No. 83
NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY
WINTER 1997-98
SEA HISTORY.
75
THE ART, LITERATURE, ADVENTURE, LORE & LEARNING OF THE SEA
LEARNING How TO SAIL USS CONSTITUTION The Seaports of Operation Sail 2000 Miss Austen's Harbor of A Century Ago The Cape Hom Road, Part XIII James Craig Returns to Her Element Pacific Steam Schooners
ISSN 0146-93 12
No. 83
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SEA HISTORY
SEA HJSTORY is publi shed quarterl y by the National Maritime Historical Society, 5John Walsh Bou levard , PO Box 68 , Peekskill NY 10566. Second class postage paid at Peekskill NY I0566 and additional mailing offices. COPYRJGHT © 1997 by the National Maritime Hi storical Society. Tel: 914 737-7878 . POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Sea History, 5 John Walsh Boulevard , PO Box 68, Peekskill NY I0566. MEMBERSHIP is invited. Afterguard $ I0,000; Benefactor $5,000; Plankowner $2,500; Sponsor $ 1,000; Donor $500; Patron $250; Friend $ I 00; Contributor $75; Fam il y $50; Regul ar $35 . All members outside the USA please add $ 10 for postage. SEA HISTORY is sent to all members. Individual copies cost $3.75. OFFICERS & TRUSTEES: Chairman, Craig A. C. Reynolds; Vice Chairmen, Richardo Lopes, Edward G. Zelinsky; President, Peter Stanford; Vice President, Norma Stanford; Treasurer, Bradford Smith; Secretary, Marshall Stre ibert; Trustees, Walter R. Brown, W. Grove Conrad, Fred C. Hawkins, Jakob Isbrandtsen, Guy E. C. Maitland , Karen E. Markoe, Warren Marr, II, Brian A. McAlli ster, James J. Moore, David A. O ' e il , RADM Thomas J. Patterson, Nancy Pouch, Ogden Reid , Charles A. Robertson , Howard Slotnick, Louis A. Trapp, Jr., David B. Vietor, Harry E. Vinall , Ill, William H. White, Jean Wort; Chairman Emeritus, Alan G. Choate FOUNDER: Karl Kortum ( 191 7- 1996) OV ERSEE RS: Chairman, Townsend Hornor; Charles F. Adams, RADM David C. Brown, Walter Cronkite, John Lehman, J. Willi am Middendorf, ll , Graham H. Phillips, John Stobart , William G . Winterer ADVISORS : Co-Chairmen, Frank 0 . Braynard , Melbourne Smith; D.K. Abbass, Raymond Ake r, George F. Bass, Fran c is E. Bow ke r, Oswa ld L. Brett , Norman J. Brou wer, RADM Joseph F. Ca llo, Willi am M . Doerflinger, Franci s J. Duffy , John Ewald , Joseph L. Farr, Tim othy G. Foote, Willi am Gilke rson, Th omas Gillme r, Wa lter J . Hande lm an , Charl es E. He rde nd orf, Steven A . Hyman, Hajo Knuttel , Gunnar Lundeberg, Conrad Mil ster, Willi am G . Muller, Dav id E. Perkins, Nancy Hughes Richardson, T im othy J. Runya n, Ra lph L. Snow, Shannon J. Wa ll , Th omas We ll s AMERICAN SHIP TRUST: Chairman, Peter Stanford; Trustees, F. Briggs Dalzell , William G. Muller, Me lbourne Smith, Edward G . Zelinsky NMHS STAFF: Editor, Peter Stanford; Executive Editor, Norma Stanford; Managing Editor, Justine Ahl strom ; Contributing Editor, Kev in Haydon ; Accounting, Joseph Cacciola; Membership Development & Public Affairs, Burchenal Green; Assistant Membership Secretary/Merchandising, Erika Kurtenbach; Membership Assistant, Irene E ise nfe ld ; Advert is ing Assistan t , Ca rm e n McCa llum; Secretary to the President, Karen Ritell ; Director of New York Operations, Will iam Becker; Education Coordinator, Dav id A llen
WINTER 1997-98
CONTENTS 2 DECK LOG & LETTERS 6 NMHS NEWS 8 THE AMERICAN FLAG AT SEA: Early Activities of the US Merchant Marine in Latin America by Roberta M . Delson , PhD 11 THE CAPE HORN R OAD, PART XIII: Captain Cook Offers the World a New Picture of Itself by Peter Stanford 19 USS Constitution: 200 Years of the Battle and the Breeze 20 USS Constitution Sails Again! 21 Forging a C rew to Sail " Old Ironsides" aboard " HMS" Bounty by Carl Herzog 25 SHIP OF THE ISSUE: The James Craig Returns to Her Element by the Staff of the Sydney Maritime Mu seum 29 NMHS/OPERATION SAIL EDUCATION PROGRAM & The Operation Sail 2000 Official Ports, Part I by Peter Stanford & Kathryn Shelton 35 MARINE ART: New York Harbor a Century Ago: Alice Austen 's Photographs by Justine Ahlstrom 40 Annals of the Pacific Steam Schooners compiled by Karl Kortum 43 MARINE ART NEWS 44 MODELMAKER'S CORNER: HMS Beagle Revisited by Karl Heinz Marquardt 48 SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS: Kalmar Nyckel-American Merchant Marine Museum News-Cutty Sark Tall Ships' Races Report-World Ship Trust Roundup-The American Navy at Whitehall- Inveni Portam-Calendar 56 R EVIEWS 64 P ATRONS COVER: "Old Ironsides" reef ed down in an Atlantic gale . Painting by William G. Muller, oil on canvas,20" x 14". To inquire about the original painting, whose sale will benefit NNHS , call 914 737-7878. For the complete painting and other stories on Constitution, see pages 19-22.
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NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY
LETTERS
DECK LOG The talk between my father Alfred Stanford and me went on for over an hour-an enjoyable but somewhat intense hour. We were arguing about whether a sea celebration our Society was planning should be about saving the sea environment, which we agreed was now at risk through man's depredation, or about learning from mankind 's experience in opening the oceans to human traffics and interchange and what that meant to the development of mankind. Imagine my pleasure when I opened the following week 's issue ofThe Milford Citizen, the paper Al published in that old seaport town on the Connecticut shore. The headline-he was always a good headline writer-read:
the rich stew of historical experience as so much useless dishwater. Rafe Parker, of the Sea Education Association , whose students learn oceanography and the humanities in two fine ships that keep the sea year-round, spoke aboard " HMS " Rose to this effect on the eve of the frigate 's departure on her European tour in 1996. It shortchanges history, he suggested, to say that its study saves you from making the mistakes of the past. In fact, searching the historic record will not guarantee you won't make the same mistake againthat takes recognition, imagination, discipline and resolve.
"Sea Day is About the Things It Takes More Than One Generation to Learn"
The ideal product of historical education is, surely, a person fit to take command of his or her own life and role in society in the unruly seas of our human experience. The concept is well expressed in the traditional Unlimited Master's License, good for "any ship, any tonnage, any ocean." Experiential learning can make a vital contribution to education in history. Building a working replica of an ancient Greek ship, as Michael Katzev did with the Kyrenia Ship in the 1970s, can teach us in ways no computer simulation can. In NMHS we seek to extend this experience as widely as possible and in the greatest depth achievable. So we take tremendous joy in the arrival of young people in tall ships on the American eastern seaboard in Operation Sail 2000. Even the build-up to the occasion will inspire more public interest in our American ventures in this field , from the great seagoing Indian canoes of the Pacific Northwest to Caribbean dugouts and the revived Liberty ships of World War II, now steaming with volunteer crews on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. The NMHS/OpSail Education effort begins in the OpSail cities, as reported on pages 29-33 of this issue. This incl udes a special report on New York, where the Hon. Ogden Reid leads our New York Harbor Renaissance, as part of the NMHS Maritime Education Initiative, chaired by Walter Cronkite. All of us know that both the purpose we are addressing and the means to carry it out depend from the outset on you, the members of NMHS. With your help we'll build the bigger ship we need to fulfill our educational mission .
That was it-the environment, man's experience, human destiny and the changing generations. That was precisely what we were-and are-about, phenomena that go beyond one's life span, things that can be picked up only in the slowerrhythms of experience and meaning. This is best done by immersion in the quest for the changing experience and what's enduring in it, rather than a quick grab at "lessons." The "lessons" approach is vulnerable to prevailing ideologies and "cure-all" answers to problems that should be grappled with, rather than explained away with set-piece answers. History, which is above all concerned with reality, rather than man's latest construct of it, has a way of shattering such hardand-fast answers as a growing tree splits a rock. When Jakob Isbrandtsen greeted the crew of the full-rigger Libertad in New York 's South Street some years ago, the young trainees had just come through a furious squall. All hands had had to jump into action, hauling on lines on slanting decks and scrambling aloft to secure thundering canvas. Wet foulweather gear hung dripping on the bulkhead. "We' re not just going back to the past here," said Jakob. "We're getting down to fundamentals ." Any historian should be delighted by such words, for they establish our changing human experience as a seamless, continuing, ever-fresh challenge; a far sounder approach (and surely more interesting!) than working out a set rota of lessons, which is all too likely to encourage the unwitting student to throw away 2
"Any Ship, Any Tonnage, Any Ocean"
PETER STANFORD
A Salute to Chairman Alan Choate I have received Alan G. Choate's letter of resignation as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the NMHS. I think he has done a magnificent job and well deserves his retirement. I find it hard to believe that we will ever find anyone with hi s patience, optimism, dedication and ability, not only to keep the ship afloat, but to bring her to port floating above her marks! I would like to add my personal salute to the many I am sure he has already received for a job well done. THOMAS HALE
NMHS Honorary Trustee Vineyard Haven , Massachusetts "NMHS News" (p.6) reports on Alan Choate' s resignation and the election of a new chairman.
Alive and Well in Canada The series on commercial fishing in the Autumn 1997 issue was well done. We were particularly interested in Jay Martin's treatment of the Great Lakes fishery , valuable summary of the history of the industry on the inland seas. We would like to point out, however, that like Mark Twain 's death , the demise of our industry may have been exaggerated. While the fishery on the US side of the lakes is a remnant of what it
a
The modern fish tugs Lasher 0 and Ashton Mac enter the harbor at Wh eatley, Ontario.
once was, commercial fishing in Ontario continues to be an important part of the economic life of many people here. A recent study by the University of Windsor places the economic impact of the commercial fishery in two Ontario counties at$400 million , and the processing plants at Wheatley, on Lake Erie, are among the most modem in the world. Nearly 100 modem, diesel-powered, steel vessels, with an average length of 70 feet, harvest fish on the north shore of Lake Erie, and there are commercial fisheries on all the Canadian Great Lakes. Ontario was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to adopt an Individual Transferable Quota management system and SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
is now entering a new agreement with the government to develop a cooperative management regime for many other aspects of the industry. We pride ourselves on maintaining a commercial fishery that is dedicated to managing sustainable stocks for the maximum benefit of all user groups. I hope we can always keep in mind that there are two sides to the Great Lakes, and , like a coin, sometimes there are differences. FRANK PROTHERO Communications Manager Ontario Commercial Fisheries' Ass ' n Blenheim, Ontario
USS Constitution 's Knees I read with interest the letter from Admiral Batcheller, USN (Ret.), in Sea History 82 relating to Constitution' s knees , since I was involved with the live oak he described. In the early 1950s I was the officer-in-charge of the restoration of Constitution at Boston Naval Shipyard. The specifications for that restoration required that all material be the same as that used in the original construction. No plywood, laminations or substitution of other wood species was permitted. We conducted a nationwide search for longleaf yellow pine, white oak logs large enough for the bowsprit bits, and live oak for frames and knees. We found the first two with some difficulty but the live oak was a major problem. All live oak in the US was on private property and owners would not part with the beautiful trees. In the archives, we found that the Navy had established stocks of live oak, stored underwater to keep the wood workable, in ponds in Pensacola, Florida, and at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire. The Pensacola wood was unavailable since the Naval Station tarmac covered the pond. So on a trip to Portsmouth we located a chart showing the live oak pieces with their locations in the pond. We removed the pieces in the shapes we needed and were able to complete the work without using any substitute materials . So, although the Portsmouth live oak wasn 't used in the '90s, it was in the '50s. CAPT JOHN R. KALINA , USN (Ret.) Nat'l Museum of American History Washington DC T2 Tanker v. Navy Fleet Oiler I've been following with interest the letters comparing the T2 tanker and the US Navy fleet oiler. Many years ago I SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
sailed on a T2 and I also served in the Navy as Engineering Officer on a fleet oiler. Capt. Block 's letter (SH 82) fairly well describes the operation of the oiler, with a few additions . Underway replenishment is accomplished at 10 to 12 knots at a distance of about 150feet. This can get exciting if the gap suddenly changes. Typically an oiler would have a carrier on the port side with four fueling rigs operating and a destroyer on the starboard with two rigs. In some instances it was necessary to take on ballast and deliver cargo at the same time, in addition to operating the twin screw main propulsion plant and all auxiliary equipment on the ship. Such all-hands refueling operations could last 12 to 18 hours or longer. LTRUSSELLM. BLAIR, USNR (Ret.) Westport, Connecticut
Our Heritage in Shipbuilding A component of the maritime historical field that seems to be neglected by your magazine is shipbuilding. Unfortunately, when shipyards close, the land is generally sold for other purposes and most of the evidence of the shipbuilding industry ceases to exist. To recognize the contribution that shipbuilders have made to our country's heritage, I have been compiling a record of shipyards throughout the Stateswhere the yard was, how long it operated, and how many and what type of vessels were built there. So far my list contains over 2000 names with various amounts of detail on each yard. Di scussions on this project with maritime historians led to the idea of a register of ship plans. A preserved ship may be the ideal way to show "how it was" but a set of drawings is a definite second best. It would be good to have a register of surviving drawings , their whereabouts and availability. Due to shipyard methods of storing drawings, many are in very fragile condition and need steps taken to ensure their preservation. If anyone would like to correspond about either subject or to assist me with the compilation of data on shipbuilders, I can be reached at 106 Sylvia Drive, Yorktown VA 23693. GA VIN DUNCAN Yorktown, Virginia
"Crazy Otto" Gave It Away was delighted during a visit to my boyhood home in Peekskill to find your
organization and to discover Sea History. Capt. Carl Bowman-who took the historic Star of India to sea (SH 79) - is a legend in the Coast Guard. His term as captain of USCG Eagle is remembered with admiration by all who sai led under his command. I trained in Danmm;k in 1943 and later taught at the Coast Guard Academy and aboard the Eagle , launched in Germany in 1936 as the Horst Wessel. I found it interesting that the Eagle 's plant was paralleled by the plant used in German U-boats-DC auxiliary power, a diesel main engine, and a free-pistongasifier air compressor. The cadets dubbed the last "Crazy Otto" since it shook, rattled and rolled in a clever and frenetic way. The characteristic noise allowed our AntiSubmarine Warfare patrols to track down surfaced U-boats at night in World War II. Its acoustic signature had all the low frequency components of a well-researched audio aid-tonavigation, unfortunately for Das Boot. Often in the wardroom I would ponder over the Germans who had trained on the Eagle during the 1930s as their nation spun into that Nazi madness. Historians today seem to consider WWI and WWII as a single combative era. We can be thankful that the historic lessons of Versailles were taken to heart and that the hand of brotherhood was extended to our former enemies after WWII. CDRGEORGERODGERS, USCGR(Ret.) Fairfax, Virginia
Calling All Bartlett Boys As many Sea History readers know, Captain Bob Bartlett acquired the fishing schooner Effie M. Morrissey (later Ernestina) in 1924 and converted her for Arctic work. Bartlett had been captain of the steam bark Roosevelt in 1906 and 1909, from which vessel Peary and Henson took their departure for the Pole. He was probably the most experienced and skilled Arctic sailor of this century. The first voyage of Captain Bob 's " little Morrissey" was in 1926. He went every summer making his last voyage in 1945 . Except for the last five voyages , which were organized by the US military , he always took eight to eleven young boys, ages 14 to 19, as "ordinary seamen." We were and are known as " Bartlett boys." I was lucky enough to go in 1940, the year we reached 80° 22 ' N Lat on 5 August. I have kept in touch with some of my shipmates and with others connected with the Morrissey.
3
LETTERS She was acquired by Captain Mendes from Cape Verde in 1948 and became a Brava packet under the name Ernestina, bringing Cape Verdeans to the ports of Providence or New Bedford-sixteen round voyages-and continued in the interisland trade for many years. She went ashore in Cape Verde in 197 6 while on the way to the first Operation Sail in New York City to represent the newly independent nation, but was rebuilt and in 1982 was presented to "the people of the USA" as a gesture of friendship. Although she was substantially rebuilt, there are several original futtocks and hanging and lodging knees and the main deck is still mostly original 1894 hard pine. She is operated as a training vessel by a commission appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts. We had a successful reunion of Bartlett boys in 1983 , organized by Rick Lopes, a film maker and NMHS trustee. Some of us have discussed another reunion on the ship in July . While I plan to be here for another 50 years, we all may not be so lucky and all of us are well into our seventies or beyond. We would like to invite Bartlett boys and their descendents and friends to attend . Interested parties can contact me at PO Box 224, Chilmark MA 02535 , or call me at 508 645-2220. FRED LITTLETON Chilmark, Massachusetts
Elissa-the Real Thing! I was in Galveston recently and dropped by the Texas Seaport Museum. It is a microcosm of how America 's maritime heritage can be preserved. Alongside a small wharf is the Elissa (1877), which visited this little port several times at the tum of the century. She was in the cotton and banana trade and may have even had a hand in some gun smuggling in those halcyon days of yore! Elissa is a pretty little thing-a gem that has been totally restored. I even peeked into lockers near the fo'c'sle and saloon areas--everything shipshape and Bristol fashion! Alongside the wharf is the work shed with a loft. Scattered about are coiled rope, strops, blocks and tackle, lumber, hand and machine tools, bolts, cable, shackles, paint and tar, giving the feel and smell of the real thingbecause it is the real thing! The slide show in the maritime museum gave me goose bumps. The introduction features a panoramic shot looking down upon an open sea, stark and 4
glaring in the sun. Way off to the right, almost lost in the broad expanse, is the small speck of a sailing ship going about her business. It is the Elissa. Subsequent shots show her in glory as she fills the whole screen under full sail. Little kids in the audience watched in fascination, without uttering a peep. Her setting is perfect-no wind , no fog, no perpetual surge. She rests in the tranquility of a mill pond, overlooking nearby shipping, and tankers and shrimp boats come and go, while commerce goes on along busy city streets . All that is lacking is the clop-clop of dray horses. Volunteers-that's the key. Inspired volunteers maintain the vessel constantly and share camaraderie in keeping the old gal trim. Sail training programs are ongoing to teach landlubbers the skills required to serve as crew when Elissa takes wind and ventures into the Gulf. It would be worth your while to take a trip to Galveston and feel the pulse of a maritime past in which the people share a great civic pride. WILLIAM BURGESS Arlington, Texas
Traverse Sailing Today On a visit to the Ships of the Sea Museum in Savannah, Georgia, an item on display intrigued me: a traverse board. I first learned ocean navigation when 16 years old. We did ded. reckoning by traverse sailing (and I still do). When I saw this device, I immediately was struck with how useful it could be on a small boat at sea today. The board was a piece of suitable wood cut in a circular pattern,
A traverse board of the 1500s (from The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, by Peter Kemp (London, 1976))
six or so inches in diameter, with radials from the center inscribed to the outer edge along each point of the compass or perhaps each quarter point. Small holes were drilled along each radial for noting the speed. To record course and speed, the quartermaster or mate simply put a pin in the hole along the radial corresponding to the course, and on this radial at the position corresponding to the speed. Thus at the end of a watch, the peg would show where changing speeds and courses had brought the ship, in direction and distance made through the water. I intend to make one for use on my own boat, Zubenelgenubi. WARREN NORVILLE Mobile, Alabama
A Welcome for NMHS in Bermuda Thank you for the burgee presented to the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club on behalf of the National Maritime Historical Society during your visit to Bermuda in September. It has been added to our display of burgees from all over the world. We are happy to extend Honorary Membership io your members visiting Bermuda. A short letter of introduction on your Society's letterhead, signed by one of your officers, should be sent to us prior to the visit. THOMAS E. C. MILLER, Commodore Royal Bermuda Yacht Club ERRATUM Being retired from the Ford Motor Company, I was particularly interested in the article on the International Fishermen's Races (SH 82), which discusses the race between the schooners Henry Ford and Bluenose. The only Henry Ford that I was familiar with was the ore carrier in the Ford fleet plying the Great Lakes until abo ut ten years ago. While examining her lines in the photograph of her launching, I was bemused by the caption reading" .. . the group in the center, standing firm despite the vessel 's rapid descent." I believe they are standing firm simply because they are not aboard the Henry Ford, but safely ensconced on the stern and taffrail of a vessel adjacent to the Henry Ford. PETER RILEY Poulsbo, Washington Michael Flannery and Fred Hecklinger also informed us of this egregious error. We were so taken up by the excitement and clarity of this historic photograph that we did not examine it as closely as we should have . No excuse!-ED. SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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.NMHSNEWS New Chairman Elected by the Board of Trustees
NMHS Aboard the QE2
Alan G. Choate, who became chairman of the National Maritime Historical Society in early 1992, has resigned after long service as a member of the Board of Trustees and more than five years as chairman. For his leadership and dedication to the Society, the trustees unanimously voted to designate him chairman emeritus. In his letter of resignation Choate reported: "Almost thirty years ago I met Peter and Norma Stanford for the first time .... I was immediately infused by Peter's enthusiasm as I am today, 30 years later. . .. When I became Chairman, my announced goals were financial stabilization of the Society and establishment of an enthusiastic Board of Trustees with an understanding of what the Society seeks to accomplish and the desire to support that work and move the Society forward. As we approach the end of 1997, my original goals have been met and the Society stands on the brink of much bigger things .... I believe there are other members of the Board who are best qualified to take these next steps." Peter Stanford, president of NMHS , said of Choate: "Alan signed on when NMHS was a small outfit with perhaps 300 members, headquartered in South Street. He worked from the beginning on charting a clear course for the Society and the fruits of that concern are evident from the achievements of his five-year term as chairman. Alan became a great friend of our founder Karl Kortum as well as Norma and myself in the decades of his service as trustee. We look forward to continuing that friendship and to his continued advice and guidance in coming years ." The incoming chairman of the Board of Trustees is Craig A. C. Reynolds , who, as chairman of the development committee, has set the Society well on the road to gaining substantial grants from foundations and individuals concerned with education and the preservation of our maritime heritage. As chairman, Reynolds looks forward to "bringing to fruition the work initiated by Peter Stanford and Alan Choate. Our partnership with Operation Sail 2000 to develop educational programs for young people and adults in anticipation of the greatest gathering of tall ships on the East Coast is a challenge and an opportunity for NMHS. The recent announcement of the New York Harbor Renaissance, a project initiated by NMHS to bring all the harbor's cultural and hi storical institutions to work together and to make them accessible by water will bring new life to New York's waterways for the Parade of Ships in the year 2000 and beyond." Two new trustees were elected at the Board meeting on 15 October-the Hon. Ogden Reid , former US Ambassador to Israel and member of Congress, who will coordinate government relations, and William H. White, who will develop the activities oftheNMHS Regional Councils. Longtime trustee Marshall Streibert was elected secretary. J,
Over the Labor Day weekend, 138 NMHS and John A. Noble Collection members cruised to Bermuda aboard the historic ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. Members and trustees came from as close to home as New York City, and as far afield as California, Kentucky and Ohio. We enjoyed beautiful weather on the voyage to and from Bermuda and experienced the heat of late summer on the island. Members gathered for maritime films and Peter Stanford's illustrated talks on the transition from sail to steam in the North Atlantic and John A. Noble and his art, and met informally to trade sea stories and share a love of our maritime past-and its future! On Bermuda we managed to shop, snorkel, swim, tour and go sailing. We also welcomed aboard Jacqueline Horsfield , director of development for the Bermuda Maritime Museum, and her husband Drew, with Bryan Darby, a local news commentator and manager of the Royal Navy Dockyard. They introduced us to the history of Bermuda and the Dockyard and we visited the museum the following day . Our members also enjoyed a buffet lunch at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. NMHS Events Chairman Jean Wort plans other cruises with The John A. Noble Collection and other maritime associations. The first is aboard Norwegian Cruise Line 's Norway, launched in 1960 as the SS France. This cruise, 7-14 February, will take us from Miami to St. Maarten,St.John, St. ThomasandNCL's private island, with three complete days at sea (see ad, p. 4 7). For a brochure, call NMHS at 914 737-7878 or Pisa Brothers Travel (Pauline Power or John Ferguson) at 1-800-786-4164.
New York Harbor Renaissance Announced by Ogden Reid, Walter Cronkite and Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern In the shadow of the Intrepid Museum, leaders of New York Harbor's cultural and historical institutions gathered aboard the frigate Rose on 15 October to hear from Walter Cronkite, Commissioner Henry J. Stem of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation , the Hon. Ogden Reid, former US ambassador to Israel, Charles Robertson , chairman of OpSail, and Peter Stanford, president of NMHS, on the inauguration of the New York Harbor Peter Stanford, NMHS president, Charles Renaissance. This is a project initiRobertson, OpSail chairman , and Walter ated by NMHS, working in cooperaCronkite introduced the NMHS New York Har- tion with the public and private secbor Renaissance aboard "HMS" Rose. tors, to survey and strengthen the educational and cultural fac ilities of New York's storied harbor, and to improve public access to these institutions, particularly by water. The aim is to have the harbor itself a park, alive with activities as the tall ships of Operation Sail stream into New York in the year 2000, when the eyes of the world will be on the city and the harbor from which it grew. J,
6
BURCHENAL GREEN
Jacqueline Horsfield, director of development for the Bermuda Maritime Museum, Peter Stanford, NMHS president, Fred Hawkins,NMHS trustee, and the Rev. Gerald Keucher, John A. Noble Collection trustee, at the Bermuda Maritime Museum.
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
SHIP MODELS SINCE 197 5
What You, Our Members, Tell Us The response to the questionnaire on the wrapper of the Autumn Sea History (#82) has been remarkable. Over 1,600 members filled out and returned the lengthy set of questions regarding the content of Sea History and broader plans for the work of NMHS . Briefly, the most widely read items in Sea History are (in order) Deck Log, Ship Notes, NMHS News , and Cape Horn Road . The least read is Marine Art News, although the marine art feature rated well , with nearly 50% reading it "always" and 26% reading it "often." The most popular subject matter was sea adventures , with general maritime history a close second and World War II a close third. The merchant marine and nautical archaeology showed well despite their specialized topics. In comments, the most frequent request was for more pages and more frequent issues, six or twelve a year. In our third section, purpose and goals, publishing Sea History rated far above any other category, with 79% rating it "essential" and 18% " important. " The job of building a national constituency for the maritime heritage rated second and saving historic ships was third. All other activities ranked well below these three. The personal information revealed that we take an active interest in our subject: 48 % of us have taken a foreign trip, 46% visited a museum three times or more in the past year, and 48 % are willing to participate in a local council ofNMHS , if one is formed in their area. That we appreciate the seafaring experience is clear: 45 % of our members own a boat, with sail the most popular type. A hefty 42% have served in the Navy and 26% in the merchant marine with all the other services represented. A whopping 92% of members are interested in marine art and 65 % are collectors of maritime items. We are serious readers, with 92% buying two or more books a year and frequent requests for "more" Sea History. A full 40% are college graduates and 48 % have done postgraduate work. We feel much encouraged by so many enthusiastic responses and are glad that we got to know our members better. The comments and good words were especially helpful, and we are grateful to the hundreds of members who took the time NFS to send them to us. SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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THE AMERICAN FLAG AT SEA
Early Activities of the US Merchant Marine in Latin America by Roberta M. Delson, PhD
Commercial relations set the pace for diplomatic relations between the United States and Latin America-and the American merchant marine was at the forefront.
