America and the Sea," which fills piece of fossilized whalebone. Or you the slot usually occupied by Mystic 's may have been lucky enough to arrive in traditional " Modem Marine Masters," time to pull up a chair and listen to opens 20 April. What does the new title acclaimed artists Don Demers and Chris suggest? Well, visitors can expect the Blossom talk their trade. These artist art to portray the broadest possible specappearances were among a number of trum of American experience of the sea, extra offerings incorporated into Big says Bosworth. This theme runs through Hom ' s recent "Marine Art of Yesterday much of Mystic Seaport's activities, exand Today"-a month-long exhibition hibits and symposia this year. that drew a remarkable 1,000 people for A 5,000-square-foot waterfront muits President' s Day weekend opening. ral is not every marine artist 's choice of Gallery Director Russell Jinishian commission. But for energetic and verwas naturally delighted with the re- satile Scott Kennedy, it is just another sponse, and red stickers dotting the walls medium for an artist equally at ease with attested to the show 's popularity. With pen and ink, watercolors and oils. What over 100 works of art by over 40 top gradually emerged on a wall in Newartists, it was the largest maritime art port, Oregon , was a breathtaking Jifeshow in the country this winter. Jinishian size stern quarter view of the C .A. also scored a big hit with another special Thaye r-a worthy subject indeed! feature: an exhibition of 19th-century Kennedy 's smaller scale work is curmarine paintings owned by avid collec- rently featured in "Work on the Sea: tor Herb Hild, president of nearby City Traditions of Sail & Steam, Collected Island-based Hild Sails. On the opening Paintings and Drawings by Scott Kenweekend , Hild regaled a capacity crowd nedy," at the Columbia River Maritime with the tale of how he built his collec- Museum. Kennedy 's favored subject is tion- which includes work by James E. the working waterfront, and this enButtersworth, Robert Salmon, Antonio gaging retrospective reflects his time Jacobsen and Frederick Cozzens. working in Scandinavian boatyards, Jinishian 's "interactive" approach is cruising the canals of Europe, following making Big Hom a regional rendezvous the America's Cup races and crewing for local artists and art lovers. With on sail training ships. (CRMM, 1792 many years of gallery experience be- Marine Drive, Astoria OR 97103) hind him, including twelve years as diSigns of percolating interest in marector of Mystic Maritime Gallery, he is rine art have appeared in some signifiobviously comfortable in the role. Still , cant places of late. The American Socihe says, there are surprises: one being ety of Marine Artists reported a large the quality and variety of new marine turnout at its Annual Weekend in Ocean art, attributable, he believes, "to the City, Maryland, last October, where newgrowing number of highly skilled and comers to the Society greatly outnumtalented people entering the field." (Big bered old-timers.

Horn Galleries, 1657 Post Road, FairFurther evidence could be found at field 06430; 203 255-4613) the Royal Society of Marine Artists' Fiftieth Annual Exhibition at London 's Art Notes Mall Galleries last October. Richard A mid-winter visit to Mystic Maritime Kirsten, of Kirsten Gallery in Seattle, Gallery found Gallery Manager Con- noted that a "full-house" attended the stance Kilgore and Assistant David private viewing of the exhibit, and paBosworth preparing for the Gallery 's trons were buying paintings as well as upcoming " America and the Sea" ex- dispersing accolades . "Considering the hibition . Their mood was upbeat, com- size of the exhibit, 288 paintings," says ing off the success of " Distinguished Kirsten, " the quality was excellent.

Women Marine Artists," the largest Nearly all of the thirty-four members of ever all-woman exhibition. Bosworth re- the Society had work in the show, some

Big Horn Becomes Regional Rendezvous

er

26

,· ·'\:-1

~;7

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Kennedy's "Angels' Gate to Starboard"

members exhibiting up to five paintings.

The balance of the exhibit was made up of juried works of those attempting to become members of the RSMA." -KEVIN HAYDON

Exhibitions • 27 January-22 June, " Work on the Sea: Traditions of Sail & Steam," collected paintings and drawings by Scott Kennedy (Columbia River Maritime Museum, 1792 Marine Drive, Astoria OR 97103; 503 325-2323) • 16February-12May, "Windon the Water," works by Richard DeRosset (San Diego Maritime Museum, 1306 North Harbor Drive, San Diego CA 9210 l ; 619 234-9153) • 7 March-30 June 1996, Christopher Newbert and Birgitte Wilms: In a Sea of Dreams (underwater photography) (The Mariners' Museum, 100 Museum Dr., Newport News VA23606-3759; 804596-2222) • April-October, Riversoundings, Delaware River Art (Independence Seaport Museum, 211 South Columbus Street, Philadelphia PA 19106; 215 925-5439) • 16 April-8 September, " Painted Ships on Painted Oceans," a retrospective of the work of Antonio Jacobsen (Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History, Washington DC) •from 20 April 1996, "America and the Sea" (Mystic Maritime Gallery, Mystic CT 06355-0008; 203 572-0711) • 20 May-22 September, "Across the Western Ocean: American Ships by Liverpool Artists" (South Street Seaport Museum, 207 Front Street, New York NY 10038; 212 748-8600) .t SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

•

l

Reillllants ofWorlGng Sail on the Hudson Recording the Remains of Two 19th-Century Schooners

by Mark Peckham

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In 1908, William E. Verplank and Moses W . Collyer published a small book entitled The Sloops of the Hudson River describing the famous Hudson River sloops and schooners of the previous century and their use as market boats, packets and bulk freighters. Pushed to extinction as the 20th century opened, most of these sloops and schooners had already been abandoned or converted to barges or lighters at the time of publication.

After reading the book, John Bigelow, a descendant of an old sloop family, was

moved to write to Verplank. In his letter, Bigelow recalled the beauty and serenity symbolized by these sloops and schooners and spoke bitterly of the industrial ization which had so changed the river: "I have known that river in its glory, when its water was the best I have ever drunk; when it abounded with fish enough nearly to feed the entire population for 10 miles from both its banks, and when the white sails of the sloops painted a new picture every hour of the day on its waters for me while sitting on the piazza of my

father's house. Now its water is so polluted with drainage that not only can one not safely drink of it, but even the fish that used to abound in it shun it! The picturesque sailing vessels of those days too are replaced by two smoky and noisy railroads and by steamers running and always disturbing our rest day and night.

"Somebody I suppose is making more money than was ever made in those days, but at what cost?'"

Half a century later, in 1966, this unassuming and matter-of-fact book was Above, the unidentified schooner seen from the bow. Note the turn of the bilge at right, the flat floors and longitudinal stiffening members. At left, the crew from Grossman and Associates sets up the 15-foot tripod. Although appearing in worse shape than the A.S. Parker in photographs taken in 1914 18, more remains of this heavily built hull today. Photo by the author.

_)

I William E. Yerplank and Moses W. Collyer, The Sloops of the Hudson River (Port Washington NY, 1968; reprint of 1908 edition), p. 50

27

discovered by folksinger Pete Seeger, who inspired a small group of music ians and environmental activi sts to build and sail the remarkable replica sloop Clearwater. The Clearwater serves today as a symbol of the Hudson 's picturesque past and a vehic le for rall ying public support behind the monumental tas k of cleaning up the ri ver and protecting it fo r future generati ons. In an effort to develop an authentic design for the replica, an unsuccessful attempt was made to locate the actual remains of an old sloop.

In 1969 while shipwrights were bending new planks over the fram es of the Clemw ater in South Bristol, Maine, old planks were silentl y floating away from the wreckage of two of the ne w sloop ' s ancestors in a tributary of the Hudson River. These vessels remained forgotten until 1993 when they were redi scovered and investi gated by historians and archaeo logists working under the direction of the NY State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

Historical Background Led by Dutch commercial interests, European coloni zation of the Hudson Ri ver Valley began in earnest in 1624 with the settlement of Fort Orange (A lbany) .

Within several years, communities and trading posts were also establi shed at New Amsterdam (New York), Esopus (Kingston) and several other strategic locations along the 150-mile nav igable ri ver. Communication and trade within the maritime colony of New Netherl and and among its trading partners in Europe and the West Indies were carried on by traditional Dutch sailing craft of the period , particularly the sloop. The Dutch sloops appear to have varied considerabl y in length and depth but generall y included bluff bows, single masts, gaff mainsail s, one or more headsail s, and leeboards in the earliest years . The larger examples of the type with deep drafts were capable of ocean passages. A 1682 cont rac t between builders He ndri ck Abe lsen and Jurian Calier and owners Corne li s Cornelissen van der Hoeven and Andries Hansen Scherp describes the specifications for a typical ri ver sloop of the period, built in Albany as "a boat which is to have a thirty-six-foot keel, with a peak [a small storage compartment] aft, also a cabin and a caboose [a galley on deck or a moveable stove], a mas t, a rudder, a jib, a roasting spit, a crane beam, bilge strakes , gunwale, festoon work [decorative carvings] and fo ur bunks, to wit, two fore and two aft. " 2 28

In this photograph taken about 1914, the A.S. Parker, at righr, still carries her masts. But today it is the unidentified schooner astern that has more remaining timbers .

Photos courtesy NY Stare Office of Parks , Recreation & Historic Preservation.

The 1753- 1760 acco unts of To bias Conradt Ten Eyck's sloop Chriestiena appear to be fa irl y representati ve of the ri ver trade carried on by the sloops of that century. Ten Eyck, who held property and slaves near Coeymans, New Yo rk , operated a sloop fo r hi s convenience in tra nsporting agricultu ral products to market and bring ing manufactured goods and luxury items back to the landing at Coeymans. 3 He ran errands fo r relatives, and , on occasion, bought and sold for his friend s and associates.

Products imported from New York incl uded molasses, oysters, books, Engli sh cheese, tea, sugar, snuff, candles, furniture and copper. Fre ights shipped back to New York typi ca ll y consisted of lumber, corn , wheat, oats, and firewood.

Dutch culture and shipbuilding traditions persisted in the Hudson Valley throughout the 18th century and into the opening years of the 19th . By 18 10, over 200 sloops were operating on the ri ver. 4 Regularly schedul ed " packet" service appears to have been inaugurated by ri ver sloops as earl y as 1807,5 eleven years before the concept was implemented by the Black Ball Line on the New York to Liverpool route. T rips between A lbany and New York often took as long as a week, but were made on rare occasions in 24 ho urs or less when wind and tide were favora ble.

The invention of the pi voted centerboard and its widespread acceptance in the early 1800s led to the fi nal stages in the design evo lution of the Hudson Ri ver sloop. The dev ice was patented in the United States by the Swain brothers of New Jersey in 18 11 6 and introduced on

the Hudson Ri ver wi th the launching of the sloops Advance and Freedom in 18 15 or 18 16 .7 Use of the centerboard enabled the deve lopment of broad-beamed, shallow draft vessels capable of carrying bulk fre ights into the shallowest inlets and coves at hi gh tide without a comp romi sed ability to sail effectively to windward . T he resulting des ign pro ved particularly well -adapted fo r use on the Hudson River and Long Island Sound and the genera l shape and confi gurati on of these carriers appear to have become somewhat standard ized by 1830.

