The Ship Shrine

My daughter coined the phrase, but it’s really more of a display than a shrine. I had the idea several months ago of buying some inexpensive plastic frames for enlargements of a few of my favorite photographs of ships and children. Nothing fancy, just a few showpieces for old time’s sake. I selected the pictures, bought the frames, and set everything up on the dresser in Miss Karen’s old bedroom. I admired this little gallery every day. She saw it when she came home for Thanksgiving and laughingly called it my ship shrine.

Starting on the left and proceeding in chronological order, I have a picture of the ferry Orient at the dock in Orient Point, Long Island, in August of 1976. I was still a teenager then. After my first voyage aboard the State of Maine and before I returned to school, my parents and I took a road trip out to the East End of Long Island. We visited the lighthouse at Montauk Point and the state park at Orient Point. We also stopped to admire the old ferry loading passengers and automobiles for transport to Connecticut.

The Orient was quite a sight. An old landing craft from the Second World War, she had been repainted in civilian colors and now sported a gray hull with white superstructure. Her age showed in her battered bow, her rusty shell plating, and her squat, box-like hull. She was not a graceful looking vessel, but with the bright afternoon sun shining on her port side, she was quite attractive in a difficult-to-describe sort of way. Little did I realize that this chance encounter with the aged Orient would prove to be a harbinger of voyages to be made with children yet to be born. When I stood on the adjacent beach and took her photograph I was unmarried and childless, still just a kid myself, and unable to even imagine the many voyages I would make aboard the Orient’s successors with my family in the years ahead. The picture I took of her has since become one of my favorites, and it holds first place in the ship shrine.

Next come two photographs of the tanker New Jersey Sun in drydock at the Todd Shipyard in Galveston, Texas, in May of 1977. Then follows a portrait of the tug Charger docked in Newark, New Jersey, in July of 1978. These pictures represent many happy memories of my formative adolescent years when I was learning the craft of the sea and working toward my license. Those were the good old days!

Next in line is the cable carrier Furman departing Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and passing the Portsmouth Light in New Castle on Saturday, March 15, 1986. This picture represents a turning point. My seagoing career was drawing to a close, but the proverbial new day was dawning. The following year the first of our four children was born. Henceforth in my photography the ships would share the limelight with the children.

And so the next picture shows Miss Patty with a very young James and an even younger Miss Karen standing on the beach at Orient Point watching the new ferry John H arrive. It was Friday, August 17, 1990. The same place where I had looked upon the old Orient now became the younger generation’s viewing platform, and over the years all the children have enjoyed many happy hours both on the beach at Orient Point and aboard the ferries between Long Island and Connecticut.

They travelled elsewhere, too, though. Accordingly, the next photograph in line shows the whole family—all four children with their Mommy and their Nana—in Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, watching the transatlantic liner Queen Elizabeth 2 depart from New York on a voyage to Southampton, England. That was a special day, Monday, August 19, 1996. Besides providing an exciting time for the children, it brought back memories for my mother and me, memories of watching my grandparents sail from New York for Europe in the 1960s when I was a small child myself.

The next photograph portrays James diligently scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars aboard the ferry Delaware on her namesake bay enroute from Lewes, Delaware, to North Cape May, New Jersey, on Tuesday, August 18, 1998. Finally, the lineup of pictures concludes with another favorite—all the children assembled with Captain Steve Pond in the wheelhouse of the ferry Champlain enroute from Port Kent, New York, to Burlington, Vermont, on Monday, July 2, 2001.

On two small shelves higher up and next to the mirror on Miss Karen’s dresser, I have two additional pictures. One shows James, Miss Karen, and Steven on Sunday afternoon, June 20, 1993, all dressed up in the vintage American Export Lines souvenir tee shirts that my grandmother had long ago brought home for my brother and me. The second is a photograph taken of a painting aboard the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam. This depicts the Holland-America Line’s earlier Nieuw Amsterdam passing the lightship Ambrose on her way outbound from New York. I had become enraptured by this painting during our voyage aboard the new Nieuw Amsterdam following James’ wedding in February of 2012, and I regretted that I could not bring it home with me! This little copy seems the next best thing.

