Summerguide 2015 | view this story as a .pdf

Keep your eyes on the coast for the Summer of the Tall Ships.

Ship Guide by Colin S. Sargent

“She sails like a bird!”

L’Hermione in Castine July 15-16

This summer, we’ve got fully rigged three masters and others storming our ports. In addition to the Iberdrola USA Tall Ships Portland 2015 festival, from July 18 to20, we’ve got L’Hermione recreating her original transatlantic voyage, which will stop at Castine.

“She sails like a bird,” was the young Marquis de Lafayette’s description of the French Concorde-class frigate L’Hermione. But what other reasons could there be why L’Hermione is belle of the ball? Well, how about the fact that her forebear, launched 28 April, 1779, ferried the Marquis de Lafayette to rendezvous with Washington where the talented young soldier could play a crucial role in the Yorktown campaign that secured the independence of the United States and led to the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Perhaps the strongest argument, though, why L’Hermione might be the best of the tall ships is this: She is a legitimate member of the original class of ships that she is a ‘replica’ of. That makes her not a replica, but a fourth member of an originally three-ship class started in 1777 with Concorde. Her sister ships, Concorde, Courageuse, and Hermione were all lost in conflict with the same Royal Navy that tried to snuff American independence along with the French Revolution, and very nearly succeeded at both. L’Hermione was built at the same shipyard, to the original plans of the Concorde at Rochefort. Concorde and Courageuse went on to have stellar careers in Britain’s Royal Navy after their captures, while the first Hermione was wrecked on the rocks at Croisic in 1793 returning from patrol. So, you could say that L’Hermione is the best tall ship because she’s just like her sister ship, which saved the United States, and is a member of a class of ships with commissioning dates that range from 1778 to 2012!

Which still doesn’t account for the incredible frenzy she’s created on both sides of the Atlantic. Backed by the Hennessey Cognac company, L’Hermione’s construction took 17 years with a price tag of $32 million, according to the BBC and Business Insider. She was exactingly created an international coterie of artisans using exclusively 18th-century tools. Her launching galas in Paris and Washington D.C. were black-tie events: Henry Kissinger was grand host of the U.S. shindig at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Maybe what’s most amazing about L’Hermione–and her retracing her historic 1780 Atlantic crossing to Yorktown–is the geographic élan of Lafayette at 23, rushing to George Washington’s aid against Cornwallis in a sweeping gesture no doubt annoying to the British general (Lafayette always ate at the cool table). Some say L’Hermione’s arrival in the New World to join the blockade that stopped supplies from reaching Cornwallis’s troops altered the course of the Revolutionary War.

Some of Lafayette’s shipboard manuscripts survive [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8376/8376-h/8376-h.htm]. It’s exciting to see this stylish new frigate writing fresh chapters as the summer of 2015 unfolds.

She’s the one most recently armed for conflict.

USCG Eagle

That might be true, but the USCGC Eagle wasn’t fighting for our side. Originally built as the training vessel Horst Wessel, she prepared young sailors to fight for the Nazi regime from 1936 to 1939, when she was decommissioned. As the tide began to turn against the Third Reich, in 1942 she was recommissioned and fitted with Flakvierling AA guns and conducted training exercises for young Kriegsmarine cadets in the Baltic. The United States claimed the Horst Wessel as a war prize and put her into service as the Eagle. Like Werner Von Braun (father of Nazi Germany’s and later America’s rocketry programs in NASA), USCGC Eagle has served the United States well after a questionable past.

To read a young German sailor’s log during the summer of 1937 aboard this very ship, before she became a war prize [there was a shuffle and at first the Soviet Union was going to get her, but then the U.S. got first dibs], visit http://www.uscg.mil/history/cutters/Eagles/docs/horstwessel1937logbooktranslation.pdf. Patriotic singing was often heard on board. After sports contests in honor of the Fatherland, successful sailor-athletes received “additional special food delicacies.”

She’s a real soldier of fortune

Privateer Lynx

Indeed, the topsail schooner Lynx is built to represent a privateer from the grand days of commerce raiding, when with a letter of marque and a ship you could go play sanctioned pirate, capturing the merchant ships of an enemy  navy for sale–giving your own government a chunk of the proceeds. Homeported in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Lynx brings to mind a time when the United States was the little guy in an asymmetric war.

