Joe Garland

Adventure Sails!

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adventure under sail

 

 

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Guests of the captain aboard Adventure as she pulls away from Maritime Wharf for her first official passenger cruise in 27 years.

The Schooner Adventure sailed proudly from Maritime Wharf in Gloucester Harbor Saturday afternoon, past Pavilion Beach crowded with Fiesta revelers, and 13 miles out to sea toward Boston, with an appreciative group of 65 guests on board.  With that four-hour trip, Adventure reclaimed her place on Gloucester Harbor.

 

No longer a work project, Adventure has again taken her place as a functioning member of Gloucester’s working waterfront, where she made her mark from 1926-1953 as a high-liner,  a workhorse of Gloucester’s historic schooner fleet, becoming, by her last season as a fishing schooner in 1953, the last of the legendary Grand Banks fishing schooners.

 

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Passengers and crew work together to raise the mainsail

 

 

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Captain Stefan Edick  with volunteer crew member Elisabeth Kerr at the helm.

The guests for this first passenger cruise since Adventure was issued official passenger certification by the US Coast Guard a few weeks ago were all friends and family of Adventure’s Captain Stefan Edick and president of  the board of Schooner Adventure, John Morris. For each person walking down the gangplank, the afternoon’s outing held its own significance.

 

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Helen Garland with Adventure’s board president John Morris, and Shirley Morris

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George Smith of Manchester with Helen Garland of Gloucester

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Helen Garland, widow of Joe Garland, renowned Gloucester historian and author, Adventure’s principal fundraiser and advocate for the 27-year, 4.5 million-dollar restoration project, was pleased to be on deck for Saturday’s trip,  surrounded by people, natives as well as newcomers  who “represent various aspects of Joe’s  vision for Adventure.”

 

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Joe Garland, 1923-2011

“We have with us today,” she said, ” our native sons like author Peter Anastas and Captain John Morris, symbols of Gloucester’s proud heritage, along with our new friends like Bing McGilvray, who respect that heritage and have chosen to become part of Gloucester’s story.  The children running over the deck, they all give me hope for the future.  Gloucester and Adventure are proof of the spirit and bravery …that created the vital democratic energy which defined this country.”

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Three members of Enduring Gloucester’s board of editors, Bing McGilvray, Lois McNulty and Peter Anastas

Helen Garland noted that she hopes to honor what the gift of Adventure means to Gloucester, in the way that  Jim Sharp, Adventure’s former captain and owner,  who donated the ship to the city of Gloucester in 1988, envisioned it. Sharp called his gift of Adventure  “a monument to the history of Gloucester and for the education and pleasure of the public.”

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Peter Anastas with Helen Garland and Judy Walcott

Helen Garland adds, ” If Adventure can be allowed to play an active and daily role in teaching children and their parents to nurture the health of our oceans, I know that Joe’s work will not have been in vain.”

 

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Adventure board member and volunteer crew member Greg Bover helps a child with a life jacket.

 

From Adventure’s website,  www.schooner-adventure.org

The Gloucester Adventure, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit maritime historic preservation and educational organization. We are the stewards of the 1926 dory-fishing Schooner Adventure. Our mission begins with restoration and preservation in perpetuity of the National Historic Landmark Schooner Adventure, one of the last surviving Grand Banks dory-fishing schooners. The Schooner Adventure is a national treasure that is resuming active sailing as an icon of the American fisheries and as a floating classroom for maritime history and environmental education programs. The Schooner will be operated at sea, primarily along the New England coast, as a living monument to Massachusetts’€™ fishing heritage. As such, the Schooner Adventure is important not only to Gloucester, but also to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and all America.

Today Adventure is a rare survivor, an irreplaceable artifact from an extraordinary era in American history. Adventure was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994 and was honored to be selected as an Official Project of Save America’s Treasures by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1999. A prominent destination site on the Essex National Heritage Area Maritime Trail, Adventure serves as a living memorial to the more than five thousand Gloucester fishermen lost at sea.

 

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Peter Anastas and Bill McLauchlan on the deck of Adventure, with the Schooner Thomas E Lannon sailing alongside .

