Salla, Lapland, Finland ...plan your stay July: Avg. high: 66 F Avg. low 55 F
In the late 19th century, Wilbur Morse, a boatbuilder in Friendship, Maine, was turning out an unprecedented number of working sailboats of similar design. As Betty Roberts writes in her history of the Friendship sloop, the boats were gaff-rigged with a clipper bow and a graceful (and practical) elliptical stern. Working craft, they were likely developed from the fishing boats of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and were used for most any kind of fishing, whether hand-lining for cod, seining for herring or hauling lobster traps.
Though Morse is credited with building the most “Friendships,” fishermen all over Maine — Thomaston, Cushing, Morse Island, Muscongus — were building the versatile, capable and seaworthy boats. Most were 30 to 40 feet, built using a formula that allowed for varying sizes. Beam was related to length, and mast height was related to length and draft. Thus, they could be built to any length from 21 to 50 feet. All had the elliptical stern.
Builders would cut their own wood, bring it to a sawmill and float the milled lumber to a boathouse using dories. “Each builder had some little secret innovation, which, in his estimation, made his model better than the others,” Roberts writes. The idea was to launch in spring, fish in summer, sell in the fall and build another. Used boats might fetch $300 to $500, the average cost of building.
The Friendship sloop remained in use as a fishing boat into the early 20th century, when motorized boats began replacing them. Before the Friendship faded from history, however, a devoted group that admired its look and sailing qualities seized upon it. The Friendship Sloop Society was founded in 1961, and the first of its annual sloop regattas, held in Friendship, Maine, drew 14 entries. Today, there are gatherings in Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well.
For more on the Friendship sloop, visit the society website at fss.org.
This article originally appeared in the August 2017 issue.
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ICEBOUND
Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
By Andrea Pitzer
Europeans once dreamed of an open sea at the top of the world. In 1606, Gerard Mercator, arguably the most famous cartographer of his time or any other, published a top-down map of the earth as he understood it. At the center of Mercator’s North Pole stood a magnetic mountain that pulled all compass needles northward; whirling around the mass of gray rock was a warm sea ringed by a thick circle of ice.
At the time, no one had a clue what the poles looked like. Mercator based his map on a theory proposed 1,800 years earlier by Pytheas, the first Greek to breach the Strait of Gibraltar and check out the Atlantic for himself. Pytheas sailed up the west coast of Europe, circumnavigated the British Isles, then continued north until he hit ice, possibly Iceland. Beyond that, he theorized, might be a free-flowing sea.
Pytheas’ travelogue was picked up by Pliny and others. Uncontested over centuries, his polar sea theory hardened into fact. Thoughts of that undiscovered ocean at the top of the world marinated in European imagination throughout the Middle Ages until the Portuguese found they could sail around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, prompting a trade route bonanza.
By the 16th century, European ships were poking into every bay, inlet and river. If there was a navigable ocean at the pole, it could provide a shortcut to Asia. In 1594, Dutch investors bet big on that theory, commissioning the cartographer William Barents to lead an expedition to the northernmost tip of Norway and then east over Russia in search of a northeast route. If they were right, Barents would make the Dutch phenomenally rich.
HIMALAYA
A Human History
By Ed Douglas
When I first came to India, I asked one of the most erudite politicians in the Indian government a question I had been scared to pose to anyone else but that seemed fundamental to understanding the region: Why does India have so many people? Geographically, it’s one-third the size of the United States but its population is nearly five times as large. The politician, who had had a long successful career in the United States as a business executive and seemed happy to explain just about anything to a new correspondent, stood up from his desk and walked over to a large wall map. He tapped a certain region, shaded brown and white.
“The answer,” he told me, “is the Himalaya.”
He explained that the world’s highest mountain range, home to Mount Everest and countless myths and counter-myths, had created such an immense river network that it left behind staggeringly rich soil across a vast swath of Asia. It’s no accident, he said, that on either side of these mountains lie the world’s two most populous nations, India and China. If you include Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, all of which also greatly depend on rivers sourced in the Himalaya, we’re talking about nearly half of humankind tied to these mountains.
The range, part of an even vaster highland region stretching more than 2,000 miles from Kyrgyzstan in the west to Myanmar in the east, has shaped Asia more than any geographical feature has shaped any other continent. The forces that drove religion, trade, learning and human interactions flowed across these mountains and their foothills for thousands of years. Even today, some of the rawest flash points in Asia, which can send armies rushing to the border and fighter jets roaring through the sky, lie high up in the Himalaya. The pros never put an “s” at the end of the word; it’s just Himalaya, which in Sanskrit means “abode of snow.”
In “Himalaya: A Human History,” the journalist Ed Douglas untangles the history of the mountains starting from when they were formed, about 50 million years ago, to the Everest climbing craze today. His book is the fruit of an enormous amount of research that focuses on the conquest of the mountains and the interconnected kingdoms and states that vied for control. His observations are sharp, and in many passages, his writing glows.
Auckland, New Zealand (January 18, 2021) – America’s Cup challenger American Magic is facing its greatest challenge yet after incurring a hard crash and capsize that damaged their hull. After nearly sinking, their AC75 PATRIOT made it back to shore at 10:45 PM NZDT, and now they assess the road forward. Here is an update from the team a day after the incident:
“First and foremost, we are incredibly grateful and thankful that everybody is safe,” said Terry Hutchinson, Skipper and Executive Director of American Magic, the U.S. Challenger for the America’s Cup. “The team did an incredible job getting PATRIOT back to the dock.”
The arrival of the American AC75 back to the team base in Wynyard Quarter was due not only to the perseverance of the team, which never gave up the fight over many hours, but that of the greater Auckland and America’s Cup communities. The three other Cup teams, the AC36 event management team, and multiple branches of Auckland’s rescue services came to the aid of American Magic in a moment of urgent need.
“The response from the local community here was incredible, and you can’t give enough thanks to the police, fire and local authorities for their quick response,” said Hutchinson shortly after stepping ashore, in darkness, alongside his exhausted but relieved teammates.
