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T
-1- he Kaiulani—named for the star-crossed Hawaiian princess who died, at the age of 24, within months of the launching of her namesake—was built by Arthur Sewall at Bath, Maine, in 1899- This first and only U. S.-built steel merchant bark, had been born as a passenger packet. Designed to carry sugar and honeymooners, locomotives and livestock on the San Francisco to Honolulu run, she turned to sterner trades as a changing technology drove her kind from the world’s oceans.
Shortly before World War I, she joined the famous "Star Fleet” of the Alaska Packers Association. With her poop deck extended 48 feet, the rechristened Star of Finland, carried salmon fishermen north from San Francisco in the spring of each year to work the perilous fisheries of the Alaskan coast. Seven months later, she would carry bone-weary fishermen and cannery workers, along with their processed catch, back through the Golden Gate.
By 1930, she was idle, laid up with other square-riggers in Oakland Creek, awaiting the fair wind that never seemed to come. She was repainted, and outfitted for sea once more in the late 1930s, for a role in the movie "Souls at Sea,” then returned to the dwindling ranks of ships awaiting the scrapper’s torch. But there was a handful of perceptive people who saw her for what she was, one of the last survivors of the American heritage in sail. Thus, a committee was formed to save her for a museum ship, a living reminder of what had once been a fleet of 17,000 deep water sailing ships.
It was not the warmth of nostalgia but, rather, the cold reality of a war-induced shortage of shipping, that saved the Kaiulani. Because bottoms were so desperately needed, a group of San Francisco shippers purchased and refurbished her, and restored her lovely Hawaiian name—"Child of Heaven.”
Yet, before she could put to sea, the Child of Heaven had to be mastered and manned. And capable American mariners, in short supply even during the heyday of the square rigger, had become an almost extinct breed in this age of steam.
The Kaiulani found her master in Captain
i In 1941, her original name restored, the Kaiulani spreads her sails once more, southbound on the road to Cape Horn.
World War II was underway in Europe and any neutral shipping was in great demand. A handful of sailing ships was placed back in service, but only one American-built square-rigger.
Hjalmer George Wigsten, whose first trip seaward was from a Swedish shore. Wigsten, in turn, found a 20-man crew, half of them old canvas men and half of them, in Wigsten’s words, green "college kids.”
With her gray and green crew and an $84,000 cargo of Pacific Northwest lumber in her hold, the Kaiulani departed Gray’s Harbor, Washington, on 25 September 1941, bound for Durban, South Africa, around Cape Horn. The Kaiulani, America’s first steel bark, was underway on the last commercial voyage of American sail.
There was no radio on board but, in mid-December, somewhere off Cape Horn, a young crew member carried a wire to the top of the masthead and, on a small battery set, faint voices in clipped British accents were heard discussing the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One of Captain Wigsten’s collegians, Karl Kortum, recalls the "unbelievable words about the sinking of the battleship Arizona ... In our young lives no American battleship had been sunk since the Maine. It just couldn’t happen.”
Captain and crew conferred and agreed to alter course to Hobart, Tasmania. On reaching Hobart, the Kaiulani's days under sail ended. Requisitioned by the U. S. Army and towed to Sydney, Australia, she was converted to a coal barge.
At the war’s end, she was sold and used as a logging barge in the Philippines. And it was in this lowly state that, thanks to the interest of maritime scholars, the Kaiulani was presented as a gift of the Philippine people to the people of the United States.
Today, from the rooftop eyrie of his office on Polk Street, San Francisco, Karl Kortum, Director of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, who sailed in Kaiulani on her last voyage, is inspiring a new generation of Americans to think about its sailing ship heritage.
Kortum has insisted, and the nation is at last beginning to comprehend, that America cannot afford to ignore the hard-won lessons of mankind’s voyaging past. Man has come a long way, after all in the 3,000 years of adventuring across deep water under sail. Much of what he learned occurred in the last 300 years of that experience, years that saw the settling and development of America, a nation determined from its beginnings to set its own style and find its own destiny.
Do we fully understand the story of America as 1
The Kaiulani 73
continental nation, a nation forged on the anvil of Cape Horn? It is a story that goes far beyond the romantic memory of clipper ships, back to the beginnings of this country as a series of coastal settlements dependent less on the plows that broke the land than on the keels that plowed the seas and waterways. It is a deep and not an easy learning, trying to follow honestly the invisible sea tracks laid down across wild oceans by three centuries of ships driven only by God’s wind and the muscle of men’s backs.