Lois A. McNulty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gloucester Writes the Sea

Enduring Gloucester 2 Comments
 
Gloucester Writes the Sea
Peter Anastas
Joe Garland on his porch at Black Bess, Eastern Point, Gloucester, preparing for a visit with Sebastian Junger, 1998,
photo by Ernest Morin

 

Sitting out last week’s blizzard with a hot toddy and a good book, the distant roar of the Back Shore’s breakers in my ears, I began to think about the storms we’ve lived through, especially the Northeaster of 1991, known historically as The Perfect Storm.  This sent me to the bookcase for my copy of Sebastian Junger’s 1997 bestselling account of the storm and its impact on the city and our fishing families. 
I read the page proofs of The Perfect Stormin one sitting.  Replying to Junger’s publicist at W. W. Norton, who had sent them to the Book Store in Gloucester for pre-publication comment, I told her that I found the book “beautifully written.”  I said it gave “the flavor of Gloucester fishing life as lived by a segment of that community—-the bars, the drinking, the relationships formed out of bar life, the violence of that life, the losses.”  I went on to note that Junger had rendered this life “without judgment and with a precision of emotional detail.”
Eighteen years later I still feel the same way.  While the book has attracted an international readership and its ageless theme of men and women against the sea, of courage in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, is universal, its local focus is what still makes it memorable.
The Perfect Storm is a profoundly Gloucester book.  It tells a local story about indigenous people.  It evokes a time and a place in Gloucester’s history.  It is told with precision and candor.  And it doesn’t romanticize the maritime life or mythologize its participants.  Books about the sea often tend to do this, especially if they are fictive.  Melville’s notably did not; neither did Conrad’s or Richard Hughes’.
Closer to home, I find the stories of James B. Connolly, who wrote so prolifically about the lives of Gloucester fishermen, less easy to read than when I was younger.  In contrast, Joe Garland’s books have seemed to ripen with age, as I believe the republication of Lone Voyager in 2000 by Simon and Schuster amply demonstrates.  Connolly’s penchant for “salty” lingo over straight talk has reached the end of its shelf life, while Garland’s Yankee astringency still seems exactly right for its subject.
Yet Connolly, who wrote in The Book of the Gloucester Fishermen (1927) that he’d sailed with Gloucestermen “to the fishing banks, loafed with them ashore, sat with them in their homes,” set a standard for writing about the maritime life here that later writers had to measure up to, including Garland and Kim Bartlett, whose The Finest Kind (1977) is the best account we have of our Italian fleet.  Both succeeded, and beautifully.  As did Geoffrey Moorhouse, an English writer who moved to Gloucester in the 1970s, fished here, and produced his semi-fictional The Boat and the Town,(1979), which documents the pressures on the industry before the establishment of the 200 mile limit, while presenting Gloucester, in the author’s words, as “a paradigm of all the fishing communities in the world.”
These texts, whether he had read them or not, were the models that Sebastian Junger had to write The Perfect Stormagainst, if only in the minds of those natives who knew and lived them.
Are these books, including Junger’s, enough to create a local tradition of writing about the sea?  And is The Perfect Storm part of that company?  In each case, the author has either lived or spent significant time here.  Connolly and Garland had the deepest roots, though Bartlett worked as the Gloucester Times’ waterfront reporter and fished alongside of his subjects.  Junger lived here, too, emerging with a finer understanding of life ashore than many natives.
In 2010, John Morris, the grandson of a dory fisherman lost at sea, published what may well be the definitive history of dory fishing, Alone at Sea: Gloucester in the Age of Dorymen, 1623-1939.  Of this major contribution to Gloucester writing about the sea, Joe Garland wrote:
“John Morris is about to tell you all there is to be told about Gloucestermen and their wives and widows and fatherless kids, and ways of life, and of death by the thousands, of good times and of bad, in a masterpiece that’s been waiting for generations to be told.”
We are fortunate in Gloucester that as this community has evolved there have been people to document in gripping prose the extraordinary quality of its life, what it means, what we stand for, what we must preserve.  In Sebastian Junger’s words, “I love this town, and I really hope that the fishing industry recuperates because that’s the heart of this town.  It isn’t tourism.  It’s not light industry.  It’s fishing, and it would really be a tragedy if business by business, boat by boat, that gets chipped away.”
Junger said this in a 1998 Boston Globeinterview and his words are just as relevant today.  In fact, they speak to our condition even more powerfully.