Walter Rybka

The U.S. Brig Niagara is a reconstruction of the sailing warship which fought at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. Owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the ship has sailed on tour every summer since 1991 to ports on the Great Lakes and Eastern seaboard. Niagara is sailed by a mix of professional and volunteer crew. When in homeport Niagara is the principle exhibit of the Erie Maritime Museum. The current emphasis of the museum's interpretation is the War of 1812, but onboard ship the emphasis is on seafaring under sail as an industrial process.

Note: the term "reconstruction" is used here to describe a new vessel that incorporates the dimensions and features of an historic vessel to the extent known, but the majority of details are conjectural based on circumstantial evidence. The term "replica" is best applied to a vessel which is well enough documented to be precisely reproduced. "Restored" or "rebuilt" should be reserved for vessels retaining a continuous identity and some continuity of original fabric. "Reproduction" is probably the best catch-all for a newly built vessel generically representing a historic type.

While this presentation will cite specifics from sailing operations onboard Niagara, the bigger question is; "What is the value of building and operating reproductions of historic vessels?"

First, it might be useful to point out what the experience is not. It is not a "re-enactment", complete with uniforms and script. Sailing is a real time activity; real wind, real waves, real hazards and consequences. We don't get to say "time-out" or "cut". Historical re-enactors can perform a valid educational function at historic sites, but there is little overlap between them and the sailors of traditional ships.

It has been my observation that the majority of re-enactors center their interest on authenticity of military uniform and the smell of black powder. At the Erie Maritime Museum we have a re-enactment group who perform valuable interpretive service, but in fifteen years, out of a pool of about sixty people, five have taken the training to become sailing ship crew members. A significant disincentive for the re-enactors to become involved in ship's operation is the degree of anachronism in the present day ship.

In the same time period over a thousand volunteers have trained as sailing crew, and not one has bought a uniform or a musket. Most of the sailors are very interested in the craft of seamanship rather than in "history." They refer to the re-enactors as "cross dressers" and would not be caught dead in "period clothing". With rare exception we are looking at two different pools of people.

Furthermore, the present sailing ship is almost never an exact reproduction of the original type. In small craft it may be possible to exactly replicate original materials, but in ships compromises are nearly inevitable. Even a ship accurate in rig and appearance will have modern navigational aids, auxiliary power, etc.

Also, we must recognize the impossibility of exactly duplicating the original conditions. As people we come to the venture better fed and generally in better health than the original participants, but almost certainly less inured to hard work, hardship, and danger. A primarily educational mission can only go so far in replicating the original conditions. Onboard Niagara there is no grog, no flogging, no incoming live-ammunition, nor surgery without anesthetics. To the literally minded, or the academically pure, the above qualifiers might be enough to invalidate the whole idea of extrapolating valid lessons from present day sailing of historic vessel types.

So what can we say is the educational validity of such anachronistic seafaring? I submit that our understanding of maritime history and literature, of the seafaring culture, is so much deeper if we have experienced some of the same conditions and problems which confronted seafarers in the past. We should simply recognize and acknowledge the anachronisms while concentrating on how much of the experience is unchanging and valid.

No amount of reading about the crowded conditions of life in a sailing warship brings it home so much as the experience of living out of a duffel and sleeping in a hammock in the tight confines of a berth deck. The bewilderment of the green hand is hard to convey without having been there. Not only is the environment strange and complicated, but most of the instructions are in what amounts to a foreign language.

There are few places as good for bringing home our own frailty in the immensity of nature as standing on a swaying, lurching footrope a hundred feet above a rolling deck, the ship but a tiny sliver of wood below, and nothing but broken water as far as the eye can see in all directions. The experience is exhilarating and profoundly humbling at the same time.

Such times also make one appreciative of having shipmates. One of the outstanding lessons of seafaring is not only how self-reliant we must be, but also how interdependent the members of a ship's company are for survival. Each must be willing to do their part, but the greatest resource the crew have is each other.

The outstanding value of sail training is not the mastery of arcane and often obsolete technical skills. The greatest value lies in reinforcing the social skills of good citizenship, of community. A sailing ship is, of course, not the only place to teach these lessons, just one of the best. Learning from sailing is a much bigger issue than merely learning to sail. In fact, sail trainees only incidentally learn to sail onboard a ship. What they really learn is how to be useful citizens in a cramped urban community set in a desert of water.