T
he destiny of the United States of America was linked to that of Latin America well before the independence of eitherregion. The bonds were initially commercial, even while political alliances were effectively impossible because of colonial restrictions. In spite of mercantilist policies that required all products to go through English ports and forbade intercolonial commerce, shippers in the thirteen colonies carried out a flourishing trade with their southern neighbors. They were quite familiar with Caribbean ports in fellow British colonies such as sugar-producing Jamaicaand Honduras (today Belize) where Philadelphia's ships took cargoes of flour in exchange for the Honduran mahogany that furnished that city's cabinet makers. There was also illicit trade with French, Spanish and even Dutch possessions, and, as England became involved in trafficking in slaves in the 1700s, her North American colonies contributed ships and crew to the effort. For convenience, however, we can date the advent of large-scale Yankee shipping ties to Latin America to the Seven Years' War, when the British successfully invaded Cuba, wrested it from Spanish control and revitalized the port of Havana. 1 Under British control, over seven hundred ¡ ships entered the port in an 11month period in 1762. This was an exponential expansion of trade, since only some 15 ships entered the Cuban port annually under Spanish rule. During the English occupation of Cuba many of these vessels sailed from British North American ports and were crewed by local seamen. Such shipping brought foodstuffs, timber, ironware and slaves to an eager Cuban market. Although Cuba was returned to Spain at the conclusion of hostilities in 1763, the alacrity with which the Spanish-Americans bought Yankee goods whetted North American commercial appetites. This brief Cuban experience signaled the start of widespread commercial excnange between the North American 8
colonies and the vast territories held by the Spanish and Portuguese empires to the south. When the thirteen colonies rebelled, Havana reopened to North American traders, and the insurgents readily supplied Cubans with wheat and flour, equipment for the sugar industry, and naval stores. The rebels also traded out of Santo Domingo and New Orleans, using these ports as entrepots for exchange of goods from La Plata (Buenos Aires) and Chile. Dutch ports in Saint Eustati us and Saba also welcomed the rebels. In short, those eager for the eclipse of British colonial power opened their own colonial ports to the rebels and initiated a trade that has been of considerable importance ever since. By 1788, shippers in the now independent United States not only had a flourishing trade with Caribbean and Gulf ports but also with ports on the east and west coasts of South America, Such trade was officially viewed as contraband by Spanish authorities and thus ships had to be disguised as whalers, seal hunters or China trade vessels. Nevertheless, this trade with Latin America was very important to the new nation; it accounted for at least one-fifth of exports as well as imports. This was especially the case when Spain was at war with England in the 1790s; in 1797 Spain was forced to open her Latin American ports to neutrals, and US ships flooded into Vera Cruz, Venezuela and Buenos Aires. While much of the trade was in reexports, largely of British goods, the market for North American products was definitely being cultivated. Some of the earliest sought-afterproducts were the actual North American ships, which were often purchased soon after they had entered Latin American ports as neutral traders .2 In this manner, and also through direct purchase, the Buenos Aires merchant marine acquired nine brigantines and 19 bigger ships from the US between 1796 and 1805. This trend continued, especially after the conclusion of the Warof1812, when many US citizens eagerly disposed of their privateers to southern neighbors. Moreover, US seamen began to offer their services as crew for these vessels. This was so much the case that by 1810 the US government appointed Robert K.
Lowry as Commissioner for Seamen and Commerce to Venezuela while Joel Poinsett received a similar position for Buenos Aires, in effect the first US diplomats to the region. In the next few years commissioners were sent to Chile and Peru. All of these areas, of course, were still officially colonies of the Spanish government; in reality, however, they were operating on their own after the Napoleonic invasion of Spain hindered contact between Spain and her territories in the New World. The beginning of the independence movements in Latin America in that same period increased US interest in the region. Anxious not to upset the delicate negotiations with Spain over the purchase of Florida, President Madison declared the young nation to be neutral in the insurgents' cause. In actuality-, US seamen and ships were deeply involved in the Latin American struggles for independence. US privateers were instrumental in Jose Artigas 's independence campaign in the Cisplatine (Uruguay), for example, while the Madison government did not really attempt to stop Latin American rebels from purchasing arms and supplies in US ports. In this manner Baltimore shipbuilders were able to sell vessels to the insurgents, while New Orleans served as a port from which Latin American privateers (manned heavily by US seamen) could operate. A large number of US sailors were either recruited by rebel vessels pulling into North American ports or were "shanghaied" to serve the Latin American independence cause. The US sailors who joined the Latin American rebels included men who had distinguished themselves in naval battles in the Revolutionary War and who had become merchant sailors. One such individual was David Jewett, who offered his services to Argentina and later to Brazil (a Portuguese colony) where he was appointed to the rank of Admiral. While British sailors (including the redoubtable Lord Cochrane) also served in the Latin American struggles, Jewett reckoned that the US sailors were the best of the lot. In a letter written to his brother from Rio de Janeiro, 3 Jewett complained thatthe "associates"brought by Cochrane to Latin America "would be rejected in a well organized Pirate SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
[venture] and those sent from England were obliged to leave England for want of imploy [sic] in the Merchant Service." By contrast, the North Americans were so well prepared as merchant seamen that there was hardly anyone who "could not obtain imploy as Second Mates of Ships." When Spanish-American and Portuguese-American independence had finally been won (the date of the last struggle is usually taken as 1824) the US was in a position to become deeply involved in commerce and shipping to the new nations. The US was the first nation to recognize the independence of the Latin American states. Underscoring the importance of this hemispheric trade was the commitment of her naval squadrons to protect the sea lanes; separate squadrons were formed to patrol the West Indies, Brazil and the Pacific coast of Latin America during the period of rebellion and after independence had been achieved. Merchant ships were thus provided with protection against piracy or the possibility of being caught in a political conflict. Yet even after 1824, when Spain's possession s in the hemi sphere had di mini shed to just Puerto Rico and Cuba and the Portuguese had given independence to Brazil, and consequently imperial obstacles to trade had been elimi nated, the US was still not the only player; it was not until the late 1800s that the US would overtake Britain (with France and Germany as strong contenders) as the premier trading partner of Latin American nations. In the meantime, US shippers steadily built up contacts, as seen by the ever increasing number of US ships pulling into Latin American ports. One such port was Belem do Para, Brazi l, at the mouth of the Amazon Ri ver. In 1832, US Consul A. Rafael Smith wrote to Edward Livingston , Secretary of State, to endorse trade with that port, which he was certain was destined to become a major trade center. 4 Within the decade his prediction came true, as US ships supplied Belem with diverse cargoes ranging from combs, flour and textiles to cordage and heavy machinery, including steam engines. 5 Not every chapterof this inter-American trade was noble, however; American sailing vessels were also deeply involved in suppl ying Latin America with African slaves. The usual practice was for US slavers to pick up human
cargoes in West African ports-a nd occasionally on the eas t coast -and off-load the captives in Brazil or Cuba. The ships involved were US built and the crews were American, although sometimes a Portuguese crew would sail the vessel back across the Atlantic. This trade was strongly condemned by the US as well as Britain, and naval squadrons from both nations relentlessly pursued slav in g Admiral David Jewett was a US merchant sailor who served in the vessels. Even so, Brazilian navy and was instrumental in achieving that country's independence from Portugal. Reproduced with the kind permission crews that refused of Candace Rifkin and other members of the Jewett Family. to obey their capta ins ' orders to transport African slaves were likely to tween Latin American and the US. In face charges of mutiny. 6 thi s regard, the US merchant marine The number of slaves brought to the may be considered instrumental in pavAmericas by US ships and crews was ing the way for a singular hemispheric substantial. When chased by naval ves- connection that remains of paramount sels the practice was to run up Spanish or importance even as we approach the Portuguese colors. In this manner, as 2 1st century. J, late as l 858, shipments of up to 1200 slaves at a time were deposited shore- Dr. Delson, an associate professor at side for sale in Cuba. The hi gh profit to the US Merchant Marine Academy, be made on such ventures apparently teaches Latin American studies and has compensated for the risks and the high published extensively on the maritime mortality rates encountered in the trans- history of the region. oceanic voyage. The invol vement of US merchant 'Although North American goods may have ensailors in Latin America is thus long- tered Cuba through Spanish Florida and New as early as 1750. reaching, if not always legitimate. By 2Orleans There were, however, important shipyards in the mid-1800s, trade with Chile had co lon ial Latin America- Bahia, Rio de Janeiro become commonplace, especially as and Belem do Para in Brazil and Guayaquil on the ships off-loaded East Coast products 3Pacific. Letter of David Jewett to his brother, Rio de and loaded up with Chilean supplies for Janeiro, 6 August 1824, unpublished. I am ingold miners in California. US ships be- debted to the late Richard Jewett of Nyack NY for gan to appear with regularity along the providing me with access to his forebear 's letters. Central American Pacific coast, stop- ' Letter of Consul A. Rafael Smith to Secretary of ping at such ports as Puntarenas, Costa State Edward Livingston, Belem do Para, Brazil , 13 August 1832. Thi s material is drawn from Rica, and La Union , El Salvador, even Consular Dispatches, National Archi ves of the while the Panama Canal was just a futur- US, Microfilm Series T378, Number 1. istic project. Refrigerated ships would 5These goods are noted in the bi-annual tabulation begin to transport their cargoes of ba- of US ships transactions in the port of Belem for 1830s. nanas from Central America to hungry 6the Perhaps the most infamous case was that of the US consumers by late in the century. Mary Ann, a US ship that sailed to West Africa in Thus maritime links between the re- 1848. The crew thought they were taking on palm gions pre-date the era of the Great White oil, but once on the African coast thei r captain told the cargo was to be slaves. The crew mutiFleet by easily a century. Indeed, it may them nied , took over the ship and once back in New be said that these early commercial ven- York (laws notwithstanding) they were tried for tures precipitated the political ties be- mutiny and docked a year's pay.
SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
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SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
THE CAPE HORN ROAD, PART XIII
Captain Cook Offers the World a New Picture of Itself by Peter Stanford he boy first learned of the sea by he'd fixed hi s mind. meeting old sailors, guessed Alan By age 24 he had risen to mate. In Villiers. Such sea wanderers, al- 1755 he reached a point of decision . He ways ready for a yam, thronged the was then 26 and it was something to be streets of the seaport towns of northern second -in-command aboard the cat England. And James Cook's mother, Friendship. As the ship worked her way Grace, and his Scottish father, James up the London Ri ver, Jam es Cook knew Senior, a day laborer in the fields who had worked his way up to managing a farm , saw to it that their son had a good education . The farm owner saw merit in thi s hard-working young famil y and paid for the boy's schooling. At 16he gotajobasapprentice in a general store in a coastal town near the thriving seaport of Whitby. Whitby , fronting on the North Sea, was full of the comings and goings of sailing ships-ships from Baltic, Mediterranean and Capwin James Cook Joseph Banks even American and far away Indian ports, bringing in the products of that he had been offered command on the wide world in England ' s growing his next voyage. An outsider with no trade of the later 1700s. But the main connections, he had achieved success trade from Whitby was in coal, carried early, with a promising career stretching some 200 miles south to the crowded before him, very likely as one of the houses and multifarious industries of owner-captains who were making Engthe great and growing metropolis of land the wealthiest nati on on earth. James Cook said no. He had other London. This was the easiest way for a ideas, and he decided to discard the opyoung man to get to sea. The coal trade was carried by a spe- portunity his hard service had openedcial bluff-bowed breed of coasting ves- and the standing he had won as a ship 's sels known as "cats. " The cat was a officer-to enli st in the Royal Navy as a small bark, broad of beam and flat-bot- seaman. This was a career other mertomed, suitable for working the sandy chant seamen , much less officers, strove shallows of the Thames estuary leading vigorously to avoid . But then, James in from the North Sea 30 miles upstream Cook was never one for the beaten path. to London. She was li ghtly rigged to A Room with a View save on crew costs, but ruggedly built to By 1768, atage 39, the taciturn , thoughttake the stress of grounding with a heavy ful Lieutenant James Cook, RN, had cargo in the ship 's capacious hold . risen about as high as a common seaman It was on one of these bulky, 450-ton could expect to go in the conservative ships, the Freelove, owned by a Quaker naval establishment. His careful chartsea captain, John Walker of Whitby, that making in the tricky shoals of the St. James Cook first put to sea. He was 18. Lawrence River had helped the Royal Going to sea as apprentice only three Navy get its ships up to Quebec to supyears short of achiev ing hi s majority at port General Wolfe 's successfu l attack age 21 meant only three years instead of on the French city, which had delivered seven or more to learn the seaman 's Canada to the English. His later survey trade, and only three years of virtually work on the North American coast had free labor for the shipowner. That Walker led to recognition by England's Royal took him on spoke well for the lanky, Society for his report of his observations rather silent youth 's outstanding quali - of an eclipse of the Sun off the lonely ties of listening quietly and thinking shores of Newfoundland. Hi s work was carefully in pursuit of a goal on which so accurate that it formed the basis of all
T
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
subseq uent charting-and thi s, before the best nav igators could get reliable, consistent measurements of longitude, their east-west position on the globe. Lieutenant James Cook, simply put, was the best of the best. The naval establishment had begun to recogni ze thi s by 1768, and so it was that Cook found himself among a remarkable group of people from London, the center of the English-speaking world. They met around a stout oak table in a low-ceilinged, paneled room. The room was lined with bookshelves and fitted with lockers to hold their papers and instruments, while in one comer stood a large globe, under a protective cover. The globe showed the world as it was known in the later 1700s -a sphere accurately depicting E urope and Africa, and even distant Asia and the half-ex plored Americas. Only in the reaches of the Pacific Ocean vast areas remained unexplored. But not unexplained! The most eminent British geographer, Alexander Dalrymple, had posited a huge continent in the southern part of this largest of the world's oceans, following the prevailing theory that thi s iandmass had to exist to balance Asia and the Americas in the north . And, indeed, various navigators had claimed to sight outcroppings of it. Staten Island, off Tierra del Fuego on the way to Cape Hom, was long thought to be a headland of this vast, mysterious continent. even after Drake had found open water well to the south, off Cape Hom. The men had been summoned to answer this question of Terra Australi s, the great southern continent, among other questions, and they met in so lemn conclave to compare notes and debate their findings . The room they met in was the best available, but it had its drawbacks, chiefly because of its location. The Scottish artist Sydney Parkinson, aged just 23, noted the difficulties in the remarkably lively journal he kept, observi ng that things got tossed about, uncomfortably, even dangerously, in that sequestered room. On 1September1769 he reported: "The sea ran mountain-high, and tossed the ship upon the waves: she 11
rolled so much, that we could get no rest, or scarcely lie in bed, and almost every moveable on board was thrown down, and rolled about from place to place. "In brief," he concluded, "a person, who has not been in a storm at sea, cannot form an adequate idea of the situation we were in." But the situation of that great cabin aboard His Britannic Majesty's Ship Endeavour was its great, in fact unique, advantage over any other possible meeting place. For these gentry from London, even as Parkinson, the youngest, wrote the entry noted above, were sailing in the remote South Pacific. They were finding no flowering Terra Australis there, but the wind-driven mountainous seas of the Roaring Forties-the belt of winds below 40° South, which howl right around the world to hurl themselves at South America, and at its tip, in 55°59 ' South Latitude, Cape Hom. In halcyon weather, the Endeavour had glided like a swan around Cape Hom on her way into the Pacific. Cook, of course, knew his good luck when the wind turned fair off the Horn, and he set studdingsails to capitalize on it, like a good seaman, stretching these light sails on booms extending beyond the yards knowing that they could be taken off in a minute or two in case of a bad turn in the weather. He noted that this was "a circumstance which perhaps never happen ' d before to any Ship in those seas so much dreaded for hard gales of wind, insomuch that the doubling of Cape Horn is thought by some to be a mighty thing and others to this Day prefer the Strait of Magellan."
The elegantly named Endeavour was anything but swan-like in appearance, however. She was, in fact, a coastal coal carrier, like the ships in which Cook had learned his shipmaster's trade. The Admiralty let him choose his own vessel, and he chose her for just the qualities that gave the vessel her dumpy, workaday appearance-name Iy her great beam for stability and carrying capacity, her shallow draft and flat floors to skim over all but very shoal reefs (and to sit upright if she hit and went aground) and above all her rugged construction, built to take a beating and to get up and continue her voyage if she did ground out on a falling tide. Cook later wrote that these qualities were not found in big warships, nor in East India Company frigates, nor in three-deck ships built for the Caribbean trade, "nor indeed in any other butNorthCountry-built ships such as are built for the coal trade." His choice was the Earl ofPembroke, a 368-ton ship just under four years old. A very exemplar of her type, bluffbowed , straight-stemmed, like her master she wasted no time on prettiness or pretence, "a plow-hauler among the racehorses" in the London River, as the square-rigged sailorman Alan Villiers put it. This unusual choice of a coasting vessel for a long-haul voyage is a mark of the confidence the Admiralty had in their shipmaster. And they promoted him to lieutenant for the voyage-for Cook a breakthrough.to officerhood and something approaching the gentry class, at last. The Ship's People As the official host of the party , Lieutenant James Cook was in undisputed command. With him was the astronomer Charles Green , appointed by the Admiralty to work with Cook on thi s voyage to the South Pacific to make an observation of the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun. This was undertaken at the request of the Royal Society of London as part of an international effort to get cross-bearings on the transit from different points on the globe, and so determine the critical measurement of the distance of the Sun from the Earththen not known . To do this, one had to be able to determine one's exact position on Earth. Endeavour spreads her wings , studdingsails set-the rig she carried with splendid swagger off Cape Hom. (From Captain Cook, by Alan Villiers (London, 1967))
Latitude, or north-south position , was readily determined by sights of the Sun or of the Pole star. Determining longitude, or east-west position, was a more difficult problem, but the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, downstream from London , had published tables that made this possible through checking the passage of the fast-traveling Moon across the stationary stars, so establishing a standard time that could be determined anywhere on earth. This standard time, based on the known position of the Moon against the stars in Greenwich at a given time, could then be compared with local time to tell you how far east or west you were from Greenwich-thus determining your longitude. The trouble was that the sights, or "lunars," required an astronomer's skill, due to the delicacy of the observation and the complicated mathematics involved. Cook and Green were fully equal to the job, and their observations, which they carefully checked against each other, established positions that frequently remain unchanged today, in the era of satellite navigation. Harrison 's chronometer, a seagoing watch that had proved able to keep constant Greenwich time at sea-Greenwich Mean Time, as it came to be called-was available to give a simpler reading of Greenwich time, but the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich was opposed to relying on a mechanical device to make determinations one could figure out oneself (with immense and rather chancy labor), so he refused to release the watch for this voyage. The Admiralty had further instructions for Cook. He was to determine whether the great southern continent of Terra Australis existed, and if it did , where it was. And Cook was also ordered to claim for England territories suitable for trade and development, particularly on the continental landmass. Dalrymple, the great advocate of the undiscovered continent, had pressed to be put in charge of the voyage. But an earlier voyage, to assess the possibilities of determining longitude through local variations of the magnetic pole, led by the astronomer Edmund Halley, had come apart due to Halley's giving incompetent orders to the crew, who finally refused to obey and sailed the ship back to England. The Royal Navy, following up on Secretary Samuel Pepys 's sweeping reforms of a century earlier, had by now established an admirable SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
professionalism. So it was ordered: No more navy crews run by a landsman. And the Admiralty, under the brilliant civilian Sandwich as First Lord and the tough warrior Edward Hawke as professional First Sea Lord, rejected Dalrymple 's terms as unacceptable. On the recommendation of Sir Hugh Palliser, under whom Cook had served at sea, the decision was made to put this virtually unknown but highly competent master mariner in charge.
Enlightenment London Afloat To Cook and Green, the Royal Society of London had added civilian volunteers, the London gentlemen who gave the voyage its unique character. Alan Villiers, seaman-author and surely the most qualified commentator on Captain Cook, who had come ashore and been living for years in Oxford in the heart of England when his biography Captain Cook appeared in 1967, surely had it right when he wrote: The great cabin of the little Endeavour made room for the most fantastic band of circumnavigating young university men-each brilliant in his own way-assembled up to that time for such a purpose, or anything like it. Joseph Banks, at the head of this group, was the patron of the voyage, the 25-year-old scion of a wealthy landowning family resident near Boston in Lincolnshire, which looks out on the North Sea less than I 00. miles north of London. Educated at both the top-flight rival school s of Eton and Harrow, he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford. There, dissatisfied with the teaching in botany, he had imported a professor from the rival university of Cambridge to teach this subject, which succeeded with students if not with the Oxford faculty. Villiers notes that little record of this distinguished graduate survives in Oxford, but in London, where Banks lived after graduation , he cut a considerable swath. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, the acknowledged center of humane, scientific and naturalist studies in England, and had made a voyage to Newfoundland before embarking on this South Seas voyage. Banks brought with him a party of seven, headed by the Swedish botanist Dr. Daniel Charles Solander, a student of the famous Linnaeus, and another Swedish naturalist, Herman Diedrich Sprong, who served as clerk and general factotum to Banks. The Scottish Sydney Parkinson, whose wry comments on the SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
The carvings on this New Zealand war canoe fas cinated the artist, Sydney Parkinson.
conditions of voyaging we've noted, served as the principal artist recording native flora, fauna and people and also kept his own remarkable notes on native ways , including detailed vocabularies of the different languages they were to encounter in the islands spread across thousands of miles of ocean. A second draftsman , also Scottish, Alexander Buchan, was an epileptic who died early in the voyage. Two footmen from the Banks manor in Lincolnshire and two black servants completed the roster. The attitudes these explorers brought to the new lands and native peoples they were determined to meet at first hand were those of the exuberant, expansive London in the midst of its own version of the European Enlightenment. This intellectual movement featured a search for truth based on empirical evidence and a growing belief in the power of reason to resolve human problemstrends reinforced, if not inspired, by humankind 's accelerating success in building machines and erecting social and economic structures that worked, in these early decades of the industrial revolution that was in the process of transforming the world and how humankind lived in it.
Entering Saltwater Space In our era of worldwide travel in the deeps of the sky above us, it is by no means easy to picture the intense loneliness of the vast reaches of the Pacific the Endeavour sailed into in 1769. Only the occasional voyager crossed this watery waste. The one regular! y traversed route, the passage of Spain ' s Manila galleon from Acapulco in Mexico to the Philippines and back across the North Pacific was customarily a matter of one ship a year. Others had been in the South Pacific, of course, but contact with the various islands as they were discovered by Western ships was sparse-sometimes more than a hundred years could pass between contacts. Such was the case with the islands Cook was first ordered to land on to
make his observations of the transit of Venus, the Marquesas. Alvaro de Mendana had sailed from Peru in 1567 in search of Terra Australis , which was then thought to lie fairly close to South America (on no evidence whatsoever). He had encountered nothing but empty ocean until, after sailing over 7,000 miles-more than twice the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean-he had come upon the Solomon Islands. On a second voyage, in 1595, he had come across the Marquesas, an island group some 3,500 miles distant, still more than the breadth of the Atlantic. Apparently no one had visited there in the intervening 173 years, and Mendana's was the only known chart on which the islands appeared-as vaguely located shapes. Cook was spared the search for this needle in a huge oceanic haystack by the timely return of the Dolphin, under the command of the able Samuel Wallis, from a voyage in which Wallis had discovered Tahiti and logged its location accurately. He arrived home in May 1768, as the Endeavour was fitting out, and hi s description of Tahiti, a beautiful mountainous island in a salubrious climate, made this the place to go. Several of the Dolphin 's people signed on for the Endeavour voyage. Even a goat that had survived the circumnavigation was signed on aboard the Endeavour. And three months later, on 26 August 1768, having embarked Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander, who hastened down from London with Banks's two greyhounds, the last of the party to join, Endeavour trundled out to sea from Plymouth, with 94 people aboard, ten guns and ammunition, and mountains of stores. She had been extensively remodeled below to take all this impedimenta in a bare cargocarrier' s hull. One of the changes was to enlarge the great cabin aft to a spacious, airy room, lit by small windows on each side and ending in a row of four arched windows , specially installed forthe voyage, with a space at the center, behind 13
"If we quarrelled with those Indians, we should not agree with angels." the rudder post. The gifted amateur Joseph Banks and his professional colleague Dr. Daniel Solander soon had nets out to scoop up sea life. This was duly studied and recorded in the great cabin, turned into a unique seagoing laboratory and study, with a red canvas carpet spread on the floor and the scrubbed walls reflecting sunlight gleaming up through the cabin windows. Heading south through the Trade Winds, they were enchanted to find that slim, silvery flying fish had flown through the open windows on their gossamer, multi-hued wings . That kind of thing just didn ' t happen in Oxford or London, except perhaps in dreams.
