Tall ships, tall tales capture imaginations
"The sea is something no one ever will tame," one maritime expert says. "It is an eternal frontier."
Late this morning, a person looking out over Elliott Bay will be able to see the improbable spectacle of 18 large ships, all under sail, ghosting across Puget Sound like a vision from the past.
Outsized sailing vessels have taken hold of the public imagination, first in a renaissance of tall ships started 50 years ago, and now in races and festivals and a minor industry of nautical books, preferably involving killer storms, far-flung quests, mutiny or cannibalism. Some 400,000 people turned out to watch the current fleet of ships stand into Richmond, B.C., last week. In a typical year, 5 million people will turn out as the vessels sail from port to port for events such as this week's Tall Ships Challenge in Seattle.
Big forces beside the wind are at work here. There's the fundamental elegance of a billowing polygon writ large, with some ships flying more than two dozen sails. There's history brought to life in a craft like the replica of the Niña, built entirely with tools and techniques of the 15th century. And for the vastly imaginative, there's the sense of exploration and adventure that ships have evoked since the Egyptians set out in papyrus boats nearly 5,000 years ago.
"With a sailing ship, it's dizzyingly complex and it's also stunningly beautiful," said Nathaniel Philbrick, director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies in Nantucket, Mass. "... It balances forces of wind and water and translates it into a way of moving that is really magical. We really haven't done anything better since."
And the idea of sailing into a vast unknown is likely as big a draw now as it was long ago, said Philbrick.
"I think it has something to do with people beginning to appreciate these final-frontier things," he said. "We all drive around cars that are Explorers or Voyagers. That's kind of an interesting concept: to be in a world where there are things to discover and unknowns. These kinds of ships evoke that kind of thing.
"And the sea is something that no one ever will tame. It is an eternal frontier. No matter what technology you throw at it, you're not going to tame it."
The latest installment of the tall-ships revival comes as the public takes a renewed interest in the lore of the sea, helped in part by Sebastian Junger's 1997 book "The Perfect Storm" and the movie that followed. Two years ago, Philbrick turned the tale of the Essex, sunk in 1820 by a Moby Dick-like whale, into a best seller that won the National Book Award for nonfiction. And director Peter Weir is currently navigating a $135 million adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's watery epic "Far Side of the World." Russell Crowe plays Capt. Jack Aubrey.
Time magazine recently noted bookstores are awash in nautical books, including two books on the 1822 mutiny aboard the whaleship Globe.
"Why is it that we landlubbers can't resist a good sea story, the wetter the better?" Time asked.
"Wherever there's a tall-ships event, people flock down," said Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, a Mystic Seaport scholar in Connecticut, who routinely climbs the rigging of America's last surviving whaleship, the Charles W. Morgan.
"They just can't believe the ships," she said. "A lot of it is this old romantic view of the ships and the people sailing on them. And then it's also got the wonder. The reason people like airports or train stations or ports is you go out from there and you go out away from home and see wonderful sights. That's all epitomized in the ship. That happened in the 19th century, and some of that magic still clings to them."
Indeed, for all but the last eye blink of civilization, big boats were the only way to go. They took Polynesians to the Hawaiian Islands in the eighth century B.C. and Phoenicians to Europe and around Africa soon after. Vikings used their lapstrake boats to stretch from Scandinavia to Central Asia and North America.
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Ships made Seattle. The bulk of the Denny Party sailed to Alki Point on the schooner Exact. In 1897, a ship brought word of gold in Alaska, launching the gold rush that secured Seattle's place as the capital of the Pacific Northwest.
That ship, the Portland, was a steamer, the type of mechanically powered craft that closed out the Great Age of Sail, a 250-year period of wind-powered exploration and conquest.
In 1956, a London solicitor thought to bring together the last of the world's great square-riggers for one final outing, a race from England to Portugal. Five ships turned up — but it was anything but a last hurrah. The event is now institutionalized in races like the Tall Ships Challenge, which brought the tall ships to Seattle. The Newport, R.I.-based American Sail Training Association, which sponsors the series, now has about 257 member vessels, more than double the number 10 years ago.
Most of the fleet is made up of training vessels, using the challenge of large sailing craft to instill teamwork, leadership and character into naval cadets and growing teens. Such a mission is likely lost on the millions who visit the ships each summer. For the most part, say witnesses, it's an aesthetic thing.
"Last year in Cleveland, these ships stopped traffic on the interstate," said Peter Mello, executive director of the American Sail Training Association. "People actually got out of their cars."
Some of the vessels in town this week are not ships in the strict technical sense, which insists that to be a "ship" a vessel must have at least three square-rigged masts. They are not even among the tallest, with the Aurora Bridge limiting their masts to about 130 feet.
Moreover, the ships can offer none of the hardship faced by sailors of yore, who faced gales in Grand Banks schooners and icy trips to the bowsprit while beating around Cape Horn.
This is more romance than reality.
Vanessa Agnew, a University of Michigan assistant professor, had a taste of the latter aboard a replica of Capt. Cook's Endeavour. For an upcoming BBC/History Channel documentary titled "The Ship," she sailed from Cairns, Australia, to Bali, Indonesia, living on salt beef and pork, sauerkraut, dried anchovies, hardtack and porridge. She slept in a hammock, swabbed the deck and hung upside down from the yardarm while bringing in a sail.
"I can certainly attest that it was a really hard experience," she said.
She was out six weeks. A whaling voyage could last three years.
Small wonder that few 18th-century voyagers comment on their ships — and when they do, it's not in romantic terms.
"They don't wax lyrical at all about the beauties of sailing or what the fleet looks like or even the motion of the ship and the physical discomfort of sailing on a square rigger," Agnew said. "None of that gets mentioned. It's only in literary accounts."
Asked to account for the popularity of tall ships, Ocean Navigator publisher Alex Agnew e-mailed the first chapter of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," which had its 150th anniversary last year.
A sampling:
"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
Agnew himself was struck by a later passage on the wonders of water, "image of the ungraspable phantom of life."
"What Melville writes about the water applies equally to tall ships," he said.
Melville closed his first chapter by noting that he would not go to sea as a passenger. But those modern folk who walk on the ships' decks can still experience a sort of living history, said Tim Nekritz, who coordinated the tall-ships portion of a town festival in Oswego, N.Y., in the mid-'90s.
"There's a tangible history element because it's not on TV, it's not in the movies, it's right there," he said. "You can reach out, you can touch history, you can walk on the decks.
"If it's an original ship, you can think you walked the deck that some great naval captains did. If it's not, then you're walking a ship as if you were John Paul Jones, even if he never really walked on it."
Eric Sorensen: 206-464-8253 or esorensen@seattletimes.com.