Not part of Miss Karen’s ship shrine but nonetheless relevant are three professionally done portraits that I did bring home from the Nieuw Amsterdam. The first of these portrays the newly married couple, James and Sarah, radiating happiness on their shipboard honeymoon. The second shows our younger sons, Steven and Michael, also looking very happy, and perhaps even a bit mischievous despite being dressed in their formal attire. The third is a family portrait. In commemoration of the wedding, Miss Patty and I posed together with all the children and our new daughter-in-law in the grand atrium of the Nieuw Amsterdam. The ship’s photographer created a family heirloom appropriate to the occasion. All three photographs are now framed and displayed together in Miss Patty’s sewing room in what we may perhaps call a wedding shrine.

There remains one more to examine. In my family history room I have another portrait taken by another photographer aboard another ship. While enroute from New York to ports in the Mediterranean aboard the Independence in November of 1966, my grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, posed for the cameraman in their evening attire at the Captain’s cocktail party. An exceptionally good likeness of them, this heirloom holds a place of honor in my family archives. I look at it often.

I look at the portraits from the Nieuw Amsterdam and the snapshots in the ship shrine often, too. But I think this collection is not so much a shrine to ships; rather, it is a mini-archive of our family history. Ships have played important roles in our family’s history, serving as transportation for business meetings, vacations, family reunions, and sometimes just plain joyriding. Also, for many years they provided a career and livelihood for me. But while they serve the family’s needs, these vessels are not part of the family. Like other inanimate objects, they are discarded when no longer useful or profitable. Inevitably, they end their careers in a scrapyard. Occasionally a famous ship may be preserved as a museum piece, such as the Queen Mary in California or the Cutty Sark in England, but this is rare. Most of the time the old ships are refashioned into razor blades and automobile parts.

The family, however, always maintains its integrity. As the Proclamation on the Family tells us,

The divine plan of happiness enables family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave. Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally.¹

When I consider the five generations of my family that I have known in this life—my great-grandmother, my grandparents, my parents, my wife and myself, and our children—this sounds like a great idea! When I consider the extended family that I have known here and the deceased family members for whom I have done research and temple ordinances, this great idea seems even better. But of all these folks, the four for whom I admit to having a special soft spot are my own children. I realize that they’re all adults now, but they’ll always be children, even babies, to me.

Unlike discarded merchant ships, my children will never end their careers in a scrapyard and be transformed into something else. They will remain my children and I will remain their father. The ships I sailed on in my youth provided me with a livelihood, but my children have given me far more. This includes both happy and sad memories, both restful and sleepless nights, both great responsibility and great pleasure, both worry and relief, but above all an abiding and transcendent feeling of satisfaction that is difficult to describe.

As I look at the photograph of the aged ferry Orient in the ship shrine and think of the many voyages that I made on that route over the years with my children, I feel the sense of satisfaction that comes from having given them life and raised them from infancy to adulthood. President Gordon B. Hinckley expressed it very simply and succinctly when he told Mike Wallace:

Look, when all is said and done, you as a parent have no greater responsibility in this world than the bringing up of your children in the right way, and you will have no greater satisfaction as the years pass than to see those children growing in integrity and honesty and making something of their lives, adding to society because they are part of it.²

This is true. As important as ships have been in my life, my children are infinitely more important. The photographs of my favorite ships on Miss Karen’s dresser may comprise a ship shrine, as she calls it, but these vessels’ significance is eclipsed by my children and also by my grandparents and new daughter-in-law. Thus, it is not really a ship shrine but a family shrine.

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¹ In Gordon B. Hinckley, Discourses of President Gordon B. Hinckley, Volume 1: 1995-1999, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 2005, pp. 32-33. This Proclamation was included in an address made at the General Relief Society Meeting on September 23, 1995.

