Connected to the sea, and history

Merrimack Valley Sunday
August 17, 1997
By Tom Lochhaas

Many years ago when we decided to move to the North Shore from the Other Coast, we did some research and a lot of thinking about quality of life. For various reasons it eventually boiled down to a choice between Gloucester and Newburyport. Gloucester was, and still is, much more intimately connected with the sea, but Newburyport had a few other things going for it and we finally decided to settle here. That personal story aside, one interesting moment in the decision process still speaks to a reality today. I had mentioned to the Realtor that we were still trying to decide between these two small cities, and she replied haughtily, "Oh, the right sort of people are in Newburyport, you know!"

She was very nearly responsible for our immediately moving to Gloucester.

The sea has mattered to people since the rosy-fingered dawn of humankind. The sea has mattered to New England and therefore America for nearly 400 years. The sea, I find, and things of the sea, matter extensively to me now.

The sea, it often seems, has almost ceased to matter to Newburyport.

And so I found myself recently in Gloucester again, this time aboard the schooner Thomas E. Lannon, built by a man to whom the sea and real boats matter. Tom Ellis is exactly the "right sort of people" when it comes to an appreciation of certain things in life, some of which should matter to us all.

Remember when you could still see a few working fishing boats in Newburyport- before they were banished from the embayment on the central waterfront? Rusty and some ugly and smelly but somehow more real than those white plastic boats taking over the harbor- and though modern still in directly lineage to the boats that fed Europe three centuries ago. You can walk the harbor in Gloucester and still find these boats by the score, rusty or not, smelly or not, still connected to the sea that means more than an arena of jet skis.

Walk along by those old boats in Gloucester, past the two big old halfbeached boats rotting into historic oblivion right on Gloucester's main drive. (If Newburyport had any self-respect, she'd tow in one of those old wrecks and let it weather away on the shoals on the east end of the boardwalk, just to give people something real to look at- even if the history was faked…)

Walk down Seven Seas Wharf past the ticket booth for that ugly steel whale watch boat - and there, just off the Gloucester House Restaurant, you'll find the schooner Thomas E. Lannon.

Designed by a descendent of the Burnham family, which has built boats in Essex since 1650, modeled after a turn-of-the-century Gloucester fishing schooner, and just built and launched by Tom Ellis this year, the Thomas E. Lannon is as close as you'll come in a new ship to the old ways of boatbuilding. You may have been fortunate enough to drive through Essex in the last year and seen it being built, the hull being framed and ribbed and planked like a mythological creature being born. The building is a long story in itself. You can learn all about it a website www.schooner.org/tel/ Buy a ticket and take a sail on this schooner, for it's something you need to experience personally. Talk to the crew, some of whom helped build her. Walk around and notice the detail. Building a schooner by hand from wood and rope and sailcloth and leather, and not a scrap of fiberglass or plastic aboard, is not merely an exercise in historical accuracy. It is an affirmation of the good reasons behind some traditions - before the age of mass production and disposable consumer goods. This is the kind of craftsmanship that used to matter when it wasn't a matter for business, or society, to cut corners and choose the quickest most profitable means.

The schooner must motor out of the congested inner harbor, of course, but you can see it in the eyes of the crew and the eagerness of the boat that they can't wait for the moment of stopping that modern noise and hoisting sail and falling into the slow easy rhythm of the sea. And so it is. The buzzing witch pleasure crafts are lurching about in the outer harbor but the schooner Thomas E. Lannon moves with majesty and grace as it heads out to sea and those other modern boats cease to matter. I have sailed fiberglass boats of all sizes for many years, and none of them was ever as at home in the sea as this wooden schooner built in the old ways. There is a difference; you can feel it. I am not condemning modern fiberglass boats (I own one) but just acknowledging that the principles upon which they are built, mostly economic, are not the same as the principles distilled from many hundreds of years of wooden boats building.

Go to Gloucester and sail on this schooner. You won't forget it, and you may discover that somehow this matters. We can put a lot of words in to and do a lot of theorizing, but in the end it's a felt reality, something you know intuitively once you've experienced it. You'll feel a little more intimately connected with the sea, and maybe that will matter to you. I'm thankful it matters to some people who still do things with that mattering, like Tom Ellis deciding to change his life and build this boat, like Gloucester still respecting the sea enough to let old hulks lie in peace and give new ones berth. The Thomas E. Lannon was built for another hundred years of sail or more - lets hope a hundred years from now there's still a harbor from which to sail!

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