Mystic Seaport Museum, 1989.

ISBN 0-913372-50-1; oversized softcover, 81 pp., illustrated by author's photos and classic yacht portraiture from the Rosenfeld Collection.

Brilliant Passage . . . a schooning memoir

by Philip Gerard

1.  Coming Aboard

There are only two stories worth telling, the late novelist John Gardner liked to say—A stranger comes to town, or someone goes on a journey. I came to Halifax a stranger to board the schooner Brilliant and go on a journey, a coastal passage that would take us into blue water: across the treacherous mouth of the Bay of Fundy, far offshore of Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, finally to a quiet berth on the Mystic River in Connecticut.

The voyage would not be extraordinary in rigor, hardship, or danger, might hardly qualify as a "voyage" to legendary blue-water skippers like Sir Francis Chichester and Philip Weld. But it would take us across the outbound track of the fictional Pequod in quest of Moby Dick, across Herman Melville’s own outbound track to the whaling grounds of the far Pacific; it would take us into the Gulf of Maine, home to one of the last great schooner fleets in the world; it would take us inshore of Georges Banks and the Grand Banks and through fleets of fishermen and lobstermen whose families have drawn their livelihoods from the sea for generations; it would take us to Nantucket Island, "the place where the first dead American whale was stranded," Melville says, launching at once a bloody nautical industry and the golden age of a nation’s seapower; and it would take us to Vineyard Haven, Joshua Slocum’s home port, from where, eleven restless years after his remarkable solo circumnavigation of the globe, he sailed forth one last time into a famous oblivion.

We would not be making history, but we certainly would be cruising waters over which the layers of history hung thick as the fog that settled on Halifax harbor every night. If on a chart of that parcel of the Atlantic you traced the voyages of every Norse longboat, Spanish galleon, Dutch caravel, Yankee clipper, every schooner, man-o’-war, frigate, pirate bark, fishing smack, trawler, dory, lobsterman, freighter, tanker, container ship, whaler, minesweeper, Liberty Ship, P.T. boat, destroyer, dreadnought, icebreaker, picket boat, submarine, sea-going tug, coastal packet, ocean liner, and yacht that had ever plied those waters, you would have a single broad black smear.

And the vessel that would take us through those waters was indeed extraordinary—a teak-hulled schooner yacht built in the depths of the Depression for the wealthy cousin of P.T. Barnum by some of the most skilled naval architects and boatbuilders in the world.