² Op. cit., p. 486. This statement is an excerpt from an interview of President Hinckley by Mike Wallace on the television program 60 Minutes on December 18, 1995.

More pictures of ships....

More pictures of some of the ships on which I sailed and also some vintage photographs of historic vessels.  I took several of these pictures myself.  Those from other sources are so noted.  Click on the photos for a larger view.

The Henry Ludlow of the Babylon and Oak Island Ferry Service on the South Shore of Long Island, New York.  My grandfather, Robert Burns, served as Master of this vessel.  The date of this picture is probably 1912 or 1913; photographer unknown.

The Bay State and the old State of Maine moored together at Penno's Landing in St. George, Bermuda, from June 17-20, 1976.  

The tanker New Jersey Sun in the floating drydock at the Todd Shipyard on Pelican Island in Galveston, Texas, on May 28, 1978.  

The range instrumentation vessel General Hoyt S. Vandenberg at her base in Port Canaveral, Florida, in early February of 1980.  All this impressive steelwork now reposes at the bottom of the Strait of Florida as an artificial reef and fish haven.

A stern shot of the tanker Waccamaw in the floating drydock of the Old Dominion Metro Machine Corporation in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 2, 1983.  Miss Patty took the grand tour of the Waccamaw while the ship was being sandblasted. 

My three sons:  Steven, James, and Michael, on the starboard bridge wing of the new State of Maine in Portland, Maine, on July 3, 2002.

My grandfather took this picture of the lightship Ambrose at 3:30pm on September 17, 1953.  He and my grandmother were returning to New York from Europe aboard the Mauretania of the Cunard Line.  This is one of my favorite photographs.

The lightship Nantucket awaiting overhaul in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, on August 19, 2009.

The Lightship

As one walks alongside the East River in Lower Manhattan, the lightship Ambrose¹ comes into view.  After a long and honorable career of sentinel duty outside the entrance to New York Harbor, she now reposes quietly as a museum piece at the South Street Seaport.  On her decks and in her compartments, mute placards and friendly tour guides tell her story to all who come aboard.  A small vessel with minimal space for her crew, she makes an impression on her visitors.  She had been a working vessel, a service vessel, not a luxury liner or a yacht, and this shows in the extreme simplicity of her accommodations.  In fact, the initial view of her from the street reveals a hull that seems very small and confining, perhaps even fragile-looking, for extended service on the open ocean.  Nonetheless, the Ambrose is an attractive vessel with a colorful and eye-catching paint scheme.  One cannot miss her.

Ships have always fascinated me, of course, but lightships especially so.  They are a very different type of vessel.  They are not merchant ships.  They are not naval ships.  They do not carry cargo, make long voyages, or conduct military maneuvers.  They do not live lives of their own, so to speak.  Instead, they exist solely to serve other ships.  They remain anchored at their assigned stations as other vessels come and go.  At night they display their distinctive light signals, in effect serving as floating lighthouses.  In the daytime their bright red hulls with their names painted in huge white letters on them stand out as identifying beacons to passing ships.  They were designed to be clearly visible, and they are.   

For centuries, lightships have kept station at important waypoints and next to danger areas along the world’s shipping lanes.  Famous lightships have included the Goodwins warning of the Goodwin Sands in the English Channel, the Borkum Riff guarding the traffic lanes in the North Sea, and the Ambrose marking the entrance to the Ambrose Channel leading into New York.  In these and in many other important locations, lightships have long warned of dangers, identified channels, and literally lit the way for passing merchantmen.  Embarked on lifelong service projects, lightships have been the “light that shineth in darkness” (John 1:5) for those sailing across the blackness of the sea.

