Ships, Boats and Navigation

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William A. Baker

THE NEW MAYFLOWER - Her Design and Construction

Barre, MA, Barre Gazette, 1958

November is an appropriate month to focus attention on the Mayflower, the ship that brought the Pilgrims across the Atlantic in 1620. Little is known about the Mayflower: written by the British naval architect who created plans for the Mayflower II built at Brixham, England, in 1955-56, Baker describes the extensive research into 17th century ships required to approximate the appearance of the Mayflower, there being no extant images or descriptions. While one might reasonably assume that the near-replica was built to honor the valor of the Pilgrims, it actually commemorates the Anglo-American alliance indispensable to victory in World War II. Local maritime enthusiasts know that Mayflower II wintered in 2014 and 2015 at nearby Mystic Seaport for the first phases of her rehabilitation, and arrived again in October, 2016 for the last phase before returning to Plimoth Plantation in 2017 as that historic site's most popular exhibit.

Our copy of The New Mayflower was the gift of the late Robert Stewart, whose detailed ship models grace the shelves of our library.

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Penny Parsekian

ALL HANDS ON DECK

Learning Adventures Aboard "Old Ironsides"

Boston, USS Constitution Museum, 1997

This is a study guide for teachers and students in grades K-12. At the time its author was a free-lance writer and until recently a resident of New London active in historic preservation and related matters. All Hands on Deck was published to help teachers integrate the Constitution into a variety of disciplines; to provide them with "innovative ways to work with students as critical thinkers" while establishing "a solid understanding of the ship's history, her role as an American symbol, her significance to American citizens, and her connection to the principles of democracy and the document for which she was named."  (From the Introduction)

For an interesting look at USS Constitution's links with New London and its Custom House visit our digital exhibition New London - Old Ironsides by Rebecca Parmer, a former member of the Constitution Museum staff at Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston. The exhibit can be found by clicking "Browse Exhibits" at the top of these pages and scrolling down the list.

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Edouard A. Stackpole

THE CHARLES W. MORGAN

The Last Wooden Whaleship

New York, Meredith Press, 1967

To see the Charles WMorgan tied up at New London's City Pier in the summer of 2014, at the start of her miraculous 38th voyage (to Boston and back), was a memorable sight. To read Edouard Stackpole's richly illustrated account of the highlights of her thirty-seven whaling voyages, from 1841 (only six years after our Custom House was opened) to 1921, only heightens the drama of her amazing return to sea seven decades after it was assumed she would never again leave her Mystic Seaport wharf. In these pages the rugged ship is both the stage and star of the story up to 1967, and one wishes the author could have witnessed the dramatic return to her element in 2014. We were pleased to be able to acquire a first edition in good condition, complete with handsome dust jacket.

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Don Lynch

TITANIC - AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

New York, Hyperion, 1992

We were prompted to feature this book after the announcement that Australian billionaire Clive Palmer intended to build a replica of RMS Titanic in China. Construction was not yet under way, and we said that we wouldn't believe it until we saw her steaming into New York at the end of a transatlantic crossing -- a success denied the original Titanic in 1912. Don Lynch, historian of the Titanic Historical Society, provides a fascinating introduction by undersea explorer Robert Ballard who, in 1986, was the first to find the shattered remains. 

The International Iceberg Patrol formed in response to the Titanic disaster is based at Avery Point, Groton, just across the mouth of the Thames River from New London. Its obvious mission is to warn mariners of the movement of icebergs in the Grand Banks region of the North Atlantic. Nearly 500,000 square miles of ocean are regularly monitored with long-range surveillance aircraft based in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. 

Postscript (2021): Titanic replica is indeed under construction by a Chinese company. Its builders are capitalizing on the Chinese obsession with the Titanic that began with James Cameron's 1997 movie. The faux Titanic will never make an ocean voyage, but will be instead the star attraction of a new theme park in landlocked Sichuan, a thousand miles from the ocean. 

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Frank O. Braynard

THE WORLD’S GREATEST SHIP: THE STORY OF THE LEVIATHAN

New York, South Street Seaport Museum, 1972-1986

To our collection of books by maritime historian Frank O. Braynard we have added his magisterial six-volume history of the S.S. Leviathan, the gift of Rod Klingman. Built for Germany’s Hamburg-America Line as the Vaterland, she was the largest ship in the world when launched in 1913. The books came with memorabilia of her troopship service after being seized by the U.S. at Hoboken in 1917, where the huge ship had been stranded since the onset of World War I. Along with papers of the U.S.S. Leviathan Veteran’s Association long administered by Lincoln Hedlander (a member of Rod Klingman’s family now deceased) we have Hedlander’s diaries while serving aboard her. Leviathan was later restored to her former opulence, becoming in 1923 the flagship of the new United States Lines and competing for the transatlantic trade with the great liners of Britain and France.

Because New London is not situated near the transatlantic shipping lanes, ocean liners have never come this way although the deep harbor and the State Pier could accomodate most of them. On the other hand, in the 19th century and well into the 20th the city was a regular stop for the great steamboats operating between New York and Boston, some as large as liners. Early in the 2000s it appeared that New London would again host large passenger vessels: several cruise ships stopped off for a day on their New England and Middle Atlantic itineraries, among them Holland America's Maasdam and Royal Caribbean's Explorer of the Seas. For various reasons the time and conditions weren't right and the visits ended without fanfare in 2008.

Note: Like Vaterland/Leviathan 87 years before, Explorer of the Seas was the largest passenger ship in the world when launched in 2000.

