In 1976 a team of hand-tool shipwrights and a blacksmith, working with raw materials on a bare public lot, re-created a fully functional Baltimore clipper. The feat was like bringing a woolly mammoth back to life. This ship, Pride of Baltimore, a topsail schooner with a sail plan of well over nine thousand square feet, embodied the sailing technology that had once enabled a newborn United States to take its vigorous place among the nations of the world. On her first voyage in 1977, she traveled to ports throughout the western Atlantic. Then she went global. Wherever she went, she inflamed the desire of cities, states, and countries to reclaim their own nautical heritage—a heritage that had been largely forgotten in civilization’s rush toward the industrial technologies of steam, oil, and iron. Melbourne Smith made this happen. Melbourne is a self-invented human phenomenon with a mind equal parts mechanical exactitude and reckless enthusiasm. In youth he was an apprentice sign-maker and hyperactive mist from a drab city on the shore of Lake Ontario. He has been at various times a musician, commercial artist, book designer, sailor, painter of meticulous watercolor portraits of historical vessels, shipbuilder, nautical technician, historian, marine architect, and even, briefly, a lieutenant-commander of the Guatemalan Navy. His story includes shipwrecks, natural disasters, desperate escapes, glorious failures, but always the assumption that any person’s life is an unscripted adventure demanding unquestionable expertise. Combining mechanics and vision, Melbourne Smith shattered the amnesia of progress and reawakened the world to the great history of towering masts, fast hulls, shining sprawls of canvas, and extreme risk on the high seas.
Innehållsförteckning
PART 1 | Sailor
1 Cap de la Hague | 1959 1
2 Manhattan | 1957 12
3 Cadiz | 1960 22
4 Hamilton | 1930 32
5 Antigua | 1960 44
6 Guatemala | 1961 56
7 Placencia | 1962 70
PART 2 | Shipwright
8 Maryland | 1963 78
9 British Honduras | 1965 86
10 Baltimore | 1975 98
11 Inner Harbor, Baltimore | 1976 108
12 Three Days North OF PUERTO RICO | 1986 123
13 Annapolis | 1974 131
14 New York City | 1841 139
PART 3 | DESigner
15 Spanish Landing | 1983 155
16 Erie | 1987 177
17 Penobscot Bay | 1998 197
18 West Palm Beach | 2012 215
19 Sandy Hook | 1849 225
Bibliography 237
Credits 238
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