Early- and mid- 19th -century sloops were equipped wi th large, square-shaped rudders and long steering tillers permitting one or more steersmen to change course quickl y and with great leverage in executing difficult maneuvers. Jibing, in partic ul ar, required a rapid change of course at nearl y 180° in order to prevent the enorrnous mainsail and boom fro m gaining too much momentum and carrying away the entire sail ri g. Thi s maneuver, referred to by boatmen as the North Ri ver jibe, balanced tremendous forces and required skill , ex peri ence and nerve.

Carelessness coul d result in disastro us consequences.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the des ign of new Hudson Ri ver sloops began to evolve in the direction of greater effic iency and speed. C lipper bows, lowered freeboard and increased sail areas became identifi ed with this trend. The well -known Victorine, built by Calib andJoseph Welsie in 1848,, reflected "clipper" features and was higlhly regarded as one of the fastest sloops mn the river.

By rmid-century , passenger service SEA\ HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

The schooners and a Signal C01ps encampment were photographed in 1918

by H.H . Russell . Both vessels are lower in the water.

â&#x20AC;˘

on the ri ver's growing fl eet of steam sidewheelers had improved greatl y in reliabili ty, comfort and safety, leav ing the sloops to earn their li ving through the transportation of bulk freig hts, incl uding lumber, brick, building stone, iron ore, limestone, cement, lime, pl as ter, potters' clay, produce and li vestock.

Many of these cargoes were carried as deck loads in order to save time and labor in handling. As profits decreased in the face of rising operating costs and increased competition from steam-towed barges and ra ilroads, sloop owners began to reduce labor costs in the 1860s and 1870s by converting their sloops, generall y req uiring crews of six to hoist the huge mainsail and long, weighty boom, into more easil y handl ed schooners req ui ring crews of fo ur. 8 New boats built during thi s period were specifica lly des igned to handle bulk freights and rigged as schooners from the start. The basic broad-beamed, fl atbottomed hull form associated with the Hudson Ri ver sloop remained largely unchanged, and a simplified schooner rig carry ing a single headsail and only one topsail became typical. A number of schooners were successfull y employed in the reg ion's iron industry, transporting ore and limestone to the lower Hudson Valley's furn aces and fo undries.

As many as 200 sloops and schooners were in reg ul ar servi ce on the river in 1860.9 By 1890, however, they were no longer competi tive and the era of commerc ial sail transportation on the Hudson Ri ver quickly drew to a close. Some sloop and schooner hull s were converted to harbor lighte rs and barges, while an SEA HISTORY 77, SPRIN G 1996

undetermined number continued to eke o ut livings along the Atl anti c coast for several more decades. One of the last identifiable sloop hull s, the Katie D. Seavey (ex- Hudson), went aground at Cuttyhunk Island at the beginning of World War II. 10 The hull of the 1866 Hudson Ri ver schooner C. S. A llison remained afl oat in Chesapeake Bay until 1972 when she sank in a colli sion. 11 Other sloops and schooners were simply abandoned along the ri ver shore and left to rot. Although other hulls may still remain in the back waters of the river, the two schooners recorded in 1993 are the onl y extant examples of thi s vessel ty pe which have been identified on the Hudson to date.

Nineteenth-Century Hulls The two hull s investi gated and recorded in 1993 were di scovered at low tide by a member of the State Hi storic Preservation Office whil e investigating 19th-century buildings and fo undations along the shore of the river in the mid-Hudson Valley. Both hull s have fl at bottoms, rounded bilges and centerboard slots which iden tified them as sloops or schooners and diffe renti ated them fro m the ubiq ui to us scow and barge hulks which line the river shore. One hull retained abruptly radi ating cant frames describing a particul arl y rotund bow. The bluff shape of the bow determined by these framing members suggests that of an earl y- nineteenth-century sloop. Upon c loser examination, however, the same hull was fo und to have a mast step at the after end of the centerboard slot, clearly indicating that the vessel was last rigged as a schooner. Eno ugh remained of the

hull to estimate her original dimensions as 70 feet in length on deck, 24-25 feet in beam, and 5-6 fee t depth of hold . These dimensions close ly corresponded with description s of typi ca l 19th-century Hudson River sloops. The phys ical evi dence suggests that the hull was an earl y sloop, later rebuilt and rerigged as a schooner. The second hull at the site, identified as the schooner A. S. Parker, appeared to have been more lightl y framed and remained less intact. She was c learl y rigged as a schooner at the time of her abandonment but offered minimal ev idence regarding her ori ginal hull fo rm during the initial survey. Other features observed at the site included the centerboard of one vessel, the rudders of both , and a nearby stone bulkhead along the shore where the schooners had last been docked.

The significance of this discovery, the relative rarity of these remains and the vulnerability of the site to continuing decay and vandali sm led to a decision by the Hi storic Preservation Field Services Bureau to immedi ately record the hulls as an initi al step in planning for their preservation . Grossman and Associates archaeo log ical consultants of New York offered to provide pro bono technical support fo r the project and sent a fi eld crew to the site fo r one week to begin the process of preparing record photography and drawings of the more intact of the two hull s. Immediately prior to the team 's arriv al, two historic photographs of the site were located showing the two schooners soon after they were abandoned and again, some 15 years later, after one had been stripped or burned.

2 A.J. F.van Laer, ed., Early Records of the City and County of Albany and Colony of Rensselaerwyck, Vol. . 3., trans . by Jonathan Pearson, Univ . of the State of New York (A lbany, NY, 19 18), p534.

3 Wa ld ron Mosher Polgreen, "G leanings fro m an O ld Account Book of the Sloop Criestiena 17531760." Yearbook, Dutch Settlers Soc iety of Albany (A lbany, NY 1944- 1945) Vol. XX, ppl 6-20.

4 Reed Haslam , "A Technical Description," Hudson River Sloops , Hudson River Sloop Restoration Inc. (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 1970), p23.

5 Paul Fo ntenoy,Sloopsofthe Hudson River(M ystic, CT, 1994), pp48-49.

6 Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York , NY, 1935), p l 69.

7 Fontenoy , p54.

8 Verp lank and Collyer, p l4.

9 ibid., p l8.

I0 John Leav itt, Wake ofthe Coasters (Midd letown, CT, 1970) , pp 135- 136.

11 Harry Johnson and Frederick Lightfoot, Maritime New York in Nineteenth-Century Plwrographs (New York, NY 1980), p39.

29

The photograph s confinned earli er ass umpti ons regarding hull fonn and ri g.

The site was recorded by a combination of electron ic survey and computer-controlled photography.

A transit was stationed on the shoreline and critical points on the hull of the most intact unidentified vessel were systematically shot by laser and digiti zed . Comers and midpoints a long all lon g itudinal members were recorded first, followed by the centerlines of all visible floor frames and futtocks.

Sketch diagrams of the stem and stempost were prepared, illustrating significant construction details.

Finally, the hull was thoroughly photographed, using computerized cameras mounted on high tripods.

The resulting images were electronicall y digitized and controlled for distortion. The data thus generated can be used by CAD programs to produce plan drawings, sections, and hull lines through patient manipulation of the data off-site as time and resources penn it. To date, the data have produced a plan diagram of the more intact hull which can be used for basic planning and field verification.

One of the most interesti ng aspects of thi s vessel which emerged during the detailed recording was the apparent irregularity in the placement and number of futtock s comprising the frames. It appears that new futtocks were inserted into the fabric of the hull where needed in order to strengthen the vessel.

Additional longitudinal members appear to have been added strategically to the keelson and near the tum of the bilge to stiffen what may have been an aging or weak-

The Victorine of 1848 measured 65 feet in length on deck, 25 feet in beam and 6 fee t depth of hold with a register tonnage of93. Her mast and topmast combined towered more than 100 feet above deck and carried almost 5000 square feet of canvas. She is generally considered to have represented the final and most advanced phase in the evolution of the Hudson River sloop, and her lines, first published in 1850, were ins1rumental in the design of the replica sloop Clearwater.

Below, a digitized pho10 of the stern of the unidentified schooner, takenlune30, 1993. Courtesy Grossman & Assoc.

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ened hull . These suggest that the vessel may have had a long career on the river, perhaps launched as a sloop and later rebuilt and rerigged as a schooner.

The centerboard slot is located midships on the starboard side of the keel and measures approximately 14 fee t in length and eight to nine inches in width. Support for the starboard frames was provided by a 42-foot-long log which paralleled the keel son on the starboard side of the hull. The centerboard trunk was built up with dri ft pins above these mass ive longitudinals.

A similar arrangement was observed in the construction of the adjacent A. S. Parker.

With the recording work completed, the future of these hull s is now being considered by public agencies and private institution s.

In the interim , it is criti cal that individual s who may encounter these or other hi storic rema ins understand the need to leave them undi sturbed so that all of us can enjoy and benefit from a richer unde rstandin g of our common maritime heritage. t

Mr. Peckham is Historic Preservation Program Analyst for the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Hi storic Preservation .

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SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

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The four-masted Cape Horn sailing ship Peking sails again on the voyage of 1929-30 that taught the great sailtraining skipper Irving Johnson to "lean forward into life."

This new edition has new photographs and a memoir of Irving by his wife and partner, Exy Johnson, in a new introduction to Irving's exciting tale of his voyage around Cape Hom. In a famous Afterword written half a century after this voyage, Capt. Johnson added what he felt he had learned from his experience, after sailing his two Yankees seven times around the world with young people in crew. That Afterword has become a testament of the sail training movement. Exy's testimony, added for this special edition, rounds out the picture of how the partnership of two very individual people worked-and why.

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31

VESSEL PROFILE

Catawissa: Last Deepwater Steam Tug on the East Coast

by Norman Brouwer

O

cean towing has been a part of the American seafaring experience for over a century. Today , powerful tugs, either with barges on the hawser or in integrated tug-barge units , move giant barges carrying freight containers, petroleum products and bulk cement between ports on our Atlantic and Gulf coasts. A century ago the primary cargo was anthracite from the coal fields of Pennsylvania, used to fuel industries, heat homes, and generate electricity to light cities and power trolley systems. One outstanding artifact survives from that trade. She is the 158foot steam tugboat Catawissa , better known in recent years as New York Harbor ' s floating tank cleaning plant Tank Master No. 1, which now lies in storage, afloat, at the New York State Barge Canal maintenance facility in Waterford, New York, north of Albany.

