{"id":15122,"date":"2022-11-01T13:10:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T18:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=15122"},"modified":"2022-11-01T18:39:34","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T23:39:34","slug":"bid-bon-voyage-to-the-good-ship-denis-sullivan-will-she-ever-return-to-her-birthplace-milwaukee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=15122","title":{"rendered":"Bid bon voyage to the good ship Denis Sullivan. Will she ever return to her birthplace, Milwaukee?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our September 2016 departure from the Denis Sullivan’s dock, outside Discovery World on the Lake Michigan shore of Milwaukee. All photos by Kevin Lynch<\/em><\/p>\n

We can absorb history in many ways, but it’s usually in a second-hand or secondary source way, like reading a book, or watching a documentary. Historically-attuned scholars and artists can surely illuminate the past with immeasurable brilliance and depth. The work of documentary-filmmaker supreme Ken Burns comes to mind, as do historians like Eric Foner, John Meacham, Shelby Foote, David S. Reynolds, Joseph Ellis, Sean Wilentz, David McCullough and others.<\/p>\n

Yet for years, Milwaukee has been blessed with something even more vivid and experientially historical than those gifted people’s best efforts, even when they are talking as guest pundits on TV. I’m talking about a mainline to history as real as stepping aboard a tall sailing ship transporting you to the glory days of such vessels in the mid-1800s, the era of Moby-Dick,<\/em>\u00a0Two Years Before the Mast, <\/em>and Typhoon. <\/em>1<\/p>\n

In September of 2016, I was fortunate enough to take that step, off the Milwaukee harbor onto the city’s<\/span> majestic flagship schooner S\/V Denis Sullivan, for <\/span>a Lake Michigan tour, which helped inspire this blog. It was motivated to do research for my novel about Herman Melville. I had visited an actual docked whaleship from the era, The Charles W. Morgan, in Mystic, Connecticut. <\/span><\/p>\n

But I’d never actually sailed on a tall mast ship from that era, even if this one was a hybrid replica, built by volunteer Milwaukeeans \u2013 the world’s only re-creation of a 19th-century three-masted Great Lakes schooner. She was the flagship of both the state of Wisconsin<\/a>\u00a0and of the\u00a0United Nations Environment Programme<\/a> .<\/sup> . <\/span><\/p>\n

And here you begin to get an inkling of our state’s loss, when the ship <\/span>\u2013 <\/span>stripped of it’s tall masts — departed on October 8 <\/span>for Boston, and it’s ultimate destination, St. Croix,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>now sold to a company in the Virgin Islands \u2013<\/span> as reported superbly by <\/span>Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel <\/em>Reporter Chelsey Lewis, in the in-depth article linked to below<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Noted Milwaukee folksinger David HB Drake, a vocal opponent of the sale, had a suggestion, as he posted on his Facebook page: “OMG– The Denis Sullivan has been sold to Boston.<\/p>\n

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This for me is like the Braves being sold to Atlanta…unthinkable!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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There was no warning or opportunity given to the very people who built her and volunteered these 30 years to keep her afloat in Milwaukee. Had there been, perhaps a citizens groups could have bought her and kept her here or at least formed a partnership with the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc to keep her in Wisconsin.”<\/div>\n
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However, that museum is currently in the midst of its own campaign<\/a> to raise $1.5 million to put the USS Cobia, its World War II submarine, in dry dock, Lewis reports. The Manitowoc museum considered possibly serving as a home port for the ship, but not the<\/em> home port.<\/p>\n

Other organizations, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “were considering partnering with Discovery World to use the ship for programming around the newly designated Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, but they, too, could not take primary ownership of the boat.”<\/p>\n

Lewis reported on a former crewmember, Michael Gaithier, who expressed bitterness:<\/p>\n

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The boat was treated like an unwanted stepchild … it was neglected and not taken care of in the way that most tall ships with most healthy organizations behind them in this country have been taken care of<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Back in September 2016, sail boats breeze by the port side rigging of the Denis Sullivan with the Milwaukee skyline in the background.<\/em><\/p>\n

For my part, as an appreciative memory, I’ll convey some of our experience on the schooner. In September of 2016, there we were, riding the waves with the huge sails billowing to and fro, as the wind took us.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Ann Peterson in the deck of the schooner Denis Sullivan in September of 2016.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The historical schooner cruise was a birthday gift to me from my companion, Ann Peterson. And it was the palpable, wind-in-your-face, and even intoxicatingly moving experience I’d hoped for, even it proved too much for the steadiness of Ann, who started out gamely, as the picture above shows. Yet as the good ship dipped and swayed in the slightly feisty waters just beyond the Milwaukee harbor breakwaters, she grew a little green in the gills, and her chipper smile faded. <\/span><\/p>\n

That’s part of the physical reality of being on open waters on such a vessel, but there’s so much more. You begin to get a sense of how a person can release oneself from the\u00a0 confining and aggravating patterns of workaday and quotidian problems and pitfalls, and from the looming shadows of psychological malaise that life’s tensions and burdens can impose. <\/span><\/p>\n

This sort of voyage lacks the tony creature-comforts and luxuries of an expensive cruise. Rather it does transport you back to a much heartier distant time, when brave people traveled and worked much closer to the elements of water, sun and wind. In reflection, one may draw from this elemental immediacy some sense of the holistic importance of water, covering the vast majority of the globe, and the ecosystems it sustains on water and land. <\/span><\/p>\n

These are things that a writer like Melville, despite (and because of) being a whaler in his early adulthood, proved quite aware of, for a man of his time. His masterpiece novel\u00a0 reveals that he had profound regard and respect for the whale and its place in “the watery part of the world,” as narrator Ishmael pointedly calls it, in his very first reference to the oceans, in “Loomings,” Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick. <\/em>Or consider his gloriously attuned description of a great herd of nursing female whales in Chapter 87, “The Grand Armada.”\u00a0 Such are some the educational aspects this vessel can pursue, though I’ve never taken an educational cruise on it, per se.<\/span><\/p>\n

How resonant is the ship’s presence culturally? Well, for one example, renowned folk singer\u00a0Pete Seeger<\/a> recorded a song called “The Schooner Denis Sullivan” in 2001. 2<\/p>\n

Here, Seeger sings his story-telling song a cappella:<\/p>\n