Venus Observed-in Tahiti The magic passage round Cape Hom had been marred by a tragic expedition ashore, when they stopped off for some botanizing led by Banks in Tierra del Fuego. The party had lost their way in a sudden snowstorm and the two African servants died of exposure, the others barely surviving. Two other men had been lost in drowning accidents. But the ship's people were in good health . As Villiers noted in his sailorly way, " the Endeavour had not a sick man aboard, no sign of scurvy, plenty of wild celery and other antiscorbutics, and recently shipped fresh water." Cook, like Drake before him, had insisted on a varied diet to prevent the dreaded scurvy, which reduced men to helpless wrecks before it killed them, and when a few stubborn old tars refused his unusual diet he had them given a dozen lashes, after which there was no trouble about the diet-and no one died of the disease. The ship's people were kept busy with work and drill alow and aloft, and the three-watch system (eight hours on, sixteen off) that Cook had installed meant that they had time for rest and recreation as well as adequate sleep. Slanting up toward Tahiti , in week after week of easy sailing, the Endeavour eventually came on the scattered islands of the Tuamotus. Banks and his colleague Solander were dying to set foot ashore, but Cook would not stop-he had a schedule to keep. But he did sail close by the islands, where they repeatedly saw natives waving at them as they sailed by--except at one island, whose inhabitants looked away from the great hillock of white canvas gliding past their surf-fringed home. Banks left his dinner to spend one evening at the masthead 14
admiring this strange land in a seemingly endless sea. Meantime, the men from the Dolphin, who had been ashore for a delirious spell with the native women two years before, spread word of the delights awaiting them in Tahiti. At last, the great peaks of the mountainous island, so different from the low coral atolls of the Tuamotus, appeared on 8 April 1769. The steady Trade Wind that had sent them bowling on their way faded away in flukey airs, and it took them two days to get around the north end of the island to Matavai Bay, where Wallis in the Dolphin had found shelter near ariverrunning down from the mountains. Excited Tahitians came out to sea in their canoes long before that, waving green fronds and calling "Taio," or "Comrade." They refused all offers to come aboard the Endeavour while she was under sail. They tossed up coconuts and fruit, accepting beads in return. "These canoes," noted the ever-observant Parkinson, "were just wide enough for one person to sit in the breadth: to prevent them oversetting, they place out riggers, upon the top of which is fixed a bamboo fishing rod. The people in the canoes were of a pale, tawny , complexion , and had long black hair. They seemed to be very goodnatured .... " He only later realized that none of the craft they'd seen, which included large, ornate vessels in Tahiti and New Zealand, was capable of the long ocean laps that had been covered in settling the islands. That chapter in the islanders' history had effectively ended before the arrival of the voyagers from Europe and England. Cook had ordered the ship ' s company "to endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a friendship with the natives and to treat them with all imaginable humanity." But their concept of property, never fully understood or condoned by the English, was one of sharing what was available. Some tussles took place once the ship was anchored, as the natives crowded onto her decks and began to grab every bit of ship's gear in sight. This was brought under control when a group of senior statesmen came aboard, who impressed everyone by their regal bearing and grave demeanor. These chieftains soon sent the unruly crowd packing, and the English breathed a sigh of relief as their canoes vani shed around a headland. On Cook's and Banks 's first trip ashore, the native women showed Banks
and his fellows "all kinds of civilities," including sexual invitations that the English felt awkward about responding to in public (in Banks ' s case, and in most seamen 's, this reluctance did not extend to later meetings in private). They sat down to a welcome feast of raw fish and cooked, plantains and coconuts with the local chief and his wives together with others including, noted Banks, "a very pretty girl with a fire in her eyes." There was merriment and carryings-on until Dr. Solander and the surgeon Monkhouse noticed their pockets had been picked. Among the missing items were a snuffbox and an opera glass. Banks raised a great fuss about this, and in a pattern that was to be repeated again and again , the chief went after the culprits and recovered the loot. The next day , when Cook led a party ashore to set up his observatory on nearby Point Venus (which still bears this name), a group of natives gathered opposite the marine guard he ' d left with the stores they ' d landed. One portly young man rushed at a marine, knocking him down , and ran away with his musket. The young officer in charge, a Midshipman Monkhouse, brother of the surgeon, ordered the marines to open fire. This killed the man who had taken the musket and injured others. The people in Cook's party were shocked at the shooting. "What a pity," wrote Parkinson in his journal, "that such brutality should be exercised by civilized people upon unarmed, ignorant Indians." And he cited Banks, who said: " if we quarrelled with those Indians, we should not agree with angels." Suiting his actions to his words, the young citizen of Oxford and London went after the natives and, through the mediation of an old man , prevailed upon many of them to return and drink coconut milk with the English. "They laughed heartily,and were very social," Parkinson reports. "Have we not reason to conclude, that their dispositions are very flexible , and that resentment, with them , is a short-lived passion?" Parkinson returned aboard ship to find his teammate Alex Buchan unconscious in an epileptic seizure from which he died. The ship 's boats took Buchan's body out to sea for burial, since the English wanted to avoid the troubles that might arise if the Tahitians saw this evidence that their visitors, for all their celestial ship and magic tools and weapons , were mortal and could die. In the ship ' s company, Buchan was much SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
missed, and Parkinson was left to do his sketches and paintings alone. This was the low point of the Endeavour's stay in Tahiti. Life picked up a kind of pattern as the people of the two cultures got accustomed to each other's ways. Early on, visitors and Tahitians came together in a church service. Cook, a man indifferent to organized religion, noted with evident approval that the Tahitians understood the English were speaking to their God , "as they themselves worship an invisible and omnipotent being." On another occasion, when the ship' s butcher forced the chief's wife to trade him the chief's stone hatchet for a nail, Cook had the man hauled before the Tahitians and flogged-a punishment that the Tahitian women tried to stop. Interestingly, though Cook and Banks were deeply sympathetic with the Tahitians, they used the European names they gave to Tahitians they came to know and do business with , rather than Polynesian names, which the English found difficult to pronounce. The humble artist Parkinson uses the Polynesian names consistently, so we read in his journal, for instance, of "one of their chiefs, named Tubora Tumaida, whom we called Lycurgus. " He compiled a vocabulary of nearly 500 words , including such sensitive translations as: "Tetooa-a title usually given to their women of rank, though every woman will answer to it," and "Tatta maro-a contradictory person, one that will not aJlow another to know as well as he," or as precise as "Peeo-bent, bending, crooked, turning, winding." He recorded words not just for brute need or commands, but words that lead you into a whole culture and human interchange. He also noted the names Tahitians used for the English, not being able to deal with some consonants: Toote, for Cook, Patine for Parkinson himself, and Mata for Monkhouse, the midshipman who ordered the attack that killed a Tahitian-leading one to wonder if the name, so different from the original, might not mean something else. He noted also that the language is very soft, having a great number of vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs, and very metaphorical. As an illustration, he cited "Mataavai, the name of the bay we anchored in, literally signifies Watery-eye," which he supposed was for the heavy rains, and, touchingly, Tehaia, the name of a woman who was lost as a child, "so SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
her friends went about crying Tehai? which means, Where is she." One would have to get quite deep in conversation to get that kind of derivation! The observation of the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun, the leading scientific object of the voyage, took place in perfect weather on 3 June 1769. One of the quadrants used had been tinkered with after being stolen by an acquisitive Tahitian, but this had been adjusted and everything worked well. The only problem , as Richard Hough puts it in his fine recent biography Captain James Cook, was one they could do nothing about, since it occurred 67 million miles awaywhere the edges of the planet were obscured by what Cook called "an atmosphere or dusky cloud," which rendered impossible an accurate timing of the entry and exit of the blurry body across the Sun's face . Cook averaged the figures he and the others had secured, -noting that there was excessive variation. In the end, it turned out that, with confused readings from other quarters of the world, the project had to be scrapped-a notable but failed astronomical effort. Cook went on to make a trip by boat and on foot around the island, calling on King Tiarreboo at the southern end, who had attacked Queen Obadia, ruler of the east coast, despoiling many settlements, slaughtering the inhabitants, and inducing a healthy fear in all the Tahitians Cook had been dealing with. Cook 's small party reported finding occasional heaps of fresh bones in their tour of the islands, and more decorating the king 's headquarters. Fortunately all went off smilingly with this formidable monarch. The great explorer Comte de Bougainville, who had stopped by in Tahiti in the well named La Boudeuse (saucy woman), shortly aftertheDolphin's visit, and a year before the Endeavour' s, brought back to France tales of smiling islanders living an idyllic life, giving ri se to the cult of the "Noble Savage," immune to all diseases and above the petty strifes and competition of modern civilization. It would take a long time to unlearn this myth , but while Cook, like Banks, recognized the islanders' quali-
A morai, or burial place , on the island of Yoolee-Etea , drawn by Sydney Parkinson.
ties, on more than one occasion calling them "nob le," he also had a keen awareness of their thievery and readiness to kill each other. The Endeavour Sailswith a Passenger The Endeavour set sail on 13 July 1769 with Cook's meticulous charts of the island, Parkinson's sensitive drawings, a host of new plants and animal and insect life recorded by Banks and Solander-and with a Tahitian guest aboard, the young aristocrat Tupia and his boy servant. They went on to explore the nearby Society Islands, where Tupia served well as ambassador, and then embarked on a long lunge deep to the southward to discover Terra Australis (as Banks felt they would) or disprove its existence (as Cook was sure they would). This was a rough, wild passage through the Roaring Forties and further south, leading to Parkinson ' s wry comments about things below decks, quoted at the beginning of our story. They came to New Zealand, inhabited by the warlike Maori, who shared the basic Polynesian language they'd encountered in Tahiti, and used similar utensils. The proud Maori battled the English in several encounters. The sur~ vivors of these encounters laughed and feasted with the English after the fray, with what seemed remarkable equanimity, and three stowaways actually tried to sail off in the Endeavour. Perhaps they feared retaliation from their brethren, but the Endeavour people, watching through glasses after they were put ashore, saw that they were welcomed back by their fellows on the beach. On one occasion, sailing down New Zealand's rocky east coast in the strong prevailing onshore wind, Cook refused to sail into a narrow inlet that he could not be sure of getting out of in the face of the adverse wind and high seas. Banks 15
Two Tahitians are memorialized in individual portraits by Sydney Parkinson. (From Journal of
a Voyage to the South Seas in HMS Endeavour, by Sydney Parkinson (London , 1984 ))
was indignant over this incident. He mentioned it several times after the voyage, until, presumably , the wiser among his friends told him to shut up. On they sailed, raising Tasmania and then the coast of Australia, where they encountered people living in primitive conditions, who did not speak the language of their guide Tupia, who was, following his adventurous resolve, fast learning new things about the wider world. As the Endeavour ran up the coast to the northward, she increasingly ran into shoal water and then islands and reefs. Sailing uneasily up the coast, looking constant) y for a clear passage ahead, she found none. They were, in fact, running into the toils of the Great Barrier Reef, which extends for over a thousand miles along the East Coast of Australia. Unaware of this uniquely menacing complex of razor-edged coral reefs, Cook kept a man aloft on lookout for the clear passage he felt must soon open up. A man was kept in the fore chains (the narrow platform outside the ship's hull to which the rigging was secured) making continuous soundings to get the depth of water. Cook anchored frequently to send out a boat to take soundings ahead. Then, on the evening of 10 June, a fine moonlit night with a good breeze, the ship stood offshore and found deepening water under her keel, 14, then 21 fathoms (or 84, then 126 feet) . All at once the leadsman called 12, 10 and then 8 fathoms. Cook was about to anchor, but the next call showed the water deepening again, so he held on in 20-21 fathoms. Just before llPM the water shoaled to 17 ( 102 feet, more than seven times the 14-footdraftoftheEndeavour). Before the next oast of the lead could be made, the ship struck a coral head. They had struck on a falling tide, and all hands
worked through the night and into the next day lightening ship; over the side went guns , stores , stone ballast and all their water. Cook even had the upper spars sent down and floated alongside to lighten the ship, while all hands worked the pumps to fight the leaks that developed as the vessel ground into the rock that held her. At 10:20PM the next night, with all the men at the capstan and windlass heaving at the anchors they had sent out with the ship's boats , the Endeavour came off. She was in dire straits, with the leaks gaining on the pumps, but they fathered her with an oakum-stuffed sail drawn under her keel, where in-rushing water drew it into the worst holes and reduced the leaks so that they could handle the inflow with just one of the ship's four pumps. The floating spars were recovered and sent aloft again, the ship ' s boats hoisted aboard, and the wounded Endeavour felt her way carefully along the shore until she found a sheltered beach in the Endeavour River. Here she was promptly hauled ashore. The worst leak was found to be partly stopped with a broken-off shard of the deadly coral that had sliced through both the sheathing and the heavy planking of the ship ' s bottom. It was a big job to rebuild the ship ' s hull, and then foul winds held her trapped in the river. But eventually, after two months ' stay, she broke clear on 13 August. She cleared the Great Barrier Reef after a few harrowing near misses in the treacherous terrain and sailed on through the Torres Strait bet.w een Australia and New Guinea, coming to refuge at last in the thriving Dutch port of Batavia (today's Djakarta) on the north coastofJava. Here the ship was properly overhauled for the long voyage home. But now a terrible blow fell on the ship ' s people, as practically everyone fell sick of a local fever in the crowded city with its sewage-laden canals. Tupia and his servant died, among others. And on the voyage across to the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, a necessary rounding point for the long run up the Atlantic to England at last, 20 more hands died, including the gentle, brilliant, steadfast Parkinson.
A Safe Return-and off Again The ship came to anchor off Deal, at the mouth of the Thames, on 13 July 1771 , and later that year Cook took his wife
Elizabeth home to meet his father and John Walker, in whose charge he ' d first gone to sea in the North Sea collier trade. By July the next year he was off again, this time with two ships , the Resolution and the Adventure, but without the impetuous Banks. Banlcs had asked for a bigger ship, but Cook had prevailed and once again a North Sea cat was chosen, though one bigger than the Endeavour, with a consort ship to avoid the horrors of losing a ship thousands of miles from any help. Banks insisted on bringing a large entourage aboard, which entailed adding a deck and poop. This proved too much for the sturdy cat, making her so unstable that the pilot refused to take her past Sheerness at the mouth of the Thames. Cook, who had said nothing during this farce, got things properly squared away after the added hamper had been sawed off, and pursued a remarkably successful voyage, sailing closer to the South Pole than man had ever gone. Banlcs flounced off to Iceland with his fellow naturalists and the musicians he had planned to take along to while away the evenings in the South Seas. He went on to a distinguished career as Sir Joseph Banlcs, President of the Royal Society. He never lost hi s admiration for Cook, to whom in later years he gave more credit than when he first came ashore from his "Grand Tour of the World" in the Endeavour, to the adulation of the papers and the fashionable world of London. Even Dr. Samuel Johnson chimed in, writing a Latin verse for Banks to engrave on a collar for the goat who had survived her second circumnavigation. The goat, by the way, died a few weeks later, perhaps from the abundance of Elizabeth Cook 's wellkept garden. The second voyage, on the model of the first, was well staffed with scientists, and an outstanding landscape painter, SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
William Hodges , substituted for the gentle hum ani st Sydney Parkin son, whose bones were left on the floor of the Indian Ocean. Parkinson ' s cantankerous brother Stanfield managed to publish Sydney's splendid journal, after some quite unnecessary battles with Joseph Banks over who had rights to what. A Fateful Dinner Party On 9 January 1776, soon after returning from his second voyage, Cook was invited to dine at the Admiralty with Sandwich, the First Lord, and his old commander Palli ser, Comptroller, and the Secretary, Stephens-high company indeed for a farmhand' s son! At dinner the talk was of a new discovery to be made (or di sproved), a "comm unication between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans," through North America. Various inlets on the Pacific Northwest coast, and in Hudson's Bay, teasingly suggested such a passage might exist. As they discussed who mi ght lead the exped ition to find it, Cook abruptly stood up and said that if so commanded , he would lead it. The top men of the most powerful navy in the world rose as one man to toast his decision. They knew he was, in fact, the best. Later Cook wrote his old 'boss John Walkertosay: "It is certain I have quitted an easy retirement, for an active, and perhaps dangerous voyage." On 25 June 1776, less than a year after his return from the second voyage, Cook set sail in his old ship Resolution accompanied by a new escort, Discovery. In some ways it proved hi s greatest voyage, as he delineated pretty well the whole vast range of the Pacific Northwest, hitherto virtually unknown to Western navigators, and uncovered the rich seal fisheries on Vancouver Island and the hitherto completely unknown Sandwich Islands, which we know today as Hawaii. These discoveries were to prove vital to a whole new era in Pacific nav igation and trade, in which the young American Republi c, in the depths of the Revolution when these discoveries were being made, would rapidly assume leadership in Pacific voyaging. The discoveries, important to hi story, were fatal to Cook. He was killed by the Hawaiians after mounting an illadvised puniti ve raid against their vi llages following the theft of the ship ' s longboat-admittedly, in Western eyes, a major crime. But Cook had handl ed other confrontations more wisely in the past, and throughout this voyage there were repeated signs of a bone-deep faSEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
In his "A View of Otaheite ," William Hodges , the offi cial artist on Cook' s second voyage, shows local craft, while Resolution (left) and Adventure are ar anchor in the bay (c. 1776). (Courtesy National Maritime Museum , London )
ti gue, and resulting shortness of temper and loss of balance in his thoughts. Almost as much of a god to the Engli sh as to the Hawaiians who killed him, people did not perhaps realize that Cook, at 50, had worn him self out in the service of the Navy and , indeed, humanity. The Actual Achievement The spirit of inquiry under which the gentlemen investigators and di scussants embarked aboard the Endeavour on Cook ' s first voyage around the world trul y reflected the spirit of the organization that sponsored their venture, the Royal Society. The Society functioned informally in meetings in Oxford and London until 1660, when it began regular sessions as the tolerant Charles II came out of exile to become king. Charles soon chartered it (1662) as The Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. Unlike similar institutions founded in Europe in thi s era, it did not work to establish absolute rules , but rather encouraged free discussion of theories and discoveri es in the natural scenes. Its publication, Philosophical Transactions, covered all sorts of topics, reaching even to an ambitious project to reform the English language. Nicolas Boileau, in France, had managed to overhaul , remold and regularize
the French language, giving that tongue the admirable lucidity and clarity it exhibits today. But tackling the lively quirks and layered irregularities built into the English language through the impact of many cultures and the tendency to accept change and compromise that characteri zed the popular experience as the nation took shape proved to be another matter altogether. The committee named to the task included interests as different as the luminous, soaring spirit of the architect Christopher Wren, rebuilder of London after the Great Fire of 1666, the acidly practical poet and critic John Dryden, and a closet romantic, the diarist John Evelyn, who with hi s great pal, the naval administrator Sam Pepys, rejoiced in the commonplaces of life, and liked nothing so much as a long, talky evening with friends over a Thamesside supper. How could such a group ag ree on how to clip and trim a wild , crazy tongue like English? The attempt fa iled and the English language continued to go its untrammeled , organically evolving route, up hill and down dale across the passing centuries and changing national experience. In sponsoring the first truly scientific expedition to explore a distant quarter of the world in the voyage of the Endeavour 17
under Captain Cook, the Society broke new ground , setting a precedent in going to see what the world is, rather than arguing over its shape and nature. A century and a half later, that tradition was honored when the Society sponsored an expedition to the Gulf of Guinea to photograph a solar eclipse. With the precise instruments available in the year 1919, they secured measurements that confirmed Einstein ' s General Theory of Relativity-a step that verified for the world the physical nature of the spacetime continuum within which it exists. Cook 's voyaging did not revolutionize our geographic understanding. Much of his geographical achievement was to verify and plot more accurately what others had first discovered. He had shown , for example, that New Zealand , which Tasman took to be part of the mythical Terra Australis, was actually a pair of islands in the vast surging ocean of the Roaring Forties, with open , tempest-roiled water reaching another 1500 miles southward to Antarctica. Cook , as he intended , had gone " where no man had gone before," and his sailing finally put away for good the nolion of a great southern continent, to give us the picture we have today of a world that is three-quarters ocean, a world where humankind lives, as we can now see from outer space, on a blue planet splotched with patches of landmaking visibly clear how , to get to know each other, the peoples of Earth had to master the broad and dangerous stretches of saltwater that make up most of the Endeavour outward bound
planet ' s surface. But it is for other achievements than the demonstration of the watrous globe to replace the prophet Esdras ' s globe, where land took up six-sevenths of the world, that Cook is remembered today. He was precise in navigation , determined to get things right so that others could use the information he developed. With the great start given by the presence of the Banks party in his first voyage, Cook became a scrupulous gatherer of facts on vegetation and animal life populating the unknown globe, including above all human life. Among the talented , but too often ruthlessly brutal people who led the opening of the ocean world, Cook and his remote forerunner Drake stand out by their essential humanity and recognition of the humanity in others. This is clearly evident in their dealings with indigenous peoples. The devoted care with which Cook and his party recorded native ways and language argue a sincere quest to know and understand these fellow inhabitants of the world he was exploring. In Cook the compassionate impulse was a principle, a driving force in his dealings with other races of people and other cultures. This principle flourished closer to home, in the treatment of men under Cook ' scommand. He saved men ' s lives by conquering the scourge of scurvy , which often wiped out half a ship 's company in extended ocean voyaging. Drake, two hundred years earlier, had managed to reduce deaths by scurvy to the vanishing point- but no one equalled his record until Cook did . So, in this little bit of London that was set afloat in the Endeavour' s cabin , the common seaman James Cook offered leadership in how to live, as well as in how to get the best out of a hobbledehoy cat.
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Both Drake and Cook grew up in the coasting trade to London, sailing the same shallow waters of England ' s East Coast and the sandy , reef-strewn estuary of the River Thames. It is pleasant to picture these commoners, who did such uncommon things, learning, in these narrow waters and in the seamen 's pubs that still line the banks of that river today , how to drive a ship to such purpose through space and time that their names live wherever seamen foregather today. And their purposes are still out..t ward bound. 18
Captain Cook and Outer Space Because of the extraordinary, strongly humane viewpoint that Cook brought to his voyaging: in his dedicated care of his crews' health and well being, his scrupulous concern for the rights, lives and lifestyles of the native peoples he encountered, his rigorous exactitude in navigation, and sterling resolution in carrying the ship forward on her mission- for these disparate but related qualities which so impressed his seagoing contemporaries, Cook is remembered wherever seafaring people gather today. And one may feel , as I do, that he deserves a larger place in the general history of our species on earth. There is hope that Captain Cook 's message will travel beyond the growing community of people who sail deepwater, for the space shuttle Endeavour is carrying that message into the heavens today-from which vantage point perhaps in the next millennium our breed may learn to see the world whole, glowing with life and the human purpose that ultimately all our voyaging is about. The name Endeavour was chosen by high school students , in a nationwide contest NMHS was called on to help judge, to remember Cook's first ship, the sturdy cat bark whose voyaging taught humankind so much , and from which we still have so much to learn.
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Alan Villiers, who believed Captain James Cook to be "the greatest ex plorer-seaman the world has known," once said: "The names of his brave ships may stand as his best epitaphEndeavour, Resolution , Discovery, Adventure." He hoped to see a new Endeavour built. This didn't happen in his lifetime. However, a new Endeavour has been built in Australia (see Sea History 74). She is bringing her message back from the land that Cook claimed, and that Villiers was born in. The new Endeavour will be in American waters next year, starting in Florida in March. Go visit her, and walk her decks. You will be establishing a vital connection with a person who by dedication and force of example showed the world a new PS picture of itself.
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
USS CONSTITUTION UNDER SAIL
USS Constitution under short canvas. Painting by William G. Muller, oil on canvas, 20" x 14"
USS Constitution: 200 Years of the Battle and the Breeze SS Constitution' s place in AmerAfter the War of 1812, the ship was ican history was secured by the put in "ordinary" (or mothballs) until battles she fought and won for 1821, when she returned to the Mediterthe new nation. For decades, the memory ranean as flagship of the squadron. In of those famous actions has kept her 1828 she was back in ordinary when an afloat as a museum ship. But she was erroneous newspaper report said the US also a strong sailing ship, able to with- Navy was about to break up the ship. This stand cannon shot and storms, and fully article and Oliver Wendell Holmes 's capable of a round-the-world voyage famed poem dedicated to Constitution when nearly 50 years old. led to a widespread public outcry in Built in 1797 to stop attacks on Ameri- support of the ship. After a restoration in can shipping by Barbary pirates in the Boston, Constitution returned to sea in Mediterranean, herfirstyears were spent 1835, sailing to France before returning on the East Coast and in the Caribbean. to the Mediterranean until 1838. Reaching the Mediterranean in 1803, She then became flagship of the Pashe and her squadron defeated the pi- cific Squadron, crui sing the West Coast rates and she returned to the US in 1807. of South America, and served in the When war was declared against Great Home Squadron until she was put in for Britain in June 1812, several dramatic repairs in 1843. The following year she confrontations established Constitution's embarked on her round-the-world voyplace in American history. The most age-an ordeal that proved her seaworpotent of these was Constitution's de- thiness but brought her to disease-ridfeat of the British Guerriere at a time den tropical climes through which her when Americans desperately needed a sailors suffered. rallying point in a war that was unpopuHer final Mediterranean tour, 1848lar with many. She went on to defeat ¡ 1850, began when American shipping HMS Ja va, Cyane and Levant, an un- was threatened by widespread revolubroken string of victories against a vastly tion in Europe. In 1852 she was recommore powerful navy . missioned for three years as the flagship
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SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
of the African Squadron, assigned to preventing American ships from illegally transporting slaves. Then, in 1860, she became a schoolship for the Naval Academy in Annapolis. She spent the Civil War in Newport, Rhode Island, and returned to Annapolis in 1865, where she continued as a schoolship until 1871. A cursory restoration for the country's centennial in 1876 was followed by an assignment to take American exhibits to the 1878 Paris Exhibition. When she returned home, Constitution briefly served in the Apprentice Training Squadron before being converted to a receiving ship in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1896 "Old Ironsides" was towed to Boston for restoration for her lOOth birthday . Her first major renovation as a museum ship occurred in 1927-1930, following which she voyaged under tow to the East, Gulf and West coasts, where 4.5 million people walked her decks. From then on, it was clear, USS Constitution would "reach over the hori zon ," as Arleigh Burke once said in these pages, to continue her voyage into hi story. PS/JA 19
USS Constitution Sails Again! OFFIC IAL US NA VY PHOTOS BY JOURNALIST 2ND CLASS TODD STEVENS
hen Norma and Peter Stanford came back from the hi storic sail of USS Constitution on 21 July, we stopped the presses for Sea History 82 to publish two pages of their on-deck photographs. However, there was no time to get off-ship views of the occasion, and several readers bemoaned the omission. So here they are-from the first of what we hope will be regular exercises under sail by the world 's oldest commissioned warship afloat. Above, the frigate fires its port and starboard bow guns whi le sailing free in Massachusetts Bay. She is escorted by the frigate USS Halyburton (FFG 40) , center, and the destroyer USS Ramage (DDG 61) , right, while the Navy's Blue Angels roar overhead. At left, Constitution slips along at 3.5 knots under the short rig of jibs, topsails and spanker so often used in action . The Stanfords report that the feeling aboard was "exalted-there's just no other word for it." ,t
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SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
Forging a Crew to Sail ''Old Ironsides'' USS Constitution Sailors Learn the Ropes aboard the Tall Ship Bounty by Carl Herzog hen USS Constitution set sai l on 21 July for the first time in more than I 00 years, the nation watched as one of its most revered historic treasures came to life again. Less noticed amid the pomp and circumstance was the quiet resurgence of square-ri gged sailing that made Old Ironsides ' sai I possible. Rebuilding Constitution was a job that took four years of restoration and the revival of wooden shipbuilding skill s that are rarely practiced today. But for Commander Michael Beck, actuall y sailing the ship also meant rebuilding seamanship skills that hadn ' t been used by the Navy in nearl y a century. Today 's US Navy seamen are wellversed in operating and maintaining high-tech machinery from satellite navigation systems to nuclear reactors , but can they " hand, reef and steer"? When plans began to develop to sail Constitution, her enlisted crew knew few of the traditional skills that once marked an able seaman. The sai lors assigned to duty on board Constitution give hi storical tours of the ship, but had little chance to learn, much less use, the skills required to sail her. The crew that would sai l Constitution consisted of her regular navy crew, members of the Naval Historical Detachment who had helped restore the ship, and Navy reservists and cadets. To teach his crew the lost arts of squarerigged sa iling , Beck turned to the US Coast Guard bark Eagle and the tall ship Bounty. Bounty is one of only two
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full-rigged wooden ships sailing in the United States. Built for the 1962 movie "M utiny on the Bounty," the ship is operated by the nonprofit Tall Ship Bounty Foundation, which uses the ship to teach traditional square-rigged sailing sk ill s to the general public. The foundation volunteered its training services to the Navy after first hearing about the plan to sail Old Ironsides. "This is what we're here to do," Bounty's Captain Robin Walbridge said. "Being able to train the Constitution crew has been a pretty big honor. " Several members of the crew had sailed aboard the US Coast Guard training ship Eagle in the spring of 1996. A large steel bark built in the 1930s, Eagle didn ' t mimic conditions on Constitution as well as did the Bounty, a replica of the ship Captain William Bligh sailed in 1787. The development of steel rigs , split topsails and steam engines dramatically changed the nature of sailing ships and sailing technique. Although some seamanship manuals were written in the 1700s, they cannot convey the intuitive sense that comes from firsthand experience. The Bounty's mission over the last four years has been to rebuild that firsthand knowledge and pass it on to a new generation of enthusiasts. But never have the Bounty' s training programs had such direct application as in the case of USS
ChiefJoe Wilson and nearly every member of the Constitution crew spent time training on board the Bounty. For several weeks in July and August 1996, the Bounty conducted training sail s in and aro und Boston Harbor-Constitution 's home waters. The navy seamen started by learning the more than 180 lines that control the Bounty's sixteen sai ls. Although Constitution is nearly twice the size of the Bounty, their rigs are virtually identical. For her anniversary sail, Constitution was only equipped with six major working sai ls: fore, main and mizzen topsails, spanker, jib and foretopmast staysail. With that configuration, she would be able to sail even in light winds and be able to conduct a wide range of maneuvers. The sails, totaling more than 12,000 square feet, were bought with $500,000 raised through a pen ny collection by the nation 's schoolchildren. For many of the Constitution's crew, sailing the Bounty provided their first experience climbing the ri g of tall ships to furl and unfurl sai ls-once considered everyday activities for seamen. "I never thought in a million years I ' d be doing this when I joined the
Constitution. Beginning in the summer of 1996, Commander Beck,
Constitution sailors man the helm a/Bounty (below) and haul away on her main topsail halyard (right) on a brisk spring day in Long Island Sound.
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
21
"Man, I thought the whole boat was going to blow over!"
