For the shipwrights at Mystic Seaport, a way of life sails on.
By Justin Shatwell
Sep 10 2015
When the work was finally done, Rob Whalen had little interest in taking a victory lap. The restoration of America’s last wooden whaler, the 174-year-old Charles W. Morgan, may be the greatest accomplishment of his career, but when the work was completed—when the ballast was loaded, the sails were unfurled, and the once dead ship moved under its own power for the first time in a generation—Whalen discovered he’d lost his desire to be onboard.
As senior shipwright at the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard at Mystic Seaport, he headed up the ship’s restoration and spent five years going over every inch of the Morgan, the Connecticut maritime museum’s star attraction. He and his crew sawed, shaved, and sanded away the damage she’d endured during the 73 years she’d been on exhibit, tied to a dock. When they were done, the museum celebrated in grand fashion, sending the Morgan on a three-month tour of New England ports and offering all of its employees, from custodians to curators, the chance to become junior crew members and help sail the ship for a day. Whalen passed. “I guess before, some part of me had wanted to be onboard and participate and climb a loft and all that,” Whalen says. But somehow that urge slipped away. For him, the turning point was when the ship’s professional crew moved aboard. Seeing the Morgan transform from a dead museum piece to a living ship made him realize his role in this story had come to an end. Shipwrights aren’t sailors, after all. It was time to let someone else have their turn. “We’d brought it to this point, but we were really not part of it,” he recalls. “I thought, you know, I’ve already had my time, and it’s not now.” It may occur to you that the same could be said of his profession—that the age of the wooden shipbuilder, which dawned sometime in the haze before written history, had had its time but was finally coming to an end. You’d be wrong, but only partly.* * *
“The fact that any of us get work, I think, is astounding,” says Tom Daniels, chuckling at his good fortune. He’s managed to stay consistently employed as a shipwright since graduating from the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, Rhode Island, in 2008. The school is one of three on the east coast that teaches wooden shipbuilding skills. Tom guesses that between them they train around 40 wooden shipwrights a year, which he concedes may be a few more than are needed. We’re sitting in the tool room of the shipyard, tucked away in the far corner of the museum’s sprawling campus. The walls are plastered with the novelties and knickknacks of the dozens of shipwrights who’ve worked for Mystic Seaport over the decades. Table saws and power tools of various stages of obsolescence run the length of the room. We’re seated around what passes for their lunch table, a single, irregularly shaped plank of oak, planed to a mirror finish and cluttered with old magazines. As a school-educated shipwright, Daniels represents the emerging face of the industry. Across the table from him sit two members of the old guard. Rob Whalen started his career as a handyman. With a bristly grey mustache and arms as thick as ash logs, he resembles an idealized worker from a Soviet propaganda poster. When he was a young man, he used his carpentry skills to, in his words, “bluff my way” into the wooden ship world. Bit by bit, he learned the finer points of the profession from those around him until, by the 1980s, he felt comfortable calling himself a shipwright and none of his peers could disagree. Walter Ansel, similarly mustachioed, learned the trade from his father, who was also a shipwright at Mystic Seaport. “I started volunteering and sweeping out the shop when I was 14,” he recalls. Aside from a brief stint as a professional fisherman, he’s been a shipwright his whole life. His daughter, who just graduated from college, is following in his footsteps. Daniels, by contrast, is a trained clinical psychologist and had a practice in Madison, Wisconsin, for 15 years. When he decided to give up that life and recreate himself as a wooden shipbuilder, he had to assure his parents that that was, in fact, something people got paid to do. “I wanted to do something where I had a better sense of the outcome of my labor,” he explains. “It was very hard, oftentimes, to see that what I was doing had any tangible results.” Daniels’ story isn’t unusual. Traditionally, wooden shipbuilding was a trade you learned on the job. Older shipwrights would pass down the skill to the younger generation. But increasingly, shipwrights are taking a more professionalized route, learning their trade in “boat schools,” often after abandoning a previous career. Examine the resumes of Mystic Seaport’s shipwrights and you’ll find them littered with all manner of vestigial degrees. Chris Taylor, one of the younger members of the crew, was working in the biotech industry before he “heard the call of the wild” and took a gamble. “I could always fall back and get a job at a pharmaceutical company, but thankfully it hasn’t come to that,” he jokes. “Our new shipwrights aren’t blue collar,” Ansel says. “They’re white collar who have changed in life—have gone to school and chosen a different path.” Daniels believes that technology is to blame. People who sit in front of computers all day feel distanced from the fruits of their labor, he contends. They start yearning for something tangible and, like so many other romantic dreamers, they head for the sea. For some, it’s a short trip. “Some of them get sorted out when they realize that, like any job, it has its ups and downs,” Daniels says. “If they had pictured themselves always making these beautiful plane shavings and looking at the sheer and getting it by eye… they realize that that’s part