44. WAVERTREE

A.K.A.: Southgate, Don Ariano N.
Location: Pier 17, off Fulton Street
Built: 1885
Builder: Oswald Mordaunt & Co.
National Register Number: 78001887
Listed: June 13, 1978
Visited: November 11, 2007 and January 12, 2008



Uh...ships! Yeah! I keep protesting that I'm fairly ignorant about wide swathes of architecture, but ships? If my brain goes limp at the vocabulary of Gothic architecture, it shuts down when faced with things as simple as "starboard" and "port." Skimming through the 1969 book The Wavertree: An Ocean Wanderer makes me regret this somewhat. "The Wavertree was in the jute trade from Chittagong, first: that meant plenty of Trade Wind sailing--where the flying fish roam--and just getting past Good Hope outwards..." This line is a drop in the ocean of facts, but the waves it produces builds and builds with suggestion of a lost world until there is no shore it doesn't touch. And that's only the foreword. Most of the book is devoted Captain George Spiers' personal account of his trip on the Wavertree as it sailed from Port Townsend in Washington to Chile to Portland, Oregon to tiny Runcorn in England, passing through rotten weather and rundown seaports no doubt transformed by time. This was from 1907-08, this when the cast-iron ship was already a relic and only a few years away from decommissioning. The book has pictures of it in its incarnation as a sand barge in Buenos Aires, its rigging gone. Even knowing just fragments of its tiny role in an industrious world gone by, you could genuinely be saddened by this emasculation--and touched (yeah, touched) by its loving restoration by the museum.