Anthracite is a hard coal which is difficult to ignite but, once burning, provides a very hot flame . It did not come into favor for industrial or heating use until well into the first half of the 1800s. In the US, high quality anthracite is found in only five counties of northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1837 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, which was still building its original line between those two cities , petitioned the State Legislature for permission to extend northward from Reading into the heart of the coal fields. During the 1840s the company built Port Richmond on the Delaware River above Philadelphia as a shipment point for coal.

Because of the lack of rail way bridges or tunnel s crossing the Hudson River, anthracite was carried by sea from the Delaware north to New England . It was first carried by small sailing vessels, usually brigs or schooners. In the 1870s the Philadelphia and Reading felt prosperous enough to begin transporting the coal itself, in a large fleet of steam colliers built for the purpose. Towing was adopted in the 1880s because it was far more economical. Each collier had an engine to fuel and maintain and required a sizeable crew. One steam tug with a smaller crew could tow a series of three or four good-sized barges with very few men on board.

Barges were readily available in the form of deepwater sailing vessel s that 32

were becoming uneconomical. By the mid-80s these could be purchased at bargain prices and rigged down to " baldheaded" schooners, setting only foreand-aft sails for steadying and as an assist for the tug when winds were favorable. When old sailing ships were not available, New England shipyards built wooden schooner barges. In 1894 the Philadelphia and Reading Company ordered ten barges from a yard in Noank, Connecticut, and converted three of its older colliers to barges.

Between 1896 and 1912 the company built ten almost identical seagoing tugs . All were named for important Pennsylvania towns served by the Railroad.

The first was the Tamaqua , launched by the Cramp Shipyard in Philadelphia.

The next was Catawissa (length: 158 ft; width: 29 feet; tonnage: 558 gross), completed in February 1897 , first of four produced by the Harlan & Hollingsworth Shipyard in Wilmington, Delaware. The firm of Harlan & Hollingsworth , like the Philadelphia & Reading , could trace its beginnings to the 1830s. It produced this country's first seagoing vessel with an iron hull, the steamer Bangor of 1844, and the first American steamship with a steelplated hull , the sidewheeler Olympian of 1884 whose remains survive on a beach in the Straits of Magellan.

Catawissa was powered by a 1000 horsepower triple-expansion steam en-

gine supplied by two coal-burning scotch boilers 12 feet in diameter. She had a single tall stack and two masts. The forward mast was stepped immediately forward of the large pilothouse. She could set four large triangular riding sails, a staysail forward of each mast, and a trysail abaft each mast. The hull and deckhouse were steel , and the pilothouse was panelled wood. The Philadelphia & Reading color scheme for its tugs was a black hull with a wide creamcolored band on the outside of the bulwarks , a green deckhouse with red trim , and a black and red stack.

In September 1917 , following thi s country ' s entry into World War I, Catawissa's si sters Lykens and Conestoga were taken into the Navy. During the war they operated between Bermuda and the Azores assi sting di sabled ships from North Atlantic convoys. At the war's end the Lykens was attached to the Third Naval District at New York, and the Conestoga was sent to Norfolk. She left Norfolk for the Pacific in November 1920. On 25 March 1921 she sailed from the Mare Island Navy Yard at Vallejo, California, for Tutuila, American Samoa, and went mi ss ing with everyone on board. The Lykens was sold out of the Navy the following year.

Steam colliers had been reintroduced around 1907, initially in the bituminous coal trade. During the 1930s and 1940s

Shoved along by her powe1ful reciprocating engine, th e great J58-foo t tug presents a handsome spectacle in her prime. (Photo: South Street Seaport Museum )

SIBA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

r

the Philadelphia & Reading Company disposed of its seagoing tugs. In the early '40s Catawissa and Tamaqua were bought by the Arundel Corporation of Baltimore and renamed New York and Brooklyn. In 1950 Catawissa was sold to the Salvage Process Corporation of New York and converted to a steam tank cleaning plant for removing sludge from ships' fuel or cargo tanks. Three years later she was acquired by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation to service vessels being repaired or converted in their sh ipyard in Hoboken , New Jersey . Bethlehem did further conversion work , and renamed her Beth Tank Ship No . 2.

In 1962 she was sold again and renamed Tank Master No. 1. At some point her pilothouse and masts were removed. To confirm her legal status as a barge, the propeller was removed, the disconnected shaft was hauled into the after end of the engineroom and the stern bearing was capped off. She spent time at Kearney , New Jersey , in the 1970s when it was the location of a major ship scrapping operation cutting up warships and Navy auxiliary vessels from the reserve fleet. Later, when based at Bayonne, New Jersey, she was towed to jobs throughout the Harbor.

She was finally retired in the 1980s and offered to a number of maritime museums and steam enthusiast groups.

An effort to preserve her was launched

in Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Erie, where she wou ld have been the home of a museum of towing. She was on her way there undertow when she ran aground in the New York State Barge Canal. Unable to move her any further, the tug had to leave for other jobs. The NYS Barge Canal Corporation eventually towed her back to where she now lies in Waterford, near the eastern end of the waterway. In 1994 a new effort to save the Catawissa was begun , with the active support of the National Maritime Historical Society.

Catawissa is in remarkable condition for a boat that wi II soon be celebrating her centennial. And she is virtually the last largely intact steam vessel available for preservation on our East Coast.

Her engine, which has not operated for almost half a century, is quite complete.

Her boilers-used until sometime in the 1980s-are stil l fully outfitted and she has an impressive array of pumps and other auxiliary machinery. One of the largest traditional-design tugboats ever built, she has ample room for public visitation in the form of both restored spaces and future exhibits on an important, but thus far little-heralded, chapter in our maritime past. ;t

Norman Brouwer is curator of ships at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City and author of The International Register of Historic Ships.

With traditional steam plant still intact Tank Master No. I (ex-Catawissa) awaiting herfate at her dock in Staten ls/and in 1990. (Photo: Walter Hoyeski)

The succession of East Coast coal haulers: afour-mastedDown East schooner, a schooner barge towed by the Catawissa (Morris ' s new contribution for this article), and a steam collier. This lively sketch of "Coal Carriers " by Paul C. Morris is from his Schooners and Schooner Barges ( 1984 ).

CAT AWISSA COMMITTEE COMMENTS

Why preserve the Catawissa?

America has always been a maritime nation , and the railroad tugs once active on our coasts and waterways are now all gone, except the Catawissa. Some people might say, "So what?" To say "So what?" to the Catawissa is to dismiss a lot of history . Americans don ' t say "So what?" to the US Frigate Constitution in Boston, the tall ship Elissa in Texas or the Liberty ship Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco. We all say hurrah for these ships, and America loves and learns from them.

I believe that all of us, as mari time enthusiasts, have a responsibility to help preserve our maritime heritage, including such sturdy workhorses as the tug Catawissa.

She is an important part of our heritage in seafaring and I implore all who care for that heritage to become active, both physically and financially, to "save the Cat." JOE DE MUCCIO

Chairman, Tugboat Enthusiasts Society of the Americas The tough trade of towing schooner barges fu 11 of coal flourished briefly in the early years of this century, bringing to our maritime heritage the hard-performing legacy of steam tugs like the Catawissa. These powerful vessels, designed to tow as many as five or six barges and to withstand the stresses of the open ocean, heralded an era of innovation in the design of tugs and the building of schooner barges. Most of the bargemen, and the vessels they pushed to their limits, are gone to a final rest. It would indeed be a shame for their place in our history to go unnoticed.

PAUL C. MORRIS Historian

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

33

A NEW TALL SHIP TAKES TO SEA

Rigging a Sail Training Ship for the Indian Navy

by Morin Scott A small feature from TS Royalist (the After many years' consideration the In- fore and main masts. She carries the dian Navy is building a 141-foot bark of German-sty le double gaffs on her mizzen 1971 Royal Navy Sea Cadet brig) is to be 430 tonnes with the government-owned to escape the problems found with found in the special arrangement of the Goa Shipyard Ltd. in the port of Goa, a brailing up a large gaff sail. In this con- mizzen topsail and the trysail. Both the former Portuguese colony in southwest nection it is interesting to note that the boom and the gaff jaws are mounted on India dating from the 15th century with USCG bark Eagle was originally rigged a heavy gauge stainless steel track on the a long tradition of shipbuilding. The in this way when in the German Navy as after side of the mast. Stainless slides bark is to be named Tarangini, meaning are her sister ships Sagres II , Mircea , made to fit this track are provided to hold rider or mistress of the waves.

Gorch Fack II and Tovarisch (ex Gorch the luffs of the lower and upper mizzen Construction of the bark commenced Fack I). This rig was only restored by so that there is no need for mast hoops or in late 1994 and completion and trial s are Captain David Wood after a number of lashings around the mast. This enables a scheduled for spring 1996. years of sailing with an overlarge mizzen smaller track to be fitted to run up the The vessel port after side of has been dethe mast past the s igned by the boom and both internationally gaffjaws. Above known naval arthe upper gaff chitect Colin jaws this track Mudie with the swings over to the after centerengineering line of the mast company Three Quays Marine and continues Ltd. responsible to the masthead. for the engines, The main use for generators, electhis track is to trical and plumbenable the ny Ion ing services, and slides of the luff Square Rigged of the topsail to Services Ltd . be fed in at deck acting as conlevel from where sultants on the it can be hoisted rigging. Procto the masthead tor Masts have under control the contract for and sheeted out to the upper gaff the spars and rig, with Ratsey & Specifications for INS Tarangini: Sparred length , J 77ft; Length on deck, J41 Ji; Length waterline, J22 peak. Thus itcan Lapthorn sub- ft; Beam , 28/t; Draft, J3.5 ft; Sail area, 10,451 sq.ft; Displacement, 430 tons ; Fuel capacity, 33 tons; also be lowered contracted for Fresh water capacity, 46 tons, Water making capacity, 5 tons/day; Auxiliary engines, twin 300 BHP to the deck under full control the sa il s and Kirloscar!Cummins Diesels; Generators, 2 (p lus harbor auxiliary). andeitherstowed Spencers forthe rigging. following someone's idea of "improv- there or removed from the track, bagged The three-masted-bark rig chosen for ing" the rig by removing the lower gaff. and stowed below. This method is far the vessel closely follows the rig design As is often the case, a return to the simpler and safer than having to stow it of Lord Nelson (designed and produced original was a good move. The double aloft or hoi sting it up a jackstay as is by the same team in 1988 for a physi- gaff seems to have been a German inven- often done.

The secondary use of thi s track is to cally handicapped crew) and, in fact, the tion and was certainly found in most only difference is the replacement of the German-built and -owned ships from hoi st the storm trysail , the head of extensive roller furling equipment by around the tum of the century. As far as which reaches just above the lower traditional gear, since there is now no I can discover, Lord Nelson was the first gaff jaws. The clew is lashed to an eye plate on the top of the boom so that British ship to be so fitted . need for the former.