of it, but it’s not that often you do that.” At its heart, shipbuilding today is similar to how it’s always been. The tools have changed—chainsaws, power planers, and forklifts have decreased the need for manpower—but it’s still rugged, often repetitive work. Ansel likes to joke that the Mystic yard is full of “white collar guys doing blue collar work.” But that’s not entirely true. While there’s still a market for wooden yachts, wooden shipwrights are increasingly finding themselves in the restoration business. No longer simply craftsmen, shipwrights are being asked to be conservators, and with that comes different kinds of questions: What moment in history do we base the restoration on? What materials will be most accurate? How much do we need to do with hand tools to affect an authentic appearance? Their job is no longer to simply build a ship that will float; now they must build one that will float in a historically appropriate way. “One of the advantages of the ‘boat school’ world is that there is more impetus on authenticity,” Whalen says. That’s a big bonus at Mystic Seaport where shipwrights run into these issues daily. The museum boasts that by maintaining their own shipyard they are preserving traditional shipbuilding techniques for future generations, but the yard plays a much more practical role as well. Mystic Seaport owns around 500 vessels, all of which need maintenance. Their shipwrights stay busy, and as they do they are helping define what it means to be a wooden shipwright in the 21st century. One lesson they’ve learned is that there is such a thing as being too authentic. The pursuit of historic authenticity can be a money pit, and the Mystic yard still must answer to budgets and deadlines. Whalen finds he sometimes has to blunt new shipwrights’ enthusiasm. “Some people want to come in and just make those joints as tiny as they can be when that’s not really what’s called for. The ‘just get the job done’ aspect overtakes the finer points. That’s a challenge to find that middle path.” For the Morgan restoration, the crew had more leeway and resources than usual. Hand tools were used when appropriate and they had access to some unique raw materials, including live white oak timbers, salvaged from an old Navy site, that were harvested from trees that sprouted sometime around the Revolution. Still, concessions had to be made. Whalen laughs as he recalls their first attempt to paint the ship. They had ordered special linseed oil paint from Sweden that closely matched what shipwrights would have used around the turn of the century. The ship looked splendid when they applied it in the fall, but it quickly faded in the winter. Whalen says it would be a great paint if you had a dedicated crew to keep adding new coats, but his workers had other things to do. When spring rolled around the choice was clear. “We’re going back to Benjamin Moore.” But as much as they talk about practicality, it’s clear the Mystic shipwrights are still vulnerable to the romance of their work. Ansel goes over to a cupboard and retrieves a pair of broadaxes. “We all love hunting down antique shipwright tools. Some have the disease more than others.” He goes over all the little things you can learn from them. He shows where the original owner had crosshatched the handle to improve the grip and explains that shipwrights preferred the shaft of the axe to kick out a bit so they wouldn’t smack their knuckles on the work. “They’re beautiful the way they’re made,” he says. “The tools sort of teach you when you start using them.” Even as they contend with 21st century practicalities, the Mystic shipwrights find themselves in constant conversation with their 19th century forbearers. Every plank, spar, and mast bears the marks of another craftsman’s work, and often they leave lessons behind. It’s common for them, in the midst of a repair, to come across a piece of work they can’t quite explain, like a joint, hidden away between two planks, that’s crafted far stronger or more elaborately than seems necessary. Was the original shipwright just showing off or did he know something they don’t? It doesn’t matter. Whether they know why it’s there or not, they always replace each piece with one of equal quality, trusting that the wisdom of those who came before will help them carry their trade into the future.* * *
Whalen wasn’t the only shipwright not eager to sail on the Morgan when she was done. Both he and Ansel took one-day cruises on the vessel and found that to be more than enough. They spent the rest of their time on the Roann, a motorized support ship that followed the Morgan on its voyage. The view, they agree, was far superior. “I’d much rather be watching from a boat length away, because I could get my head around the whole thing,” Ansel says. “You can see the way she moves through the water. You can see all the sails full. You can see the crew’s sail-handling skill, the flags flying, the whole picture.” In short, you could see it work. That’s what their job was, after all, to deliver a vessel that worked. They weren’t just staring at a ship; they were taking in a job well done. And while the future of their profession is not entirely clear, they can feel proud of their efforts there as well. Whether you call it white collar or blue, craftsmanship or conservation, what they’re doing at Mystic Seaport is working. The role of the wooden shipwright might be changing, but it remains. The skills survive. A tradition continues. A way of life sails on.Justin Shatwell is a longtime contributor to Yankee Magazine whose work explores the unique history, culture, and art that sets New England apart from the rest of the world. His article, The Memory Keeper (March/April 2011 issue), was named a finalist for profile of the year by the City and Regional Magazine Association.
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