Navy," said seaman Nick Hetzer, hanging from the Bounty's royal yard , 100 feet above the deck. With sails set, the crew began learn ing to maneuv er the ship- tacking, wearing, boxhauling and heaving-to. The Bounty 's sail training programs emphasize the underlying theory behind maneuvering the ship. In on-deck classes using a model, trainees learn the basics about forces acting on the ship 's hull and rig. By setting, striking, fi lling, backing and luffing different sails, the ship 's center of effort can be manipul ated in a number of ways. These were the techniques once used by Constitution captain s to make their way across the world 's oceans, beat their way up ti ght harbors under sail , and outwit their opponents in battle. Last spring, officers and crew joined the Bounty for a passage from New York City to Fall River, Massachusetts. With the wind on the quarter, the crew began to master wearing ship up the East River through Hell Gate. Each turn of the helm required them to brace the
Bounty' s yards and sail s to the new angle of the wind. A cold front brought high winds and squalls to Long Island Sound as the ship worked her way east. On deck, the Constitution crew got a crash course in heavy-air sailing. In a squall off Kings Point, 40-knot gusts meant sail s had to be struck and furled quickl y. For some, the high-winds climb tested their fearof heights. Others relished the excitement. "What a rush! " one seaman beamed as he climbed down fro m the rig. "Did you see me up there? Man, I thought the whole boat was go ing to blow over. " Several crew members had learned to sail small boats at the Courageous Sailing Center in Boston and adapted their understanding of fo re-and-aft sail trim for use steering the Bounty. "I want you to be able to judge this yourself when we sail Constitution," Commander Beck told Jamal Ross as the helmsman worked to steer the Bounty "full and by"-as close to the wind as possible, keeping the sails full. Beck diligently prepared his crew for any poss ibility. Although Constitution's July sail was straight downwi nd in light airs, her crew was trained to handle every point of sail and condition the ship might face . During the Bounty's last training sail, the crew turned the deck over to the Navy and stood by as the Consti-
tution crew put the Bounty through the maneuvers that Old Ironsides could have been required to conduct during her 200th anniversary sail. "We've come a long way,"Chief Joe Wilson said at the close of the training. "I feel really good about thi s crew." Scheduled to spend the summer touring Lake Ontari o, the Bounty was unable to participate in the hi storic sai l, but when Constitution set sai l off Marblehead, Massachusetts, Captain Walbridge was on board to advise Beck. For Walbridge, seeing such an important ship join the active sai ling fleet was a huge step toward rev iving the sq uarerigged arts he believes in. In addition to prov id ing sail training trips for the general public, the Bounty runs a teen program in the summertime, offers corporate teamwork charters and dockside programs. "Maritime museums throughout the country do a great job of preserving historic square riggers, but you can 't sail those ships anymore," Walbridge said. "Our goal is to practice and preserve the sailing skills used by those ships. If we don' t, the knowledge will eventually be lost forever. It' ll be like building the pyramids in Egypt-people will have no idea how it was done. " .t For more information about the Bounty and her voyages, contact the Tall Ship Bounty Foundation, JO North Main Street, 2nd Floor, PO Box 990, Fall River MA 02722; 508 673-3886. Carl Herzog was second mate aboard the tall ship Bounty.
"HMS" Bounty under sail. (Photos by the author)
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SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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SHIP OF THE ISSUE
The James Craig Returns to Her Element by the Staff of the Sydney Maritime Museum n 1971, a letter to the British maritime publication Sea Breezes drew its readers' attenti on to the James Craig, a rusting hulk in Recherche Bay, near the southern tip of Tasmania, where it had been scuttled in the 1930s. The letter might not, at a glance, have seemed especially surprising. Australia ' s coastal waters are, after all , littered with wrecks, a grim legacy of the continent' s dependence on shipping. What made this wreck unusual was that it had settled in the shallows and, despite the skeleton having been picked bare by scavengers, its rusted keel, frames , and stringers, and parts of the plating were remarkably well-preserved. In fact, enough remained for the practiced eye to recognize the sweet lines of a handsome sailing ship. This rusting eyesore's clipper bow, sweeping sheerand The swift and handsome James Craig heaves to off the long, slender hull terminating in Australian coast, ca. 1920 , perhaps to pick up a pilot. a neatly tucked stern offered a (All photos courtesy Sydney Maritime Mus eum) classic profile of its period. Commi ssioned in 1873 by Scottish loomed large-the ravages of time and shipowner Thomas Dunlop, the Clan the interest ex hibited by other maritime Macleod, as she was named, was a par- preservationists (including NMHS and ticularl y elegant three-masted iron bark, San Francisco Maritim e Muse um launched on 18 February 1874 by ship- founder Karl Kortum) led to fears that builders Bartram Haswell & Co. at Sun- other groups might get the ship first. The derland in England. Her length overall museum 's principals had no doubt that was 180', her breadth , 31', her depth , this classic example of an iron bark 17' 6", and her displacement was 650 should be restored and should remain in tons. barely half the tonnage of other the southern hemisphere in which she vessels that Dunlop was to commission had traded for so long. In fact, they over the next decade for hi s fleet of fast believed the most appropriate home for traders. Her plating was all wrought iron her was Sydney, her last port of registry. and her decks were timber. Maiden Voyage When theSea Breezes letter appeared, Taking the Clan Macleod on her first members of the Sydney Maritime Mu- voyage, bound for Callao, Peru , with a seum were already looking for an iron cargo of coal and then on to Portland, vessel to interpret Australia 's maritime Oregon, to take on wheat for Britain, her heritage. The lames Craig ' s hi story and first master, Captain William Alexander, condition and the international interest had his problems. He was forced to aroused by the "rediscovery" stung into make an un scheduled stop at Rio de action the Sydney Maritime Museum , Janeiro when he ran short of fres h water; an organization dedi cated to preserving his wife, who sailed with him , delivered historic vessels in working order so that a son; and the vessel ran agro und, though today 's and tomorrow ' s generati ons briefly , at her home port after a return might better appreciate their maritime passage from Portland that took an unheritage. The prospect of this important conscionable 212 days! vessel being lost forever to Australia Despite this unpromising start, for
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SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
more than a decade the Clan Macleod carri ed a variety of cargoes to the major seaports of the world. Her third voyage-a passage from the UK to Dunedin, New Zealandsaw her enter Australian waters for the first time, though it would be a further two years before she entered an Australian port. Always a stirring sight under the press of full canvas, he r arrival at Brisbane in 1879 attracted the excitement and admiration of the local press.
Winds of Change Beautiful she may have been, stately, even, and swift, but steamships were proving that they could carry the same cargoes more cheaply, quickly and reliably than sail. Certainly the wily Scot Thomas Dunlop was quick to recognize thi s. In 1887, four years after he took delivery of hi s first steamer, he sold the Clan Ma cleod to Sir Rod e rick Cameron . For the remainder of the century, Cameron sailed her in the colonial trade between New York, New Zealand and Australia. She carried kerosene and manufactured goods south and returned with flax , kauri gum and wool. (See p. 37 for photos of the ship in New York.) Such shipping provided a lifeline of trade and immigrants for the colonies. In this service, the Clan Macleod circumnavigated the globe more than a dozen times, sometimes in perilous conditions, particularl y when rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. In 1900, J. J. Craig, an Auckland merchant and shipping entrepreneur, bought the Clan Macleod for the trans-Tasman trade, appointing hi s father-in-law , Captain Alexander Campbell, as master. Ports of call were Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Auckland and Kaipara, a New Zealand timber center. During this largely uneventful but productive period the ship was renamed for Craig's son, James. Though the James Craig gave stout service, compe tition from steamers and a depressed market for timber, her main cargo, marked the beginning of the end for the handsome bark. After her 25
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-:_-
The scuttled hull of the James Craig lay in Recherche Bay for 40 years before being rescued by the Sydney Maritime Museum .
last Auckland-Sydney run in 19 11 , she was sold again , this time to the New Guinea Development Company. Brief Reprieve from Ignominy Her new service was brief. After delivering coal to Port Moresby, her new owners unceremon iously stripped her of her rig and spars and set her on a permanent mooring as a storage hulk fo r copra. The end of World War I, however, triggered such an urgent need for cargo vessels that it earned the James Craig a reprieve. She was recommi ssioned, rerigged and purchased by the Hobart merchant Henry Jones and Company . Buffe ted badly on the run south , she had to be repaired at Gladstone and then towed into Port Jackson . Another coastal run , carrying coal from Newcastle, saw her in danger of foundering again, this time when she encountered heavy weather and mountainous seas off Gabo Island in the Bass Strait. With some topside plates sprung, she began taking on more water than her pumps could handle. Captain Murchison said later that he never expected to make port. But the James Craig did , and was again towed into Sydney, thi s time with four feet of water in the hold . Again and again , it seemed, the sea tried to claim the aging bark. A year later she battled formidable Tasman storms all the way from New Zealand , onl y to be blown back o ut to sea three times when within sight of Port Phillip Heads. After the third attempt, the wind reached such a pitch that the crew were forced to take off all sail, lash the hel m and let the ship drift beam-on for three weeks. This
26
passage, which might normally take between 14 and 20 days , took 59 days . An Ironic End Yet it was not the sea that claimed the James Craig in the end , but progress. In the early 1920s, after an interminable wait in Recherche Bay for a cargo that never came, she was sold to the local Catamaran Coal Mine. Again she was stripped. Again she became a hulk, this time bunkering coal for the very steamers that had driven her out of business. Worse followed. When the mine closed in the 1930s, the James Craig was left with no purpose. When she ran aground during a storm, she was not only allowed to settle, but a gaping hole was blown in her stern to prevent her ever floating free to menace shipping. And there she lay, rusting and looted of anything that could be prized loose, for nearly 40 years . The Impossible Dream The restoration period of the James Craig has proved as challengi ng and demanding as her working life. The first surveys of the James Craig proved surpri singly positi ve, convincing the Sydney Maritime Museum that the project was practicable and worthwhile. Though neglected, rusted and vandali zed, the old vessel had settled on an even keel in shallow water, which meant her structure was intact, and the keel and much of her wro ught iron plating were still sound. A small , skilled band of museum volunteers , using considerable improvisation , plugged the hull and refloated her. She stirred off the bottom at SAM on
24 October 1972-her first movement in more than 40 years. This proved that the hull could be made sufficiently watertight to be towed. On 28 May 1973, the James Craig was at sea once more, under tow to Hobart, where she docked at the hi storic Powder Wharf, a familiar enough berth in her working life. At that point, just when spirits were mo st ex ultant, the project was again threateneda downturn in the economy throttled the flow of funds to a trickle, and the project teetered alarmingly. Goodwill Prevails Difficult times notwithstanding, men of goodwill in Hobart and Sydney did what they could. The James Craig project weathered the worst of the recession and sufficient donations were raised to allow work to continue, albeit at a frustratingly slow pace. She was eventually towed to Sydney in 1981, to a jubilant Port Jackson welcome, and berthed at Birkenhead Point. In 1984, the Wran government in New South Wales made a $1.5 million grant toward the restoration in the expectation of seeing the James Craig ready for the B icentennial celebrations. It was never more than a hope, and nowhere near enough, even then. Nevertheless, much was achieved, and , with the ship docked on a pontoon , a substantial part of the hull was repaired and new decks were laid . Not all of the problems were financial. One of the biggest challenges facing the restoration was establi shing the vessel's original design detai 1, which, as was commonplace at the time, relied more on the mind and the skilled eye of the shipbuilder than a naval architect's blueprints. Research was heavi ly reliant on historical photographs, with their inadequacy for the serious engi neering involved. But these problems have in the main been overcome. Authenticity The Museum 's key purpose has always been to maintain important hi storical vessels in working order, rather than as static exh ibits. To this end the James Craig will be fully rigged and fitted out as authentic to her era in every way. It is intended that she be not on ly a fascinating exhibit, but also a majestic sight under full sai l, undertaking day passenSEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
ger cruises in the Sydney area. Naturally, in order to comply with modern navigation and safety req uirements, the James Craig will be fitted with engines, modern fire-fighting equipment and 20th-century navigation and safety devices, but these will be installed in such a way as to not interfere with her 19thcentury appearance.
The Project Today In 1995 the Sydney Maritime Museum establi shed a separate James Craig Restoration Division to oversee the project's completion, with a view to hav ing the vessel sailing by the year 2000. The Division commissioned a Feasibility Report and consulted the Sydney Waterways Authority for guide lines on the requirements for the James Craig to be used as a passenger-carrying sailing vessel. With their enthusiastic help, a blue-
print has been established for the vessel's eventual certification. Incredible feats were accomplished between 1995 and February 1997 when, with great fanfare, the James Craig was returned to her element 123 years after her original launching and after 22 years out of the water. In July 1995 we had 74 hull plates to replace, nearly one quarter of the ship to be reframed, some 17,000 rivets to place and nearly 1000 meters of caulking to be done. At the end of January 1996 it was estimated that 12,500 rivets remained to be driven prior to launching. Our paid and volunteer work force set new records , achieving over 150 rivets per day and up to 190 on occasion. The weekly record stands at 818 rivets. The compound nature of the ship's shape in the stern made the building of
Before being refloated, the James Craig was towed through the harbor, pasr the Sydney Opera House (below). After the bark was returned to her element, the Sydney Maritime Museum' s steam tug Waratah ( 1902) helped bring her to the museum' s dock (bottom).
new frames quite difficult. Our boilermakers and restoration supervi sor had to use all their ingenuity to match the new frames to the fair lines of the ship. Throughout the restoration there have been constant reminders of the workers who kept the ship in trim during her working life. While renewing the plating, the remains of the temporary shoe fitted to the forward part of the keel (probably in 1919) were removed. Volunteers were intri gued to find that the putty used to fill the voids between the shoe and keel still emitted a strong linseed oil aroma after more than 70 years. Other historic links with the ship 's construction were recovered from the stern "deadwood" area of the hold. Amidst ancient concrete and rust we found pieces of wood, deck bolts, barrel drifts (for aligning hull plates during fitting) and, most significant of all, a half-meter-long metal dolly. This dolly was last used 123 years ago during construction of the ship when it backed up the hot rivets as they were hammered home. Our workers reflected on the similarities and differences in riveting techniques when they gave the dolly a short workout to compare its performance with our 20th-century models. Now that the vessel has been refloated, the restoration focus has shifted from the hull to above decks-masts, yards, bowsprit and rigging. The fully rigged ship will have some 5,000 meters of wire rope supporting the masts and yards. The lower yards for the main- and foremasts were made of iron; the upper masts and all other yards are timber. Each of the lower yards is 20 meters long and will weigh over one-and-a-half tons. The crew plans to have the foretopmast raised, jibboom fitted and all relevant standing rigging completed by January 1998. This phase is a new and exciting one, requiring different ski ll s, presenting new challenges, requiring more historic research and the continuation of the tremendous support the project has had to date. Not only do we remain confident that we will "build the mighty ship," but also that the James Craig will sail again . .t
This article was edited by RADM Tony Hunt, restoration director for the James Craig Project, and Barrie Flakelar, the Museum ' s media and advertising officer. (SMM , 6 Mansfield Street , PO Box 431 , Rozelle 2039, Australia; 61 (29) 810 2299) SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
27
NMHS/OPSAIL EDUCATION PROGRAM
THE OPSAIL PORTS: The Group
Plans Cooperative Action for Tall Ships Visit in 2000 and Receives $5 Million Sponsorship from Ocean Spray n 10 September this year the OpSail affi li ated ports met in Philadelphia. They met in hi gh spirits to deve lop joi nt pl ans for the gathering of the tall ships of the world ' s sail training fl eets in East Coast seaports fo r OpSa i12000. Most of the ports involved- San Juan, Miami , Norfo lk, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York-have previous experi ence dealing with the logistics of receiving a very large fl eet of bi g sailing ships. But fo r New London thi s would be a new experience, as it wo uld be, too, fo r Portl and , Maine, one of the affiliated ports that will receive the ships on the return journey after the trip up the East Coast. But fo r all the ports involved, thi s was the first time that they had worked together, united under the OpS ai l umbrell a. Charles A. Robertson, chairman of Operation Sail , pointed out that thi s unity of purpose could generate new resources for the seafaring heritage, as well as assure more effecti ve operati ons. "Ocean Spray has become the presenting sponsor of OpS ail 2000 with a $5 million contributi on," he reported to the group. "Thi s unprecedented support will all ow OpS ail to fulfill its mission, which includes supporting sail training and the maritime heritage." OpS ail leaders in the partic ipating citi es talked about the advantages of working in a unified way toward agreed goals. Promotion can be more effecti vely handled, backed by national publicity, and info rmation can be shared. The prospect of getting inner-city yo uth fro m the seaport citi es involved to sail in the ships from one port to the next will be greatly en hanced. Thi s program for youth is of spec ial interest to NMHS , because we put people from New York aboard the Gaze/a in her trip fro m Philadelphia to New York in OpSail 1992, and also put two youngsters aboard the USCG Eagle in her passage from New York to Boston that year. These are small efforts in the scale of things, certainly when compared to what Yi sionQuest and other organi zati ons devoted to city yo uth and the sea are doing every year. But these small beginnings will have reverberating consequences under the NMHS/OpSail Education Program, and we look to see a grow ing interest by philanthropic fundin g sources and the educational community in getting yo ung people to sea. At this meeting it was reported that Boston , a participant in a ll prev ious OpSails, is not, so far, part of OpSail 2000. In the meantime, an NMHS Boston Counc il has met to foster an educati onal program in the Boston area under the leadership of Ed McCabe and Lory Newmyer of the Hull Lifesav ing Museum , which runs ac ti ve programs for inner city youth in Boston Harbor. The OpSail city representatives agreed that their coming together under the OpSail umbrell a sent the right signal to the publi c and to supporters of thi s great effort on behalf of the maritime heritage and the sail training movement.
O
Philadelphia ~+-1-*--,_~-e~-
-Miami
Baltimore Washington, DC
c=:;s-- San Juan
P ETER STANFORD
SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
29
NMHS/OPSAIL EDUCATION PROGRAM
The Operation Sail 2000 The City and the Sea NEW LONDON: Host City to OpSail ThefirstOpSailcameonlytoNew York in 1964. Some people thought this the swan song of the square-rigged sail training ship, but not the founders of Operation Sail. Frank Braynard set about organizing the next Op Sail for the National Bicentennial in 1976. Emil Mosbacher, Jr., continued as chairman, and Presidents Nixon and Ford again proclaimed the event. This time there were more ships than before--and more cities were added to the schedule. The cities in the schedule for the year 2000 are listed on the preceding page. The city most recently added is New London. If New London is the youngest city on the list, New York is the oldest, and it seems appropriate to look at these two together, as we do on this and the following pages. In succeeding issues of Sea History we'll be taking up the other OpSail cities. Each has its own story to tell; each has contributed in vital and distinctive ways to the story of America, from Indian times onward. We are working, indeed, to develop the Native American story in each of these cities, which were extensively linked in trade and culture long before the arrival of the Europeans. The European traders and settlers established cities ofnotably different character with strong local traits and folkways that persist, contributing to the variety that characterizes the United States today. One aspect of their being all the cities had in common-their dependence on the wide, boisterous ocean their people had crossed to get here. That common thread in their experience is celebrated in OpSail, as tall ships from all over the world re-visit these cities under sail. What stories we have to learn in the unfolding narrative of each port, and what joy we'll take in the telling! We invite your comments, suggestions and questions as we open this new department in Sea PS History.
30
Flagship USCG Eagle ew London owes its existence to the sea and its protected harbor. The city's motto "Mare Liberum," freedom of the seas, indicates how the world 's oceans have brought prosperity to the city in a variety of forms. Now the city on the harbor is preparing for the rejuvenation of its waterfront that will take it into the 2 1st century . New London 's harbor was first mapped in 1614 by Adrian Block aboard the Onrust (Restless) on that vessel's historic voyage east from New York, where she had been built over the preceding winter. The city's coloni al hi story began in J 646 with the establishment of a settlement by John Winthrop, Jr. , son of the leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop, a schol ar and scientist, negotiated with the inhabitants of the Pequot vi llage ofNameaug ("good fishin g place") for land on the west side of the Great River. The Pequots had named their settlement well. Blackfish were plentiful , salmon swam upstream and whales cou ld be caught in the nearby ocean. The harbor was so deep, wide and she ltered that the Connecticut Comm iss ioners in 1658 suggested the
N
name Faire Harbour for the town. But Winthrop and the settlers thought otherwise, so Nameaug became New London and the river became the Thames. Through the 1600s and 1700s, trade with other North American co lonies, the West Indies and Europe flouri shed from the port of New London . As commercial port activity grew, ships, including sloops, brigantines, schooners and barks, were designed and bui lt in New London. Vesse ls of over 65 tons were being launched by the late 1600s. By 1774, 70 vessels, representing 40 percent of all the vessels in Connecticut, were registered in New London . Alongside regular commerce, smuggling was a way of life for many, and in the 1760s the armed revenue vessel Cygnet was stationed in New London Harbor to regu late trade and collect duties . Oppos ition grew to various British navigation and trade acts, and the port went on to play an important role in the Revolutionary War. As the co lonies began to resist British rule, New London had its version of the Boston Tea Party at T he Parade, the area across the street from the present rai Iroad station .Nathan Hale, the young patriot who was hanged by the
Th e Port of New London, at the mouth of the Thames River, looks out on Fisher's Island, at the end of Long Island Sound, and beyond that , on the broad Atlantic. (Photos courtesy Office of the City Manager)
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
Official Port Cities, Part I
British as a spy, taught in a one-room New London schoolhouse, now also at The Parade, before joining the war effort. In . 1776, the first colonial naval expedition went out from this port, and during the long struggle, the port brought in needed goods and provisions for the war effort. Privateers flourished, and over 300 enemy vessels were seized and brought into New London. Among these was the Hannah, the richest prize in the war. But retaliation was severe. New London , situated at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, was a prime target for invasion and blockade. At the hands of Benedict Arnold, the traitor general born in Norwich, a few miles up the Thames, the British got their revenge. Arnold set fire to the city in 1781, burning more than 140 buildings and most of the shipping on the waterfront. The city rebuilt itself after the war, and by 1790 New London was listed among America 's ten largest cities. In 1784 the courthouse at the head of State Street was built, and it is now one of the country's oldest. The US Custom House, still in operation and open to visitors today, was opened in 1833 to handle the flow of goods coming into the harbor after the War of 1812. The Custom House is also the site of the landing of the Spanish slave ship Amistad in 1839. Fifty-three Africans who had been kidnapped from their homeland seized control of the vessel and were eventually captured off Long Island and taken to New London. Local abolitionists helped propel the argument for the Africans' freedom to the US Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams successfully defended their freedom. The new Spielberg film on the case was, appropriately, filmed largely in southeastern Connecticut. Whaling added much to the port's prosperity-the first whaling vessel left New London in 1718, but whaling really took off in 1819 after the War of 1812 and reached its height in the 1830s and 1840s. Whaling pervaded commercial and civic aspects of the city. The waterfront bustled with life once again with shipbuilding, whaleboats, casks, barrels, SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
The USCG Eagle makes her home in New London, as part of the Coast Guard Academy establishment.
sailmakers, food provisions, etc. From 1718 to 1908 more than 1000 vessels left New London on whaling expeditions, a rtcord second on ly to that of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Though its heyday was brief, whaling influences the city's character to this day; its hospital, library, art museum and two parks survive as civic contributions of fortunes made in whaling. New London has also made major contributions to the US Navy . Submarines built by the famous Electric Boat Works and stationed at the Naval Submarine Base, New London , strongly affect the city 's economy and culture. The city's history is even more closely tied to the Coast Guard. In 1910, the US Revenue Service, forerunner of the US Coast Guard, moved its training vessel Itasca to Fort Trumbull in New London. In 1930, the city donated the original 40 acres for the permanent home of the US Coast Guard Academy, one of the nation's four mi litary academies. Thousands of cadets have been trained on New London's shores, and the harbor serves as home port of the Coast Guard's cadet training vessel Eagle, the largest tall ship flying the Stars & Stripes. As flagshipofOpSail2000 , the Eagle will lead tall ships from around the world into New London ' s historic harbor, where today's piers can easily accommodate the entire sail training fleet. The harbor itself will be undergoing rejuvenation as the citizens of the city recap-
ture their downtown waterfront and transform it into a beautiful park to serve the community and tourists. Almost a mile of the downtown waterfront is undergoing an $8 million renovation. The State of Connecticut has also announced a $20 million renovation of Fort Trumbull , making it the crown jewel of the state park system. "OpSail 2000 is helping provide the catalyst needed for the revitalization of our waterfront. New London's future will be as tied to her waterfront as was her past," said City Manager Richard M. Brown. And the city is making maritime history again with the Mashantucket Pequots, descendantsofthePequots who first settled New London 's shoreline. As owners of Pequot River Shipworks, the tribe is building the country's first superfast Tri Cat passenger ferries, capable of speeds exceeding 50 knots. The first ferry launched, the Sassacus, will soon begin making regular runs between New York City and New London. New London looks forward to a bright future with reliance on her waterfront to take her into the. 21st century. ,!, This story was written by Kathryn Shelton based on research by Sarah M. Ryan, municipal historian, and Alma C. Weis. For information on OpSail 2000 in New London, contact the Office of the City Manager, 181 State St., New London CT 06320; 860 447-5270; FAX: 860 447-7971.
31
NMHS/OPSAIL EDUCATION PROGRAM
NEW YORK HARBOR RENAISSANCE:
To Revive
by Peter Stanford he vivid , bustling scene that characterized New York Harbor when tall ships leaning on the wind brought us the people and the commerce that built the city has vanished. Abandoned waterfronts and derelict piers gaze out today on the waterways that embrace the c ity in stillness broken only by a passing tug with barge in tow. The Port of New York and New Jersey last year handled the greatest volume of goods ever shipped through the port-some 51.3 million tons-but this was in hugecontainerships, tankers and bulk carriers, one of which can carry eas il y ten times the cargo aboard all the ships in the scene of 1829 above. So an observer watching from Battery Park who once wo uld have looked out on the live ly spectacle of overseas, coastal, riverine and harbor traffics that thronged the stage in the las t century and well into this, today will catch only distant glimpses of ships slipping by against the Staten Island shore, bound for huge containerports built in the Jersey marshes to the westward. But all around the harbor, new ventures are taking shape to conserve the cultural resources of the harbor and revive our moribund waterways. The NMHS New York Harbor Renaissance held its inaugural meeting this past 15 October aboard " HMS " Rose, docked at the pier of the Intrepid Museum, which holds the annual Tugboat Challenge and other active harbor programs. T he meeting, under "the chairmanship of NMHS trustee Ogden Reid, was attended by the leaders of more than two dozen serious projects, who discussed ways to open New York's storied harbor to New Yorkers and all who
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vi sit New York. The Renaissance is no paper scheme of office-bound planners, but a deep-rooted movement of people dedicated to recovering a priceless heritage for people. Like an incoming tide, waterfront and waterways ventures seem to be ari sing everyw here in the water-penetrated city. In Staten Island there ' s the Alice Austen Park, looking out on a sweepi ng vista stretching from the Narrows , gateway to the Atlantic, north to the we lcomi ng-and challenging-Statue of Liberty, and beyond herthe island of Manhattan , its towers in changing sun and shadow , standing tall like a ship under sail over the dappled, sometimes roiled waters that surround it. In the sylvan setting of the park, the former headquarters of the New York Yacht Club is slated to be restored and opened for public use. NMHS is working also to see a new pier built to replace the one the club had years ago- a pier to receive people visiting this idyllic corner of the watrous city in order to gaze on the same prospect that Mi ss Austen photographed , recording the changing turn-of-the-century scene with the artistry recorded on pages 35-39 of this Sea History. In 1967 sailboat racing was revived in New York Harbor with the first an nual Schooner Race for the Mayor's Cup, and this year, in the revival of a grand tradition , a fleet of gaffrigged yawls and schooners sail ed in company with state-ofthe-art racers in a transAtlantic race to England, under the auspices of the New York Yacht Club. Closer to the water, rowing in small craft is undergoi ng an encouraging revival in SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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New York Harbor and the Battery are bursting with life in this imagejf"om 1829. From this vantage point, artist Thomas Thompson looked out on Governor's Island and Castle William (center left) and Castle Garden (far right) , originally Castle Clinton but converted to a concert hall in 1823. Straight ahead (right of the cente1fo ld) is Bedloe' s Istand, later to be known as Liberty Island , where a flag flies over Fort Wood, undergoing construction. The harbor itself is full of sloops, schooners, brigs and ships, carrying cargo and passengers into and out of America' s busiest port. The ship at left is one of the famed Black Ball packet ships that voyaged between New York and Live1pool on a regular schedule-the first shipping line to guarantee on-time departure. Signal flags identify this ship as the Manchester, heading to its berth in the East River. The Black Baller at right is probably the same ship. And people, young and old, are enjoying the life of the port. The original oil painting was done in three parts and the print derived from the painting was published as a triptych. In this image, the three parts have been joined digitally to provide an uninterrupted scene. The print is reproduced here with the permission of the Acorn Foundation. Copies of the print measuring 30" x 16" are available from NMHSfor $100. Proceeds will help support the work of the New York Harbor Renaissance.
a Shining Asset of a City Born of the Sea a remarkable effort by Floating the Apple. Headed by schoolteacher Mike Davis, recently this enterprising group, who have been trekking their craft through city streets to get to the water, have secured quarters in a disu sed fireboat house on the Harlem River. AttheNY State Maritime College, in the Bronx where the East Ri ver turns into Long Island Sound, boating for high school students has long been a fixture. And the fri gate Rose of Connecticut, the schooner Ernestina of Massachusetts, and other visiting ships we 've been involved with have often joined the South Street Seaport schooners Pioneer and Lettie G. Howard in getting the young idea to sea. NMHS, which runs ed ucation programs in the harbor heritage, is worki ng to get more actual seafaring experience available to city students. W e sent two youngsters to sea in the USCG Eagle for the passage from New York to Boston , with Walter Cronkite in the ship ' s company, in Operation Sail 1992. We are dedicated to getting more young people into the experience, not in New York alone, but in all the OpSail ports-and in seaports beyond that. A strong start in New York will do more than any amount of speechmaking in drawing attention to this grand , life-changing experience. Olga Bloom ' s Bargemusic moored on Brookl yn 's East River shore at Fulton Ferry Landing, David Sharps's Barge Museum at Erie Basin in South Brookl yn, and The John A. Noble Collection at Snug Harbor in Staten Island on the Kill van Kull , offer unique artistic ventures in music, dance and graphics at the water's edge. SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
Mayor Rudolf W. Giuliani announced plans last spring to open Pier A, North River, to the public. This strategicall y sited pier looks out on the harborscape shown in our picture from just north of the Battery. A Harbor Park Visitors' Center is planned in the pier under the direction of Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stem, who di sc ussed this with NMHS members at the meeting aboard the Rose. An early ex hibit is expected to feature The John A. Noble Collection, celebrating the harbor artist whose life and works have inspired a new generation of harbor explorers. John was a tugboat hand , schoonerman and ship's carpenter as well as lithographer and essayi st. He was a man of the harbor, and loved nothing better than opening its riches to young people with open minds and eyes. Frauds, fakes and culture snobs he notoriously could not abide, but I believe he would be pleased to see young New Yorkers rowing their boats in the backwaters and hidden comers of the harbor, where he and his Susan rowed their boat bound to untold adventure 60 years ago. On John's and Susan's wedding trip in 1934, they rowed through the harbor, and up the Hudson , through the Champlain Canal to Lake Champlain. That trip is a reminder of the inland outreach of the harbor-a vital factor in the growth of New York and the nation , and a vitally refreshing, purposeful way to rediscover, as each generation should do, how we built a 1, city and a nation from the sea. Forfurther information on the Renaissance , call NMHS' s NY Operations Director Bill Becker at 212 349-9090, x250. 33
Her final mission is just the beginning.