By a similar token it is peculiar to once thi s is sec ured the normal mizzen Deep single topsails follow Royal Navy custom where-as in sail training note that Captain Jarvis's magnificent boom sheets can be used to control it ship's-a large crew is available and the brace winches were seldom, if ever, fit- and haul it to weather if req uired. To big reef produces a storm sail of similar ted in British ships but they found great. enable safe access to the boom while dimensions to a lower topsail without favor with Laeisz and other German securing the trysail clew lashin g, the incurring the extra windage, cost and shipowners, and his clew lines are still to boom can be lowered down onto the inconvenienceofadditional spars on both be found in German ships.

1deckhou se rail and held steady there 34

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

r

COMPL EMENT: 16 offi cers and crew, 45

cadet tra inees.

DECK GEAR : electri c anchor windlass

A srare-ofrhe-art new enrry in rhe world' s sail /rainin g fl eer, Tara ngini offers we/I-planned accommodations fo r caders and crew. until th e try sail c le w is made fa s t.

All ya rds, exce pt the two courses, are ri gged for hoi stin g, albeit on stainless steel trac ks, since we firmly believe that thi s is an easie r a nd better way of setting th e upper square sail s . The clews c an each be brought down easily to the yard be low by one hand . Then the first yard is hoi sted by a g roup of cadets hauling togethe r on a powerful purchase . Experi e nce with the " Polish System " of having fi xed yards has shown that this is fine in lig ht wind s but becomes increas ingly diffi c ult as the wind force increases . In ex tre mi s it requires the whole watch plu s a hand y -billy to get the clews prope rly haul ed down to the yard below .

In a gene ral way we believe that fidd ed to pmasts, deadeyes and lanyards , a nd external chains , together with other equipment which has been outdated by efficient modem replacements are only good for " film replica ships." In our vie w a modem sail training ship is an indu strial tool which needs maximum utili zation to be financially and prac ti cally effective and thus requires minimum maintenance .

Some traditional equipment can still find its place in a modem vessel and in thi s connection we have specifi ed a la rge windsock at the masthead since it is qui cker and easier to see from an y where on deck than your yachtsm an 's " wind direction meter. " Admittedly it has been modernized by having its final six inc hes m ade in fine net to lengthen its life a nd it is illuminated at ni g ht by an all round shi e lded electric light. When trimming sail s to a fin e tune or undertakin g a SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

maneuve r it is a godsend .

Since th ere a re times in the life of a mode m sa il training ship when a time schedul e needs to be adhered to, all the fo re-and-aft sail s are fitted with two sheeting position s. The first is for sailing unde r square ri g when, even close hauled, the wind will be at least sixty-five deg rees off the bow and the second is for m o tor sailing under fore-and-aft canvas o nly , with one or both screws turning, whe n the wind can be held at 40/45 degrees off the bow. Except in very Iight wind conditions with a smooth sea (when motoring directly to windward may be an option) motor sailing at 40/45 degrees to th e wind unde r hardened-in staysail s is fa r and away the most effective m ethod of making way to windward. A s a rul e of thumb one can say that a modem square ri gger attempting to motor directly into a w ind of Force 7 Beaufort will achieve a speed of zero knots and in stron ger winds will make a stemboard . Brac ing th e yards hard up to about 30 deg rees to the cente rline without any square sail s set and then " tacking to windward" with each tack 30 degrees off th e wind will ac hieve a moderate success but seldom as good as the method mentioned above.

The design is extremely well thou ght o ut and practical and should serve the Indian Navy well far into the next century. j:,

j:,

j:,

Capt. Morin Scott has long been a champion of the sail training movement, as well as an active participant. He heads Square Rigged Services, Ltd, specialists in rigging.

with a verti ca l shaft rope capstan forw ard for th e heav y anchors and cables. (Squ are ri ggers require ground tac kl e approximately 100 per cent over Lloyd 's Rules to prevent dragging due to the extra windage); two smaller electri c winches aft for handling stern ropes and two amidships to hoist boats and ass ist the small professional crew when sa iling with no cadets.

BOATS : Two 15-foot semirigid rubber boats of standard Indi an Navy specificati on on the main deckhouse roof with launching and recovery gea r; life raft capacity fitted to Indian Navy requirements with spec ial attention to easy launching (unlike many sail training ships observed recentl y); boat boom fitted for use at anchorages with an accommodation ladder for easy access to th e boats.

G ENERAL C ONSTR UCTION : Constructed of steel generall y to Lloyd 's Rules; teak trim where required; teak decks laid onto long-scarfed plywood except over the engine room where a steel deck is fitted under the teak as a fire precaution; extensive use of stainless steel is made in all places where corrosion of carbon steel cannot be dealt with in normal maintenance such as under bulwark capping, teak deck boundary bars, etc. ; stainless stee l used fo r rails where running ri gg ing has to be secured with shackl es.

ENGINE ROOM : Auxiliary propulsion prov id ed by two Indian -manufac tured Kirl oscar-Cummins 300 BHP di esels dri ving twin screws with fi xed blades ; electri c power by two main generators and an au xili ary harbor generator fitted for silent runnin g; thirty-three tons of fuel are carri ed and 46 tonnes of fresh water, backed up by a reverse-osmosis water-making capacity of fiv e tons per day; sewage treatment pl ant; cold and cool storage fo r fo odstuffs.

A CC OMMODATIO N: From bow : boatswa in 's store and workshop; sleeping quarters for two watches of 15 cadets; washrooms; mess deck (starboard), sleeping qu arters for third watch of cadets (port); accommodation for four petty offi cers (starboard), a small sick bay (amidships) , accommodation for six ratings (port); engine room ; two doubl e cabins fo r officers (port) , a wardroom (starboard ); single cabins for captain and exec utive offi cer; Above the accommodation deck: tw o deckhouses with a ship 's office, radi o room and a very large chart-room with four separate chart tables fo r naviga ti on instruction ; the ship ' s galley.

ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT: Radar and satellite navigation sets and VHF and HF radios for ship' s use and instructi on, with forethought given to continual updating.

35

SHIPNOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS Down to the Sea in Ships

Spun Yarn

Readers who are heading for the International Festival of the Sea in Bristol, England, 24-27 May, can expect to see a multitude of fascinating historic and modem vessels.

A provisional li st from England includes the steamships Advance and Shieldhall, mine hunters from Britain, Belgium and Germany, tugs ranging from the Kerne of 1913 to the Brocklebank of 1965 , and a host of sai ling vessels, big and small, including America's own "HMS" Rose and Pride of Baltimore II as well as England's new replica Matthew, Asgard II, Pogoria, and Eye of the Wind. Many of these vessels and others from around the world will make the rounds of European maritime festivals thi s summer in England , Ireland, and France, and participate in the Cutty Sark Tall Ships Races in the Baltic and Mediterranean.

It is marvelous to see American vessels making the Atlantic voyage. The Rose will fly the NMHS ensign and be an information center about NMHS in England and Europe. She is looking for sail trainees to cross the Atlantic and for the shorter passages between European ports. The first leg of the journey begins in Boston on 22 April with arrival in Bristol in time for the Festival. Nineteen 6-day trips will take her to ports in Britain, Ireland , France, Spain, Portugal and, finally, to the Canary Islands in October in preparation for the westward passage to the West Indies for a winter of Caribbean cruising. For dates and costs, contact "HMS" Rose Foundation, Inc., I Bostwick Avenue, Bridgeport CT 06605 ; 203 335-1433.

Pride of Baltimore I l' s journey reinforces her role as a representative of the State of Maryland-she sailed to England with a memorial that will be placed at the unmarked grave of Cecilius Calvert, founderofMaryland, at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London. The voyage is a collaborative effort for Pride II, Maryland Public Televi sion, The Baltimore Sun and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. An online web site (http://www.mpt.org/mpt) will provide updates on the transatlantic voyage and MPT has created a Maryland Electronic Field trip, "The Voyages of the Ark, the Dove, and Pride II," to allow students to view the site of the first settlement and communicate with historians, archaeologists and costumed interpreters. (Pride II, World Trade Center, Suite 222, 401 E. Pratt Street, Baltimore MD 21202; 410 539-1151, FAX: 410 539-1190) For those of you staying home thi s summer, there are myriad ways to get yourself on the water or otherwise involved in America's maritime heritage on the East, West and Gulf coasts, the Great Lakes and our rivers and canals. Directories such as Sea History's Guide to American and Canadian Maritime Museums (avai lable from NMHS for$ I I .50) or the American Sail Training Association Directory ($5 from ASTA, PO Box 1459, Newport RI 02840; 401 846-1775) can help you find museums and vessels near you or on your summer travel routes.

One vessel with berths for volunteers is the US Brig Niagara. Her East Coast voyage wi ll take the vessel and her volunteer crew from Philadelphia (where she spent the winter) to Baltimore (18-19 May) , Washington DC (25-27 May), Annapoli s (1-2 June), Norfolk (8-9 June), New York City (15 June), Mystic ( 18 June), Newport (22-23 June), Boston (3-7 July), aMaine port to be announced ( 13-14July), and two Canadian ports (27 July-2 September). (USBN, 164 East Front Street, Erie PA 16507; 814 871-4596, FAX: 814 455-6760) JA

GEITINGAROUNDTHESH IPS: the steam-

A Graveyard of Ships As Sea History goes to press, NMHS Sponsors Ralph and Dorothy Packer have just Lady Elizabeth (Photo by Dorothy Packer) returned from the Falkland Islands, where they fo ll owed the Maritime Trail and came upon the wrecks of vessels fami li ar to Sea History's readers. Their letter to us and photographs of vessels like the Charles Cooper, the Jhelum and the tug Samson will appear in Sea History 78. We wanted to whet your appetite with just one image of the lady Elizabeth of 1879, swathed in rust but still carrying her lowermasts.

She has been grounded in Whalebone Cove since 1936.