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Steven Ujifusa

A MAN AND HIS SHIP

New York, Simon & Schuster, 2012

The subtitle puts it concisely:  “America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S. S. United States.” This account of the career of William Francis Gibbs was named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal. Launched in 1951, the United States began her remarkable career the next year, offering fast, comfortable transportation between New York and Europe until, together with the other passenger ships of the mid-20th century, she succumbed to the economic advantages of the jetliner. Decades after she was laid up in 1969 she is still afloat at a Philadelphia pier while the S. S. United States Conservancy struggles to convert her to a stationary exhibit along the lines of RMS Queen Mary, Cunard Line's beloved liner now permanently moored as a hotel and museum at Long Beach, California. A preserved S.S. United States would recall the great days of American shipbuilding, the brilliant innovations of William Francis Gibbs, and the pride the nation once had in the great flagship bearing its name.

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Paul Farrell

TUGBOATS ILLUSTRATED

History - Technology - Seamanship

New York, W. W. Norton, 2016

Tugboats Illustrated was acquired in anticipation of the author’s lecture at the Custom House Maritime Museum. That the talk was well received would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the engaging content of his book. Replete with superb photographs and enhanced by the author’s deft drawings, the narrative is an essential contribution to the history and technology of the tugboat. An architect who just happens to love tugboats, Mr. Farrell’s drawings add clarity and charm to his instructive, entertaining text. He opens our eyes to a particular maritime activity without which commercial shipping could not take place. Signed copies for sale following the lecture boasted a gold embossed seal from the sponsor, New London's venerable Thames Tow Boat Company.

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Hardie Gramatky

LITTLE TOOT AND THE LOCH NESS MONSTER

New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1989

Of the classic maritime books for young children, Hardie Gramatky's Little Toot is perhaps the most famous. First published in 1939, it has never been out of print. To commemorate the late author's centennial, it was published in a new edition in 2007, restoring the original colors and other design qualities. Little Toot gave rise to several sequels, among them the story of his encounter with the elusive creature from the depths of Loch Ness. 

Following Linda Gramatky Smith's lecture at the Custom House Maritime Museum in 2009 for the opening of the show "Tug Boats and Little Toot," she presented the Society with a thick notebook of copies of her father's sketches, notes and drafts that led to the Loch Ness sequel. Together they form a stream-of-consciouness riff on the art of creative writing that goes well beyond the story of Little Toot's Scottish adventure. Here and there Gramatky wrote out snippets from writers that inspired him: Faulkner, Chekhov, Cather, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, to name only some. Reaching the end of this silent communion with the spirit of Hardie Gramatky, one is astonished by the philosophical and moral values lying just below the surface of this childlike story of a quest and the trusting friendship that followed.

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Daniel Newhouse

THE WHOLE ART OF NAVIGATION

London, Richard Mount, 1701

For the ancient Chinese and Greeks, for Columbus, and even for the captain of the Mayflower, navigation was an uncertain mix of art and science in which luck also played a part. Capt. Newhouse’s treatise, first published in 1685 and reissued four or five times over the next forty years, was one of several attempts to describe the techniques of navigation as they evolved from ancient methods of celestial observation to the 18th century inventions that would allow longitude to be calculated. Our copy is the second edition, once owned by James Rogers, a prominent New London sea captain who died ca. 1754 and bequeathed it to his mariner son James. Their signatures are prominently inscribed on the flyleaf, as are those of subsequent owners.

We’re proud to be among the few libraries holding a 1701 edition of this work printed by the London stationer Richard Mount, whose shop at Tower Hill would have been near the place where prominent political prisoners were taken from the Tower of London for a very public execution. Other libraries with this edition are Harvard, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Smithsonian, while other editions are owned by the Mariners’ Museum, the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, Oxford University, the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, Princeton and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. The work is also available in digital or microform versions. A first edition (1685) is held at the British Library in London.

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Richard Dunn and Rebekah Higgitt

SHIPS, CLOCKS, AND STARS

The Quest for Longitude

New York, Harper Design, 2014

As John Masefield’s narrator famously says in Sea Fever, “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”  From the dawn of history navigators depended on the stars to find their way across the trackless oceans. Ship captains consulted celestial tables such as those in our library's oldest and rarest book, The Whole Art of Navigation, by Captain Daniel Newhouse (London, 1701), once owned by New London’s Captain James Rogers. Three years after this book was printed the British Parliament’s Longitude Act of 1714 paved the way for mariners to be able to determine exactly where they were when out of sight of land. This lavishly illustrated book accompanied a bicentennial exhibition of the 1714 Longitude Act at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England, which we were able to see after it traveled to Mystic Seaport. Not since Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of the Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time (1997) has the complicated story of John Harrison’s chronometer - a clock that could keep time aboard a rocking ship on a heaving ocean - been so vividly told. 

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Nathaniel Bowditch

THE NEW AMERICAN PRACTICAL NAVIGATOR

Being an Epitome of Navigation 

New York, E. and G. W. Blunt, 1837

Two years after our Custom House opened its doors, the Ninth New Stereotyped Edition of Bowditch's famous navigation encyclopedia was issued. We don't know how our copy found its way to the Custom House, but we're glad it did because of the unique way it's put together: it would seem that a clever sailor used a length of cotton cloth rope to tie a supple leather binding to the book in place of the original boards. Conservator Gene MacMullan tipped in a copy of the missing title page we obtained from Mystic Seaport, cleaned the leather and made this protective folding box.

The federal government bought the copyright to "Bowditch" in 1866 and has published it ever since, most recently through the Defense Department's National Geospatial - Intelligence Agency. No longer printed, it is available at no charge in digital form.

Ships, Boats and Navigation