March 12 - 24 -- A Western Land Adventure, But Studded With A Star

Yeah, the trip included Tuscon Arizona, San Diego, California and Portland, Oregon with lots of family and friends. A good time but such subjects are not grist for this blog.

The Star of the show was the Star of india, the centerpiece of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, which includes a total of about eight boats. I detached from the rest of the folks and visited for about three hours on a warm sunny typical San Diego day. The other boats include the ship built to replicate the HMS Rose (or Surprise), which was used in the film Master And Commander,  a Spanish galleon, several pacific designed racing boats, two submarines, one Soviet and one of ours and a former ferry whose main deck provides lots of exhibition space.

I checked out the HMS Rose, a replica of a British Frigate. On her port  bow, looking out over the Bay was a sail broad reaching; it made me long to be underway again. Below decks were her guns, well actually guns that were too large for her to have used, and a description of the gunnery drill.

But I spent most of my time with the Star of the show, the best renovated and maintained and probably the largest.

She was built in 1863 on the Isle of Mann, between England and Ireland and originally named Euterpe which means Delight in Greek and is the name of the Muse of Music. Her LWL is 205 feet, 278 with spars, her beam 35, her draft 22 feet fully loaded and her highest mast towers 124 feet above the water.

She led four consecutive highly productive and profitable lives before becoming a museum. First she hauled freight between England and India. Then she changed careers to carrying paid passengers (settlers) from England to New Zealand. Her third life was carrying lumber from Alaska to San Diego, which at the time was rather treeless. Large rectangular holes were cut into her aft hull (which could be covered by heavy steel plates dogged down tightly) through which tree trunks could be loaded into her hold. Finally, starting in 1901, she was sold again, to the Alaska Packers Association, and worked carrying canned salmon from the Bering Sea to Oakland, California with her name changed to Star of India in 1906.  Along the way her aft mast was converted from square rigged to fore and aft, which made her a barque.

Her hull was iron and she escaped several near disasters, dismastings and other damage, only to be repaired and live on during her 21 circumnavigations and many other passages. While this fact was not mentioned, she obviously made a ton of money for her owners during her 63 years as a workhorse, until 1926 when she was sold to the San Diego Zoo to become a museum.

 But the depression and other factors intervened and it was not until 1957 that restoration began and not til 1976 that she put to sea again, with tourists, not settlers. Here is the stern deck and one can see the effort that went into the brightwork on which settlers could sit on good days.

The Maritime Museum calls her "the oldest ship still regularly sailing" and "the oldest iron hulled merchant ship still afloat." I thought, "What about Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor". On the day of my visit there were zero docents so I was not able to ask. I think there may be disputes about the meaning of the word "regularly". I did notice that some sails were bent onto the spars and two of them were set, in the light winds that day. My thought was that such sails are expensive and should be protected by sail covers from the strong steady San Diego sun.

Below decks were many exhibits of various aspects of nautical information. A lot of space was devoted to the lives of some of the men who sailed her and the men and women who were passengers, including typical bunks for those not in steerage. One section said that ships were the first and in the early days, the only vehicles that connected the world. This was certainly true of the two hemispheres, but land caravans had connected Europe and the far east before that. Her bow hold was open, below decks. and looked huge, though not compared to today's super ships. One part was an art gallery for photos of racing on San Diego Bay.

There is much more to see in the museum -- for my next trip.