JA

36

ship Nobska of 1925 has received a $3 million !STEA grant which will be used to survey and replace the hull and restore the steam engine, decks, staterooms, stairways and dining room to prepare for a return to service in 1997 (New England Steamship Foundation, c/o The Whaling Museum, 18 Johnny Cake Hill , New Bedford MA 02740; 508 999-1925) .. . supporters of the 87-year-old Regina Maris in Greenport, New York, are stepping up their efforts to restore the hi storic barkentine spurred by a New Bedford, Massachusetts, proposal that includes the Regina as a centerpiece for their own touri sm effort (SRM, One Bootleg Alley, PO Box 624, Greenport NY 11944; 516 477-0004) ... the Continental Navy sloop Providence , based in Rhode Island, has hauled down her sails and suspended operations until next spring due to a financial loss following the failure of a charter that wou ld have taken he r to the Maritime Provinces over the summer (CSP, PO Box 76, Newport RI 02840; 40 J 846-1776) ... with no immediate funding available for repairs , the Seattle-based Virginia V Foundation will surrender the Virginia V ' s Certificate oflnspection to the US Coast Guard and lay up the vessel for the summer while campaigning to use her as a shoreside attraction and raise funds so she will be steaming again for her 75th anniversary in March 1997 (VVF, 901 Fairview Avenue North, A-110, Seattle WA 98 I 09) ... a new 20-year lease of the Queen Mary to Long Beach CA businessman Joseph Prevratil has raised objections from several sources based on Prevratil 's previous lack of maintenance on the Queen Mary and the inadeq uacy of funds for repairs to rotting decking and weakened structural supports (SS United States Preservation Society, 540 Fort Leavenworth Street, Suite 301, San Francisco CA 941097503) .. . the Submarine Memorial Association has announced that, after25 years in Hackensack, New Jersey, the Ling (SS-297) and the New Jersey Naval Museum are finalizing plans for a new home in the Hoboken Southern Waterfront Project (SMA , PO Box 1602, West New York NJ 07093; 201 662-1229) .. . in June the Toronto Historical Board plans to relaunch its steam tug Ned Hanlan of 1932, wh ich has been drydocked since 1972 at the Marine Museum of Upper Canada (MMUC, 55 SEA HISTORY 77 , SPRING 1996

t

AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE MUSEUM NEWS The American Merchant Marine Museum at the US Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York, hosts its popular annual reunion for all merchant mariners on Saturday, 20 April. This year marine radio operators and members of the Navy's Armed Guard are especially recognized.

More than one hundred World War II merchant marine veterans are expected to meet in the Academy's auditorium for talks , films and sea stories, enjoy lunch at the Officers' Club and gather in the Mariners' Chapel for a memorial service.

The day's highlights include two ceremonies-the dedication of a 7,500-pound 3" gun to members of the Navy's Armed Guard and the opening of a recreated Victory ship radio room exhibit.

The 3" cannon is similar to those mounted on the bows of many merchantmen during WWII. It has been placed in front of the Museum and dedicated to the Navy 's Armed Guard, 1,810 of whom lost their lives defending American merchant ships.

The radio "shack" has all the authentic equipment from a WWII Victory ship. "Sparks" sits at his set with one hand on his key and a cup of coffee in the other. You can hear CW code coming from the room and, at the touch of " ,, . . a button, "Sparks" will tell you about the life of a radio Sparks .in the new radw operator in 1945. room exhibit.

An attractive new multipurpose room has been established on the second floor of the Museum. It will seat 35-40 people comfortably or can be used for temporary exhibits. Our curator, Frank Braynard, is already scheduling lectures in the new facility and organizations visiting the Museum can inquire about reserving the room for meetings.

A steam pipe burst under our main gallery during the Christmas holidays keeping the Museum closed for over two months. Fortunately, none of the priceless paintings, ship models or artifacts were damaged, but the badly buckled floor had to be replaced . The down time was used to paint a good portion of the Museum and to rearrange exhibits. (AMMM, USMMA, Kings Point NY 11024; 5 I 6 773-5515)

Call Commodore Bernie Klay

800 247-3262

CAPT. CHARLES RENICK

Executive Director

f

Ontario Street, Kingston , Ontario K7L 2Y2; 613 542-2261) . .. the Vancouver Maritime Museum took over the St. Roch-the 1828 patrol vessel that was the first to travel the Northwest Passage from west to east in the I 940s-from Parks Canada in July 1995 (VMM, 1905 Ogden Avenue, VancouverBCV6J 1A3, Canada; 604 736-4431) ... the International Sail Training Association has announced a £7.5 million campaign to build the first barkentine in Britain in more than 120 years (IST A, 5 Mumby Road, Gosport PO 12 I AA, UK) ... word from Norway is that the six-year-old Polish sail training brig Fryderyk Chopin has been sold to the city of Trondheim for $1 million ... the Ukrainian bark Tovarisch-built as the German Gorch Fock in 1933-is languishing in England, where a $2 million estimate has halted intended repairs ... other European vessels slated for repairs include the Rickmer Rickmers of 1896, the great Passat of 1911 and the 8-yearSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

old Russian Mir . . . the Seute Deern, built in Gulfport, Mississippi, as the Elizabeth Bandi in 1919 and now owned by the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum in Fryderyk Chopin at sea in 1992.

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37

SHIPNOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS Bremerhaven, Germany , has a severe hogging problem and is being supported with flotation bags at bow and stem to relieve strain on the keel and keel son, both of which will be replaced in the fall (DS , Van Ronzelen strasse, D-2850 Bremerhaven-M , Germany).

MUSEUM NEWS: the Maine Maritime Museum has completed an inventory of the Sewall Family Papers, a collection that charts the history of the Maine shipbuilding family from 1761 to 1937 (MMM, 243 Washington Street, Bath ME 04530; 207 443-1316) ... the North Carolina Maritime Museum received the Southeastern Museums' Conference " Award of Excellence" for its exhibit "North Carolina 's Working Watercraft" (NCMM, 3 15 Front Street, Beaufort NC 28516; 919 728-7317) ... the Apalachicola Maritime Museum has added the shrimp trawler Venezelos of 1915 to its fleet of Gulf Coast work boats (AMM, 57 Market Street, PO Box 625, Apalachicola FL 32329-0625; 904 653-8708) ... American President Companies has donated a collection of photograph s, film s, videos, stereographs, menus, letters and brochures to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park depicting the company's 147 years of shipping passengers, cargo and mail to San Franci sco from the East Coast, as well as $20,000 to fund the cataloguing of the collection (SFNMHP, Fort Mason, Bldg 201, San Francisco CA 94123; 415 5563002) .. . the National Maritime Museum in London will hold a conference and exhibition marking the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's visit to England and to recognize his role in creating the Russian Navy (NMM, Greenwich, London SElO 9NF; (181) 3 12 6686).

LIGHTHOUSE NEWS: the new us Lifesaving Service Heritage Organization was formed in September to inventory surviving lifesav ing vessels and lifeboat stations (USLSSHO, PO Box 12, Hull MA 02045) ... the assistant keeper's house that once stood near Maine's Monhegan Lighthouse will be rebuilt, thanks in part to a gift from Maine philanthropi st Elizabeth Noyce, using original blue prints for the 1850 building (Monhegan Cultural & Historical Association, Monhegan ME 04852) .. . the Canadian Coast Guard 's plan to destaff Canada's last 70 manned lighthouses has met with opposition from the provincial government of British Co-

38

CALENDAR Festivals, Events, Lectures, Congress of the International Congress Etc. of Maritime Museums (Adrian Jarvis, • 4 May, A Wooden Boat Show (North Carolina Maritime Museum, 315 Front St., Beaufort NC 285 16; 919 728-7317) • 4-5 May, Shad Festival (Hudson Ri ver Maritime Museum, One Rondout Landing, Kingston NY 12401 ; 914 338-0071 ) • 11 May, New England Lighthouse Foundation Spring Co n ve ntion in Hyannis, Massac husetts (NELF, PO Box 1690, Well s ME 04090; 207 646-0515) • 17-19 May , 4th Annual Mid-Atlantic Maritime Festival (Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum , Mill St, PO Box 636, St. Michaels MD 21663; 410 745-2916) • 15-16 June, Harbor Fest '96 (Michigan Maritime Museum , PO Box 534, South Haven MI 49090; 616 637-8078) • 15-16 Jun e, C learwater 's Great Hudson River Revival (S loop Clearwater, 1 12 Market St., Poughkeepsie NY 12601 ; 914 454-7951 ) • 28-30 June, W oodenBoat Show at Mystic Seaport Museum (WoodenBoat Publications, PO Box 78,Brooklin ME046160078; 207 359-4651) • 3-4 August, 20th Annual Model Ships & Boats Contest and Symposium (Wisconsin Maritime Museum , 75 Maritime Dr. , Manitowoc WI 54220; 414 6840218)

Curator of Port History, Merseyside Maritime Museum , Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 4AQ , UK; fax: 44 (151) 478 4590) • 9-1 2 September 1996, " Steam at Sea: The Application of Steam Power in the Maritime World" (David J. Starkey, Dept of History, Uni versity of Hull , Hull , HU6 7RX, UK; fax: 44 (1482) 466126) •September 1997 and 1998-Call for Papers: 12th International Congress of Economic History in Seville, proposals on "Global Markets: The Internationalization of the Sea Transport Industries since 1850" are due by 1June1996 (David Starkey, see address above)

Exhibitions

• through 2 September, Carriers, Codes, and Silent Ships: WWII and the New Navy (The Mariners ' Museum , (see address above) • 24January-21 April, "Sacred Waters: 20th Century Outsiders and the Sea" (South Street Seaport Museum, 207 Front St.,NewYorkNY 10038;2 12 748-8600) • 28 January-3 1 June, Blood, Sea and Ice: Three English Explorers-Drake, Cook, Franklin (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich , London SE lO 9NF, UK; (181) 858 4422) • 15 February- January, "Saved by the Conferences Light: Michigan 's Magnificent Light• 8- 11 May, Council of American Marihouses" (Michigan Maritime Museum, Dyckman at the Bridge, PO Box 534, time Museums 1996 Spring Meeting at The Mariners' Museum (TMM, 100 MuSouth Haven MI 49090; 616 637-8078) seum Dr. , Newport News VA 23606• I March-Summer 1996, " The Spru3798; 804 595-0368) ance Touch" (Naval War College Museum , Newport RI 02841-1207; 401 841• 23-25 May, "Commerce and War," 1996 Conference of the Canadian Nauti3571) • 20 March-30 December, S.O.S. Safety cal Research Society (Lt-Cdr. Glover, Directorate of History, National Defence on Ships: Learning from New York's Headquarters, Ottawa Ontario KI A OK2; Maritime Tragedies (Seamen's Church Institute, 24 1 Water Street, New York 613 998-7048, FAX: 613 990-8579) NY 10038; 212 349-8342) • 13-15 June, Early American Indus• from 23 March, "Harvesting the Intries Association Annual Conference in Boston (EAIA , John S. Watson, PO land Seas: Great Lakes Commercial Box 143, Delmar NY 12054-0143) Fishing" (Wisconsin Maritime Museum, 75 Maritime Drive , Manitowoc WI • 20-23 June 1996, Steamboat Conference, Loui sv ille KY, (Steamboat Mas54220; 414 684-0218) • 1 May-310ctober,"OneMan 's Trash ters and Associates, PO Box 3046, Louis Another Man 's Treasure" (Jamesisville KY 40201-3046; 502 778-6784) • 2-4 July, "Anglo-French Naval/Mari- - town Settlement, PO Drawer JF, Williamsburg VA 23187; 804 253-4838) time Cooperation through the Ages," • 11 May-29 September, "Deadrise: The 6th Anglo-French Naval History Conference (Dr. Michael Duffy , Centre for Relationship of Chesapeake Bay Watermen to Their Boats" (Chesapeake Maritime Historical Studies, University Bay Maritime Museum, PO Box 636, of Exeter, Queen's Building, Queen's Drive, Exeter EX4 4QH, UK) Mill Street, St. Michael s MD 21663; 410 745-29 16) • 3 1 August-7 September, Triennial

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SHIPNOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS INVENI PORT AM Arleigh Burke (1901-1996) Admiral Arleigh Burke, who died on I January, was buried in the Naval Academy cemetery in Annapolis under a black granite marker bearing the image of a Fletcher class destroyer and the words "Arleigh Burke-Sailor." As the last of the great fighting admirals of World War II, Burke embodied the sailorly qualities that the Navy seeks and the nation will always need. His long life began on a farm near Boulder, Colorado, in a second-generation Swedish immigrant family. He loved to tell how a snowstorm prevented most of hi s Colorado competitors from showing up for the Naval Academy exam, so he was able to get in despite the primitive education available to a hard-scrabble farm family .

