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54  “Ships, the Heart of the Story” How Tall Ships Became Big News By the mid-1960s, fewer commercial ships were navigating the waters off Manhattan. Once omnipresent, their sights and sounds—broad sails, plumes of smoke, fog horns, passenger decks, churning tugs—had given way to transatlantic jets, tractor trailers, commuter bridges, container ships, and the ascent of rival ports near and far. Recognizing the change, Seaporters worried that the city and nation were less sea minded, that another character-making frontier had been closed, and that the present generation would forget from whence it came. While ships from their target date of 1851 had largely passed from the scene, they hoped to save sailing craft from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They regarded those vessels as representatives of an era that seemed better than their own and could teach Americans about their failings and prepare them for the rough seas ahead. Myths, nostalgia, and wishful thinking partly shaped Seaporters’ perspectives, but they were as much concerned about bettering their own world as lamenting the lost past. It took Kortum four years to acquire the square-rigged Balclutha and Carl Cutler twelve years for the whaler Charles W. Morgan, but the Seaport ’s first resolution in 1967 was “to bring historic ships to the waterfront.” Yet some Seaporters claimed that such permanently docked museum ships were “an alien thing” because a ship’s purpose was “to live and travel through unquiet waters . . . and do battle with untamed sweeping forces.” As a result, the Seaport amended its resolution to require its ships to “be regularly exercised at sea, if humanly possible, in order to keep the gear in working order, and to keep alive the skills and sailorly culture of the ship’s people.” That is what the famed seafarer Captain Irving Johnson called “the religion of sail,” but its implementation was difficult. Because of the dangers involved, Stanford acknowledged in 1968, for one, that “only reconstructed ships, with ballast keels, Diesel auxiliaries, and other [Coast “Ships, the Heart of the Story” 55 Guard–required features] should sail from the Seaport.” For another, Howard Chapelle was “philosophically opposed” to acquiring old hulls and preferred building replicas. Some Seaporters were even landlubbers. While Joan Davidson said “she didn’t ‘give two figs’ for old ships,” Joseph Cantalupo admitted that his seasickness was no fun. Even so, identities could be forged with keen imagination, as Terry Walton made “the deepwater experience” found in Conrad and Melville her own.1 Fitting for Gotham’s towering stature, Stanford wanted to be the unrivaled collector of old ships. Pushing him “to recreate the street of ships with bowsprits lining South Street,” Kortum was the most determined of a small cadre scrambling to save the fast-disappearing survivors of the square-rigged era. As a later Seaport president put it, “We owe these people a great debt of gratitude. Without their passion and their commitment , we would have simply lost it all.” Kortum wanted New York to quickly acquire “at least three large, deepwater, square-rigged ships.” When Stanford mentioned fishing schooners, Kortum rejoined that Stanford’s yachting experiences were compromising his wisdom. One whose life was defined by a half-year sail aboard the 231-foot, square-rigged Kaiulani (1899), Kortum cautioned, “Schooners are just spear carriers for squareriggers , which are divas.”2 But, as in Greek mythology, those divas sang the sirens’ song that drew ship savers to dangerous shoals because preservationists slowly realized that the bigger the ship, the bigger the headache. Ship committee chairman Monk Farnham, for one, wanted money in the treasury before acquiring a ship, but, as Stanford charged ahead, he felt like “a small boy on the back of a bull.” While almost all vintage, wooden tall ships had been lost to the elements, the last iron or steel commercial square-riggers, which once numbered in the thousands, were “rusting away in quiet corners of the world.” As their numbers declined to fewer than two dozen in the 1960s, the National Trust’s vice chairman, Peter Manigault, warned that the 1970s would be the last decade to save any of them. But most Americans knew little about those vessels. While the English sage John Ruskin had called them “the most honorable thing that man . . . ever produced,” his disciple Frank Carr, who saved Cutty Sark, pictured them as “cathedrals of the sea.” Thinking that America suffered from amnesia and dissipation, Stanford lamented that the world of sail was...

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