The Sail Power and Steam Museum of Rockland, Maine

Captain Sharp framed by an arch in the limerock room.

ROCKLAND — To hear Captain Jim Sharp tell it, the brigands down at Mystic Seaport were fixing to scuttle the schooner Bowdoin. They had let her wallow and rot, stripped all her hardware by the crudest methods, and were all but ready to make her into a reef when an outraged Donald B. MacMillan intervened.

The venerable Arctic explorer had generously gifted his famed vessel to the Mystic museum in the late fifties. He had prepared her kit as if for an expedition so that all those who came to the museum could see her as she was when MacMillan and dozens of others had sailed her into the Arctic Circle on their brave scientific voyages.

It was 1968 when Bowdoin was towed from Mystic Seaport, her well-being and restoration entrusted to Captain Sharp. “She was near a derelict by the time we got her up here,” said Sharp as he stood before a black and white photo of a dismasted craft barely recognizable as Bowdoin. Fearing that a twilight MacMillan might not see his ship under sail again before he passed, Sharp wasted no time in restoring the vessel to her original splendor.

Bowdoin got a new engine, foredeck, gunwales, and many bits besides. A plumb spruce was hauled down from The County and planed into the slender cone of a beautiful new mainmast. With the paint barely dry, captain and crew raced down the coast from Rockland only to find themselves in a thick fog near the old man’s house.

Worried by the mist, Bowdoin crept along, guided by guess and the faint tintinnabulations of a shrouded bell. A seaman’s flare for the dramatic gripped Captain Sharp as his story rose to its crest: “We were sailing in a dungeon thick of fog when the mist parted like a curtain drawing back, and there we saw MacMillan standing on his porch, ringing his bell and waving.”

Captain Sharp demonstrates an antique ballast calculator. These were the days before computers. And before this, they did it by the seat of their pants. Sometimes their pants were wrong.

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