Cruise of the Pintail: A Journal

A Note on Voyage of the “Pintail”

A Note on voyage of the “pintail” / 191 A Note on Voyage of the “Pintail” In 1995, three years after Fonville Winans’s death, his heirs placed many of his surviving negatives on deposit in the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections, including not only the images reproduced in this book but also images that run the gamut of his work. From high society headshots to scenes of wild Louisiana, Winans captured it all. In addition to wedding pictures and portraits, he photographed opera stars, showgirls, debutantes, and politicians. In several series, he recorded the agricultural and industrial aspects of cotton, sugar, and rice, as well as their social sides, with the blessing of the sugarcane harvest in Loreauville and the Crowley Rice Festival. The new State Capitol and the LSU campus were frequent subjects, and many aerial shots documented Baton Rouge and the coastline. Amid all these photographic riches, one treasure of a different kind stands out. Included with the thousands of negatives of still shots were two reels of 16mm film marked “Pintail 1” and “Pintail 2.” Silent, in black and white, the film begins with credits: “Photography by Fonville Winans, continuity by Bob Frederick, titles by Raymon Orren.” For the next twenty-six minutes, the viewer tours a Louisiana that seems familiar and yet has mostly vanished. Although Winans edited the film to create a good story line, some scenes are easily recognizable in the diaries. For example, we see the sailors battle with thickets of impenetrable water hyacinth, like those described in the diary entry for June 11, 1932. Adventures in New Orleans, recorded in the diary entries for June 15 through 19 of that year, appear on screen, as donning their Pintail uniforms, the crew visits “Lafitte’s Rendezvous,” Jackson Square, and the market, where they buy bananas and other supplies. Other scenes pass unmentioned in the diaries, as the photographer commented with his camera on what seemed “picturesque and quaint” to him: a one-eyed man eating melon, 192 / A Note on voyage of the “pintail” long braids of garlic, black women nonchalantly balancing huge bundles on their heads, and New Orleans’s courtyards with their palms and fountains. Later, after crossing Barataria Bay in a storm, they visit the Grand Terre lighthouse , recorded in the diary entry of June 26, 1932, where the lighthouse keeper makes coffee, and the photographer’s camera admires the lighthouse keeper’s wife. The stay at Grand Isle is omitted from the film, which segues into more exotic scenes of the swamp and its inhabitants. A gap-toothed man poses with his two young sons, and chickens, dogs, a pig, and a pet coon make appearances, along with a couple of alligators. Adventures with a pirogue follow, as well as scenes of clam shucking and Spanish moss being picked and baled, mentioned in the diary entries for August 6 through 8. Finally the film and the voyage of the Pintail both end, as the diary describes, with a picturesque sunset. In 2003, Winans’s heirs donated the Pintail film to the LSU Libraries. Recognizing the value of this rare visual record of Louisiana in the 1930s, the Libraries immediately contracted with Colorlab, a company specializing in film restoration and preservation, to conserve the original film and transfer the images, for preservation , to VCR and DVD, both of which are available for viewing. Because we lack a copy of Fonville Winans’s narration of the silent film, the publication of his diaries is particularly welcome, shedding new light on the visual record of the Voyage of the “Pintail,” now preserved for posterity in the LSU Libraries. Elaine Smyth Head, Special Collections ...