The Ambrose is a good case in point.  In the very early 1900s, a shipping channel leading from the Narrows, the waterway between Brooklyn and Staten Island, to the naturally deep water of the open Atlantic was dredged to a depth of 40 feet with a width of 2000 feet.  At the time, these dimensions were enormous.  As the size of merchant ships and the volume of traffic increased, however, these dimensions were able to accommodate the growth.  A lightship was anchored at the seaward end of the new channel to indicate the location of the deep water for arriving vessels.  Both the channel and the lightship derive their name from John Wolfe Ambrose, a prominent businessman who convinced a skeptical Congress to make the necessary financial investments in the improvement of New York Harbor.  This improvement included several dredging projects, of which the largest bears Mr. Ambrose’s name and stands as his memorial.² 

From the time of the light station’s establishment, a lightship was anchored there almost continuously.  On the occasions when the Ambrose needed to return to port for her annual drydocking, a relief vessel took her place temporarily.  Otherwise, the Ambrose remained at anchor at her station where she served the navigational needs of other vessels by flashing her characteristic light signal at night and displaying her distinctive bright red hull with white letters by day.

While this job sounds simple enough, it was not without its risks.  In heavy fog on June 24, 1960, the lightship Relief, substituting for the Ambrose during her annual overhaul, was flashing her light signal and sounding her foghorn when the freighter Green Bay collided with her.  The lightship sank; the freighter remained afloat.  Most importantly, the lightship’s crewmen were all rescued.³

Later in the 1960s, although not because of this accident, the Coast Guard undertook to replace most of the lightships with fixed light towers.  These structures were built on steel piles driven into the seabed.  Equipped with lights, foghorns, helicopter decks, and crew accommodations, these structures would last longer than lightships and cost less to operate and maintain.  Furthermore, they would not swing on an anchor chain but stand immovable, thus making them more accurate navigational markers than the lightships.  But they would serve the same purpose.  Like the lightships, these new light towers existed solely to serve others.

Once again, the job sounds simple but it had its risks.  Following its construction, the new Ambrose Light Tower was placed in service with a six-man crew on August 23, 1967.⁴  It was designed and built to withstand a hurricane, but in October of 1996, the tanker Aegeo collided with the tower and damaged it beyond repair.⁵  There were no human casualties, however, because the tower had been automated and its crew reassigned on March 15, 1988.⁶

After removing the wreckage of the tower, the Coast Guard built a new structure, also fully automated and unmanned.  Performing the same function, this new tower served until November 3, 2007, when the tanker Axel Spirit collided with it and damaged it beyond repair.  The following summer this second tower’s remains were dismantled and removed.  Deciding against yet another rebuilding, the Coast Guard replaced the Ambrose Light with a large buoy.⁷

Whether the method was towers or ships or a buoy, the Ambrose Light has for over a century diligently and at great risk to itself served the needs of others.  And this is just one light.  In their day, many lightships were positioned along both American coasts as well as in Canadian and European waters.  Merchant ships, fishing boats, and naval vessels all depended on them.  Since the conversion to towers was implemented, only a few lightships remain on station.

These good vessels have come to different ends.  Some were scrapped.  Some were sunk.  Others live on.  Like the Ambrose in New York, the Chesapeake serves as a floating museum in Baltimore.  The Frying Pan works as a party boat, moored to a pier on the West Side of Manhattan.  One Nantucket operates as a floating hotel in Boston.  Another Nantucket is moored to a pier in Oyster Bay, Long Island, waiting to be refurbished as an exhibit in a waterfront park.⁸

These lightships were a lot like some people.  They all had different identifying characteristics such as names and distinctive light signals.  They lived to serve others, and they did a lot of good in their lives.  Most of the good they did never became widely known, though, and often times the good they did was really the prevention of something bad.  For example, a merchant ship seeing the Ambrose Light knew where the channel was and therefore steered the correct course and did not run aground.  Like the lightships, the dangers and the waypoints near which the vessels stood guard were all different, too.  Shoals, reefs, rocks, channel entrances, traffic separation lanes, and junction points have always been of critical importance to the safe movement of ships.  Their location must be made known or property damage, injury, and loss of life will inevitably result.  For centuries, lightships, and more recently their replacement towers, have selflessly served in this important capacity.  And some of them, both lightships and light towers, have gone to their deaths while serving.

