Museum Offers Safe Harbor to Old Ships

For those who would go down to the sea in ships, Mystic Seaport is the place to drop anchor.

The 17-acre, 60-year-old maritime museum is home to the largest collection of historic small craft in America, a working 19th-Century shipyard and 60 waterfront buildings of that bustling era.

Like books on shelves, boats dating to 1824 are stacked in the museum’s huge warehouse, each with a placard telling its history and unique features.

Visitors can peek into an 1836 sail loft, an 1874 lifesaving station and a 1824 rope-making factory that still functions as it did a century and a half ago.

Other 19th-Century waterfront businesses in operation here include a ship’s chandlery, a hoop shop for fashioning wooden mast hoops, and a cooperage for crafting casks and barrels.

At Mystic Seaport, the clock has been turned back to a time when the sea and the ships that sailed the sea dominated New England life.

In 1988, the U.S. Postal Service chose Mystic Seaport to represent Connecticut in its commemorative stamp series. Featured on the 22-cent stamp is the 1841 wooden whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, a National Historic Landmark.

The museum was founded thanks to three Mystic residents who, in 1929, voiced the urgent need to preserve surviving maritime artifacts. The three were Carl Cutler, author of “Greyhounds of the Sea,” the definitive work on American clipper ships; Dr. Charles K. Stillman, descendant of local ship builders, and Edward E. Bradley, a successful businessman who had gone to sea as a boy.

The past springs to life at Mystic in the form of ships like the Charles W. Morgan, 150 years old next year and the last of the wooden whaling ships that sailed the Seven Seas.

The Morgan’s 40-month maiden voyage began Sept. 6, 1841. She rounded Cape Horn, cruised the Pacific and did not return to New Bedford until her holds were filled with oil and whale bone to be processed into candles, lamp oil, cosmetics, buggy whips, parasols, corset stays and much more.

The Morgan made 37 voyages, some lasting as long as five years. When her whaling days ended in 1921, Col. E.H.R. Green, son of multimillionaire Hetty Green, preserved the ship on his estate. In 1941, the ship came to Mystic.

Another tall ship docked here is the square-rigger Joseph Conrad, a training ship, launched in Denmark in 1882. Since 1949, thousands of boys and girls have lived aboard the Conrad learning about sailing ships and the sea.

One of the last coal-fired ferry boats in the United States is the 1908 Sabino, which served the islands off Portland, Me. Now the Sabino zips up and down the Mystic River tooting its quaint horn and carrying passengers.

Among the thousands of daily visitors to Mystic Seaport each summer are graduate students enrolled in American maritime history classes. Williams College also offers an undergraduate maritime program during the regular school year.

The Mystic Seaport Museum has one of the most comprehensive maritime history libraries in the United States, with more than 350,000 manuscripts, 56,000 ships’ plans and charts, and a collection of hundreds of ships’ logs.

At the Preservation Shipyard, modern shipwrights and craftsmen use traditional tools and techniques to restore and maintain the tall ships, pleasure boats, fishing boats, yachts and other craft from the past.

The museum’s small craft storage facility is filled with boats like Connecticut river drags, Kingston lobster boats, double-ended Hamptons, oyster boats, Bay of Fundy shads and Gloucester fishing schooners.

Many boats were donated by their owners. The yacht Barracuda, for example, came from the family of a man who vowed in 1932 that if Franklin D. Roosevelt were elected President, he would never sail his boat again. The boat never sailed after the election. It remained in the man’s boathouse until his death, when his family gave the Barracuda to Mystic Seaport.

An ice boat here was found in the basement of a bank where it had been stored and forgotten for nearly a century. The four-cylinder Panhard I, a 1904 torpedo-shaped boat powered by a car engine and exhibited at the 1905 New York boat show, is also on exhibit here. And an Eskimo walrus-skin boat was shipped here from Umiak, Alaska.

Some of the boats were rescued from bone yards, some from the briny deep.

Max Hamlin, 64, owner of the 57-foot racing sloop Gesture, was visiting recently from his Newport Beach home.

“I love it here,” he said. “A boat person just couldn’t ask for anything more.”