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.

The Shipping News

For many years The New York Times ran a daily page carrying news of the shipping industry. Located toward the back of the main section of the paper, this page contained news articles concerning merchant shipping and notices of the arrivals and departures of ships in New York Harbor. The news articles were fairly prosaic, involving freight rates, schedule changes, service adjustments, weather reports, and so on. The arrivals and departures were presented in tabular form. These tables listed every commercial ship and military transport vessel, its time and date of arrival or departure, its pier, and its voyage’s destination or port of origin. Sometimes entire itineraries would be listed if a ship was scheduled to make several port calls on the same voyage. In addition, it listed arrivals and departures for selected foreign and American West Coast ports.

There was nothing artistic or literary about this writing. It was strictly business. Today, however, it’s history. The names of the world famous passenger liners as well as the names of comparatively unknown freighters and tankers filled these pages as if they were a social register. In an era when the vast majority of the passengers, mail, and cargo crossed the oceans by ship instead of by airplane, the names of the ships and their times and piers of arrival and departure were important news items.

Here’s an example. Going back 56 years, we read that the passenger ship Nieuw Amsterdam of the Holland-America Line sailed at 12:00 noon on Friday, June 21, 1957, from Hoboken. She was scheduled to arrive at Southampton, England, on the following Friday, June 28, and then call at Le Havre, France, later that same day. Continuing her voyage, the ship would arrive at her home port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on Saturday, June 29.1

This routine transatlantic voyage interests me because my grandparents, Robert Burns and Julia Murphy, made this sailing in order for my grandfather to attend an engineering conference in Switzerland. They disembarked from the Nieuw Amsterdam in Le Havre, took a train to Paris, and after a few days there resumed their journey. When his business was completed, they travelled by train to Genova, Italy, where on Sunday, July 14, they embarked on the Italian Line’s Cristoforo Colombo. This vessel subsequently delivered them to the passenger piers on the West Side of Manhattan at 9:00am on Tuesday, July 23, 1957.

Day after day and voyage after voyage, this tabular data of arrivals and departures indicate that merchant shipping was a big business. The movement of passengers, merchandise, and mail across the world’s oceans commanded the attention of millions of people who had a personal or financial interest in the shipping. For my grandparents’ travels, this news was important to the family twice a year—the voyage out and the voyage back—for about thirteen years. For many others, it was a livelihood. Hence the importance of devoting daily an entire page of a major metropolitan newspaper to this information. But now, it’s history.

For me, it’s a very interesting history. The shipping news combines my family’s history and my affinity for the things of the sea. Big ships, long voyages, exciting destinations—these are some of the finest things in life! Sailing to Europe is always so much more enjoyable and adventurous, even if it takes longer, than strapping oneself into an airplane seat and getting there overnight. I have flown to Europe once and flown back from Europe once. I’ve sailed there and back many more times. Sailing is definitely better. My grandparents agreed. They certainly had the option of flying, and they did cross the Atlantic a few times by air in the mid 1960s, but they strongly preferred to travel by sea.

Here’s another example. In 1956 they sailed aboard the American Export Lines’ Constitution for the first time. Departing from Pier 84 at the foot of West 44th Street in Manhattan on Saturday, September 1, she called at Algeceras, Spain, on Friday, September 7, and at Cannes, France, and Genova, Italy, on Sunday, September 9. My grandparents disembarked in Genova.

They liked American Export and the Constitution so much that beginning in 1959 they sailed almost exclusively with this company. That year they returned to New York from Genova aboard the Independence, the Constitution’s twin sister. These are the ships that I remember from the 1960s. I was a small child then, but old enough to find everything about these great liners fascinating. On sailing day I spent hours wandering around these vessels with my family, examining everything and asking many questions before the ritual call of “All ashore that’s going ashore” was sounded.

But this is digression.² The shipping news pages in The New York Times call to mind a bygone era, when travel by sea was the norm, not the adventurous exception. It was a time when a person would speak literally of “when my ship comes in.” Shipping was a far-reaching business, a way of life, not just a vacation cruise or a novelty. From the humblest ferry crossing the Hudson River to the grand Queen Mary, vessels of all sizes, shapes, and purposes dominated the waterways. This changed as bridges and tunnels increasingly replaced ferries and the airlines became the mainstay for overseas travel. Ships do remain, of course, and they carry the freight and the petroleum the world uses, but so much of this is so far from public view that it is largely unknown. I’ve met people who honestly had no idea how all the Japanese automobiles arrived in the United States!

To read the shipping news, then, is to step back in time. Scrolling through reels of microfilm researching the ships and the voyages of my grandparents’ travels, I become absorbed by the lists of vessels arriving and departing from New York. The data, while tabular, is not impersonal. Merchant ships with names and personalities stand out on the pages. The American flagship United States; the two Queens of the Cunard Line; the –dam ships of Holland-America, including the Statendam, Noordam, Westerdam, and Nieuw Amsterdam, aboard all of which my grandparents sailed; the pragmatic Swedish Gripsholm and her fleet mates; the diminutive Atlantic; the several Export freighters; the numerous Esso tankers; the military troop transports including the good old Upshur³—these and dozens more connected New York with the rest of the world, and their comings and goings were important news to many, many people.

For some of us, the comings and goings of merchant ships remain very important. Something that was once a chosen career and a way of life for me does not lose its significance. Despite the passage of time, the yearning for the sea remains with me. While my seafaring days are regretfully long past, I can in some sense go to sea again by reading the old newspapers.

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¹ Rather than cite every last detail, I will simply note that all the voyage information comes from three sources: the shipping news pages on the appropriate dates in The New York Times, which are supplemental to my grandmother’s travel journals and my grandparents’ letters. They wrote frequently when they were away, and I consider this body of scripture a family heirloom.

² To continue the digression, see Leonard A. Stevens, The Elizabeth: Passage of a Queen, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, for a fascinating and in-depth description of the workings of a passenger liner in commercial service between New York and Europe.

³ The Upshur later became the State of Maine, on which I sailed in 1976 and 1978 while studying for the license as third mate.