A Race Back In Time

Of all the ships that have sailed the oceans of the earth, the most majestic was the square-rigger. Whether she was a lumbering East Indiaman of the 18th century or a fleet Yankee clipper of the 19th, a square-rigger was the tallest and mightiest of sailing ships. Its routes were those of the prevailing winds, and its sails and rigging—acres of rectangular canvas suspended from yards the size of telephone poles affixed to towering masts—were designed to take advantage of those winds.

The last square-riggers still plying the seas for profit were German merchant ships of the Laeisz line that carried grain from Australia to Europe into the mid-20th century. But the beginning of the end had come almost a century earlier. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave a greater advantage to steamships than to sailing ships, and with the improvement of the steam engine at about the same time, sailing ships were no longer economical. Within 10 years the transfer of the world's cargo from sail to steam was well under way.

Although a life that had existed virtually unchanged for centuries came to an end with the passing of the deepwater sailing ships, an almost mystical conviction has survived in maritime circles—that going to sea under sail as a rite of passage can never be equaled, that the unique combination of individual initiative and selfless teamwork required to sail a square-rigger in conditions of frequent hardship and occasional genuine danger is uniquely suited to making men out of unformed boys.

That conviction—fueled by a large body of romantic literature, the nostalgia of an older generation and a certain amount of historical evidence—finds its expression today in school ships, the giant training vessels maintained by the navies and maritime academies of the world's seafaring nations. The U.S.S.R.'s Kruzenshtern, Norway's Christian Radich, Argentina's Libertad, Colombia's Gloria, Germany's Gorch Fock, Japan's Nippon Maru, Poland's Dar Mlodziezy, Venezuela's Simon Bolivar and the U.S. Coast Guard's Eagle are among the square-rigged ships that exist for the sole purpose of training cadets who probably never again in their professional lives will be required to "Ease the halyard, tend the sheet, walk away with the downhaul."

Yet the anachronistic practice of teaching marlinespike seamanship in the age of nuclear-powered ships not only continues but continues to grow as well. In 1956, one year before Passat, the last of the German grain merchants, off-loaded her final cargo, a Sail Training Association was formed in Great Britain for the purpose of bringing together the tall ships of the world in friendly competition—not just the large naval and merchant marine school ships, but, eventually, smaller vessels as well. The goal of the STA and of its later American offspring, the ASTA, was not to produce professional seamen but to introduce young people to the tradition and the character-building challenges of the sea.

"Introduced into a complicated environment where the trainee is virtually helpless without direction," wrote a former ASTA president, "he learns to accept instruction, realizes the need for discipline in a natural way, becomes aware of each member of the crew's dependence on every other, and perceives that he or she is of importance to the whole."

Or as Joanna Collins, a 19-year-old U.S. Coast Guard Academy cadet, Third Class, put it one day as she sat cross-legged on the gently rolling deck of Eagle, whipping the end of a length of four-inch manila line with beeswax-coated sail twine and using a leather bos'n's palm to force her needle through the strands, "If you come here as a bad person, really self-centered, it's going to change you."

Collins and 123 other first class (senior) and third class (sophomore) cadets from the academy in New London, Conn., led by Rear Admiral Edward Nelson Jr., superintendent of the academy, were on a five-week training cruise aboard Eagle that had begun at the World's Fair in New Orleans in May. Eagle had then proceeded to Bermuda, and now in June was halfway to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Bermuda-to-Halifax leg of the journey was one of a series of races, jointly organized by the British and American Sail Training associations, intended to culminate in a vast Parade of Tall Ships' into the port of Quebec as part of that city's celebration of the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier's "voyage of discovery."

Since the American Bicentennial of 1976 with its Fourth of July OpSail spectacle in New York Harbor, the tall ships have become an indispensable part of such celebrations. Eagle's dance card is filled years in advance.

THE START