Men who sailed the last of these graceful ships are still with us, although in a steadily diminishing company. Karl Kortum has pioneered in preserving their testimony, through interview and tape recording. Talk has become cheap in this last quarter of the 20th century. Back then, men used words differently; to command, to argue (a ship with a silent forecastle was notoriously a dangerous ship), but the word always was a symbol of the act, not a thing lightly given or taken. Grand story-tellers they were, and singers of songs; it is a fact, not a myth, that they sang at their work, to speed it along and perhaps to express something of themselves in work that landlubbers could never understand.
Through the efforts of Karl Kortum and many like him, the Kaiulani is at last to be taken up and restored. In mid-1973, she was designated as the flagship of the Maritime Bicentennial Fleet, an official project of the American Revolution Bicentennial. She will be brought from Manila Bay and will voyage from port to port as she once voyaged in the trades that helped build a nation; from Maine to New York to San Francisco to Hawaii and Alaska. Leading citizens, including Elliot Richardson, Emil Mosbacher, Frank Braynard, and Helen Delich Bentley, Chairman of the Maritime Commission, have enrolled in her cause, along with scholars and maritime museum staffs across America. James Biddle, President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has said of the effort to save the Kaiulani, "Surely Americans are equal to the task. Surely Americans can save this ship.”
As a part of the movement to save the Kaiulani, discussions are now being held between the National Maritime Historical Society and the National Trust for Historic Preservation toward creating a National Ship Trust. The purpose of such a Ship Trust would be to focus public attention on our heritage in ships,
to arrive at priorities in the work of preserving this heritage, and to help establish standards so that what is achieved may be worthy and lasting. This work would be based on the learning acquired in ship restoration at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, the San Francisco Maritime Museum, San Diego, the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and newer centers like the Bath Marine Museum in Maine, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in Maryland, and the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City.
But the people who are associated with this work are not limiting their efforts to saving only the Kaiulani. The National Maritime Historical Society has played an active role in the effort to save the historic coasting schooner Alice S. Wentworth for Boston, and the last surviving ship of the California Gold Rush, the bark Vicar of Bray, now a hulk in the Falkland Islands, for San Francisco.
Anyone wishing to learn more about the National Maritime Historical Society, its activities and its publications, may write to 16 Fulton Street, New York, N.Y. 10038. And those who wish to sign on as members at $10.00, or patrons of the work for a contribution of $100.00 are cordially invited to do so. For it is by the efforts of individual Americans that this Child of Heaven who has done such noble work here on earth will find her permanent home in the nation she and her kind helped to build.
COURTESY OF
"..SHOP MUSEUM. HONOLULU
76 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1974
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of American sail around Cape Horn afforded a rare chance to j
For the "college kids” among the Kaiulani’s crew, the last comnierct'
many moods of the world's two great oceans. Becalmed on the E#7/ j the Kaiulani lay 17 days waiting for a wind as her young men « themselves mending the old sails. Only five new sails had been pu* the voyage—the ship set 20. Later, as they changed to storm cartVtdi ^ if | on the yard, directed the bending of the mainsail as, on deck, on a ^ | tended the buntlines. Later still, on ice lookout in the South Atlan^ weather and the danger of icebergs kept a man on the fo'c’s’le he the clock.
Ur‘od karette' Captain Wigsten, facing page, a veteran of 49 sailing t>f^n8 uit/j ‘I ^ee °f a tarpaulin stretched across the weather mizzen
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"B/g John, ” with whom he quarreled frequently and room for grappling in the and whiled away the
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’"aitla ed Pitcairn Island was sighted, above, and Kaiulani backed Co*>e nfj- J S and waited for the descendants of HMS Bounty’s mutineers n t/oeir boats.
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I>e Kaiulan "of bat’d service continued through and after World W'ar 11 as Sailj)t “bored as a log barge in the Philippines. Although shorn of her ;r'"lee ^ 'be legacy of Western Ocean packets, China clippers, and
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f’ last Ca,t “sters showed in her lines. So, too, did the Viking character of '8*ten a'“ sbow through as, just before his death in 1958, Captain > -7 '• “friend. "I am like an old ship with blocks and gear
p '“'‘del rjj. “'oft. ” In 1964, standing in front of the Kaiulani's wheel and , rts‘8ent , e> ' l*resident Johnson accepted the ship herself from Philippine
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“Capagal. Today, still a hulk in the Philippines, she will be
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Under the houseflag of the Alaska Packers Company, the rechristetieu ( Finland was eased out of her off-season layup berth at Alameda, ‘tU'Al her companions in the Packers’ Fleet. A crew of fishermen and canrte1l ^ workers milled about her foredeck as she prepared to depart for A dozen Packers’ ships went north in 1925, but only one went in ^3®'
"Star Fleet” was disposed of over the next decade. By 1940, only ^ remained, still cared for, though out of service; she was used in Mar'1 . j,i( Day harbor parades under tow. During the 1930s, lower photograph page, she had set her sails briefly for a motion picture.