After answering the nation's call in four wars, the USS New Jersey is awaiting her final mission. As a floating museum and veteran's memorial, BB-62 will be a unique e ducational experience and is expected to be one of the world's most visited naval attractions.
The USS New Jersey Battleship Commission is authorized by the state to seek the return of the Navy's most decorated ship to New Jersey. A check-off box on the resident income tax form allows taxpayers to contribute. Special Battleship commemorative license plates can be purchased by residents who own or lease a vehicle.
An effort is under way in New Jersey unmatched in the history of the Navy's Ship Donation Program. Its goal is to ensure that the New Jersey will take its place near the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, universally known symbols of freedom . ' Operation "Big J" -Bring Me Home has support of the New Jersey state government, individuals and corporations.
Millions of dollars have been raised or committed from over 16,000 individuals and corporations as well as through license plate sales and state support. Work to set the stage will continue until the Navy releases this 55-year-old gallant lady.
To contribute, make check payable to the Battleship New Jersey Foundation and mail to 1715 Highway 35, Middletown, NJ 07748. Mastercard and Visa contributions accepted. For more information on how you can help Operation "Big J" -Bring Me Home, call the Foundation at (732) 671 -6488 or visit www.battleshipNJ.org. Donors will receive future membership/event info.
***
This ad prepared courtesy of Hammond Farrell Inc., New York, NY.
MARINE ART
AView of New York Harbor a Century Ago: Alice Austen's Photographs by Justine Ahlstrom
The view from the lawn of "Clear Comfort" instilled in Alice Austen a lifelong familiarity and fascination with the ships that built the seaport of New York. On any given day, an international fleet of square riggers, ocean liners, fishing and coasting schooners, excursion steamers, yachts and tugboats went by her home and she
rom the lawn of her Staten Island home "Clear Comfort," overlooking the Verrazano Narrows at the entrance to New York Harbor, Alice Austen observed and photographed the dynamic life of this great seaport, bequeathing to us a priceless record of square riggers, coasting schooners, racing yachts, tugboats, excursion steamers, immigrant ships and ocean liners in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Today, that home is a museum , overshadowed by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, but still witness to the commercial and recreational traffic that makes the harbor one of the world's preeminent seaports. Young Alice was only ten years old in 1876 when she got her hands on her first camera, loaned to her by her Danish sea-captain uncle, Oswald MUiler. She took to the medium immediately and soon became a skilled photographer with an artist's eye for composi-
F
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
was frequently to be found under the old yew, photographing the life of the harbor. This image , taken on 27 September 1890, is dominated by square riggers. Later photographs feature ocean liners and steamers. All photographs courtesy the Staten Island Historical Society.
tion and light and a scientist's understanding of the new technology. She was a pioneer in the new field of photography, capturing places, people and events that no one else, man or woman, was recording. Her home, family, friends and New York harbor were her first subjects, but she soon took her craft out into the wider world, to tennis courts and race tracks, to quarantine stations like Hoffman and Swinburne islands, to South Street where the great ships berthed, to the busy streets of Lower Manhattan, and on her travels up and down the East Coast, to the Chicago World's Fair and to Europe. Born into a wealthy Staten Island family and raised as the only child in a household with six adults-her mother (Alice 's father had deserted his family, possibly before Alice was born), her grandparents, her mother's siblings Mary and Peter, and Mary's husband
Oswald-Alice had the leisure to explore her new-found interest and the funds to pay for expensive equipment. In that era, photography was not a hobby you could pick up on a whim. Expense was not the only cons ideration. The cameras she owned were heavy, cumbersome instruments that required a tripod to hold the camera steady for the several seconds needed to take the picture. The images were made on glass plates, which she had to carry with her-one for every shot she planned. She then took the plates home and processed them in her own closetlike darkroom on the second floor of the house. Because there was no running water in the house for most of her life, she took the plates out to the pump to be rinsed in all weather. Composing the photograph, eval uating the natural lighting, the optimal exposure time, the amount of the danger-
35
The America' s Cup Race on 5 October 1893, between American defender Vigi lant (the first of Nathanael H erreshoff s five successful America's Cup defenders) and the British Valkyrie II, was called off halfway through when the wind died and it was evident that neither yacht would finis h in the six-hour time limit. When the race was called, Vigilant was nearly a half hour behind her challenger. In each of the later three races that were run to completion, however, Vigilant beat Valkyrie o n corrected time--by only forty seconds in the fina l thrilling race-to retain the Cup. Ya chting writer W. P. Stephens, in his series on the Traditions a nd Memories of American Yachting (Woode nBoat Publications, Brooklin ME, 1989), wrote: " ft was in this match . .. that the attendant fleet of excursion boats,from fishing smacks to the largest Sound and Hudson River steamboats, became not only a nuisance but a menace, giving the yachts no space in which to maneuver, and killing with its deadwash the yacht which chanced to be astern." Some of this activity is evident in Alice Austen's photograph of the 5 October evem . Her caption reads: "First Fluke Race, 'Vigilant' rounding stake boat. Fin e day, light wind."
ous magnesium flash powder needed to illuminate an indoor scene and the correct methods of processing the plates made up a challengi ng comb ination of art and sc ience. Alice more than met that challenge. Throughout her life she experimented constantly with her art and she recorded her experiments meticulously on the sleeves that held each plate, li sting the date, subject, weather, time, location, camera and len s used, the exposure time and other assorted detail s. A typical entry reads: "Wi steria taken from window upstairs. No sun , but not far away. A sort of Indian summer day, glimmering. 2.40 p. m., May 21st, 1914. Stanley Ortho. Counted 20. Azo Hard G Matte. " Amateur only in that she did not get paid for her craft, she energetically pursued photography until arthriti s made it too difficult for her to manipulate the camera. It is estimated that she took some 7 ,000 photographs in her lifetime. Of those, 3,500 or so survive in the Staten Island Historical Society, rescued by chance. Few of these had been seen by any but family and friend s. Austen did get copyrights on about 150 images, some of which became postcards. Another series of photographs of men, women and chi ldren on the streets of Lower Manhattan were part of a series entitled "New York Street Types," which were mounted and sold in a fo lder, tied with a silk ribbon. In the mid -1890s she took photographs to illustrate a book on bicycling for ladies for her friend Violet Ward-which gave her an opportunity to further her experiments photographing people and objects in mo36
tion , a challenge she wrestled wi th throughout her photographic career. After the stock market crash in 1929, Alice Austen's life changed dramatica lly. Throughout her yo unger years she had not had financial worries and her soc ial position in Staten Island , as well as the force of her personality, made her a person of influence in her community. However, with the loss of her money at the age of 63, life became difficult. She had never married and had stayed at "Clear Comfort" after her family passed away. She li ved there with her friend Gertrude Tate for 16 more years; trying to keep he r home and possess ions together. Gertrude ran a dancing school for years and the two ladi es opened an unsuccessful tea room in the ir house for several summers. Fi nall y, in 1945 , they were forced out. After several increasingly traum atic moves, Austen signed a statement ackno wledging herself a pauper and was given a bed in the Staten Island Farm Colony, basically a poor house, where she would have ended her days had she not been found by Oliver Jensen, a former editor at Life who would go on to found the American Heritage Publi shing Company. In 1951 , Jensen was looking for photographs by women for hi s book Th e R evolt ofAmerican Women. The Staten Island Hi storical Society brought Alice Austen 's photographs to hi s attenti on. Jensen was highl y impressed with the skill of the photographer and the social hi story recorded in the coll ection and was astounded and delighted to discover that she was still alive. When he
found her, she was unresponsive until he showed her prints made from her glass pl ates. She gradually came out of her withd rawal to tell him the stories behind the people, places and events in the photographs. Jensen managed to get her photographs publi shed in several magazines, raising over $4000. Austen's share of thi s was sufficient to move her out of the poor house and into a comfo rtable, pri vate room in a nearby nursing home. She died in June 1952, after having enj oyed a few brief months of fame for her remarkable photographs of her world . It was a sad ending to what had been a happy and full life. By all accounts, Alice had been possessed of a live ly intelligence, great curiosity, a sense of fun , a formidable tal ent for organizing, and considerable charm and stubbornness- great assets when trying to get frie nds, family and strangers to pose at length for photographs that had to meet her exacti ng standards. Lawn tennis, golf, swimming, sai ling, bicycling, parties , dances , gardening, social organizations and travel in the US and abroadAli ce Austen participated fully in the activities available to one of her position , but she was also always an observer by virtue of her chosen medium . Whil e many of her photographs are of family and friends, she explored farther afield than most women of her era would, or could , have gone. She seems as comfortable in commercia l and industrial surroundings as she was at home or on a tennis court. In Boston she took a photograph from aboard a fishing schooner at the dock; in Annapolis a SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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Today, the lovely Clan Macleod is being restored to sailing condition as the James Craig in Sydney, Australia (see pages 25-27). When these photographs were taken, ca.1895, the three-masted bark, built in Glasgow in 1874 , was sailing between New Zealand and New York on a regular run, taking kerosene and manufactured goods south and flax , kauri gum and wool north. The photographer captured her under tow in the East River (be low) , possibly from the ferry, and at a pier in South Street (above) , perhaps from the upperfloor of one of the maritime businesses lining the wate1front.
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
The remarkable clarity of th e images is retained after a century , and many of the buildings across the rive r along the Brooklyn wate1front remain today. There is some question about wh ether Alice Austen or her uncle , Oswald Muller , who gave her herfirst camera and her first lessons , made these particular photographs . The sleeves that held the glass plates are missing, so we do not have her usual notes. Both Austen and Muller photograph ed other images from this period in South Street.
37
On 27 April J897 , a fleet of ships sailed up the Hudson River to celebrate the dedication ofGrant's Tomb in Manhattan's Riverside Park. Ten American and five foreign warships dominated the naval parade , attended by a host of excursion vessels , tugboats and private yachts. Ashore, thousands lined the banks of the Hudson to watch the spectacle and50 ,000 people paraded uptown to walk past
line of African-Americans posed for her in an oyster-shucking house; in Hoboken she spent hours climbing through the ruins of a recently burned block of houses. Immigration was a subject that fasc inated her. The ships bringing Europeans to New York passed by her windows everyday , and the quarantine station was nearby. She was frequently at Hoffman and Swinburne islands and one of her quasi-professional jobs was on the quarantine ship James Wadsworth, as it went out to disinfect a ship suspected of carrying yellow fever. When in Manhattan, she photographed new arrivals , as well as immigrants in their neighborhoods.
the resting place of Presidem Ulysses S. Grant and his wife. Most ofthe vessels shown here would have passed by Alice Austen's home the day before. Two years later, Alice returned to Riverside Park to photograph another naval parade celebrating the return ofthe hero of Manila Bay, Admiral George Dewey, at the end of the SpanishAmerican War.
Unlike other photographers who took their craft to poor neighborhoods , Austen was not looking for the seamy underbelly of New York City. Her subjects, for the most part, appear healthy , friendly and interested in the world around them. Barefoot chi ldren selling newspapers look cheeky, not downtrodden , immigrant women at the market seem to be stopped in mid-conversation , a cheerful policeman proudly presents his profile for the camera and fi shermen pause in the midst of a business deal to face the photographer. Some of these photographs were taken in South Street, surely one of the least likely places in New York to find a well-bred young lady.
Elsewhere on New York's waterfronts she captured salvors taking wood from the hull of a wrecked sai ling ship, passengers aboard the ferry, a shadfishing station just north of her house, Sea Witch at a South Street pier, naval parades, yacht races , and the neverending flow of traffic that passed by her window. An avid sailor herself, she captured some of the most famous yachts in hi story including the races for the America 's Cup between Puritan and Genesta in 1885 and Valkyrie and Vigilant in 1893. Jensen recalls Alice Austen telling him that she was such a determined and untiring photographer in part because she realized the world she knew was
Somehow, Austen convinced working men , women and children. to take the time to pose for her camera--rarely a brief encounter. She was a pe1fection.ist and constamly endeavored to get light , people and background to cooperate with her artist' s eye. Her fascination with the wate1front and with the workaday lives she observed around her often took her to less than salubrious places. What, one wonders, did these fishermen think of the well-bred, determined woman. carting heavy, awkward camera equipment through the muck of a fish market? This image is one of eleven. surviving photographs of the fish market. Her description. reads: "Weighing small fish at the Fulton Fish Market, April JO, 1895." Jn the midi 890s she made myriad photographs of people at work in all parts of New York City and in all walks of life . Her interest in harbors and fishin g took her to other piers as well, as she took some photographs from aboard a Gloucester fishing boat in Massachusetts during a trip in 1892.
38
SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
Fit for a President. ~~
vanishing, and she wanted to preserve some part of it for the future. That goal she certainly accomplished. New York Harbor had a talented and artistic champion in Alice Austen and she indeed left us with an incomparable record of o ur seafaring past from a unique perspective. ,t
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Additional reading: Alice' s World: The Life and Photography of an America Original: Alice Austen , 18661952, by An n Novotny (The Chatham Press, Old Greenwich CT, 1976, 224pp, illus, ISBN 0-85699-128-7) "The Seagoing World of Alice Austen," by Oliver Jensen, Seaport XIII (4): 18-22. "The Ful ton Fish Market: An Alice Austen Portfolio," by Charl es I. Sachs, Seaport XXIII (3): 50-53.
The Alice Austen House Museum & Garden is a National Hi storic Landmark today, part of New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation. Originally an 18th-century farmhouse, when Alice's grandparents bought it in 1844, they transformed it into an elegant Victorian
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Alice Austen's photograph of her home "Clear Comfort," ca 1899 from the path leading up from the entrance gate.
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39
Annals
of the Pacific Steam Schooners
One of the most remarkable of the late Karl Kortum's legacies to the field of maritime history is the collection of oral histories, interviews and letters he gathered from those who sailed in square rig and other historic trades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The steam schooner trade, unique to the Pacific coast of North America, was one ofhis interests and he corresponded with people who had sailed aboard them as crew and passengers, focusing particularly on the Wapama (currently on a barge in Sausalito, California), which he rescued from the scrap heap and restored at the San Francisco Maritime Museum.
T
he Pacific wooden steam schooners first appeared in the later 1880s to carry lumber from the PacificNorthwestto supply the building boom in the cities of California. The last one was built in 1923. Today, of the 225 that once served the West Coast, only the Wapama, built in 1915, survives. The steam schooners and the men who sailed them became the stuff of legends along the coast and among sailors the world over. They were a different breed of sailor from deepwatermen. The vessels sailed close to land, working their way along rocky cliffs in treacherous waters. Loads of lumber and railroad ties were sent down chutes perched atop the cliffs or were put in a sling and lowered to the vessel. According to Captain Fred Klebingat: "You couldn't use a deepwater skipper for that kind of work. He would die. He would die of fright. Sailing right up to the cliffs-you 've got to get used to it. A deepwaterman never did .... "If you 're going north with a sailing schooner you go a thousand miles to sea. "But an under-powered steam schooner is a different thing. Bound northward in the middle of summer one had to hug the beach to escape the high seas and strong winds . You can ' t buck that stuff-you have to look for every cranny. You crawl along, close around the headlands. The old time skippers knew every cove, every farmhouse and barn. At night even the lights in the windows were a help. And in a fog you were supposed to know where you were by the different barks of the farmers' dogs. "As Minturn , the second engineer of the Rolando, put it one time: ' We used to go that close in that you could pick flowers as you pass by. ' 40
compiled by Karl Kortum "You see a big tankerout there-spray all over, plenty of power, hedoesn ' tgive a damn. Hedoesn ' thave to give a damn." The vessels were known the world over for hard work, good food and good pay. The work didn ' t end when you got to your destination, for the crew also served as longshoremen, on- and offloading piles of lumber from docks, chutes and slings. The food was good and plentiful because they were in port more than they were at sea and the food did not go bad; captains found good food to be an added incentive. And the good money came from the overtime earned loading the ships after you had already put in your long hours at sea. Sailors recall those days with a combination of admiration and disbelief: Emmett Hoskins: "It used to be commonly heard along the waterfront that the steam schooner captains worked their crews too hard. Yet these crews were the highest paid seamen in the world, I believe. They liked their overtime pay and they liked the good feeding that went with it. They were there because they wanted to be there." John Stoll: "I kept hearing about the 'white slave drivers on the West Coast' ... of the ' Russian Finn man of wars.' You could earn fantastic sums of money in them, like $ 100 a month. You could eat until you burst with the constant food on the table. One hundred dollars was a phenomenal amount for a sailor to make in those times. I am talking about 1913. Sailors ' wages then were $35 a month. Of course, the $100 was with overtime." Paul Hensel: "Everybody was after money-you would quit a steam schooner that didn't work overtime. If there was no money in a ship, one trip was enough. You could go offshore in the big steamers, work eight hours and have nothing to do-I mean deepwater ships. ... You ain't packing much with youpair of shoes, overalls, union card, hook. " In those years, nearly 75 percent of the 3500 members of the Sailor's Union of the Pacific were northern Europeans, and Scandinavians, particul arly the "Russian Finns" seemed to have laid claim to the Pacific steam schooner fleet-it was called "California's Scandinavian Navy. " Klebingat recalled: "Those Russian Finns were very clannish. They work you out of a ship--drop a tie on your toes or something like that. . . . In time I would have been accepted as one of them by the Russian Finns. I would have
paired up with one of them as a partner. But I wasn 't cut out for a steam schooner man, if it really comes showdown ." Myths arose about the men who drove the steam schooners to their Herculean tasks, the men who made up California's Scandinavian Navy. Skill, fortitude and stubbornness were the characteristics by which they were known, as they took their often dangerous!y overloaded ships into treacherous waters. In the stories told of them , logic and safety were of secondary importance where the lumber was concerned, and they performed miracles to get the job done. Emmett Hoskins: "After working two or three twelve-hour days in a row handling lumber, when you turned into your bunk at night your fingers were all curled. After the first day at sea, working the wheel, your fingers would ¡straighten out again. But for awhile your¡ hand was shaped like holding a hook. Your hand gets so tough , you are not bothered by blisters or anything like that. ... The young fellows used to say that you shouldn 't go in the steam schooners until you were 30 years old or so because the work was so hard that it bent your bones ... made you round-shouldered." Harold Gade: "Crazy buggers .. . they would put on the company deckload, then they'd put on their own deckload. Wintertime, too. I used to see them at Pier 45, deckload all shifted. All he was going to do was straighten up the lumber and keep going south. "That 's why they all died richthey 'd put on a deckload for the company and then steal their own deckload to go on top. " And John Stoll: "There was a certain sense of insanity involved in the whole business of lumber schoonering, as far as I'm concerned. Get the lumber ashore as fast as you can, get in, get out again, get another load. The boom on the foremast was ready to drop the first sling on the wharf while you were still making fast aft. . .. You never waste a minute. In a steam schooner everything counts." Klebingat summed it up: "All those steam schooner men are the samethey 've got lumber on the brain .... Show them a lumber pi le and that's it." To keep all the Carlsons, Johansens and Walgrens straight, nicknames were customary-"Single Reef," "Rough Pile," " Glassy Eye," "Swell Head ," "Cordwood," "Doughnut," and "Scarface " were used to tell one Johnson from the nex t, according to Hugh Delanty in SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
'.,! y
_/
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"Along the Waterfront." Each skipper earned hi s reputation and hi s nickname. Bill Olesen recalled: "If any skipper was entitled to be nicknamed ' Crazy,' then Krauss was the man. Time and again I've seen the old South Coast coming down the line with an impossible deckload and the weather boom 'wung out ' to maintain the balance against a beam sea. It was hi s trade-mark and could be spotted from far off." When Alan Rynberg was chief engineer aboard the Mary Olson in 1952, he reported to the captain that, due to the weight of the lumber stacked on board, the vessel was sitting on the bottom and was sucking mud into the condenser. The captain responded "Yas us Christ, ve haf to get de loomber on har !" and he kept loading as the condenser intake became plugged with mud . So Rynberg released the steam into the air instead of through the condenser. "And what was the price for the skipper's hurry-up? Next morning they had to get the longshoremen down and unload some of the lumber off ' har. ' On overtime." As a kid, Henning Hogansen remembered that "when loaded with lumber their decks were awash. One time .. . there was a steam schooner headed down the Willapa river and they were in the usual hurry and they forgot to put these stopwaters in place. In a steam schooner they wouldn't secure the boom at the dock ; they did this while she was underway down the river so the boom s were still up. She went around a bend, heeled over, the water started pouring in the engine room door, and down she went. The steam schoonerdidn 'tsink; the lumber floated her. " E. L. Owens relates a stranger yarn: "In the Donovan we were bar-bound inside Grays Harbor for three or four days .... Our captain got impatient after the best part of a week had gone by. We probably would have made it if it weren ' t such a big ship. And if a wave had happened to help us at the right spot and had kicked us over. "But we got there-on the bar itself-in the trough of a wave. We hit. There is no other sensation like hitting a bar. It is like this building being dropped ten feet and stopping there-sudden like. No springs to break the shock. "It broke the spring stay between the masts-that was the damage we could immediately see. The Donovan was now hump-backed. It was blowing, there was a pretty good sea running-we couldn ' t SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
l
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Schoonerman Darrell McClure sailed aboard the Sea Foam , here moored head and stern awaiting a load of lumber coming down on.a trolley at the Point ,Mendocino City, Ca lifornia.
turn around or we would broach to. "What kept us together was the loadin those days each piece was fitted like in a building, a structure. The lumber was of any kind of a length and it was all interlaced. I wasn ' t particularly worried when I saw that the chains lashing the deckload to the ship did not break. "Well, we couldn't get back in so we continued down the coast to Astoria. The pumps were going full blast but the water was gaining on us-striking the bar that hard had started bad leaks, as might be expected. We started to use the hand pump, too. "We got in to the Columbia and the skipper ran her on the mud. He really gave her a good shove up there. The whole crew quit-I stayed. The captain, chief engineer, and the mate stayed. A marine surveyor came aboard-put more pumps in! The Donovan was a badly shaken up ship. "A pick-up crew was put aboardloggers and cannery hands from the salmon canneries up there. They all came aboard and we set out for San Pedro. The new crew hadn't been told the ship was sinking. "'How come there are so many pumps! ' "'We've got a little leak.' "They began to complain, claimed they were shanghaied. "The keel, as we found out later, was split in a kind of a big jag. Like in a big shark with its mouth open . As we went down the coast this jag started to gather kelp. The Donovan started to slow up .. . and slow up. We were finally going only three or four knots, dragging all that kelp. So we stopped. The kelp attached
to our broken keel came floating up on both sides, masses of it. We put over stagings and tried to cut it adrift. "This didn ' t work too well so the captain put her astern for two or three hours. That dislodged it. We had to do that two or three times. We went offshore a little further to miss the kelp. But all the time we were pumping like the dickens-that made people nervous and that was why we stayed in close and got into the kelp in the first place. "We finall y made Pedro. The Donovan was dry docked in Wilmington. They took some photographs on the drydock . It looked like a low tide scene on a coastal rock. Some of the kelp was 100 feet long." Overloading, treacherous seas, green hands, damaged vessels were not good reasons to delay a voyage. And stories abounded that the death of a crewman was also no reason to slow down . Fred Klebingat: "It was all a hurry-up system; stop for nothing! A man got killed loading or discharging: All right! Put him to one side." Richard H. Tooker: "Once upon a time, somewhere north of Point Arena, the schooner was under the wire loading as fast as poss ible when one of the deckhands slipped and fell overboard. "Another of the sai lors rushed up to the mate, with the word. "The answer? 'Never mind the man overboard, load the loomber, he can svim , maybe.'" And from Pinky Tollefson: "There was an old longshoreman who had been on the booze and was just killing himself and finally he died down a hatch. "' Benny just died! ' yelled up some41
In 1923 , the. Esther Johnson was the last wooden steam schooner built on the West Coast. Here, she smls 111 her prime , loaded with a cargo of lumber. NMHS Truste e Ed Zelinsky sailed 111 the aged ship to the Pacific war zone in WWII.
body from the gang (really not too surprised). '"Never mind that . .. throw him in the vings and let's have the loomber! ' "That particular gang boss was a terror for getting the lumber out." Many of the lumber schooners also served as passenger vessels-a fairly quick and reasonably inexpensive way to travel in the days before roads and the railroad connected the coastal towns. But the passengers did not always realize what they were letting themselves in for. Captain Hugo Clever: "I was in the Wapama. We unloaded lumber in San Pedro and then we loaded cement. You can imagine what that was when we got through. Then when that was through we had to go meet the train . The train come alongside with passengers and we carried the baggage. Sometimes they wouldn't let us have the baggage. We looked like a bunch of-well, the worst you could ever see. Just cement on us from one end to the other. '"Hurry up, boys, get the baggage over.' And those poor fellows that bought the tickets for the Wapama, of course I heard the story later, they show them in the offices big ships with four stacks on them. When they come down they have to look down to us. "And here we were, about ten of us, going up to the train. The train comes in and we had to carry all the baggage. '"Where you going with it?' '"On the ship. ' '"That's not the ship. ' '"Sure that's the ship; that's the Wapama ."' Robert and Lucille McKee of Sonora, 42
California, decided to have a seagoing honeymoon during the Depression. "A trip to San Francisco was one of the least expensive holidays you could take. For $25.00 a sea voyage for two! The Wapama was due to sail on Saturday. I went down and looked her over on Friday on my way home from work. The Wapama was loading in San Pedro and I must say I was a bit startled at our honeymoon ship when I first saw her. It was not her size-somehow I had an intimation that she was not an ocean liner-but her condition. She looked her age. " In spite of the hardships and their workaday appearance, the ships and their crews were regarded with affection and pride by those who lived along the coast and knew them well. Mrs. J. W. Stafford wrote: "The folks who lived on the coast recognized the ships as friend s, and knew the names and histories, just as one would know about a friend. And the names were often used in conversation, and are familiar and wellloved, just as the names of the captains are known. " Mrs. Nannie M. Escola recalled her many voyages aboard those schooners: "I wouldn ' t have missed the steam schooner days for anything. I traveled as a passenger in the Pomo, Point Arena; that Pomo was a squeaky squawkish boat. I traveled on most of them, whichever was going; it was interesting. " Schoonerman Emmett Hoskins summed up what the vessels meant to the West Coast: "To me the Pacific Coast sailing vessels and the steam schooners were like part of the coast. Without them nowadays the ports seem deserted .... I
will never forget them and I was always happy to sail in them , fine masters and old time mates; the sailors and crew were always the pick of the American merchant service. Most all had served in sail and were excellent sailormen. "To see these vessels in port was a pleasure, hard-working, with their cargo gear hoisting out or heaving in slings of lumber, shingles, laths or timbers. The sailors and longshoremen humping the lumber kept the gear going as fast as the winches could handle the load, a joy to watch them work. The steam exhaust from the winches was discharged in the air which was picturesque; it formed white steam clouds as the loads were hove in or out. Really those were great days along the coast with the little busy J, vessels always on the go. " Pacific Steam Schooner Foundation The newly incorporated Pacific Steam Schooner Foundation has been working hard over the past year to stabilize the Wapama, in cooperation with the vessel' s custodians, the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. RADM Thomas J. Patterson reported that the Pacific Steam Schooner Foundation met recently with National Park Service staff to draft an agreement outlining each organization 's responsibilities with regard to the historic steam schooner. They also have the cooperation of the Army Corps of Engineers at Sausalito where the Wapama is berthed on a barge. Work on the vessel has included the reinstallation of fire , security and flood warning alarms, a thorough cleaning, the removal of pigeons and new screening to keep pigeons away, a secure covering against winter rains, and new lights inside the vessel. The Foundation meets once a week in the office of Edward G. Zelinsky, a local businessman who sailed on one of the last steam schooners, the Esther Johnson , in WWII. Plans for the future include the possibility of establishing a youth hostel on board. Now that the group has been incorporated as a non-profit organization, they can begin a strong fund-raising campaign, as any donations will be tax deductible. For more information on the Pacific Steam Schooner Foundation, or to make a donation , contact them at PO Box 1043, Tiburon CA 94920; 415 435-0413.