He gave himself wholeheartedly to Navy life, where his tenacity of purpose and brilliance of mind (always concealed behind a bluff, self-deprecatory manner) made him a prime candidate for shoreside jobs in the peacetime Navy.

He had to fight his way to sea in WWII, but arrived on the scene as the Solomons campaign opened in the Pacific where he soon rose to command the destroyer squadron that became famous as the "Little Beavers." He revolutionized destroyer tactics, at which the Japanese had been beating the US Navy hands-down.

Aboard his own ship, he had the yeoman who kept track of the orders he gave in battle ask him why each order was given, right there on the bridge, in the thick of the fight. Some years back, I met Arleigh for breakfast to di scuss these notes, a talk which merged into a di scussion of Patton's and Guderian's philosophies of tank warfare-typically of Arleigh, he kept on asking questions about these and other tank leaders, until Bobbie Burke interrupted us for lunch. Roberta Gorsuch Burke was the other focus of Arleigh 's life, a wise and witty woman who kept Arleigh on his toes. When paying his dues to NMHS, the Admiral would always add something extra to his check, usually with a note saying: "There goes Bobbie's spring dress ." But I am sure he consulted her first.

Pulled off the bridge of hi s beloved destroyer, Arleigh became Marc Mitscher' s deputy in the US carrier fleet, and later served as Eisenhower's Chief of Naval Operations, pushing forward with the Polaris program and other measures that kept peace during the Cold War. Eisenhower knew he had something special in Burke, and kept him as CNO for an unprecedented three terms. The Navy knew it had something special, too. Naval historian Captain Edward L. Beach paid Burke perhaps the ultimate tribute when he named him among the big men who "have so far always surfaced when the country needed them. " PS Dr. W. M. P. Dunne (1934-1995) It's good to know NMHS presented its longtime advisor, Bill Dunne, with its Distinguished Service Award last year for his book Thomas F. McManus and the American Fishing Schooners: An Irish-American Success Story. I first came to know and admire Bill during research for my naval history, The United States Navy: 200 Years (1986). When I was looking for background for the then uncompleted manuscript, someone suggested Bill. The support he gave me was expressed in a special foreword, "A Grateful Salute to Bill Dunne," in which I wrote: "He turned up information that in some cases had been buried since the day it was compiled or written. His continued immersion in the smallest detail s of these ships has produced much information about their design and construction. Much of the history of our navy of that era was a direct outgrowth of the way its ships were built- as is now clear. Bill 's contribution has been to bring these structural details forward with lucid explanation .. . . He knows more about the ships of that long ago but not forgotten time than anyone in my experience."

No one better epitomized the search for historical truth, unfettered by the preconceptions that have so often hobbled our efforts. His prodigious written work stands out, as it always will, for its concentration on the facts that, when assembled, often produced an edifice that was at odds with the popular concept.

Our better knowledge of the way our early ships were built, and how that affected their employment and produced our early successes, is his monument today.

CAPTAIN EDWARD L. (NED) BEACH 40

lumbia where officials are working to convince the federal agency that BC's commercial and recreational maritime activities require active lighthouses ... searchers believe they have found the Pharos of Alexandria at a site the Egyptian government plans to cover with concrete to protect another historic sitethe 15th-century Qait Bey Fort.

UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY: the hull s of the flagship Warren and four other vessels of an ill-fated 1779 Revolutionary War fleet have been discovered in the Penobscot River in Maine by Warren Riess and hi s volunteer team (Darling Marine Lab , University of Maine, Walpole ME 04573) .. . the mission of the newly organized St. Lawrence River Historical Foundation, Inc. is to protect the remains of what may be the oldest identifiable shipwreck in the Great Lakes/Upper St. Lawrence RiverHMS Anson (formerly the French lroquoise of 1759) sank in 1761 while carrying provisions to Fort Ontario at Oswego (SLRHFI, PO Box 96, Cape Vincent NY 13618) ... a campaign has been launched to recover a 300-year-old wreck off the Texas coast near Matagorda Bay, believed to be the frigate Belle, part of Robert Cavelier de La Salle's ill-fated 17th-century Fort St. Louis settlement (Texas Hi storical Commission, Belle Recovery Effort, PO Box 12276,Austin TX78711 ; 512463-6218) . .. the remains of a 700-year-old, 50' ore transport vessel discovered at Magor Pill, Gwent, on the Severn River are believed to represent a missing link in British medieval maritime hi story between early craft and vessels like Mary Rose .. . Greek divers have discovered the wreck of the White Star Line's Britannic, sunk by a German mine off the Aegean island of Kea in November 1916 . . . treasure hunter Robert F. Marx has applied for a license to explore the waters around the Azores which the director of the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon calls a world sanctuary of underwater culture.

GRANTS & AWARDS: Mystic Seaport Museum announced it has only $11.4 million to go in its $38.4 million "Campaign for Mystic Seaport," (MSM, PO Box 6000, 75 Greenmanville Avenue, Mystic CT 06355) .. . the Maine Maritime Museum and the Calvert Marine Museum have each been awarded a $1 12,500 operating grant from the lnstiSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

f

tute of Museum Services (MMM, 243 Washington Street, Bath ME 04530; 207 443-1316; CMM, PO Box 97, Solomons MD 20688) .. . the Penobscot Marine Museum received a $40,000 grant from the NEH to_plan an exhibit entitled "An Ocean Going Community: Searsport at Sea and Ashore" (PMM, Church Street, SearsportME04974) .. . theJamestownYorktown Foundation has received major funding from the First Colony Life Insurance Company of Lynchburg, Virginia, to support the sailing of the three full-scale colonial replicas, the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery (J-YF, PO Drawer JF, Williamsburg VA 23187; 804 253-4138) ... the 200year-old structure in Amesbury , Massachusetts, that is the home of Lowell's Boat Shop will be renovated this year thanks to a congressional appropriation of $327,750 administered through the Massachusetts Historical Commission, reports Bill Barton, director of the Newburyport Maritime Society which

land (the refurbishment of downtown Birmingham) shared top honors for the Excellence on the Waterfront A wards presented at the 13th Waterfront Center Conference in Oregon last October (TWC, l536 44th Street, NW, Washington DC 20007; 202 337-0356) . .. the Nautical Research Guild has announced an Annual Essay A ward to encourage new research in the maritime heritage with prizes of $500 and $250 (Eugene L. Larson , 9223 Presidential Drive, Alexandria VA 22309; 703 360-2111). steamboat buffs can acquire a series of 90-minute tapes of various American, British and German steam engines at work from the New York Technological Society, 178 Emerson Place, Brooklyn NY 11205 ... the Steamboat Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, 20-23 June, will feature a wide range ofactivities forsteamboaters and their families, including lectures, tours , and riverboat trips (Steamboat Masters and Associates, PO Box 3046, Louisville KY 40201; 502 778-6784).

STEAM BOA TIN ':

POSITIONS Av AILABLE: Massachusetts Schooner Ernestina is taking applica-

z

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z

,..< ~"----~~~~~~~~~~~~--' ~

Lowell's Boat Shop

now owns the Boat Shop (LBSTrust, PO Box 1793, Amesbury MA 01913 ; 508 388-0162) ... the Delaware Bay Schooner Project's New Jersey oyster schooner A.]. Meerwald has received a $25 ,000 grant from the Cutty Sark Tall Ships Foundation for organizational development and operational expenses (CSTSF, PO Box 110231, Stamford CT 06911-0231 ; DBSP, PO Box 57, Dorchester NJ 08316; 609 785-2060) ... the World Ship Trust presented the Maritime Heritage A ward to the Royal Netherlands Navy monitor Buffel of 1868 and the A ward for Individual Achievement to Mrs. Wil Van Son for her role in preserving the ramship Schorpioen of 1868 . . . people-friendly waterfront projects in Massachusetts (the restoration of the Deer Island Pumping Station in Boston Harbor), New York (the NYS Recreationway Plan to develop a linear park along the canal system) and EngSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

tions for the upcoming sailing season for a master, mates, AB sail, engineer, steward and educators (Gregg Swanzey, Director, Massachusetts Schooner Ernestina Commission, PO Box 2010, New Bedford MA 02741-201O;508 992-4900, fax : 508 984-7719).

PEOPLE: Professor Barry Gough, from the History Department at Wilfrid Lauri er University in Waterloo, Ontario, has been named Editor-in-Chief of the Peabody Essex Museum 's The American Neptune, replacing outgoing editor Timothy Runyan (PEM, East India Square, Salem MA 01970; 508 745-1876) . .. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Julian Oswald, GCB, former First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, has succeeded Arthur Weller, CBE, as chairman of Britain's Maritime Trust (MT, 2 Greenwich Church Street, London SEIO 9BG, UK).

Full information on the stories in Spun Yarn appears in Sea History Gazette, Vol. X, No. 12 and Vol. XI, Nos. 1 & 2.

We'll send you the three Gazettes for $6 or include them gratis ifyou subscribe to the Gazette for one year (6 issues) at $18.75 ($28.75 for foreign postage).

Iron Men, Wooden Women Geu der and Seafaring in th e A tla11tic World, '/700-1 920 edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling " T his collection not o nl y sketches life at sea in all its deta il an d dive rsity but also expands o ur understandin g o f th e con necti o ns of ge nder, occupatio n , class , colonization , and race at sea and on land." -Jeanne Boydsto n , University ofWi sco nsin- Madi son 304 pages, 11 ill us., $16.95 paperbac k

Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World Lionel Casson " This is unqu es tionabl y th e fin est ge neral reference on th e subj ect of an cient seafa ring; copiously iUustrated, erudite, and always readable." -A111erica11 Nept1111e 469 pages, 197 illus., $19.95 paperback

The Good Ship Ships, Shipb11ildi11g, and Technology i11 E ngland, 1200-1520 Ian Friel T he Middle Ages we re a tim e of unprecedented change in shipbuildin g in no rthern Europe, bringing tec hn ological inn ova ti o ns that would have far- reachin g effec ts o n wo rld hi story.