She’s the hardest worker.

Schooner Alert

Launched as Tall Cotton in 1991, she was bought by Roger Woodman, a commercial fisherman, in 2006. Renamed and re-equipped as the Alert, she was used for research and ground fishing. She worked out of Portland for six years until she was sold to Captains Perry Davis and Bethany McNelly-Davis, who converted her to a commercial passenger carrying vessel. Perhaps more than any of the others, Alert likes to pay her own bills!

She’s sailed the farthest.

Picton Castle

he 284-ton Picton Castle was built in 1928 as a fishing trawler and then later refit with masts and sails as a barque. Her excellent seakeeping hull has made her ideal for long-range sail training missions–indeed, in the last decade, she’s completed six circumnavigations of the globe. Requiring far less maintenance than other tall ships, thanks to her working-built hull design, Picton Castle might be the toughest of the fleet!

She’s the strongest wooden ship ever constructed.

Schooner Bowdoin

The schooner Bowdoin, flagship of the Maine Maritime Academy, was built by the Hodgdon Brothers of East Boothbay in 1921 to survey Arctic waters. That means her timbers were built to stand up to the kind of scrapes that took down the Titanic. Bowdoin continues in this vein, having completed three voyages past the Arctic circle crewed by MMA instructors and students since 1988. The 100-foot ship might not be the longest, but let’s see any of those other gals shrug off an iceberg.

She’s got the oldest design.

El Galeon Andalucia

Certainly the sailors of El Galeon Andalucia can say that. Homeported at the Spanish port of Seville, which would have been a home base familiar to Ferdinand Magellan, El Galeon Andalucia is the world’s only sailing replica of a true galleon, a ship type that predated the present day fully rigged ship. Easily distinguishable from the others by towering fore and aft castles and fewer, larger sails, El Galeon Andalucia was constructed using simpler methods, for long-distance voyaging with a smaller crew. Compared to the other tall ships, she’s a little slower than her companions built to more recent designs, illustrating how the tall-ship era was one of grand technological change and innovation.

She’s bringing tall-ship construction back to the U.S.

Oliver Hazard Perry

That could certainly be said of the Oliver Hazard Perry, which when finished was the first tall ship built in the United States in 110 years. The  steel-hulled, full rigged ship built to approximate 19th-century design is the only one of the tall ships privately owned and operated in the United States, SSV Oliver Hazard Perry might spark quite an interest, especially since her construction was just recently completed at an apparent cost of $3 million.

She’s the real racer.

Tree of Life

Not only is the Tree of Life is a luxurious schooner built of teak and Honduran mahogany, she’s a real thoroughbred. First place at Antigua Race Week, Classic Division, first overall in 1997 New Zealand Tall Ships Race are enough of a racing pedigree for us.

She carries the day.

Piscataqua

Well, New England wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without her, and [other] ships don’t like her. The gundalow was the ship, the best design settled on to go up and down Maine’s rivers and between coastal towns. The gundalows were used to pick up all the consumer goods from the trade ships at the big ports, and ferried timber and bricks and other products from the mills back down. There’s no way you could be from coastal New England without having some direct connection in your family to these vessels: They were the cargo trucks of the 19th century. They made everything move.”–Lisa Robblee

We take you there in style.

Schooners Bagheera and Wendameen and topsail cutter Frances

So where can you get a day sail around these ships? Portland Schooner Company’s two schooners–both designed by John Alden–sail with the tall ships, each certified for 48 guests per cruise. Bagheera sailed in the Bermuda Race shortly after being built  and went on to a long racing career, winning the Chicago-Mackinac Race. Wendameen hosted such guests as Katherine Anne Porter and playwright Eugene O’Neill. She was sold off and left to rot during the Depression, until rescued by Captain Neal Parker, who found her in a mudbank in the 1980s and had her restored from the keel up. The topsail cutter Frances, operated by Maine Sailing Adventures, will join the schooners offering day sails during the festival.