Title: Wavertree

Type: Segment Subject(s): Museum Exhibit Project Contact: Name: Wavelength Admin Company: Thirteen Email: [email protected] Original Broadcast/Publish Date: 01/14/2020 Runtime: 00:05:48 Main Asset File Size: 2.34 GB Short Description: WE HEAD TO THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM IN NEW YORK CITY TO SEE WAVERTREE, THE FLAGSHIP OF THE MUSEUM’S FLEET. WE GET AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE 1885 GLOBE-TROTTING CARGO SHIP, LEARNING ABOUT HER HISTORY AND REMARKABLE ARCHITECTURE. Long Description: WE HEAD TO THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM IN NEW YORK CITY TO SEE WAVERTREE, THE FLAGSHIP OF THE MUSEUM’S FLEET. WE GET AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE 1885 GLOBE-TROTTING CARGO SHIP, LEARNING ABOUT HER HISTORY AND REMARKABLE ARCHITECTURE.

Rights Information

Media Rights: Please refer to the MMG Arts Initiative Agreement for full rights information. Sensitive Material: N/A Special Instructions: The ship should be referred to as “Wavertree,” not “the Wavertree.” Ships have female pronouns, so use “she/her” instead of “it.” See the description on the Seaport’s website for an example: https://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/v isit/street-of-ships/wavertree/ File Clean of Graphics: Yes Language English Embed Code: www.southstreetseaportmuseum.org

Lower Thirds

TC In Lower Third In Cue 00:00:00 Capt. Jonathan Boulware The South Street Seaport President and CEO Museum is a 50-year-old South Street Seaport Museum institution... 00:03:16 Capt. Jonathan Boulware Life on a sailing ship in the 19th

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President and CEO century... South Street Seaport Museum Production Credits: Thirteen/Wavertree Executive Producer David Horn

Editorial Director Joan Hershey

Supervising Producer Mitch Owgang

Producer Maureen Coyle

Production Assistants Rikheil Patel Dominique Spooner

Music Services Sue Sinclair

Photography:

“Wavertree Under Sail” by Oswald Brett Oil on canvas, 1967

“Wavertree” by Oswald Brett Crayon on paper, 1969 South Street Seaport Museum Foundation, 1981.35 Wavertree lying at anchor in San Francisco, circa 1885 Courtesy of South Street Seaport Museum Archives

Cape Horn (Another View) Freshwater and Marine Image Bank University of Washington via Wikimedia Commons

La frégate l'Herminie Auguste Mayer, 1860 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest via Wikimedia Commons

Wavertree in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands, following December 1910 dismasting Courtesy of South Street Seaport Museum Archives

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Wavertree's crew in Portland, Oregon, 1907 Courtesy of South Street Seaport Museum Archives

A production of NYC-ARTS/WNET Cold Open THE ARTISTRY OF A SHIP THAT HAS SAILED THE WORLD Lead IN THIS SEGMENT, WE HEAD TO THE SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM IN NEW YORK CITY TO SEE WAVERTREE, THE FLAGSHIP OF THE MUSEUM’S FLEET. RECENTLY RESTORED, WE GET AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE 1885 GLOBE-TROTTING CARGO SHIP, LEARNING ABOUT HER HISTORY AND REMARKABLE ARCHITECTURE. Tag FOR MORE ABOUT WAVERTREE, VISIT SOUT H-STREET-SEAPORT-MUSEUM-DOT-ORG. Transcript Capt. Jonathan Boulware: The South Street Seaport Museum is a 50-year-old institution that exists in the original port of New York. It is located in the buildings and adjacent to the piers and with a fleet of ships that are representative of the original port of New York. So New York was a port before it was a city. For us, place really matters where we are doing our work is in actually the original accounting houses that are the first world trade center of the city of New York. The shipping piers and the ships and their connection to the rest of the world is what built New York. So we really tell the first chapter of the story of modern New York. “The Street of Ships” is a term that's used to describe South Street, really from the Battery up to Brooklyn Bridge and beyond. The image of the Street of Ships is that of the bowsprits, the head rig, the spar that comes off the bow of the ship and meeting with the city, hanging over the buildings that are there. It is that connection between waterborne transportation and the growing metropolis that represents really the birthplace of New York as we know it. These ships were - in the 19th century - the engines of trade. They were bringing raw materials in and manufactured goods out, but they were also instruments of globalization, they were instruments of connection. They were the instruments of the migrations of peoples, of cultural exchange. Wavertree is our flagship. She is an 1885 iron