224 pages, 86 illus., $35 .95 hardcove r The Johns Hopkins University Press Hampden Station, Baltimore, Maryland 21211 To order, call l -800- 537- 5487.

41

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42

REVIEWS Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius W ho Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel (Walker & Co., New York NY, 1995, 224pp, biblio, index , ISBN 0-80271312-2; $19hc) Tracking the story of how the problem of finding a ship 's longitude at sea was solved by the obscure amateur clockmaker John Harri son, this lively account tackles a subject beset by technical difficulties and historical obscurities with admirable clarity and coherence. Against all odds, Harrison 's clocks proved accurate enough for safe navigation and rugged enough to survive long-distance ocean voyaging.

Ms. Sobel follows the development of alternative methods such as determining east-west position from changes in the magnetic variation of the ship 's compass-a solution that occurred to Christopher Columbus on his Atlantic crossing of 1492. But variation, though it does change with east-west position on the face of the globe, is too irregular to give useful results. The astronomical solution, long sought, was reliably determined by Harri son's rival, the brilliant, Cambridge-educated Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. Maskelyne 's " lunar distances" solution depended on tracking the moon 's relati vely swift progress across the skies against the timeless stars, to arrive at a standard time on earth, which, compared to local time, would give you your di stance from the position where local time matches the standard time.

The concept of the moon moving like the hand of a clock against the fixed background of the stars is elegantly simple- but unfortunate! y the extreme! y precise observations required were not.

As many as seven observations had to be taken to be reasonably sure of the data, and translating the data into standard time demanded elaborate calculations. It took a skilled astronomer (not an ordinary ship's navigator) four hours or more to get the longitude from a lunar sight.

The idea that a clock could be made to keep a standard time to compare with local time seemed plainly fantastic, particularly when that clock would have to weather changing temperatures and humidity , amid the leanings, jounces and crashes inseparable from ocean voyages in sailing ships. Also, to a sophisticated mind like Maskelyne 's, it clearly seemed improper to rely on a mechanical sol ution to a problem that could be

resolved by mathematics. Such leading philosophers as Galileo and Isaac Newton had bent their minds to this leading problem, which became acute with the opening of the ocean world to longdistance voyaging.

Thi s business of locating a ship' s position on the spinning globe seemed to fall in the same order of business as determining Earth 's place in the solar system. And as the aging Newton pointed out (he died in 1727, three years before Harrison brought his first nautical clock to London), with the mechanical solution once the longitude was lost-if the clock stopped for any reason-it cou ld not be recovered . But with accurate observations and the C011'1putational geni us of the human mind, the longitude could be determined anew, direct from the observable clock face of the universe.

Much more satisfactory!

Some such reflections as these may explain Maskelyne's dismissive treatment of Harrison, and his actual maltreatment of Harri son's clocks as they came to the Royal Astronomer for judgment. The author wisely makes allowance for this, suggesting that Maskelyne was not so much the villain of the story as the anti-hero. He was an intensely focused person who simpl y could not recognize the facts of proven performance based on an alien system of ideas and di sciplines. But Captain Cook, an extraordinarily able navigator, perfectly capable of finding his longitude by lunars, swore by the versions of Harri son 's clocks which he took on his second and third global voyages.

With Ms. Sobel's sympathetic grasp of the interplay of character among the actors in thi s long-drawn drama before Harrison's achievement won full recognition, toward the end of his life, it is startling and distressing to find an egregious error early in this otherwise distingui shed work. By an almost unbelievable misconception of the di sciplines of the Royal Navy of the day, she reports that a sailor aboard the Association, just before she was wrecked off the Scillies, presented an accurate but contradictory reading of the ship 's position to Admiral Shovell, who thereupon summarily hanged the sailor for mutiny.

This never happened, nor could it have happened as the author describes.

Under the rules of the " wooden world" that was the Royal Navy , even actual mutineers had to be tried with legal representation before a board of officers SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

before being sentenced.

Queried on this point, the author tells us that she had heard the story from a reliable source, but had been unable to verify it. "It could have been true," she told us. But the incident, in fact, was not in the bounds of possibility. Some animus seems to have given the story credence in the author's mind; her description of the wreck of the Association and the fleet the flagship led to destruction on the rocks , with appalling loss of life, is rife with condemnatory remarks about Shovel I. But.Shovel! was a victim of the limited accuracy of navigation in his day and the vagaries of a north-setting current which runs through the Scillies, giving navigators trouble today as they pass by this notorious graveyard of ships.

Fortunately the author 's animus does not appear to have affected the rest of the book, where, as I've noted, she is quite fair to the brilliant but vindictive Maskelyne. Her feeling for John Harrison and his son William is sound, affectionate and balanced, never degenerating into blind partisanship. One feels one truly gets to know this man whose delicacy and sureness of touch in conceiving and building clocks was not matched by any corresponding sensitivity in dealing with conservative naval officialdom, or indeed in dealing with the English language, which he mangled atrociously.

Ms. Sobel made a fortunate decision in resolving to go to England to get to know Harrison 's surviving clocks firsthand. There she shared with her two young children the wonder of these machines, which were indeed the wonder of their age. She also met a retired naval officer who had devoted twelve years of his life to restoring four of Harrison ' s clocks to working order, and through him she got a special feeling for Harrison ' s achievement. She sums up that achievement memorably: With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth- temporal--dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world ' s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

PETER STANFORD

Tall Ships and the Cutty Sark Races,

by Paul Bishop (Aidan Ellis, Henleyon-Thames, Oxon, UK, 1994, 160pp, illus , biblio, index , ISBN 0-85628-2219; ÂŁ25hc + ÂŁ4s&h) SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

The Sail Training Association (ST A) and Cutty Sark Scots Whiskey have been organizing and sponsoring a s.eries of races for tall ships since 1956. The marriage of ST A and Cutty Sark has become almost synonymous with tall ships, and this tidy book chronicles the organizational development and the history of the Cutty Sark Tall Ships races.

Amply illustrated with graphic silhouettes and a full-color photograph of each of 58 tall ships, Paul Bishop ' s book provides a description of the fleet, along with a discussion of the races, their "ratings," and an appendix which lists all the class winners for the 84 different race-legs held from 1956 to 1993.

Casually put together to emphasize the "endangered" status of sailing ships as working vessels , the ST A events began with seven vessels racing from Torbay to Lisbon in 1956. Forty years later, three of the original seven are still sailing and the fleet has multiplied with the creation of over 20 Class A square riggers in the last decade.

As Bishop elucidates, the races are handicapped with an elusive and secret "Rule of Ratings" which purports to make older and newer vessels competitive. Much is made of the secrecy in the ratings, though all the participants know that the age and hull material of the ship give advantages to older and wooden vessels. These "ratings," thus, account for more of the repetitive "winners" than actual sailing experience, skill and performance on the sailing courses.

Janka Bielak ' s photographs are excellent and reflect her vantage point from a committee boat at the start of many of the, races. The individual silhouettes are interesting, but do not reflec t realistic proportions of the vessels to one another. It is hard to visualize the proportional range of Sedov at 386 ' to the smaller Class A-II Asgard 11 at I 0 I '.

Editorially, the selection of these 58 vessels gives a sampling of the major participants in the events, though one cannot understand the exclusion of Canadian vessels, or the Mexican bark Cuauhtemoc. The United States is represented by the Eagle and the Pride of Baltimore II, which have both participated in J;:uropean events. The inclusion of Blue Clipper and Tunas Samudera over other more popular vessels appears to be idiosyncratic rather than informative, however.

It Didn't Happen On My Watch

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canoe aboutthirty-three feet long ....

Chesapeake Bay in the Civil War, by Captain Turpin owned this boat and Eric Mills (Tidewater Publishers, was regularly engaged in the blockCentrevi lle MD, 1995, 284pp, illus, ade-running business, carrying pasnotes, biblio, index, ISBN 0-87033-4 79sengers and contraband goods.

4; $29.95hc) Though a very hazardous business, it At the start of the Civil War, Chesawas very profitable, twenty dollars in peake Bay was a crucially important gold being the fare each passenger piece of water real estate with North and had to pay.

South struggling for its control. Up the Potomac lay the capital of the United This is a story of gunboats, smugglers, States; up the James lay the Confederate privateers, and the movement of mighty capital. Control of the Chesapeake could armies, of cavaliers and street-brawlers, determine the course of the war. In the political prisoners and prison-camp hell, Chesapeake's waters, fierce and tragic shoreline artillery and tidewater guerrilbattles would be waged, naval warfare las, blockade-running oystennen and the would be changed forever, and the Civil unsung sailors of the Potomac Flotilla.

Historian Bruce Catton wrote: "The War would finally be won.

The author portrays Chesapeake Civil War is the thing that makes country from the months preceding the America different. It is our most tregreat conflict to shortly after the death mendous experience, and it is not quite of Abraham Lincoln. A rich panorama like anything that ever happened to anyof fascinating Civil War history emerges: one else. The story of this war needs the war's first deaths on the streets of retelling because it helped to shape the Baltimore; Franklin Buchanan com- future of the human race. " (The Amerimanding the ironclad CSS Virginia can Heritage , 1960). And Eric Mills (popularly known as the Merrimack) as brings the people and events alive, so she sounded the death knell for the age that the reader fully experiences the of sail; Naval Academy instructor John actions and emotions of those long-ago Taylor Wood becoming one of the most courageous fighters. For the first time, feared Confederate raiders on the Bay; the complete history of the role of Chesacountless soldiers losing their lives at peake Bay in the Civil War is told. the hellish POW camp at Point Look- History buffs, Civil War buffs and readout; Jefferson Davis imprisoned at Fort ers in general will be captivated by one of the most exciting narratives of an Monroe.

One scene describes President Lin- historical happening to come into print.

