When the United States celebrated its bicentennial I was working on a ship, the fabled S.S. Mayaguez seized by Cambodia in May 1975, its recapture causing the deaths of 41 American servicemen. I didn’t make the connection when I signed on a year later as a clueless Ordinary Seaman with the Seafarers International Union, newly graduated from Mount St. Joseph High School. The ropes I intended to learn were how to splice words into sentences into paragraphs into something that might be published.
Fifty years and many thousands of stories later I was at sea again on Independence Day, the 250th earlier in July. This time I stood around on deck with a notebook while the young crew of the Pride of Baltimore II worked the wooden ship from the foot of Broadway to Pier 15 in New York harbor.
“I was a banker in San Antonio before this,” said 36-year-old deckhand Sean Zimmerman as we passed Turkey Point Lighthouse on the Elk River. It was sunset on June 30, the first day of the five-day sail toward Gotham City and the brutal heat of the Fourth of July. “At work one day I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I want adventure.'”
I tell young people who say they want to be writers to forget the expense and veneer of a fine arts degree and chase adventure. Run away with the circus with a pen and cheap notebook in your pocket. Many Big Tops still travel with elephants so start scooping, keep writing and scrape by on what they pay you.
A replica of a 19th-century Baltimore Clipper, the Pride II is one of about 120 tall ships across the country, sea-to-shining-sea, Great Lakes to the Gulf. Though it doesn’t offer formal apprenticeships, many others do. One job leads to another, sometimes with as little as 24 hours notice to pack your bags.
So, when you’re just about to stick your head in the break room microwave while waiting on your burrito, ask yourself: What would Mark Twain do?
Hoist the spinnaker in your heart and get a tattoo of the national flower of every country to which you’ll sail, as Pride II bosun Tanith Anhaiser has done. One of her favorites is the Basque silver thistle from her time in Bilbao sailing deckhand on the Atyla, a two-masted Spanish training ship. Of the sunburst thistle, known along the Pyrenees as Eguzkilore, she said, “It wards off storms.”
If only. In light of the fate of the original Pride of Baltimore, which went down in a May 1986 microburst off the coast of Puerto Rico changes were made to her successor, launched in the Spring of 1988.
Mobtown’s first global ambassador of the seas was conceived to be historically accurate to the turn-of-the-18th century vessels built in Fells Point, a “static replica” of the high fliers that changed the maritime world. She had hammocks for the crew and just five feet of headroom below deck.
Architects of Pride II enhanced that design for safety, making the ship about 15% larger overall with watertight bulkheads and watertight doors down below. For comfort, hammocks were replaced with bunks. And, blessedly, fans in the focsles as holiday temperatures earlier this month – the wicked “heat dome” – daily topped 100 degrees. As a guy on Charles Street told me one summer for yet another newspaper weather story, “It’s so hot the chickens are standing in line to get plucked.”
Five decades does not provide a true measure of how much has changed since the morning the Mayaguez shoved off from the Dundalk Marine Terminal when Gerald Ford was president. It’s what I glimpsed as Pride II passed the far end of Thames Street for the Inner Harbor that made it real.
There, a row of glass and steel highrises – financial, residential and commercial – towered above the topsail, their sleek facades reflecting what used to be; the distance between an iron anchor on a hairy forearm from Tattoo Charlie’s on the Block to the graceful outline of a Black-eyed Susan on the inside of a young woman’s bicep.
“When I was a kid there were lots of vacant lots and junk yards and a bunch of foundries down there and we’d go digging for what we could find,” said Robert G. Lukowski, 72, who grew up on South Ann Street and worked on Fells Point tugboats before becoming a bay pilot in Long Beach, California.
Now retired, Lukowski remembered finding a lawn mower engine in a pile of junk a few blocks west of Bond Street with his friend Robert Zientek. The Zientek family owned a longshoremen’s tavern at Thames and Ann Streets called Zeppie’s, the kind of place that sold work gloves along with ham and cheese sandwiches and shots of rye. In 1977 it became the John Steven and is now Penny Black.
As close to Huck and Tom as you’d find along the cobblestone streets of 1960s, pre-hippie Fells Point, the boys hauled the engine back to the Zientek basement on Fell Street, mounted it on a wooden frame and, said Lukowski, “Brought it back to life.”
That’s what passed for fun for a couple of southeast Baltimore kids with backyards made of concrete.
Circling the Inner Harbor, Pride II announced itself amidst tall ships from around the world – including the Columbian naval training ship GLORIA, a three-masted, steel hulled barque – with cannon blasts before sailing north for the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.
En route to join a Hudson River parade of more than 50 ships from 30 countries at the Verrazzano Bridge for Gotham’s big 250th celebration, Captain Jan Miles filmed and narrated videos on his smart phone. Miles skippered the original Pride on its first cross-Atlantic trip in 1985, piloting it to the Irish port of Baltimore in County Cork. He also helmed the second leg of Pride II’s maiden voyage from Bermuda to the Gulf of Mexico and around the Caribbean before sailing north along the Atlantic Coast.
With a half-century of experience on both vessels, the 75-year-old Miles has an encyclopedic knowledge of Baltimore Clippers and what he calls “the 1812 war” that made them famous. Extraordinarily nimble, the vessels proved themselves by running English blockades, encircling the British isles and capturing merchant ships flying the Union Jack. In private hands, Clippers became infamous for ignoring the 1807 U.S. law against importing human beings to be used as slaves.
Another person doing real-time reporting was Eastern Shore outdoor writer Kate Livie, part of the guest crew along with her husband Ben Ford, who contributed drone footage to her dispatches. Livie, who operates an Instagram site called This Old Shore also sketched watercolors at the dining table in the ship’s saloon. The crew fixed their plates on a sideboard near the galley and mostly ate on deck.
“The most famous ship ever built on the Chesapeake wasn’t a Navy ship, she wasn’t a cargo ship either … she was a hunter,” said Livie, narrating one of several videos made on the journey.
Livie was speaking of the privateer Chasseur. Launched from Fells Point in December 1812 she was captained by Thomas Boyle during the War of 1812 and either captured or sank an estimated 18 British merchant ships and their cargoes of brandy, cotton, cocoa and, as Scatman Crothers tells Shelley Duvall in The Shining, “seven kinds of what have you.”
Pride II’s lifeboat is the Chasseur – French for “hunter” – in honor of its fabled ancestor.
We ate well on the ship, courtesy of the skill of Christina Melendez who fed a complement of 18, a dozen crew and six guests. Any captain, be they on deep sea cargo ships and tankers or an Alaskan fishing boat, will tell you that morale comes out of the galley. Melendez prepared everything from large skillets of scrambled eggs and bacon each morning to jambalaya with kielbasa in the evening.
A while back, while sailing cook on the schooner Manitou out of Grand Traverse Bay, Michigan, she had a chance to step away from the heat of the stove and climb aloft for the fun of it. When the invitation came down, Melendez hollered back, “Just let me turn this curry off.”
Up there, she said, “You can look down on the tops of the trees. The air is blowing on you and it’s quiet. Freedom. You never get to do that in a normal job.”
Only at sea with your fellow gypsies.
Rafael Alvarez has been writing about the Baltimore waterfront since he covered a 1977 longshoremen’s strike for the fledgling City Paper. In September he will be making a film adaptation of his short story The Fountain of Highlandtown. Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com