A ship at sea is an isolated small town that only works when competence, cooperation, hard work, and trust, are all present at the same time. Each ship contains its own society which in large measure is based on trust. Trust by the officers that the crew will do their duty. Trust by the crew that the officers know what they are about. Trust by all in an ancient tradition of skills and responsibilities. On an intellectual level this much may be inferred from reading, but the feel and the grasp of it are so much deeper if it has been experienced.

Most sail training programs stress the primary value as "character building." I believe this to be true, although I am the first to admit this is a very hard sell to those on shore. One historian (who shall go nameless because he really ought to know better) once chided me to the effect of "...I don't buy this character business, after all, look at what dissolute drunkards sailors historically have been while ashore and look at how many came to a bad end!" As a professional mariner, and even as a former board member of the American Sail Training Association, I never try to sell "character building". It implies to the customer that: a) your character needs improving, and b) that I am competent to work on it. Being neither psychiatrist, therapist, nor of the clergy, I make no such claim.

As a professional sailing ship master, however, I do know how a ship should be run. Should you choose to sign on, I can teach you how to be a useful member of the ship's company. What the experience does for your "character", or for the rest of your life, is entirely up to you.

So what is the relevance of present day "sea experience" to the study of Maritime history? History is the story of how people solved, or failed to solve, the problems confronting them. Our understanding of these people is greatly enhanced if we have seen first hand what they were up against and what options were available to them. This is especially true for seafarers, whose circumstances differed so markedly from life ashore.

Performing many of the same tasks, learning to hand, reef, and steer, learning to recognize danger and how best to weather it, in sum, learning to think like a seaman, improves the odds of understanding the seafarer's world of ages past. We can't get it to be exactly as it was, but we can come close enough to gain insights and appreciation which would never come without benefit of such experience. Sea experience is not a substitute for traditional scholarship, any more than the other way around. Yet each informs and reinforces the other.

Corwith Cramer, the founder of Sea Education Association (S.E.A.), often said "Heritage preservation is attitude preservation." Attitudes don't exist in a vacuum, or lie dormant in the pages of books, but are developed over time through our human contacts and our experiences. A strong case can be made for the educational value of sea experience completely aside from the questions of historical authenticity of the vessel in which it is gained.

In the case of Niagara, however, we do have a vessel intended to focus our attention on a moment in history, the Battle of Lake Erie, 10 Sept. 1813. As previously stated, the majority of volunteer crew members onboard Niagara are interested in the sailing adventure and the craft skills of the sailor rather than "history." However, most years since 1996 the U.S. Navy has sent a few of the USS Constitution crew to sail for a few days to gain insights that will aid them as interpreters and docents. Likewise, East Carolina University professor Larry Babbits has frequently brought groups of students to serve onboard for three week stints to get a first hand feel for the environment and working conditions in which maritime history took place.

For an illustrated tour of what takes place in our program please reference the power point slide show accompanying this file. The main themes can be outlined as:

1. Winter lay-up and spring rigging-up and outfitting

Every year green hands come to supplement professionals in preparing the ship for sea. If you had been in Erie in the spring of 1813 the same thing was happening.

2. Learning to eat, sleep, and stand-up

There is a specific drill for mess tables, hammocks, and getting around below. The most authentic aspect of Niagara is the squalor of living onboard. A large part of the ship's routine is devoted to maintaining the crew, before they can be available to do anything for the ship.

3. Learning the ropes

The apparent complexity of square rig is pretty daunting to the uninitiated. We offer the Berlitz immersion course in speaking ship. What is less apparent at first is that the real complexity is not in the sticks and string, it is in the nuances of handling and the tasks which must be learned.

4. The ship as a set of systems

The ship is made up of many interlocking systems; propulsion, navigation, safety equipment, ground tackle, galley, armament, etc. Ships are challenging to interpret because the reasons and the functions for all of these systems are not readily apparent lying alongside a pier, nor is the human structure which makes it all work.

5. The ship as fabric

A very significant difference between a wooden square rigger in the days of hemp, versus an iron ship with steel spars and wire rigging, is that the whole ship, not just the sails, needs to be thought of as a flexible fabric of thousands of pieces of organic material. Strain distribution was a major factor in design, loading, and handling. A wood and hemp ship had an insatiable appetite for hands-on labor for maintenance, tune, and trim.

6. Stability as a variable

Niagara today has external ballast, carries only six guns rather than twenty, does not have to carry large amounts of consumable stores, and has the benefit of naval architecture to inform the officers of the ship's limitations. Operational sailing men-of-war had much smaller stability margins, which were more subject to change.

7. The human presence onboard

Today the ship is sailed by a crew of forty, and may on a day sail have up to a hundred onboard. In 1813 the desired crew was one hundred and seventy! A fair amount of organizational effort went in to just moving about the ship, let alone accomplishing any tasks. The watch, quarter, and station bills are the key to understanding how all these people are put to use.