3 / 5 sailing ship. Many people would refer to her as a tall ship, so a big tall-masted square rig sailing ship. And she is for us the connection between New York and the rest of the world. So she was a globe trotter. She was a- what's called a tramp for most of her life. So a tramp was the name for a ship that would carry any cargo, anywhere in the world as long as it paid. On the day that Wavertree was launched in Southampton, England in 1885 she was a profoundly normal ship, no more special than a Mack truck or a freight car today. But she is the last surviving ship of her type in the world. She has outlasted all of her sisters. She did so actually because of what I think you could call a series of happy accidents, which might not have seemed happy at all at the time. In 1910 during her second attempt to try to round Cape Horn, the Cape at the southern end of South America, and probably the most violent and dangerous body of water in the world, she was dismasted. Which means that her tall sailing rig came falling down to the deck, iron and wood and steel and cable and cordage and canvas all came crashing down, destroying the ship's ability to sail. Remarkably, killing no one. She was declared by her owners a functional loss. She was converted first to a floating warehouse. She was then converted by having her decks cut out into a sand barge. She was found by the South Street Seaport Museum. And so in 1970 she came here to great fanfare and she has been lovingly preserved by volunteers and staff of the museum ever since. Wavertree just completed in 2016 a completely unprecedented restoration project funded by the city of New York, a 16-month, $13 million restoration that brought her really as close to sailing condition as she has been since she was dismasted in 1910. Life on a sailing ship in the 19th century was a pretty grim business. So let's first think about what's the function of these ships? The job is to get a small pile of coal, a couple thousand tons of coal, or its equivalent, halfway around the world or die trying, right? So the inversion of importance of money and human life between the 19th century and now can't be overstated. Crews were expendable, sailors were expendable, cargos and ships were not. It was a rigid class hierarchy and you can see a really stark example of that in the cabin door that leads to the captain’s saloon.

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Inside the captain’s saloon, she's a Victorian ship, so posh, you know, cushions and nice chairs and a pump organ and a settee and a tea service made of silver and so on. On that side of the door, it's brightly finished with varnish and nice panels. On the other side of the door: painted white utilitarian, work-a-day. And so too was the lifestyle. Aboard the ship, the captain enjoyed a pretty comfortable existence. The sailors lived forward, toward the bow of the ship, and lived many men to a small cramped thing, sleeping perhaps on a straw mattress, eating salted meat out of a wooden barrels. One of the impacting things about Wavertree, about seeing her, is just walking down to the pier and seeing the majesty of her tall masts and the rigging that's necessary to make a ship like that work. But the real gem is to get into Wavertree and go down into the hold space, which is open this year for the first time ever and be able to take in the size and the scale of a huge cargo sailing ship from the 19th century. It's like being inside the belly of a whale or in a cathedral. At one turn incredibly beautiful - the construction is breathtaking - and yet its function was to do a very mundane and dirty job. And this is where I would say that Wavertree is truly unique. There is not another ship in the world that has a space inside like the one that Wavertree has. She isn't the ship that built in New York, but she is of the class of ship that made New York what it is. And so for us, particularly as the last of her type, she represents a New York's connection to the rest of the world. That in the 19th century from an East River pier, you could get on a ship like Wavertree. You could go out the Narrows, turn left, go right, go straight, and end up anywhere in the world.