LILA LINE coln aboard the Miami , determining Royal Oak, Mary land when and at what point troops would land at Ocean View, Virginia: Miami returned to the location with Sumner-Gearing Class Destroyers: President Lincoln. Earlier, he and Their Design, Weapons and EquipStanton had combed the same coast- ment, by Robert F. Sumrall (Naval Inline by tugboat; they, too, had thought stitute Press, Annapolis MD, 1995, it promising-in fact, they'd wanned 320pp, illus, appen, gloss, notes, biblio, to a spot just a mile or so away .... index, ISBN 1-55750-786-4; $59 .95hc) Sumrall, the curator of ship models The troops began moving out at midnight, nearly six thousand of them in at the US Naval Academy Museum, canal boats towed by steamers. The provides the reader with "a study of a soldiers rode in the boats while cav- single generation, the Sumner-Gearing alry steeds and fieldpieces filled the Class, covering its development and steamers. The guns of the Rips Raps evolution in the course of nearly forty bombarded Sewells Point to foster years and three wars in the service of the the illusion that the landing would be US Navy ." Beginning with a discussion made there. Meanwhile, the first troop of pre-World War II naval development transports were arriving at Ocean in general and destroyer evolution in particular, the author traces the design View by 1: lOam. Although the CSS Virginia and USS of destroyers through the 1920s and Monitor are probably the best known 1930s, culminating in the classic Fletcher seafaring participants in the conflict, class in 1940.

The early years of WWII before US even the Chesapeake Bay log sailing involvement provided design and opcanoe got into the action.

The boat used in conveying this party erational information which led to a across to the Virginia shore was a new design in 1942. It became the SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

,,

...

Sumner class, the first of which was commissioned on 26 January 1944.

Initially devoting a chapter to the Sumner-Gearing class design, Sumrall follows with five chapters dealing with armament, fire control, electronics, engineering, and conversion/modernization. This in turn is followed by a postscript and three detailed appendices .

In hi s postscript, Sumrall states that "fifty years of service is certainly a tribute to their designers and builders."

Be that as it may, as a gunner 's mate serv ing on one of these destroyers in the mid- l 970s, I did not reli sh the thought of going to war with a forty-year-old . gun system and virtually no anti-aircraft defense! By then these ships had long outlived their usefulness.

With that minor objection noted, Sumrall has written a design study tourde-force that provides invaluable detail and information on all aspects of this important post-World War II class of destroyers.

HAROLD N. BOYER Aston, Pennsylvania

.

)

Nelson: an Illustrated History , edited

by Pieter van der Merwe (Laurence King Publishing, London UK/Trafalgar Square, North Pomfret VT, 1996, 176pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 1-85669061; £11.95/$22.95pb).

This handsome large-format publication tells the story of the world ' s bestknown admiral, drawing on the matchless holdings of England's National Maritime Museum to illustrate Nelson's life and times. A very readable text places Nelson's career in the context of the Age of Revolutions in which he won the defining victories at sea, leading to the overthrow of Napoleon ' s empire and the opening of the hundred years ' Pax Britannica, 1815- 19 14. Brian Lavery contributes di stingui shed chapters on the Royal Navy of Nelson's day and an incisive di scussion of his victories.

Original letters and other documents of the time are exte nsiv ely quoted throughout the work, adding considerably to its interest and value. With the solemn portraits, battle sketches, lusty cartoons of the era, and such objects as the ship's bell of the San Josef (the ship Nelson captured and used as a " patent bridge" to board another, still more formidable ship), thi s well researched and richly illustrated volume does much to bring to life a vani shed era surviving today onl y in Nelson's shi p HMS VicSEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

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CLASSIFIED ADS Ship Paintings Restored. Museum quality restoration of old paintings. Damaged old ship paintings purchased. Peter Williams, 30 Ipswich St., Boston MA 02215. By appointment: 617-536-4092 Compass and Binnacle restoration , repairs and adjusting. J. K. & E. Enterpri ses, Inc., 7075 12 l st Way North, Seminole FL 34642.

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Any key. Any quantity. Free info. Quick ship. Visa/MC. Lockrnasters. 1-800-46 10620. Fax 904-235-7658 Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, hand-crafted, signed & numbered models, size 5" x 7" price $ 15 + $2 shipping. Money-back guarantee. Maritime Museum , 1214 Church St. , Galveston TX 77550. Also available tall ships Elissa & Santa Maria. 409-762-562 1.

Historical oil paintings, aircraft, marine, WWII. Free brochure. Don O'Brien, ISMP, PO Box 802, S. Denni s MA 02660 USA. Shipping or maritime links with South Africa? We will investigate your enquiry : Port & Starboard, SA Maritime Historical Research, PO Box 50892, Waterfront 8002, South Africa. Fax 02 1 754 907 .

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US Brig Niagara, reconstruction of Perry ' s square-rigged 18 13 flagship, wi ll spend the summer of '96 on an East Coast voyage, visiting ports from Norfolk, VA to Canada and has openings fo r professional and vo lunteer crew. Three weeks minimum sign-on is required : ex perience levels from lots to none are welcome. For the thrill of a lifetime send inquiries and/or resumes to: Mary Jo Yonkers, Yeoman, PO Box 862, Erie PA 165 12.

26 year s of Sea Classics. Vol.I , No. I (1968) through Vol.28, No. I 0 ( 1995). Twenty binders indexed and dated. $750 + s/h. Edward W. Wolcott, 7336 Shirland Ave. , Norfolk VA 23505 , 804-423-22 13.

Torpedo Junction : Submarine and Naval History Books. PO Box 227 , Penn grove CA 9495 1-0227. Internet # vividvision.com/ - jwatts/comsubpac. html Ships Wheels, Burma teak circa 1900s. Two wheels 68", $ l ,200 each. One 70" brass hub, $ l ,400. Reill y,GreenlandNH 603-436-6286.

To place your classified ad at $1.60/word, phone Carmen at 914-737-7878. Or mail your message and payment to Sea History.

46

REVIEWS tory, preserved at Portsmouth , and in the traditional Royal Navy toast to Nelson: "To the immortal memory." PS NEW & NOTED Historic Photographs at the National Maritime Museum: An Illustrated Guide, by the National Maritime Museum (Ashford , Buchan & Enright, Leatherhead , Surrey, England, 1995 , 184pp, illus, indices, ISBN 1-85253320-X; ÂŁ16.95pb) This guide to photographs held by the National Maritime Museum focuses on their 220 collections of negatives-some include several hundred or thousand images (the Villiers collection, for example, has 20,000 negatives). The alphabetical listing of individual collections is followed by indices that allow searches by person, corporate body, place, subject, and vessel names and types.

Courts of Admiralty in Colonial America: The Maryland Experience, 1634-1776, by David R. Owen and Michael C. Tolley (Carolina Academic Press, Durham NC, with the Maryland Historical Society, BaltimoreMD, 1995, 456pp, appen, biblio, index , ISBN 089089-856-1; $45hc) This collaborative effort of an admiralty lawyer and a political scientist traces the transmi ssion of British admiralty law to the colonies. It describes the evolution of the courts of admiralty in Maryland, bringing in comparisons with other colonies and placing it in the context of Ameri-

NAUTICAL RESEARCH Gu IL D The Guild's acclaimed quarterly N AUTI CAL

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can coloni al hi story. The extensive use of primary documents from both sides of the Atlantic is particularly noteworthy as is the focus on the first two centuries of our hi story-providing insights not only into the labyrinthine hall s of admiralty law , but also into the day-today realities of shipping practices.

The Ship that Held the Line: The USS Hornet and the First Year of the Pacific War , by Lisle A. Rose (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1996, 328pp, illus, notes, biblio, index, ISBN 1-55750-729-5; $34.95 hc) On 20 October 1941, the new Yorktown-class aircraft carrier Hornet (CV -8) was commissioned ; one year later, she went down off the Santa Cruz Islands during the stru gg le to take Guadalcanal. The carrier's gripping, though brief, hi story is recounted through the eyes of her officers and men, as she launched the US counteroffen sive in the Pacific, played key, if controversial roles in significant battles such as Midway, and led the way for the future of carrier warfare.

A Quest for Glory: A Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren , by Robert J. Schneller, Jr. (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 1996, 480pp, iI !us, notes, biblio, index, ISB N l-55750-7627; $37.95hc) After his death , RADM John Dahlgren' s wife Madeleine wrote that he des ired "the recognition of posterity." Despite worldwide recognition of hi s abilities as a naval ordnance designer, command of the Washington Navy Yard and the Bureau of Ordnance, and a personal friendship with Abraham Lincoln, Dahlgren never felt he achieved his goa l. Thi s work recounts the story of his ri se in the US Navy and the occasionall y self-destructive decisions he made in his quest for glory.

Silas Talbot: Captain of Old Ironsides,

by William M. Fowler, Jr. (Mystic Seaport Museum , Mystic CT, 1995, 238pp , illus , index , ISBN 0-913372-73-0; $29.95 hc) Here, Mystic presents the colorful biography of the second captain of the nation 's ship, the USS Constitution. For him, command of the Constitution was a means to an end , proof of hi s statu s in the new republic. Hi s drive toward that goal exemplifies our vision of the opportunities avai lable in the formative years of our nation as a poor boy makes good through ambition , talent -!, and luc k .

SEA HISTORY 77, SPRING 1996

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NEW! The NMHS Tote. Sturdy canvas with our logo on one side, andeithertheCommander (shown above) or the bark Kaiulani on the other. Navy blue on natural.

10 x 14 x 5" $12 + $2 s/h.

by Katrina Sigsbee Fischer and Alex A. Hurst. A comprehensive and loving look at the artist's life and work as seen by his daughter. Beautifully produced on art paper with many personal photos, the artist ' s pre liminary sketches, and 200 of his finished works, 103 in full color. 259 pp, 60 full -page illus, 50 sketches and drawings.

HC $50 + $4 s/h.

Armored Ships, by Ian Marshall. Beautiful accurate watercolors accompany a spirited account of the world ' s most renowned armored cruisers and battleships.

SC $28.95 + $3.75 s/h.

Ironclads and Paddlers, by Ian Marshall.

Watercolors and pencil sketches help trace the evolution of ironclads.

HC $34.95 + $3.75 s/h.

The International Register of Historic Ships

by Norman J. Brouwer. Second edition, en larged to cove r 1,200 vessels, fully illustrated and indexed, a wealth of information .

HC $57.75 , SC $37.75 + $4 s/h.

The Marine Society of the City of New York, 1770-1995: A Concise History

by Gerald J. Barry. This book covers the sweep of events, the personalities and changing affa irs that shaped New York port. With a fo reword by Walter Cronkite, maps, drawings and phoHC $17.50 + $2.50 s/h. tographs.

J

For a full listing of all the books, shirts, mugs and

other merchandise we have for sale, call or write Erika, and she'll mail our four-page brochure to you right away. Proceeds benefit the work of the Society.

Old Ironsides, by Thomas C. Gillmer. The story of America ' s most famo us fighting ship, with some never before published paintings of the ship and new art from marine artist William Gilkerson. HC $24.95 + $3 .75 s/h.

To phone in your credit card order, or for a complete list of merchandise, call Erika at

1-800-221-NMHS Or write to: NMHS, Attn: Erika, PO Box 68, Peekskill NY 10566

NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY SPONSORS

THE A CORN F OUNDATION

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