8. Getting underway

A square rigger in port is most often presented with yards squared, but this is hardly ever how they are positioned at sea. Sailing the ship is the difference between looking at a violin and playing it.

9. Live Fire

While the literature describing the effects of solid shot on wooden ships is extensive, the physical evidence is long gone. The age of fighting sail predates photography, and the damaged ships were either completely repaired or lost. Erie Maritime Museum in 1998 conducted a live fire experiment against an accurate hull mock up. The results recorded in slow motion film would not do for a recruiting clip.

Gun drill and firing demonstration onboard Niagara is the one area of training that has no current applicability and is conducted solely for historic interpretive value.

10. Sailing a warship compared to sailing a merchant ship

While the difference in mission is obvious, the difference in handling is less so. At first glance there seems little difference between the rigging of warships and merchantmen of this period. The warship, however, carries a proportionately larger rig, with much lower purchases in the tackle. This gave much greater speed of maneuver, but came at the price of needing a much larger crew. Onboard a man-o-war there was pride in the speed and smartness of carrying out any evolution. Onboard a merchant ship they took pride in how much work they could accomplish, albeit more slowly, with so few hands. "A drill for twenty bluejackets is a job of work for three seamen." Most training ships today are based on merchant vessel designs, but Niagara is very much the naval rig and demands to be treated as such.

11. So what does this effort do for us?

Going to sea still requires knowledge, skills, and acceptance of risk. As mariners the experience of sailing Niagara deepens our respect for the abilities of our forebears to surmount a far greater level of hazard. As historians the experience of placing ourselves in the living, working marine environment helps us understand the problems faced by and the options available to our predecessors. As museum professionals this understanding better informs our interpretive efforts.

A maritime museum may in part be a fine arts museum, but it also needs to be a combination of a history museum and a science center. Understanding the history is dependent upon having at least enough grasp of the technology to appreciate the circumstances and limitations placed on the historical actors. Maritime history cannot be fully appreciated without some understanding of the marine environment and how the ships functioned in it. The most fragile aspect of maritime preservation is human experience, but at the same time it is the experience, the attitudes, that we have the best chance of preserving indefinitely as long as we understand the need to keep it alive.

The Maritime Heritage Conference was well attended by historians, academics, archeologists, preservationists, and was very worthwhile and rewarding. The very next week I attended the annual conference of the American Sail Training Association (ASTA), which was also very worthwhile and rewarding. I am always struck by how little overlap there is between the two conferences in subject matter and attendance. I find myself one of a very small set of people who move between both peer groups.

As such it never ceases to amaze me how little communication there is between the academic maritime historians and the sailors. Consciousness of Maritime anything is pretty minimal in the United States, and maritime historians fill but a tiny niche of a not very large profession. Likewise, sailing ship mariners are a tiny fringe element within the very small group of professional mariners.

Yet each can be observed looking down their noses at the other. The professor looks askance at a sail training program if it lacks formal academic rigor; "...you aren't providing any serious study, it's just an adventure travel jaunt." The compliment is returned by the seafarer; "...bunch of useless clumsy suits who'd barf to windward if ya let'em." That there is an uncomfortable amount of truth in both sets of unflattering assertions doesn't change the fact that both historians and mariners have much to learn from each other.

The above presentation was given on the opening day of the Conference, as part of a session that was more oriented to the economic benefits of "Tall Ship" events and festivals. Let others address those. My primary interest has always been the learning that takes place once the ship is underway and out of sight of the crowd on shore.

The session this paper is more applicable to was the Saturday morning session on Maritime Heritage Education at Sea. The most interesting part of the session was the discussion following the presentations, and it was most notable for the lack of acceptance from the primarily academic audience. Criticisms centered on the lack of accurate or extensive historical content in the majority of sea experience/sail training programs.

This criticism from the academic discipline of history is fairly valid, in that only a few sail training programs seriously focus on maritime history, and with varying degrees of depth. However, dismissing the educational value of sea experience for what it is not completely misses recognizing the value of such experience in providing understanding and perspective that can be applied academically long afterward.

One may or may not learn any maritime history while participating in a sea experience program under sail. If history is a well presented part of the program so much the better, but even if it is not, even if the emphasis is on oceanography or personal development, the experience will give an understanding of circumstance which will aid the academic study of history. Time at sea under sail is not a substitute for academic study, but needs to be taken on its own merits as a reinforcing and enhancing experience for any field of endeavor.