In the long history of Christianity, many people have served their fellowmen as faithfully as the Ambrose and others like her have served their fellow ships.  The life of the Savior as it is described in the New Testament stands as a shining example of service to others.  During his time here on Earth, our Lord healed the sick, fed the hungry, comforted the bereaved, taught his doctrine, and invited all to come into the safe haven of his Gospel.  He called ordinary people to come unto him, learn his teachings, follow his example, and carry on his work.  His disciples did not need to be politically influential or militarily powerful; they needed only to be converted and have a willingness to serve.  Like the Ambrose, these good people rarely made the history books or the headlines.  Whether they were laymen or clergymen or members of religious societies, the vast majority of them led unremarkable lives and sought no earthly rewards.  Despite the unfortunate divisions in Christianity, most of its adherents have long had much more in common than not.  These common characteristics have included a love of the Lord and a desire to do his work, with some disciples even sacrificing their lives in the process.

It is much the same today, although with the ordinances of the temple restored to the Earth, there is even more opportunity to serve both the living and the dead.  Like the Ambrose, the temple serves as a beacon, but to those on both sides of the veil.  Once again, the work is done largely by ordinary people who simply love the Lord and want to help others come unto him.  One need not be rich and famous in order to carry out the Lord’s work in the temple.  On the contrary, one needs only a sincere testimony of the importance of the temple ordinances and a demonstrated willingness to live one’s life in a manner befitting a temple-attending Latter-day Saint.  This is a high standard, but one which all people are capable of attaining.  Likewise, the crewmen of the Ambrose needed to meet certain standards in order to perform their service.  They enabled the safe passages for seamen on both their outbound and homebound voyages with visual and sound signals.  Similarly, temple personnel mark the safe way for all people on their homebound journeys to their eternal home and reunion with their Heavenly Father.  The temple was built for this very purpose.  Like the Ambrose, it exists to serve others.  Perhaps more accurately, the temple gives us the opportunity to serve others.

King Benjamin said it so well: “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God” (Mosiah 2:17).  The Lord himself said it even more succinctly: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:16).  Whether serving at a light station or serving in the temple, we must be “steadfast and immovable” and “always abounding in good works” (Mosiah 5:15) in order to bring everyone, the children of the sea and the children of the Lord, safely home.

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¹ Technically, “Ambrose” is the name of the light station, not the lightship.  This lightship’s official designation is LV 87/WAL 512.  In a decades-long career, the same light vessel could serve at several different light stations and would have the appropriate station’s name painted on her hull during her time of service there.  Practically, however, the ships came to be known by the names of the stations at which they served, and the name of the light station was informally transferred to the lightship itself.

² Author unknown, “Ambrose Channel,” original publication unknown, 1921, at http://www.oldandsold.com.

³ Milton Bracker, “Ambrose Lightship Sunk in Fog,” The New York Times, June 25, 1960, p. 1 & 9.

⁴ Homer Bigart, “Ambrose Lightship Blinks Her Last Lonely Signal,” The New York Times, August 24, 1967, p. 1 & 75.

⁵ Sue Clark, “Ambrose Light Tower Destroyed in Collision,” December 6, 2007, at http://lighthouse–news.com.

⁶ Dennis Hevesi, “Men Leave But the Light Shines On,” The New York Times, March 16, 1988, at http://www.nytimes.com.

⁷ Sue Clark, op. cit., and Associated Press, “Staten Island: Ship Damages Light Tower,” The New York Times, November 5, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com.

⁸ On May 10 and 11, 2010, this Nantucket was towed to a shipyard in East Boston, Massachusetts, where she is to be refurbished.  See www.lighthousefriends.com.