SEA HIST!ORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
MARINE ART NEWS Buttersworth in the Chesapeake
Mystic Exhibits
From naval ships and clippers to yachting scenes and ships in stormy seas, "The Cold Green Sea and the Sky: Paintings by Thomas and J. E. Buttersworth," on display at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, celebrates the American maritim e experience. The differences in Thomas 's precise renditions and his son Jam es' s more stylized interpretations illustrate the evolution of marine art, from static ship portraits to a more fluid use oflight, design and movement. Thomas Buttersworth (1768-1842) served in the Royal Navy for five years, which left him with an intimate knowl"An American Frigate in Distress ," by James E. Buttersworth , edge of British waroil on millboard, 8 1/2" x11 3/4". (Photo by Paulette Barton) ships and naval engagements. His son, James Edward (1817-1894 ), became better known, finding his subjects in the fast clippers being built in America, hi s adopted country, for the Gold Rush and scenes of increasingly popular yachting races. James painted vessels in dramatic situations and from different angles, and used light in new ways , taking marine art beyond the ship portraits done by his father and his colleagues. The 18 paintings on view at the museum are from the collection of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, and the exhibit was developed in cooperation with the Penobscot museum, with a grant from the Grayce B. Kerr Fund. It will run from 8 November to 26 April. Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Mill Street, PO Box 636, St. Michaels MD 21663 ; 410 745-2916
To close out the year, Mystic Maritime Gallery will display the works of three prominent American maritime artistsmodelmaker Alan Burghardt and painters William Duffy and David Thimgan. The exhibit, which runs from 15 Novemberto 31 December, is supplemented by a collection of small works by gallery artists in a range of sizes and prices. And keep your eyes open for works by the following artists: Marek Sarba, Wendell Mohr, Victor Mays, Ralph Bush, David Thimgan, Marc Berthier, Anne-Emmanuelle Marpeau, Tingbo Guang, and Yoko Gaydos. They all were award winners in the 1997 Mystic International, which has just closed at the Gallery. Mystic Maritime Gallery, Mystic Seaport Museum Stores, Mystic CT 063556001; 860 572-5388
Regional Exhibition of ASMA in Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum is hosting the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA) Regional Exhibition for the Mid-Atlantic area in Philadephia from 15 November through 12 April. The 36 new works of art in media including oil, watercolor, acrylic, drawings and sculpture, feature local scenes, ranging from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and the bustle of the Port of Philadelphia to oyster dredging on the Chesapeake and containerships unloading in Wilmington, Delaware. Peter Stanford, president of the National Maritime Historical Society, was the featured speaker at the members ' preview on 13 November and, after his lecture, he led a walking tour of the exhibit with Curator Mark Isaksen. IndependenceSeaport Museum, 211 South Columbus Boulevard& Walnut Street, PhiladelphiaPA 19106; 215 925-5439 "Dawn on the Delaware," by Jack Coggins, oil on canvas
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
EXHIBITIONS • Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum: 8 November-26April 1998, 'The Cold Green Sea and the Sky: Paintings by Thomas and J. E. Buttersworth" (PO Box 636, Mill Street, St. Michaels MD 21663; 410 745-2916) • Cummer Museum of Art: 20 November28 February 1998, "Romancing the Sea," 11th National Exhibition of the American Society of Marine Artists (829 Riverside Ave., Jacksonville FL 32204; 904 356-6857) •Independence Seaport Museum: 15 November-12 April 1998, Mid-Atlantic Regional Exhibition of the American Society of Marine Artists (211 S. Columbus Blvd, Philadelphia PA 19106-3199; 215 925-54 39) • Kurt E. Schon, Ltd Fine Art Gallery: 5 September-2February 1998, "Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Marine Oil Paintings from the Bradford Collection" (510 St. Louis Street, New Orleans LA 70130; 504 524-5462) • Mystic Maritime Gallery: 15 November31 December, Three Distinguished Artists (Mystic Seaport Museum Stores, Mystic CT 06355-6001 ; 860 572-5388) • Naval War College Museum: 11 December-January 1998, 12th Annual Navy-Newport Artists and Art Show (686 Cushing Road, Newport RI 02841 ; 401 841-7689) •San Diego Maritime Museum: 14 November-IO May 1998, "A Celebration of Pacific Maritime Heritage by John Stobart" (1306 North Harbor Drive, San Diego CA 92101; 619 234-9153) • South Street Seaport Museum: 1 November-25 January · 1998, "John DePol: New York Engraved" (207 Front Street, New York NY 10038; 212 748-8600) •The Mariners' Museum: 6 December-31 May 1998, "The Culture of the Sea: One Hundred Photographs from The Mariners' Museum" (100 Museum Drive, Newport News VA 23606-3759; 804 596-2222)
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MODELMAKER'S CORNER
HMS 13eagfe Revisited by Karl Heinz Marquardt
hen I chose HMS Beagle as the subject for my next contribution to Conway Maritime Press's "Anatomy of the Ship" series, my belief that it would be an easy task to research such a well known and fairly modem ship was quickly shattered. To get the illustrations I required for the book, I decided I had to design and build the model myself. Not having been an ardent "Beagler" before, I took on thi s project with an open mind and was grateful for research done by such previous hi storians as Lois Darling, Keith S. Thomson, David Stanbury and others. However, I realized that some of their conclusions regarding the ship's appearance conflicted with firsthand descriptions and artistic renderings, and, in building my model , I reassessed their findings in 1ight of contemporary evidence. HMS Beagle, launched in 1820, was the forty-fifth vessel built from Sir Henry Peake's 1807 design for a IO-gun brig. A slightly modified plan was developed in 1817, which was used to build Beagle and several other vessels. The brigs had a poor reputation in the Royal Navy, but many of them, after conversion to packet and survey ships, had long and successful careers. Beagle sailed only once as a brig, in an 1820 naval parade, and lay at the
W
Woolwich Naval Yard, where she had been launched, until 1825. At that time, she underwent a refitting that transformed her from a two-masted brig to a three-masted bark-a change made to earlier bri gs that had greatl y improved their sailing ability and allowed them to operate with a smaller crew. Originally a flush-deck vessel, Beagle also acquired a poop cabin and forecastle. Thus, she made her first surveying voyage to South America as a bark, returning to England in 1830, where, under Captain Robe rtFitzRoy , she soon underwent another refit in preparation for her second surveying voyage-the one on which the young Charles Darwin sailed. The changes ordered by FitzRoy included raising the maindeck, replacing the capstan with a windlass, replacing the open-galley fireplace with a Frazer 's patent stove, and adding several small boats for exploring in shallow waters. The second voyage lasted until 1836. Beagle made one more surveying voyage, from 1837 to 1843, and was then stripped and turned into a fixed coast watch vessel. In 1870 she was sold to "Murray and Trainer," probably scrap dealers, and disappeared from the record . My reconstruction is based on the second refi t done in 1831 , just prior to the famous Darwin voyage. As no actual
drafts of the ship after her refit are availabl e, it is no wonder that my search for models met with little success. However, orig inal drafts of Sir Henry Peake's 1807 des ign are extant, as are drafts of changes to the class ordered in 1817. Written descriptions and artisti c impressions by contemporary witnesses such as Beag le captains John Lort Stokes and Robert FitzRoy, First Lieutenant Graham Gore, Charles Darwin, Midshipman Philip Gidley King, official arti sts Conrad Martens and Augustus Earle, and HMS Britomart's captain Owen Stanley, also provide a good base to work with if they are used in the proper perspective. Sweep of Sheer Let us first consider the ship 's sweep of sheer. Here, confusion reigns supreme and none of the reconstructions come close to the available watercolors and pencil sketches. The questions may stem from a literal interpretation of Robert FitzRoy 's letter to the Principal Officers and Commissioners of His Majesty 's Navy, 9 July 1831 , in which he asked them to increase the height of the maindeck by eight inches, a request that, in the end, came to 12 inches forward and eight inches aft. He wrote: "The BEAGLE is ordered to carry only two six pound guns, therefore raising the deck will not be of
Th e author developed these plans-side elevation (top left) , profile ofdeck and interior (bottom left), rigg ing configuration and sail plan (below )--based on the original drafts ofthe I 0-gun brig and contempora1y accounts and artists' renderings of the refits in 1825 and 1831. All photos by the author.
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SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
consequence as respect the guns and their ports. By making this alteration, the stowage and comfort will be very greatly increased. She wi ll be much dryer upon deck; - Her waist wi ll be less deep, and as she carries only two guns, the stabi lity of the vessel will not be affected." If this order had been fo ll owed and the bulwarks had not been increased, as Thomson and Darling maintained, the depth of waist would have decreased from 52 inches to 40 inches from the top of the rail to the deck. That he ight would have been impracticable from several points of view. First, the space necessary for gunports on the upper deck for the six-pound guns was 39 inches- IS inches for the height of the gun above the deck, plus 24 inches for the he ight of the port. Thi s does not take into account the height of the port 's upper sill and the gunwale. In any case, FitzRoy also took aboard four six-pound gun s as well as two nine-pound carriage guns-nearl y a fu ll complement of armament. Second, if the bulwarks remained unaltered, neither the forecastle nor the poopdeck could be raised without spoiling the sheerline considerably. Our artists tell us that did not happen. The normal height of the forecastle wou ld be 4 feet; subtracting the 12 inches resulting from the raising of the deck wou ld have rendered that space unworkable, with the chartroom height in the poop cabin sufferi ng, too. Add iti ona ll y, Beagle's channels in Owen Stanley's waterco lor were not fitted between the gunports, as indicated on the original brig drafts, but above, something on ly possible by raising the sheerline in accordance with the new deck.
Upper Deck and Interior Layout The on ly eyewitness ev idence for the layout of the upper deck and interior comes from Philip Gidley King, who sai led as midshipman during B eagle's second voyage . His recollection, about 60 years later, was in many ways still very accurate and could be reconstructed by considering known dimensions. One contradictory point was hi s positioning of the windl ass. Hi s sketch of the interior shows the windlass below the forecastle whil e hi s upperdeck sketch places it aft of the foremast, therefore abaft the forecastle. The new ly installed windlass was a SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
HMS Beagle in Sydney Harbor in 1841, by Owen Stanley, captain of HMS Britomart (from Darwin and the Beagle, by Alan Moorehead (New York, 1969))
patent windlass des igned for several Royal Navy ships. Fitted with crankhandles outside the bit pins, its width occupied the space from bu! wark to bulwark. The smaller space between the boatswain 's and carpenter's storerooms be low the forecastle was just wide enough to have the bowsprit steps fitted and the anchor chai ns pass ing beside them from the hawse holes over the barrel into the chain locker pipe. The fo ur feet of height below the forecastle beams would not have allowed the sailors to stretch themse lves and exert the necessary muscle power when turning the crank handles. There was only one place fo r the windlass , and this was where the riding bits were fitted when the ship carried a capstan-j ust aft of the foremast as indicated by King on hi s upper deck sketch .
Location of Masts and Galley King also locates the galley in front of the foremast, while the original position was aft of the foremast. Darling concluded: "When Captain FitzRoy men-
tions ' one of Frazer's stoves' to replace the 'fireplace' but fails to include a major change in its location, it could be an oversight, but I would doubt it unless the change took place at the time of the first voyage." In those last words lies the crux of the matter. The fireplace was moved at the time of the first voyage, when the brig became a bark. Throughout their argu. ments, earlier researchers have concluded that only minor changes accompanied the addition of a third mast. We have no documentary proof of that assumption , but all images show the ship, when bark-rigged, with her mainmast in bark position , not remaining in brig position. For example, none of the artists drew the mainmast in brig position , according to all drafts slightly afore the sixth gunport, but just aft of the fifth . The mainmast moved, therefore, from a brig position of0.138 to approximately 0.08 abaft center of waterline, a difference of several feet forward . Darling and Thomson looked at the 45
Two ofthe small boats--the ship's cutter and the yawl-the patent windlass, the fore hatchway.forecastle ladderways, stove pipe , hammocks in their boxes and two of the guns--the six-pound carronade and a six-pound long gun-are all visible in the bow of Marquardt' s Beagle model (above left) . In the poop deck as seen from starboard (top left) , Marquardt displays the jolly boat or dinghy hanging in the stern davits , the 26' whaler in the quarter da vits and secured by gripes. Otherfeatures include the deep-sea sounding winch, the chartroom skylight, the azimuth compass between the two 28' whalers and the open handrails , without which nobody could work on that narrow deck in a rough sea. Th e bow detail (above right) shows the headsails and lower foremast.
work done to HMS Barracouta, another brig converted to a bark, for their conclusions. This comparison is not justified, as Barracouta was converted in Lisbon, a foreign port, during a short stay on her way to her African survey expedition. The Beagle bark rig was fitted in 1825 before her first survey expedition at Woolwich, a naval dockyard, making her conversion a completely different matter. In addition, Barracouta could not have influenced Beagle's rig because she returned to England in 1826, when HMS Beagle was already on her way to South America. The new setting of the mainmast required several changes to upper deck furniture. During the first voyage, a 28' yawl, the largest boat on board, was placed between the mainmast and foremast. The galley pipe in its original position would have been in the way of the yawl, and if the fore hatchway, a major entry and exit for the crew, had remained in brig position, it would have been directly below the yawl's bottom. However, with the newly relocated fore-
46
hatch taking the room of the galley, one place available for the cook 's department was forward of the foremast. To make way for the large yawl, the main topsail sheet bits were also removed. King does not show any on his sketch. The obstruction of oversized boats on the upper deck during the first voyage probably led to FitzRoy's request forthe smaller 26' yawl and 23 ' cutter for the second voyage to replace the 28' yawl, lost in 1828. King also shows two fore and aft ladderways in both the fore and main hatchways, while the Darling reconstruction shows on Iy one athwart fitted ladderway in the fore hatchway. Sailors who have used such ladderways tend to believe King 's sketch. His representation of ladderways in the main hatchway is unusual, but surely not accidental. In his years as a midshipman he probably went that way hundreds of times. Therefore, they should not be ignored. I have also concluded that the main hatchway had to be widened as the original would have been blocked by the yawl's stem and the new width could
accommodate the two ladderways. It cannot be determined with certainty whether this was done during her first major refit in 1825 in connection with the forward stepping of the mainmast. However, with the mainmast's repositioning, other items, such as pumps and main jeer bits had to follow suit. Rigging The repositioning of the mainmast leads us to new conclusions regarding Beagle's rig. Darling wrote: "Nothing I have come across in either the 'sketches' Stanbury refers to, some of which go far beyond that definition , or in the literature, leads us to believe that the proportions of the standard 10-gun brig rig, other than the replacement of the mainsail and its long boom with a mizzenmast, its spanker and topsail , and the addition of what FitzRoy called 'large trysails ' between the masts, were basically altered in the Beagle at the time of her conversion from brig to bark." However, all the artistic ev idence indicates that the mainmast was brought forward, and other telltales point to it. The images show that the lengths of the SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
top- and topgallantmasts and yards on the fore- and mainmasts were different, while on a traditional brig they would be of equal lengths. Ki ng prov ided other unmistakable hints. He placed the two 28 ' whaleboats on skids abaft the mainmast and the break of the poop, so the bows stayed aft of the mainmast. "Over the quarter-deck, upon skids , two whaleboats, eight-and-twenty feet long, were carried," wrote FitzRoy. This could on ly
be done with the mainmast in bark position, not in brig position, where the whalers' stems would extend fo rward of the mainmast. Thus, with the avail able historical evidence and educated inferences about Beagle and her sister ships, I have significantly altered previous views of the famed survey ship. The model will be part of the permanent exhibit in the new Hydrographic Di vision of the Deutsche
Schiffahrtsmuseum in Bremerh aven, Germany, scheduled to open in 1999. 1-
Mr. Marquardt is a marine artist with50 years' experience building and restoring shipmodels. The "Anatomy of the Ship" volume dedicated to HMS Beagle appeared this autumn. His books include Eighteenth Century Rigs & Rigging and Captain Cook's Endeavour, from the "Anatomy of the Ship" series.
P ortside profiles ofHMS Beagle by Beagle artist Conrad Martens in Sydney , 9 March 1839 (below left) and the author' s model (below right).
The Glory Days of Cruising Are Back! Join fellow members of the National Maritime Historical Society aboard the SS Norway, ex-SS France, for a 7-day Caribbean cruise, February 7 to 14, 1998. The SS Norway, ex-SS France, first sailed into New York in February 1962, her beauty combining past elegance and modern speed. The France boasted nearly 2000 works of art, spectacular public rooms and art deco murals. Two decades later, the France was rechristened the Norway to serve in the Norwegian Cruise Line. Sail from Miami with the National Maritime Historical Society and The John-A. Noble Collection for 7 days as we tour the balmy Caribbean visiting St. Maarten, St. John, St. Thomas and Norwegian Cruise Line's private island Great Stirrup Cay. Slide shows on the maritime struggle for the Caribbean, the era of the great liners and the life and art of John A. Noble will be given by Peter Stanford, president of the National Maritime Historical Society, and Erin Urban, director of The John A. Nob le Collection.
From $637 per person, plus port taxes. For information call John or Pauline at PISA BROTHERS TRAVEL 212-265-8420 or 1-800-786-4164
SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS SPUN YARN
Kalmar Nyckel Launched in Delaware
Full information on these news items appears in Sea History Gazette, September/October 1997. Write and ask, and we' ll send you this issue free. To subscribe to the bi-monthly Gazettefor one year, send $18.75 to NMHS (add $10 for foreign postage).
Athigh tide on 28 September, the new replica of the Kalmar Nyckel, the vessel that brought a Swedish colonial expedition to Delaware in 1638 , was launched into the Christina River in Wilmington . Of the fi rst nine large vessels to bring settlers to the New World, the Kalmar Nyckel is the largest and most ornate. The ori ginal vessel was built in the Netherlands in the early 1620s and was purchased for the Swedi sh Royal Navy in 1629. The Crown made the ship available to the New Sweden Company and, in November 1637, she left Sweden. D amaged in a storm , the Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip put into Texel Island, The Netherlands , fo r repairs before leaving Europe under the leadership of Peter Minuit, with sailors, soldiers and 24 Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and German men who pl anned to establish a fo rt and trading post. They landed at "The Rocks" in today's Wilmington, Delaware, on 29 March 1638, and successfull y created a permanent settlement based on fu r trading and , eventually, agriculture, shipbuilding and flour and cotton mills. The Kalmar Nycke l made seven more trips across the Atlantic and served in the Swedi sh Navy before being lost off the city of Kalmar. The replica was built over a period of two years in the Kalmar Nyckel Shipyard, close to the point where the colonial vessel landed in 1638 . Des¡igned by naval architects Thomas Gillmer(Pride ofBaltimore II , Lady Maryland) and Melbourne Smith (Niagara, Californian) and constructed under shipbuilder Allen C. Rawl (Susan Constant), Kalmar Nyckel was based on the original vessel and has been modified only to confo rm to current safety standards. Building crew and carvers came from California, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York , Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virgini a, Wisconsin , Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Representati ves from the countries of Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands spoke at the launching and the ship was christened by Mrs. Martha Carper, First Lady of Delaware. The ship will serve as Delaware's seagoing ambassador of good will and as a sail training vessel with voyages pl anned along the East Coast and to Europe. The Kalmar Nyckel will be commissioned on 9 May 1998, 360 years after the original vessel landed on America's shores. Kalmar Nyckel Foundation, 1124 East 7th Street, Wilmington DE 19801 ; 302 4297447; www.kalnyc.org
SS United States has been arrested in the Delaware River for nonpayment of the mortgage since 1994, which will probably result in a default judgement and orderof sale (S S United States Preservation Society, PO Box 90482, Raleigh NC 27675) .. .. The major US lighthouse preservation groups are discussing the creation of a National Lighthouse Center and Museum to broaden public appreciation and understanding of Arnerica' s lighthouses, create a museum and archive, and serve as a contact point for public inquiries, develop educational programs and events, and support ex isting lighthouse museums . .. . The original 1887 Fresnel lens from the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse, di scovered in storage at Mystic Seaport Museum , will be returned to the lighthouse (PDLILPA, 493 1 South Peninsula Drive, Ponce Inlet FL 32 127; 904 76 1-1 82 1).... The Ships of the Sea Museum, which holds a collection of ship models, paintings and maritime artifacts interpreting Atlantic trade, has fo und a home in the 1819 house once owned by Willi am Scarbrough, a principal owner in the SS Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atl antic (SSM, 41 King Boulevard, SavannahGA3 1401 ; 91 2232-1 511) . .. . The Municipality of Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Randstad Group, plans to bu ild a ship modeled after the 1854 cl ipper Amsterdam, a mediumsized, iron-hulled ship of 800 tons, to be called the City of A msterdam (Joost Schriever, Randstad Holding, 3 120 5695175 or Huub Winthagen, Municipality of Amsterdam, 31 20 552-3245) . ... The new Indian Navy bark Tarangini (see Sea History 77, Spring 1996), designed by Colin Mudie, underwent sea tri als thi s summer. ... The Brazilian government has announced plans to build a sail trainer, also des igned by Mudie, that should be fini shed in time to participate in sailing events in the year 2000 .... The expedition to sail a reconstructed Viking knarr, led by W. Hodding Carter and sponsored by Land 's End, from Greenland to Newfoundland (Continued on page 52) 48
Th e Kalmar Nyckel is launched from her shipyard on the Christina River in Wi lmington, Delaware. (Photo: BB Price)
.., f
SEA HISTO RY 83, WINTER 1997-98
ORIGINAL AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE MUSEUM NEWS When USS Constitution set sail this past summer, she was not steered by the original wheel, which had felt the touch of Hull and Bainbridge. Constitution's original double wheel is on permanent display in the American Merchant Marine Museum. The late Commander Harry P. Hart, formerly at the US Merchant Marine Academy, gave us his account of how this came about. In 1877 , Constitution lay in the League Island Navy Yard, Philadelphia. She was being overhauled in preparation for a trip she was to make to France, bearing the American commissioners and an exhibit to the Paris Exhibition of 1878. In the League Island Yard also lay USS Potomac, no longer seaworthy , but containing some useful fittings. It was the plan to refit Constitution with some of the gear of Potomac , then to sell the latter at public auction for the iron she contained. Government inspectors, whose report is now in the archives of the Navy Department, condemned the wheel and capstan of Constitution. Transferof Potomac's wheel and capstan to Constitution was duly ordered, carried out, and reported to Washington. With the transfer, the wheel of"Old Ironsides" vanished, as far as the official knowledge of the Navy Department is concerned. A note on the sale of Potomac to Capt. Elbert Stannard at public auction completes the incident. What actually happened, according to records of the Stannard family, was that Captain Stannard, after buying Potomac , came to the yard to tow hi s purchase to Port Washington, Long Island , the graveyard for many ships that had outlived their usefulness. Discovering that Potomac had no wheel, he reported the matter to the commandant of the yard, Capt. C. H. Wells. "I have to take Potomac up the Jersey coast," Capt. Stannard explained. "I couldn't possibly get along without a wheel." The commandant ordered that a wheel be found and put aboard Potomac. Officers of the League Island Yard searched through the storehouse and could find nothing but the "worthless" double wheel of Constitution. "If you are willing to risk the trip with this wheel," Capt. Wells told Capt. Stannard, "you are welcome to it. It is of no use to us." "It seemed to be that or nothing," Capt. Stannard wrote later to Rear Admiral Denniston, who at the time of the purchase had been paymaster of the yard. Capt. Stannard had not spent thirty years at sea for nothing. He brought the weary old Potomac safely to Port Washington, where he removed the wheel and set it up in his barn, out of wind and weather, as a curiosity. The wheel was later donated to the US Merchant Marine Academy by the Stannard family. But why is the wheel from a Navy ship in a merchant marine museum? Cogent reasons can be adduced: mariners from our colonial merchant marine started the US Navy-Captain Isaac Hull and three later captains of Constitution were merchant masters as was John Paul Jones-and the reason for founding the US Navy and its primary mission until the 20th century was to keep the seas safe for our merchant shipping. But the truth is, as visitors to the museum will attest, the wheel's beauty and historic significance create a new mission, which justifies putting it on display here. American Merchant Marine Museum, US Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point NY 11024; 516 773-5515
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The original double wheel of USS Constitution is on display at the American Merchant Marine Museum.
SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
49
SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS Report on the 1997 Cutty Sark Tall Ships' Races This year the annual Cutty Sark Tall Ships ' Race series started in Aberdeen. The welcome of the people more than outweighed any minoroutbreaks of Scottish sunshine-elsewhere known as rain! Most of the usual stalwarts were there, but Class All for the small square riggers (under 120') suffered from the absence of the brig Astrid (whose operators had gone bankrupt), the brigantine H enryk Rutkowski (apparently laid up), Eye of the Wind (in Australia), and the R oyalist (electrolysis problems), leaving the two brigantines Asgard II and Jean de la Lune to fight it out in a twohorse race. So, this once vital class has hit the doldrums. Class A proper was graced by all three Norwegian square riggers-StatsraadLehmkuhl (1914), Christian Radich (1937) and S¢rlandet (1927)-for the first time since the Falmouth-Skaw race of 1966. S¢rlandet-one of the ships in the original Tall Ships ' Race of 1956had not raced since 1980. It was good to see her back. She had no engine in 1956, and she thus holds the unique distinction of being the only pure square rigger ever to have taken part in the tall ships' races. Given modem safety legislation one can bet that that record is safe for all time! The parade of sail out of Aberdeen allowed the square riggers to set some sail, but it ran late so the race start had to be delayed. At last everyone got away en route to Trondheim. As the race progressed, an Atlantic high neatly split the fleet, favoring the leaders while leaving the rear to battle declining headwinds. A 150-mile gap soon opened up, and as usual Russia's Mir (1987) was the first square rigger home, followed by Christian Radich and then Statsraad Lehmkuhl. On handicap these places were reversed. In Class B, Sweden's Gladan and Fa/ken were obviously enjoying their 50th anniversary as they fought it ·out. Gladan took the prize, which is only proper as Commander Bengt Malm is the senior officer of the squadron! At the back of the fleet many vessels were becalmed and had to retire in order to get into harbor. Victorian homilies on the virtues of sticking it out to the time limit do not cut much ice with anyone when they are twelfth in class. The weather in Trondheim was outstanding and the long days made it seem tropical. We hated leaving this small but charming place, but the prospect of a cruise-in-company down the Norwegian 50
coast to Stavanger was enticing. Race Results Stavanger was another delightful host Aberdeen to Trondheim, 24 July 1997 city, but soon it was time to be off on CLASS A ( 11 entries) another behind-schedule parade of sail , 1st Statsraad Lehmkuhl Norway Norway and another delayed race start. This 2nd Christian Radich Russia time the route was west-south-west to 3rd Mir an oil rig in the North Sea and then east CLASS All (2 entries) Ireland to a marker buoy in the Skaggerak, 1st Asgard 11 2nd Jean de la Lune UK before turning south ·for the final 50 CLASS B (9 entries) miles or so to the finish off Goteborg, !st Gladan Sweden Sweden. Gladan and Fa/ken had to come 2nd Fa/ken Sweden down from the annual Scandinavian CLASS er cadet meet off Trondheim and started 1st Liv some twelve hours behind the rest of the 2nd Marieto fleet. Despite this massive handicap, 3rd Jolie Brise Gladan still stormed through to win 4th Duet Class B, leaving the British Sail Train- CLASS err ing Association schooners punch drunk ! st Esprit and wondering what they have to do to 2nd Rona II 3rd Dark Horse beat the Swedes. 4th Vegewind In this race once again the wind fa- CLASS cm vored the leaders, with the back markers !st Corsaro II not only having to beat up to the first 2nd Tornado mark, but cope with a wind shift that left 3rd Tormilind them beating to the second mark, and 4th Nauticus thence yet another beat to the finish , but Stavanger to Gtiteborg, 15 August 1997 this time in a near flat calm. Germany's CLASS A (13 entries) Russia bark Alexander von Humboldt (1906) !st Mir 2nd Eendracht Netherlands supposedly had a better handicap this 3rd Statsraad Lehmkuhl Norway year, but still gave time to the huge 4th Kaliakra Bulgaria Russian Kruzenshtern (1926). She man- CLASS All (2 entries) aged to get ahead of both Russian four- I st Asgard /I Ireland posters on the second day (boat for boat), CLASS B (10 entries) Sweden only to find herself still behind Kruzen- I st Gladan shtern on handicap. She also caught 2nd Sir Winston Churchill UK Kruzenshtern on port tack on day three 3rd Johann Smidt UK and was thus able to force her to give 4th Malcolm Miller way. But still no cigar. There is a theory CLASS er I st Frithjof /I in the fleet that playing "liar dice" would 2nd Wyvern van Bremen result in a more interesting, and prob- 3rd Wyvern ably fairer, system of handicapping. 4th Duet In Class A Mir again took line hon- CLASS en ors. On this occasion the wind fell after 1st Esprit she crossed the line and thus she man- 2nd Nomad aged to save her handicap and earn a 3rd Freedom well-deserved first prize, with Statsraad 4th Dark Horse Lehmkuhl taking second prize. This year CLASS cm I st Tormilind the Vicki Scott trophy for square-rigger 2nd Corsaro /I captains was awarded on the aggregate 3rd Nauticus of both races, and Captain Marcus Seidl 4th Trapegeer of Statsraad Lehmkuhl just pipped Cap- Special prizes included the Vicki Scott Metain Viktor Antonov in Mir to win the morial Captain's Prize to the captain of the winning square rigger (Capt. Marcus Seidl inscribed Captain's decanter. Goteborg was the final port of call . A of Statsraad Lehmkuhl), the ST A Prize for number of vessels then went on to upholding the principles of the Cutty Sark Gdansk, Poland, for their millennium Tall Ships' Races (Dar Mlodziezy and Jens celebrations, where they enjoyed that Krogh), the Helmut Bastian Bell for the ship with the youngest crew (Falken) , the Hon. real rarity, a parade of sail actually under Company of Master Mariners Prize for Good full sail-and no need for engines! Seamanship (Kvartsita) and others, ranging LCDR MORIN Scarr from awards for assistance in radio commuPaphos, Cyprus nication to the ship farthest from home. SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
World Ship Trust Roundup The past twe lve months have been busy ones for the World Ship Trust, based in London. The SS Great Britain in England , the Star of India in California, and the Bergantim Real in Portugal have been awarded the prestigious Maritime Heritage Award. The Duke of Edinburgh presented the award to SS Great Britain at Buckingham Palace on 15 October 1996. The US West Coast's Edward G. Zelinsky and East Coast's Peter Stanford, officers of the National Maritime Hi stori cal Society and of the World Ship Trust, were on hand to represent the American interest in thi s innovative steamer built in 1843 for the North Atlantic run. Arrangements for the presentation of the othertwo vessels are in hand at the time of writing. Together these will bring t~ e total of such awards up to fourteen. The trustees are presently considering further such awards, including a special one to be presented at Greenwich during the millennium celebrations there. Awards for Individual Achievement in ship preservation were made to Sir Jack Hayward and Dr. Ewan Corlett for their leadership in sav ing the SS Great Britain. The Trust lent its weight to efforts to saveNgaio (New Zealand), Wapama (US), HMVS Cerberus and May Queen (A ustralia), HMS Demon (UK) and Rotterdam (Holland). The latter is the last great p assenger vessel to have sailed under the Dutch flag and one of the few remaining vessels anywhere dating from the latter years of the golden era of ocean line rs. The Trust has assisted the Natipnal Maritime Museum 's pl ans for the millennium by tracing people familiar with the 1930s paint scheme of HMS Implacable, which, as the Duguay Trouin, fought on the French side at Trafalgar. The museum is rebuilding the stern of the ship, on which this Trust's logo is based, from parts which have lain un seen in its cellars s ince they were removed from the vessel prior to her being scuttled off Spithead in 1949. The stern is to be the centerpiece in the Museum 's Neptune Court. On the publications side, the Trust continues to publi sh three editions of its Review annually. It contains brief ite m s of news on ship and maritime artifact preservation from aro und the world and longer articles on other relevant matters. Thi s year also saw the publication of a booklet on the life and achievements of Frank Carr, the Trust 's founder and the man be hind saving Cutty Sark and many other ship preservation projects. Plans were put in motion for an updated third edition of Norman Brouwer's unique International Register of Historic Ships. Membership continues to increase and the geographic spread of members is greater than ever before. Eight nations are now represented on the Tru st's International Governing Council, which is made up of Vice Pres idents, Trustees, Advisers, and Hon . Corresponding M e mbers. The eight nation s are Australia, France, Japan , Malays ia, the Netherlands , Portugal, the United Kingdom and the US. The council is actively engaged in extending this inte rnational representation. We continue, of course, to be honored by having the patronage of HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand. The increase in membership is mainly due to therecruitmenteffo rts of members themselves, the record for thi s going to Ed Zelinsky, one of our American vice presidents. The Trust has also received publicity from an article that was publi shed in the June/Jul y edition of Maritime Heritage. Other articles are due to appear in in France and Great Britain later this year. The "Frank Carr Annual Lunch" aboard HQS Wellington, a preserved sloop of the Ro yal Navy and the floating livery hall of the Honourable Company of Master Mari ners, is always we ll attended. These luncheons are followed by a talk by someone eminent in the ship preservation fi eld. One of WST' s aims is to promul gate through its worldwide membership news of ship preservation operations everyw here, and it does thi s through the " Sea Pie" columns of its Review. As editor of this publication , the present writer is always on the lookout for such items, and these can be sent to him at the headquarters of the Trust at The Marine Society, 202, Lambeth Road, London , SEl 7JW, England (FAX: 44 (171) 401 2537). P ETER ELPHICK
Hon. Editor World Ship Trust SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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CALENDAR Festivals, Events, Etc. • San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park: 13-14 December, Christmas at Sea (Foot of Polk Street, PO Box 470310, San Francisco CA 94147-0310; 415 929-0202) • Columbia River Maritime Museum: 21 December, WinterFest (1792 Marine Drive, Astoria OR 97103; 503 325-2323) •EXPO 98: 22 May-30 September 1998, "The Oceans, A Heritage for the Future" in Lisbon , Portugal (phone: (351 1) 8319898; FAX: (351 1) 837 3133; e-mail: info@expo98.pt; web site: http://www.expo98.pt) Conferences • Canadian Nautical Research Society: 25-27 June 1998, International Conference on Maritime History in Calgary, Alberta, Canada (PO Box 550350ttawaON,KIP !Al, Canada) • Maine Maritime Museum: 1-3 May 1998, 26th Annual Maritime History Conference (243 Washington Street, Bath ME 04530; 207 443-1316) •National Maritime Museum: 9-11 July 1998, "Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives" (Greenwich, London SElO 9NF, UK) • North American Society for Oceanic History: 9-12 April 1998, 22nd Annual Conference in San Diego CA (Prof. Briton C. Busch, Dept. of History, Colgate University, Hamilton NY 13346-1398; 315 824,7511; FAX: 315 824-7098) • Ship Modelers Association: 26-29 March 1998, 1998 Western Ship Model Conference and Exhibit aboard RMSQueenMary atLongBeachCA (Lloyd Warner, 2083 Reynosa Drive, Torrance CA 90501; 310 326-5177) • Society for Historical Archaeology: 8-12 January 1998, Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology in Atlanta GA (Patrick H. Garrow, Program Coordinator, Garrow
and Associates, 3772 Pleasantdale Road, Atlanta GA 30340; 770 2701192, FAX: 770 270-1932) Exhibits • The Equitable Gallery: from 22 January 1998, "The Dutch in the Americas, 1600-1800" (7th Avenue and 51 st Street, New York NY 10019) •The Mariners' Museum: 26 September-January 1998, "Chartered for History: President Wwfield to Exodus 1947'' (100 Museum Drive, Newport News VA 23606; 757 596-2222) • New Bedford Whaling Museum: 2 May-31 December 1997 , "New Bedford: From Whaling Port to Whaling National Park"; from 19 September, "FacesofWhaling" and"Women Who Went Whaling" (18 Johnny Cake Hill, New Bedford MA 02740; 508 997-0046) • Penobscot Marine Museum: 20 June 1997-15 October 1998, "Travels to the Pacific Rim: The Chi ldhood Sea Voyages of Lincoln and Joanna Colcord" (5 Church Street, PO Box 498, Searsport ME 04974; 207 548-2529) • San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park: 7 February 199831January1999, "Found! The Wreck of the Frolic-A Gold Rush Cargo for San Francisco" (Foot of Polk Street, PO Box 470310, San Francisco CA 94147-0319; 415 929-0202) •US Naval Academy Museum: 21 October -12 January 1998, "USS Constitution 1797-1997: Life of the Ship" (US Naval Academy , Annapolis MD 21402-5034; 410 293-2108) •Vancouver Maritime Museum: 3 October-5 January 1998, "Ghost Ship: Photographs of SS Prince George II" ; 15 November-25 January 1998, "Fishing Baskets of Asia Pacific " (1905 Ogden Avenue, Vancouver BC V6J 1A3, Canada; 604 257-8300)
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(Continued from page 48) to commemorate Leif Ericsson 's voyage of discovery, suffered a setback when , halfway across the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada, the rudder line tore loose and the crew lost the ability to steer the ship. The ship was towed back to Greenland by the Canadian Coast Guard, and the crew will wait until next July to try again (www. viking
1000.org) . . .. The Chinese cruiser Chungshan , sunk off Wuhun by Japanese planes in 1938, was raised in January after 77 days of salvage work and is to be restored at a cost of 10 million yuan . .. . Polish divers working on the Baltic wreck of the 18th-century English vessel Carleton of Whitby have raised several artifacts including the ship 's bell. ... The Portuguese frigate SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
INVENI PORTAM EMIL "BUS" MOSBACHER, JR. (1922-1997), ended a long battle with cancer in August. His legacy to the maritime world is embodied in Operation Sail, which he served as chairman from its founding in 1962 through its most recent gathering of the world's sail training sh ips on America's shores in 1992. The first OpSail in 1964 caught America somewhat by surprise. Twelve years later, the nation came together in 1976 around the ships of OpSail, however, as the majestic vessels drew millions to New York and other seaboard cities to celebrate the nation's birth in 1776. The ships fascinated people as images of a storied past, and their diverse, hard-working young crews dramatically reminded Americans how the nation was founded and what it was about. This event, and the other parades of sail that followed in 1986 and 1992, led to a vast reawakening of America's interest in the sea and in its urban waterfronts. Among many other awards, Mosbacher received the NMHS American "Bus" Mosbacher, on the decks of the frigate Ship Trust Award in 1993 for his leader- Rose, receives NMHS awardfor his work with ship of Operation Sail, a singular contri- Operation Sail. (from left: Walter Cronkite, bution to the maritime heritage. Alan Choate, NMHS chairman, Mosbacher, In his distinguished career as yachts- Peter Stanford, NM HS president) man he served as commodore of the New \ t York Yacht Club and twice successfully defended the America's Cup, in Weatherly in 1962 and Intrepid in 1968. As a racing skipper, he was a crack helmsman and a meticulous manager. Away from the sea, he oversaw his family 's oil, natural gas and real estate business and served as the State Department's chief of protocol from 1969 to 1982. Surviving him are his vivacious wife Barbara, and his three sons, Emil 3rd, R. Bruce and John . PS SCHUYLER M. MEYER, JR., chairman of NMHS, 1989-92, died at his home in Dover Plains, New York, on 3 November. Hi s work lives on in NMHS, the State Counci l on Waterways, the George Bird Grinnell Foundation for American Indian Children and other organizations he inspired and led to the betterment of humankind. An appreciation of his life will appear in the next Sea History.
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Oldest House in South Florida tells of Key West wrecking history. 322 Du;al St. Key West FL 33040
GODFREY WICKSTEED, master mariner and ship-rigging adviser to the Cutty Sark, died at Stockport, England, at the age of 98. He first shipped before the mast in the bark Bellands in 1914. In the 1930s he gained the last Extra-Master's certificate for square riggers ever issued in Britain. In 1934 Alan Villiers gave him command of the Joseph Conrad. Ashore he became a nautical instructor, school teacher and lecturer. In 1957 Villiers appointed him first mate of the replica Mayflower. He worked aloft aboard Cutty Sark until he was 87, at which stage the insurers made him give up that kind of aerial acrobatics.
Dom Fernando II e Gloria, built in Portuguese India in 1843, has been launched again and will be armed with her original guns in the Lisbon Navy shipyards .. .. The Abel Tasman (exBonaire) , built in 1877 and the oldest Dutch vessel afloat, will be rebuilt in Den Helder, The Netherlands .. .. The Scottish paddle steamer Waverley of 1946, which still carries more than 200,000 passengers each year, will get an overhaul thanks to British Heritage Lottery funding of £2 .7 million, allowing the operators to refurbish the boiler, deck shelters, funnels and bow rudder SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
(Waverley Steam Navigation Company, Waverley Terminal, Stobcross Quay, Glasgow, UK) .... The Royal Australian Navy has signed over its Daring-class destroyer Vampire, launched in 1959, to the Australian National Maritime Museum, where it has been on display since 1991 (ANMM, GPO Box 5131, 13A Union Street, Sydney 2001 NSW, Australia; 61 (29) 552-7777) .... The former Canadian Pacific steamer SS Keewatin, built in Glasgow, Scotland, and open as a museum si nce 1968, celebrates the 90th anniversary of her launching
works by Jeff Eldredge for listing and information call: 508-947-0557
or write: Marine Art by Jeff Eldredge P.O. Box8 North Carver, MA 02355
(Continued on page 55)
53
• • •
Four beautiful calendars will keep your eyes on the water all year long! ''
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The Art of the Sea is produced in conjunction with Mystic Maritime Gallery, and sales will benefit Mystic Seaport . The twelve paintings were selected from the seventeenth Mystic International exhibition. Price: $11.99 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign. Classic Motorboats features twelve knock-out photographs of motorboats cruising, racing and at rest. A must for the sailor who loves the throb of the engine. Price: $11.99 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign. The Cruising World calendar presents exceptional photos of sailing yachts in glorious surroundings, chosen by the editors of Cruising World magazine. Price: $10.99 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign.
Tall Ships 1998 features 24 photos of tall ships-full riggers, schooners, barks, and brigantines-a full portrait of the ship and a detail photo for each month. Price: $10.99 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign .
Enjoy these new titles for great winter reading! Appointment in Normandy, by Walter W. Jaffee takes you on the historic voyage of the Liberty shipleremiah O'Brien from her home port in San Francisco through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic for the D-Day commemoration in 1994. Read about a real ship, run by people, not computers, with meals from a coal-fired stove, a triple-expansion steam engine, beer breaks on no. 4 hatch, chipping, scraping, painting. Then witness the ceremonies off Omaha Beach and experience the outpouring of gratitude from the English and French. 550pp, illus. Price: $31.95 + $3 s/h, $5 foreign . TheLane Victory, by Walter W. Jaffee. This is the history of the SS La.ne Vic-
tory, from her birth in WW II, through her service in the Pacific theater, to her present status as a National Historic Landmark in San Pedro CA. 4 l 2pp, illus. Price: $30 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign .
The Last Liberty, by Walter W. Jaffee, captures the life of the Liberty ship Jeremiah O 'Brien, from her service in World War II carrying food and weapons to Europe through storms, ice and the threat of U-boats to her life as a museum ship. 476pp, illus. Price: $29.95 + $3 s/h US, $5 foreign . The Hudson Through the Years, by Arthur G. Adams chronicles the history of the Hudson River region of New York
State through five centuries. 362pp, illus. Price: $35hc, $19.95sc + $3 s/h, $5 for.
The Hudson River Guidebook, by Arthur G. Adams. The best comprehensive guide to the Hudson since the works of Ernest Engersoll in the early 1900s. This guidebook fills the need for a detailed guide to the river from its source in the Adirondacks to the Atlantic. 450pp, illus. Price: $35hc, $25sc + $3 s/h, $5foreign. Life Along the Hudson, by Allan Keller. This volume of impressions oflife along the Hudson encompasses the scope of history, art and literature to tell the story of the majestic Hudson and the life along its banks. Price: $25 + $3 s/h, $5 foreign .
To order, call Erika at 1-800-221-NMHS (6647).
SHIP NOTES, SEAPORT & MUSEUM NEWS Before There Was a Navy-There Was Whitehall! On 30 June 1997, the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vermont announced that "a Revolutionary War gunboat that was part of a fleet commanded by Benedict Arnold . . . has been found sitting upright at the bottom of Lake Champlain, astonishingly well-preserved." It is an appropriate monument to the brave Americans who died fiercely fighting the British Navy at the Battle of Valcour, 11-12 October 1776, in the first naval fleet action in American history. The ships of the Continental Navy, the navies of the individual states, and the privateers, together, harassed Britain 's long supply lines and maintained a flow of seaborne supplies to Washington's army, substantially helping to advance the American cause. But, in the earliest, tenuous days of the Revolution, it was an embryonic naval squadron on Lake Champlain that alone blocked a British incursion from Canada, thus saving the American Revolution. "The little American Navy on Lake Champlain was wiped out, but never had any force, large or small, lived to better purpose or died more glorious ly," naval historian Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan declared. "That the Americans were strong enough to impose the capituThe Phi ladephia, another ofBenedict Arnold's gun- lation of Saratoga, was due to the boats , was discovered in 1935 and was removed invaluable year of delay secured to from Lake Champlain. The original is on display at them in 1776, by their little navy on the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and Lake Champlain." a replica sailsji·om the Lake Champlain Maritime For nascent America, this cruMuseum. This model is in the Skenesborough Mucial engagement began on the seum in Whitehall , New York. shipway s at SkenesboroughWhitehall, New York, today. From here the Champlain Squadron, valiant vanguard of America 's great naval fleets, was launched in 1776. Who today remembers the names: Congress, Trumbull, Washington, Lee, Boston, New Ha ven, Providence, New York, Jersey, Connecticut, Philadelphia and Spitfire? Today, citing a lack of "institutional continuity," the official status of the Champlain Squadron in US Navy annals is obfuscated and unresolved. For their uniquely documented service to America in 1775-76, the sailors and marines of the Champlain Naval Squadron deserve to be cited "for actions above and beyond the call of duty ," not relegated to an obscure, dusty corner of American history, there to be overlooked! Born in Whitehall of adversity and nurtured under fire at Valcour, the ships of the raggle-taggle Champlain Squadron vigorously fanned the feeble flames of American freedom, and, in so doing, left the fledgling US Navy a magnificent legacy. The crews earned "the sailor's right to wear the Navy blue and gold" and they deserve recognition as the progenitors of today 's Navy.
The Visolette Loupe is a unique combination of condenser and 2. 7X magnifier. Its ability to bundle ambient light makes the reading within the glass easier.This 65mm (2.5 ") diameter lens is precision ground and polished, mounted in a solid brass ring with anti-slip bottom and enclosed in a solid walnut case. It makes a stunning addition to any chart table or desk and a beautiful and useful gift for any flat piece collector. $69.00 plus S3.00 shipping per order.
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(Continued from page 52) this year (Peterson Steamship Company, PO Box 511, Douglas MI 49406) ... . The hundred-year-old , 3-masted wooden schooner Wawona , which served in the Pacific lumber and cod-fishing trades, is being restored and stabilized in Lake Union,Seattle(NorthwestSeaport, 1002 Valley Street, Seattle WA 98109-4332; 206 447-9800).... The North Carolina M~ritime Museum has acquired 36 acres of waterfront property on Beaufort's Gallants Channel, funded through private donations , grants and state monSEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
ies, on which they plan to build a conservation laboratory, headquarters for the junior sailing program, a small-craft storage and exhibition shop, a foundry, windmill, ship chandlery and sail loft (NCMM, 315 Front Street, Beaufort NC 28516; 919 728-7317) .... A database with over 65,000 shipwreck records from the North Atlantic is available on CDROM from David N. Barton, Northern Maritime Research, Northern Shipwrecks Database, Box 48047, Bedford NS, B4A 3Z2, Canada; http://www. chebucto.ns.ca/-ad5 l 4/Profile.html). J,
13orpotsr (thannrl ~hip models Fine Half Models of Pilot Schooners and Gloucester Fishing Schooners Paul G. Gill, Jr., M.D. P.O. Box 56 Middlebury, VT 05753 (802) 388-6027 e-mail: paulgill @mailcity.com
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REVIEWS It Didn't Happen On My Watch by George Murphy, retired United States Lines Chief Eng in ee r and Port Engin eer. 50% autobi ographical ; 50% sea stories; 100% entertaining. Written from the unique down under perspective of the engine room. Spans over 40 years United States Lines history from WWII and its glory years to its slow decent into bankruptcy. Includes many fascinating, heroic and humorous sea stories and photos. "Any person who served in the merchant marine or military will rel ate to It Didn 't Happen On My Watch. This book tells it like it is! Sometimes serious, sometimes sad, but mostly humorous. Recommended reading fo r all veterans." George Searle, National President Merchant Marine Vetera ns Hard cover, 360pp, photos $22.95 incl : s/h, NC res. add $1.20 ORDER VISA/MC:
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Forgotten Fleet: A History of the Part specially put together for the support of Played by Australian Men and Ships the Small Ships Section. The authors both served in the Small in the US Army Small Ships Section in New Guinea, 1942-45, by Bill Ships. They, together with other AusLunney and Frank Finch (Forfleet tralians of that group, share their recolPublishing, 7 Wade Close, Medowie lections and experiences in an anecNSW 231 8, Australia, 1996 (1995 ], dotal format. These make enjoyable and 192pp, illus, biblio, index , ISBN 0-646- often fas cinating reading. Many are 26048-0; $50 incl. s&h) highly humorous, relating the chaos tci During the earl y months of 1942, the be expected with such a hurriedl y put Allies in the Southwest Pacific were together force . Their work includes an teetering on the edge of total defeat. annotated vessel li sting that contains Singapore had fallen; Java and Sumatra many of the craft that made up the would be next. The combined British, ori ginal Small Ships commandeered Dutch and American naval squadron in during 1942. Even though I have done the area was virtually wiped out. On 6 considerable researc h toward identifyMay 1942, the Philippines would fall , ing such vessels, the list offered by its defenders marched off to captivity. Lunney and Finch contains a number of Prior to the Philippine surrender, Gen- names pre viously unknown to me. eral Douglas MacArthur had been orIn 1943, the Small Ships Section was dered to Australia to organize against incorporated into the US Army Transan invas ion of Australia, which was portation Corps, Water Division , and thought to be Japan's next target. many of the original vessel s and their The line MacArthur drew in the sand Australian crews continued to serve unagainst further Japanese advance was der that command up until the Japanese the island of New Guinea, which lies surrender in August of 1945. Told from the Australian particidirectly north of Australia, separated only by the Torres Strait. MacArthur pants' viewpoints, this book, although had little to work with , either in men or not organized as a formal hi story in the materiel . Among the most critical short- academic sense, provides an invaluable ages he faced was shipping. In order to insight into the sea-borne supply for the meet that need, American Arrny offic- New Guinea offensive. I highly recomers, with the support of the Australian mend thi s book to anyone with an intergovernment, commandeered great num- est in the war in the Pacific. bers of Au stralian craft, including fi shCHARLES D . GIBSON ing boats, yachts, harbor craft, copra schooners-in fact, almost anything ca- A Most Fortunate Ship: A Narrative pable of staying afloat. This arrnada History of Old Ironsides, by Tyrone G. was put together under a makeshift or- Martin (Naval Institute Press, Annapogani zation known as the Small Ships lis MD, orig 1980, revised 1997, 400pp, Section, US Arrny Service of Suppl y, illus, notes , gloss, biblio, index, ISBN 1American Forces in Australia. To man 55750-588-8; $35hc) this oddball fleet, Australian civi lians, Commander Martin has left no stone as well as refu gee Filipinos, Dutch East unturned in his quest fo r information Indians and others were hired under about the construction and people and contractual agreements . Later, the poly- events impacting on that icon of Ameri glot crews would be joined by Ameri- can maritime history, USS Constitution, can civilians sent from the United States, "Old Ironsides." His obvious love of the but that recruitment would not take place ship is quite understandable; he was her until well into 1943. commanding officer. Hi s exhausti ve reIn August of 1942, the first of the search into the history of thi s vessel has Small Ships arrived in New Guinea spanned nearly 25 years and covers not where they became heavil y engaged in onl y the ship herself, but also life on acti vities ranging from resuppl y mis- board, the traditions associated with her sions to landing operations again st de- and events in which she participated. He fended beaches. The vessel s were armed provides the reader with a rare insight with just about anything that could be into the people and circumstances that scrounged including light cannon, which shaped the frigate's 200-year voyage when fired often di slodged the decking into the hearts of the American people. to which they were affixed. Many of the A chronological style of writing cregun s were of WWI vintage. The gun - ates a narrative that is complete and ners came from US Army detachments reveal img; an afi cionado of naval hisSEA HIISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
tory, American hi story or great ships wi ll thrill to the battles of the Tripo li campaign and the War of 18 12, as well as fee l Martin 's pain at the ignominiou s treatment Old Ironsides received during her subsequent periods of inactivity. At the lowest ebb of the great ship 's hi story, she was, in succession, a receiving barracks, a school and a cargo vessel. Gradually, subsequent administrations realized th e incredible value of the ship and started her on her long journey back to respectability. Martin 's efforts take us through the completion of Constitution's three-yearoverhaul and the preparations for her 200th birthday.
* * * NEW from the*** SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION The MARITIME ADMINISTRATION COLLECTION of SHIP PLANS, 1939-1970 Listing of 55 sets of design drawings of Liberty and Victory Ships, SS United States, etc., with ordering instructions. Send US $10 check payable to SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION to: Ship Plans, NMAH5010/MRC 628, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560 USA
Adtlenture for the Discernin9 Few
WILLIAM H. WHITE CDR Martin has received NMHS' s Robert G. Albion/James Monroe Award for Maritime Historiography for A Most Fortunate Ship.
