Pride of the Sea is a compelling account of the intersection between civic boosterism, marketing, boat design and nature, and how the needs and contingencies inherent in each interest can skew, in this case with deadly consequences, what might have been remedied or avoided entirely.
Baltimore-based author Tom Waldron relates in a simple way a complex story of how a replica of a circa-1812 Baltimore Clipper went from one man's pitch to a 1970s-era civic government eager to promote a failing small city to an actual and (as it turns out) all-too-authentic sailing vessel.
Pride of Baltimore was originally conceived as a static display to lure tourists to the decaying Baltimore harbour. Designed to be much as the original fast, heavily canvased schooners of 200 years past as possible, despite the poverty of blueprints or other design elements that would show how such boats were actually constructed, Pride would be ineligible for U.S. Coast Guard certification, lacking the water-tight bulkheads or stability aspects that make even the most delicate-seeming of today's sailboats inherently more seaworthy than almost all "historical tall ship" designs.
Nonetheless, Pride plied the seas as a sort of floating goodwill ambassador for Baltimore, manned by a hired, if ill-paid, crew who moved about the international fraternity of tall-ship sailors. This fraternity had, rightly as it turned out, reservations about the safety of Pride, which had for all its apparently excellent sailing qualities that mimicked, as close as could be evaluated, the original "clipper" experience, and yet also was a noticeably "tender" ship that had given in its nine years of operation signs that a strong if not excessive wind could send her over, not to come back again. Even her skipper, a cautious and observant sailor, to judge by the letters quoted here, would challenge the assumptions made by the civic managers of Pride and by her designer as to her ultimate suitability as an ocean-going boat.
I needn't foreshadow anymore...you can guess what happened. Tall ships with internal ballast and massive pyramids of sails have beauty but not always physics on their sides, and as the less-tragic if no less dramatic sinking of the modern-designed Canadian sail training ship Concordia earlier this year indicates, they can be sunk, and quickly, in rare adverse weather conditions. It was a suspected microburst that doomed Concordia, and a similar event is suspected to have doomed Pride: Whether different design or ballasting or operational choices would have prevented these sinking remains an open question.
"Tall ships", whether saved from the breakers or built with modern ideas and materials, continue to exert a romantic fascination with the general public and with recreational sailors alike. I myself stood upon the deck of Pride of Baltimore II this summer; I like tall ships and I like the idea of young people sail training at sea. A book like this, however, reminds us that the sailors of the past worked in conditions and on craft far more dangerous than we are prepared to tolerate today, leading to some hard questions about the feasibility of having such ships ply the waters of the world on behalf of tourism and marketing when the sea, as ever, remains capable of swatting them beneath the waves in a matter of seconds.
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