Charlestown Navy Yard (Division of Publications, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, Washington DC, 1995, 89pp, illus, index, ISBN 0912627-60-3; $4.75pb) This and other NPS books available at 304 535-6018. This outstanding small guide to Boston 's famous navy yard conveys a vividly depicted history of the yard itself, which opened in 1800 and closed in 1974. It also offers useful insights into the actual business of building ships in the ages of sail and steam, with cutaway models and clear diagrams, supplemented by illustrations of the time. The work covers the famous yard commanders and important ships handled, from wooden walls like USS Constitution to the 24 destroyers built there in World War II. A full sympathetic account is given of the changing conditions of work and the lives of the working people. The National Park Service is to be congratulated on this excellent popular hi story, worth more than its price for the illustrations alone, to say nothing of the first-class story . PETER STANFORD
Sailing on Friday: The Perilous Voyage of America 's Merchant Marine, by John A.Butler (B rassey' s Inc., Washington DC, 1997, 304pp, illus, biblio, index, ISBN 1-57488-124-8; $27.95 hc) John A. Butler is a graduate of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy , a former licensed deck officer on US-flag merchant ships, a former naval officer, an experienced cruising sailboat skipper, and an obv ious aficionado of all SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
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Wake of the Wirelessman by 8.}.Clemons. Based on a 1917 sea diary. An 1875 freighter anned with borrowed guns, a radio and a self-sufficient crew defies submarines and surface ra iders. "Well documented, powerful hu man story." 288pp, photos, biblio. , index, $16.95. Order: Glencannon Press. PO Box 633, Benecia, C A 94510 or phone 1-707-745-3933
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things nautical. Sailing on Friday re- including the present, as "clumsy," an flects his dedication to chronicling 220 accurate but perhaps understated label. Five incremental extensions of the years of American maritime history in a manner that is direct, forthright and American coastline from Maine to compelling. Butler divides those 220 Alaska also. are recorded, as are the years into 16 time segments that flow openings of the Chesapeake and Delasmoothly forward from 1776 to the ware, Erie and Panama canals and the present and reflect the American mer- locks at Sault Sainte Marie, as well as chant fleet's "shifting fortunes , periods the contribution of these splendid works of growth , decline , or significant to America 's status as a maritime nation. The contributions of maritime lachange." It reads like a novel, albeit one that is bor and of international laws governing supersaturated with the names of famil- the terms of service of seamen in ships iar heroes, explorers, entrepreneurs, pa- occupy a large portion of the latter half triots , inventors, statesmen, and famous of the book, and he does not slight the ships. Butthe researcher will find ample heroic service of American seafarers in source material in a very complete bib- two world wars , Korea, Vietnam , the liography, which is further enhanced by Gulf War, and lesser military actions the author 's notes on the contents of and international crises. This is a must various sources and his suggestions for read for both the professional mariner additional reading. These appendices and the American maritime history buff. CAPT. ROBERT W. KESTELOOT, may very well be, in fact, one of the USN (RET.) most valuable aspects of the author 's superb recounting of two centuries of This review has been exce1pted with permission from Sea Power, July 1997. American maritime history. Sailing on Friday traces the birth of the American merchant marine through The Schooner: Its Design and Develits ascension to maritime supremacy and opment from 1600 to the Present, by subsequent decline-a cycle that repeats David R. MacGregor (Naval Institute itself more than once and is, hopefully, Press, Annapolis MD, 1997, 19lpp, illus, not yet ended (not, at least, until another reading li st, index , ISBN 1-55750-847period of ascension has been completed). X; $42.95hc) As with all of David MacGregor 's The opening chapters relate the initial growth of the "Merchant Princes," fore- books, it is readily apparent that he is a most among them the Derby and Crown- knowing author and enjoys his work. I inshield families, seafarers and traders once had the pleasure of visiting him in who understood globalization better than his London studio. His collection of drawings and photographs must be the most people today . There is an ample amount of salt and largest and best of any maritime author. a wealth of nautical lore in every chap- The illustrations in The Schooner repreter. Advances in celestial navigation, sent the best of this class of vessel culled techniques of dead reckoning, the art of from his vast collection. This is an updated and larger-format heaving a deep-sea lead , the hazards of furling topsails, and the living condi - version of his earlier Schooners in Four tions when sailing through the Roaring Centuries , published in 1982. It also Forties or the disease-ridden tropics all includes an additional chapter describare vividly told in the early chapters. ing naval schooners that were built, capThe transitions from sail to steam and tured or purchased by the British navy. from wood to iron are duly chronicled- Other chapters include colonial America, and contrasted with the fact that America shallops and chebacco boats, privateers, trailed the rest of the world in adapting Victorian schooners, pi lot schooners and to steam, but used the speed of its fa- the school ships sailing today . All of the mous clipper ships to counter the steady plans included in the book are available but slow pace of the foreign steam pack- directly from the author as well. Many of the photographs chosen for ets. When British steamships caused freight rates to drop, American clipper reproduction are necessarily very old ships requested and received govern- and often in poor condition. However, ment subsidies for the carriage of mail , their content of rare details, occasions a cargo that took little room but yielded and historic worth make the book an high revenues. Butler describes the en- absolute must for artists, model makers tire history of government maritime in- and lovers of this vanishing rig. The tervention through the years, up to and photographs are augmented with line SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
drawings and sail plans, many created by the author to further illustrate a co lossal parade of schooners of every size and shape. Because of the compelling nature of so many rare photographs, one 's attention is quickly directed to the accompanying captions, which reveal vital historic details easily overlooked in the illustrations. No matter if it is your first or tenth encounter with his work, you find yourself passing through the book in either direction just studying the pictures and their captions. But that is only half the pleasure. There is still the text to explore. The writing, the pictures, and the captions, all lead to the obvious conclusion that the author understands the ways of sailing vessels and their history far beyond the florid writings by some authors who are merely fascinated by sailing ships. MacGregor not only thoroughly understands his subject, it is unmistakable that he is a man who has both carefully searched every possible archive for facts and has crawled through many rotting hulls for truth . As with all his books, I come away with the feeling that I wish he would tell us more. But this author is not given to conjecture or romantic suppositions. He speaks simply about that of which he is certain and that may be the beauty of his books. The Schooner is a broad-ranging survey of a fascinating class of sailing vessels over four centuries; from the most humble coastal schooners to great ocean carriers, and from poor fishing boats to costly racing yachts. With over eleven remarkable sailing ship books to his credit, MacGregor has added still another jewel to our bookshelves. MELBOURNE SMITH
Age of Sail (TalonSoft, Inc., 5020 Campbell Boulevard , White Marsh Business Center I, Suite F, Baltimore MD 21236, 1997; $39.95) (CD-ROM computer game for Windows) This is areal-time simulation of shipto-ship combat from the 1750s to the early 1800s. It has over 100 scenarios ranging from single-ship actions to the crowded scene at Trafalgar. The graphics are quite nice and the interface is fairly smooth, although it is diffic ult to handle more than three ships at a time. As the manual states: "You must deal with all the elements crucial to the real battles: variable wind direction and SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
force, setting the sails, fouling, grappling, hull and sail damage, crew quality and casualties, and differing ammunition types." In general , the game system rewards true-to-life tactics, with some questionable exceptions. Since the game is running in real time, large fleet actions have to be handled by the use of squadrons. In a confused battle this can lead to some unintended but oddly realistic results, such as all the ships in a squadron suddenly turning to port no matter what their tactical situation. The game can also be played via modem. I am sorry I did not try out this option since the AI is a little weak at times. In one scenario two English ships collided early in the game, and did not get untangled until I sank one of them . It is an enjoyable game to play, but as with most real-time games I found myself spending more time on details than a real commander would and not enough time trying to outthink the opponent. I ran the game through Windows 95+ on aP166 with 32MegofRAMand had no complaints about performance. Minimum requirements: 486DX33, 2X CD ROM, Windows 3.1orWindows95. It can be played on a Macintosh using Soft Windows. THOMAS STANFORD
Lighting the Bay: Tales of Chesapeake Lighthouses, by Pat Yojtech (Tidewater Publishers , Centreville MD , 1996, l 94pp, illus, biblio, index, ISBN 087033-466-2; $34.951ic) At the turn of the century, the beams of 68 lighthouses stretched across Chesapeake Bay to provide safe passage for mariners. No body of water in America was better lighted than the Chesapeake. But an era has ended. Changing topography, technology and lifestyles on the Bay sounded the death knell of the manned li ghthouse. It has been nearly 10 years since a lighthouse was manned on the Bay and nearly 50 years since the bulk of li ghthouses were automated. Pat Yojtech's work comes in the nick of time, before the lighthouse stories she recounts would have been lost forever. The 25 chapters of her book record the perils of li ghthouse keeping-war, ice, erosion, the encroaching sea-dramatic rescues, and the role of women. An award-winning photographer, Yojtech provides an intimate portrait of the lighthouses and life on the guiding lights of Chesapeake Bay. The photo-
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Tall Ships Books Fiction and nonfiction from the age of fighting sail to WWI , WW2 and modem times. New and used books. Send $3 for printed catalog to Tall Ships Books, PO Box 80278 , Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52408 Visit us at www.tallshipsbooks.com
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CLASSIFIED ADS REVIEWS graphs alone are enough to acclaim Lighting the Bay as a superb lighthouse book.
LILA LINE Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay And Other Tales of the Lost Chesapeake, by Donald G. Shomette (Tidewater Publishers , Centreville MD, 1996, 390pp, illus, appen, notes, index, ISBN 0-87033480-8; $29.95hc) The three tales in this volume tell a compelling story of ships sunk in Chesapeake Bay. A great deal is revealed about the people who settled the Bay, and who lived, fought and died there, as well as about marine archaeology. The author says much of the history we know of the Bay is based on rumor and fable. He challenges, corrects and supplements our view of the past through archaeology, providing " data for undocumented events and peoples and for preliterate times that would otherwise be impossible to scrutinize." The first tale involves the discove ry of the steamship New Jersey of 1862, a Civil War vessel designed to negotiate the canals, rivers and bays of the eastern United States, carrying soldiers and supplies. After the Civil War, she hauled freight between Baltimore and Norfolk. In February 1870, a fire broke out amidships resulting in loss of the ship. Few knew that she was carrying incorrectly marked combustible freight. The second tale is the search for a 17th-century trading center on Kent Island , founded by William Claiborne who came to the Virginia colony in 1621 as a surveyor. By 1626 he had risen to colonial secretary. Restless and ambitious, he explored the northern bay and traded with the Indians. Despite setbacks, Claiborne built a su bstantial trade, constructed Fort Kent and established a community of farmers. The final tale, "Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay," dwells on ship remains in the Potomac. The " ghost fleet" turns out to be over 180 wooden steamships, part of a program to build over 700 large, wooden steamers on both coasts to counter losses to German submarines in WWI. The effort got launched just in time for the war to end. Few of the ships ever put out to sea. Over 200 were completed only to be sold off cheaply for salvage and stripped of their metal parts, leaving the problem of what to do with the hulks . Experiments in burning and sinking the ships met with varying results. One poignant photograph shows 31 ships side SEA HISTORY 83 , WINTER 1997-98
by side set afire in 1925. Negative publicity, political turmoil and corporate shenanigans accompanied the mess. These stories are background to the modem-day quests to explore what remains of our history underwater. In each tale, Shomette recounts the difficulties of starting and funding an expedition, dealing with politicians and using new methods . Each expedition brings new challenges and new understanding of man 's history, the cultural and topographical changes in the Bay, and opportunities arising from new technology.
LILALfNE Life Along the Hudson, by Allan Keller (Fordham University Press, Bronx NY, 1997 [1976], 272pp, illus, index , ISBN 0-8232-1803-1; $25hc, $16.50pb) This splendid revised edition of Keller's ramble up the Hudson River picks up impressions of the river in history , art and literature, bringing to life the people, commerce, mansions, vessels and natural settings of the great highway linking America's interior with the wider world. Keller was a reporter and editor for the New York World Telegram and later taught journalism at Columbia University. Complemented by a wealth of period illustrations, his text reflects the chronological and geographical paths of life along the river. JA Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson, 1793-1815, by Dean King with John Hattendorf, PhD (Henry Holt and Company, Inc. , New York NY, 1997 , 463pp, index, ISBN08050-4608-9; $27 .50hc) This volume tops the Christmas li sts of the Sea History editorial staff. The team of King and Hattendorfhas already brought us two companion guides to Patrick O ' Brian 's Royal Navy. But this compilation does yeoman duty on its own. Through the eyes and ears of the men who participated in naval confrontations that still inspire us today, we are drawn into the violence, courage, gore, glory and tedium that were to be found on a warship sailing into battle. There is no substitute for this firsthand reporting. From the French Revolution through the War of 1812, we learn how it was from men at all levels of the naval service and the merchant marine, in peace and in war, at sea and ashore, in scenes of triumph and devastation. This book should not be missed! JA
Small Ship Anchors-Inglefield's or Hall 's type ship anchors (1-2 pounds, 4-7" long), the type associated with large 20th C ships, no sailing/pirate ship type anchors. Often produced as paper weights, advertising gifts, commemoratives. Call Bruce, 219-489-5004, Indiana. 17th, 18th, 19th Century marine Oil Paintings. Originals by Backhu ysen, Isabey, Brooking, Carmichae l, Van-Beecq , Monamy, Gudin. 30 works. For details: e-mail mpbecker@aol.com or fax (504) 482-4410. Marine China: 40 yr. collection, over 70 hard to find , some rare 11 1/2" to 8 1/2" dinner and souvenir plates. Ships, S.S. lines, etc. $2,250 or best offer. SASE for list. E. Wolcott, 7336 Shirland Ave., Norfolk, VA 23505 For Sale: Large private collection of period ship models all highly detailed. Bob Schwarz, 610-868-9643 10 books, new: mixed titles, paper/hardcover, tax , shipping $15 ($100 +value) prepay visa, mastercard, check: LRA Inc. 474 Dunderberg Rd., Monroe, NY 10950, 914-783-1144. Nautical Books - Lighthouses, Coast Guard, Life Saving Service, shipwrecks our specialty. General line of nautical books also available. Send for free list. Wreckers, 253 Bonny brook Road, Carlisle, PA 1701 3 Marine Watercolors. 19th century originals including: "Clipper Ship"/Brown, "Schooner off the Coast"/Dutton, "Fishing Boats in a Storm"/Aldridge, "Winter Port"/Brandrett, "The Pool of London"/Dixon and other important artists.e-mail:mpbecker@aol.com or fax (504) 482-4410 for more information. Ship Paintings Restored. Museum quality restoration of old paintings. Damaged old ship paintings purchased. Peter William s, 30 Ipswich St., Boston MA 02215. By appointment: 617-536-4092 Maritime Books-Used and rare. All maritime subjects. Free catalogs upon request. American Booksellers, 102 West 11th St., Aberdeen, WA 98520. 360-532-2099. Chart your course through New England's maritime heritage. Send for your free copy. Cubberley & Shaw Maritime Museum News, Box 607NM, Groton, MA 01450-0607 Marinas/Boatyards on Chesapeake Bay, buy or sell. Call Wilford Land Company, PO Box 953, Easton, MD 21601. Tel: 410-822-4586, Fax: 410-226-5205 Collection: Korean diving helmet. Ship: wheels, paintings, models . President FDR model. Dollond Telescope. Books. Memorabilia. SASE, Box 231 , West Covina, CA 91793. Fax: 909-595-6655. E-mai I: j impin xit@aol .com. To place your classified ad at $1.60 per word, phone Carmen at 914-737-7878. Or you may mail your message and payment to Sea History, Attn: Advertising Desk, PO Box 68, Peekskill NY 10566. J, J, J,
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REVIEWS NELSON BOOKLOCKER The importance of Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson's military victories-as momentous as they were-may well be exceeded by hi s literary legacy. And the early stage of The Nelson Decade in Britain, culminating in October 2005, the 200th anniversary of his Trafalgar victory, is an appropriate time to survey the books associated with his life.
What's Current in the US The spectrum of currently available books stretches from biography-both modern and classic treatments-to analyses of the ships and battles associated with the man and his era. The Naval Institute Press ( 118 Maryland A venue, Annapolis MD 21402; 800 233-8764) is the most prolific US publisher in the Nelson field . Their titles include reprints of two of the most definitive biographies: Robert Southey's The Life of Nelson (1990 [1813], $32.95 hc) and Carola Oman 's Nelson (1996 [1947] , $46.95hc). Each is a particularly well-written view from different chronological perspectives. More recent books from the Institute include The Nelson Companion (1995, $34.95hc), edited by Colin White and Nelson's Battles: The Art of Victory in the Age ofSail, by Nicholas Tracy ( 1996, $39.95 hc). The Nelson Companion is a must and includes eight chapters describing the Nelson legend, sites associated with his life, artifacts, and his letters . There's also a chronology of his life and an excellent list of books for collectors. Nelson's Battles propels the reader beyond the person to the naval tactics and hi storical context of his time. John Harbron 's Trafalgar and the Spanish Navy (1988, $39.95 hc) and BrianLavery'sNelson' sNavy: Its Ships, Men , and Organization, 1793 -1815 (1990, $56.95 hc ), are both interesting, richly illustrated, large-format books. The Trafalgar Roll: The Ships and the Officers (1989, $27.95 hc), by Col. Robert Holden Mackenzie, is a different view of the battle. He states his case with Scottish bluntness: "The literature on the subject cannot be said to be complete until the names of all the officers of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines who by their valour contributed to the day's success have been placed on permanent record ." Also notable among currently available books are several available from Trafalgar Square Press (PO Box 257, 62
North Pomfret VT 05053; 800 4234524 ). One of the most interesting, Nelson: An Illustrated History (1996, $22.95pb) , edited by Pieter Van Der Merwe and publi shed by the National Maritime Museum and Laurence King Publishing in London, is centered around six essays written by Nelson authorities Stephen Deuchar, Brian Lavery and Roger Morriss. Photographs of artifacts in the National Maritime Museum collections, many of which are on display in the museum 's Nelson Exhibition, enhance the text. A new offering from Trafalgar Square is Nelson: The Life and Letters ofa Hero (1996, $24.95hc), by Morriss. This tabletop book contains 140 plates and focuses on hi s correspondence, a primary source of our understanding of Britain 's greatest naval hero. One of the slenderest among the current Nelson offerings is Men-of-War, Life in Nelson's Navy (1995, $23 hc), published by W. W. Norton. Patrick O'Brian, also author of the AubreyMaturin series of novels, describes his elegant little 91-page book as "a short account of the Royal Navy of Nelson, St Vincent, Duncan , Howe , Cochrane, Seymour and a hundred thousand other true-hearted seamen. "
What's Current in the UK An unusual recent appearance in the field is Remembering Nelson: As told to Lieut. Cdr. John Lea, RN, a detailed description of the remarkable Nelson collection of American Lily Lambert McCarthy. This privately published volume appeared in 1995 and is available in the States from The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia ($ 12.95; 757 596-2222). Chatham Publishing ( 1 & 2 Faulkner's Alley, Cowcross Street, London ECl 6DD, UK) offers an impressive list of titles, including Nelson' s Favourite, HMS Agamemnon (l 996, $44.95hc), by Anthony N. Deane, and Life in Nelson's Navy ( 1996, 16.95pb), by Dudley Popeboth also available from the Naval Institute Press. The latter book is known for its outstanding bibliography. The first series of the new Chatham Pictorial Histories includes the just-released Nelson against Napoleon: From the Nile to Copenhagen, 1798 -1 801, which puts Nelson's achievements in an oft-lacking geopolitical context. Each of the Pictorial Histories volum es contains hundreds of carefully reproduced illustra-
tions, a bibliography and other reference information. The listings of Conway Maritime Press (33 John Street, London WClN 2AT, UK) includeoneof themosthighly regarded Nelson biographies, Nelson , The Immortal Memory (1997 [1988] , £11.99), by David and Stephen Howarth , plus a definitive reference on Nelson's legendary flagship at Trafalgar, The 100Gun Ship Victory (1996, £22), by John McKay. A new title, The Ships of Nelson's Navy, 1793-1815 (1997, £ 35), by David Lyon, due in November, includes all Royal Navy ships in commission between 1793 and 1815, plus essays on ship building policy, the roles of specific ship types, gunnery, rig and naval strategies and tactics.
What's Classic Since Nelson's electrifying victory, and death, at Trafalgar, countless books have been written abo ut him and those who were part of his life. Many of the best of these are out of print, available only in libraries and from rare-book dealers. Among the most important out-ofprint biographies is Captain A. T . Mahan's The Life of Nelson (Little, Brown and Company, 1897). In its preface, the preemi nent American sage of sea power refers to Nelson as "the one man who in him self summed up and embodied the greatness of the poss ibilities which Sea Power comprehends,the man for whom genius and opportunity worked together, to make him the personification of the Navy of Great Britain ." Another important biography of somewhat less military emphasis, Tom Pocock's Horatio Nelson (The Bodley Head, Oxford, UK, 1987), written by one of the most widely recognized and widely publi shed authorities on the sub._ ject, has been reprinted by Pimlico Press in England and is available from Trafalgar Square Press (1997, $16.95pb). Perhaps the most important single literary record of Nelson is contained in the seven volumes of The Dispatches and Letters of Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson, assembled by Sir Nicholas H. Nicolas and published by Henry Colburn in London between 1844 and 1846. Chatham Publishing has recently republi shed the first three volumes of thi s collection and plans to release the other four in 1998. These revealing communications to his wife, lover, fellow officers, family , friends and the Royal Navy SEA !HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
NELSONIANA-JUST FOR FUN!
HMS Victory, Nelson's fla gship at Trafalgar, passes into mythology in J.M . W. Turner' s famous painting, with a fallin g French mast bowing to the cross of St . George on Victory's own collapsing foremast . The whole scene is draped in clouds of canvas as the great warship ascends into immortality, rising above the hapless seamen struggling in the water.
Two enduring fiction seres are based on Nelsonian times and characters. C. S. Forester's classic Hornblower series is great fun for anyone who enjoys unvarnished swashbucklers. The hero, Horatio Hornblower, moves through the eleven novels, from midshipman in the British Royal Navy to flag rank. The entire series has been reprinted in paperback by Little Brown and Company. PatrickO 'Brian'smorerecent 18novel series about Royal Navy officer Jack Aubrey and his friend and colleague Dr. Steven Maturin, is also placed in the Nelson era. O'Brian's grasp of the technical details oflife in the Royal Navy of the time, and his ability to capture the essence oflife at sea, are among the features of these stories that have created an O'Brian cult. The most recent novel in the series, The Yellow Admiral, was published last year. The hardcover versions of the series are available through W.W. Norton & Company, while the paperbacks are published by Harper Collins Publishers. JFC
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and Whitehall officialdom form a unique near-autobiography. Interestingly, the images of Nelson that this series illuminates do not always match other portrayals. The republishing of this seriesarguably the most usefu l single reference work on the man-is a major event for those interested in Nelson. Geoffrey Bennett' s Nelson the Commander(B. T. BatsfordLtd. , 1972) gives insight into Nelson as a military leader. An excellent list of noteworthy outof-print books about Nelson is found in The Nelson Companion, mentioned above. For those interested in finding out-of-print Nelson books , leading sources include: Marine Books, 3 Marine Road, Hoylake, Wirral, Cheshire1A7 2AS, UK; 151 632 5365; and J. Tuttle Maritime Books, 1806 Laurel Crest, Madison WI 53705; 608 238-7245 . What's Coming Although countless books about Nelson and related subjects have been written , the number will increase during The Nelson Decade. Among the most noteworthy coming books are two from SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
Chatham Press: Nelson and the Nile, by Brian Lavery, due in 1998 and The Campaign of Trafalgar, with sections by noted naval historians , scheduled for release late this year. Why Nelson Now? Beyond the advent of the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, why does Horatio Nelson warrant our attention today? Many would argue that advance technology and a radically altered geopolitical landscape make his life of marginal interest today . Yet, as interest in many of the more prestigious players on the stage of world history recedes, interest in Nelson grows. Is it the heroic and the epic in his life that attracts public attention? Is it the powerful bond he formed with those who served with him? Is it his passionate love affair with Emma Hamilton? Tom Pocock came as close as anyone to summing it up in one of hi s books: "To the British people he had become 'The Hero ' who was human and humane. He was Superman with Everyman's weaknesses." JOSEPH
F.
CALLO
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State me nt filed 10/1/97 required by th e Act of Aug. 12, 1970, Sec. 3685, Title 39, US Code: Sea Hi story is published quart e rl y at 5 John Wal sh Bl vd. , Pee kskill NY 10566; minimum subsc riprion price is $ 17 .50 . Publi sher and ed itor is Pe ter Sta nfo rd: managing edit or is Ju stine Ah ls tro m; ow ne r is Na ti onal Maritime Hi stori ca l Srn.::it:ty, a non -profit corpo rati on ; all are located a t 5 John Wa lsh Bl vd. , Peeks kill NY I 0566. Durin g the 12 month s preceding O c tobe r 1997
the average number of (A) copies printed each issue was 25,539 (B) paid and/or reques ted circ ulation was ( I) sold throu gh dea le rs, carrie rs and co unte r sales 699; (2) mail subscription s 13,780: (C) total paid and/or requested c ircu la tion wa s 14,479; (D) free di stribution , sa mpl es, compli me ntary copies were I 0 ,503; (E) total di stribution was 24 ,982; (F) copies not di stribut ed ( I) office use 444; (2) re turn from news agents 11 3; (G) total = 25,539. The actual numbe rs fo r th e s ing le iss ue precedin g Oc tobe r 1996 are (A) to tal num ber print ed 25 , 191 ; (B) pa id c irc ul a tion was ( I ) sales lhrough dea le rs, carri ers and co unter sales 697 ; (2) mail subscripti o ns 15,047; (C) to tal paid a nd/or req uested circ ul ati o n I 5,744; (D) fre e di stributi on, sa mple s, compli me nt ary co pi es were 8,623; (E) tot al di stributi on was 24,367 (F) copi es not di stributed we re ( I ) office use 724; (2) re turn from ne ws agents 100; (G) total = 25, 19 1. I certify that th e above state me nt s are correct a nd co mpl ele. (s igned ) Pe ter Stanford , Pres., National Maritime Hi sto ri ca l Socie ty .
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K EY B ANK OF NEW Y oRK
CoMMO. H ENRY H. ANDERSON,
ELEANOR B ALCH
ALAN G . CHOATE
H ENRY
R OBERT E . G AMBEE
ELIZABETH S. H OOPER FOUNDATION
C ALEB L ORING,
J.
W ALTER R . B ROWN
JR.
M RS . D . L . FLEISCHMANN FRED
CHARLES F. A DAMS
L EONARD
JACQUES M EGROZ
D AVID A. O ESTREICH
ESTA G. P ROCOPE
NEILE. JONES PIERRE M AN IGAULT ELI ZABETH M EYER
CLIFFORD B. O ' H ARA
M ARCOS JOHN PSARROS
JOSEPH & JEAN S AWTELLE
RAY R EMICK
R OBERT C. SEAMANS,
JR.
EDWARD W. S NowooN FRED N. SoRTWELL CDR Y1 cTOR B . STEVEN, JR. R OBERT G. STONE, JR. DR. NORM AN B . THOMSON, JR. C ARL TIMPSO N, JR. Tor SHELF GRAPHICS WI LLIAM R. T OWER,
D ANIEL
w.
C.
VERDI ER
HOLGER W1 NDEL0V
CAPT. A USTIN N. VOLK , USN (RET)
THOMAS H. W YSMULLER
R AYMONDE . W ALLACE
R OSALIE S. W ALTON
R OBERTS . Y OUNG
You CAN ENSURE THAT THE WORK YOU SUPPORT TODAY WILL CONTINUE INTO THE FUTURE If you wish to make a substantial gift to NMHS in the future without depleting your current assets, you can do so by bequest or through a life-income gift. Either way , you will help keep our seafaring heritage alive for future generations . And by making a planned gift today to the National Maritime Histori-
-----------------, I would like information about the NMHS Planned Giving Program. D I intend to include NMHS in my will. Please send me information on bequests. I In confidence, I wou ld like you to know I have already provided for NMHS in my will.
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I I I I I I I I I
cal Society you may receive significant tax benefits. Enjoy the satisfaction and mutual benefit of making a gift to the National Maritime Historical Society. Write or call for our free and informative brochure outlining a variety of planned giving strategies, which you can review with your financial advisor. Please fill out the form and mail it to: National Maritime Historical Society Attn: "Planned Giving" 5 John Walsh Boulevard, PO Box 68 Peekskill NY 10566 Or phone: 1-800-221-NMHS (6647) and ask for "Planned Giving."
300 Years of Service "Your staunch pilot boats are always ready in storm and fog, and it takes skill, courage and long years of experience to carry on this important and hazardous work so necessary to our commerce. I congratulate you on your remarkable record..."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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SovIRI1GN
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