Rory Lockowitz climbs into the 18th Century every day at 7.
As morning rush-hour traffic crawls toward the high-rise downtown behind him, Lockowitz and his fellow Navy seamen scramble skyward up the rigging of the oldest commissioned warship in the world.
They’re preparing to do what no one has done in 116 years: take the USS Constitution to sea under sail.
“This is what makes the Constitution stand out from all the other historic stuff in Boston,” Lockowitz says later on the deck. “She’s still alive. Now we can take her out and sail her.”
The three-masted flagship of the U.S. Navy traditionally has ventured from her dock in Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard just once a year, on the 4th of July, when she was turned around by tugboats to weather evenly.
Now, freshly swabbed and polished after 3 1/2 years in dry dock, “Old Ironsides” will sail under her own power this summer for the first time since 1881 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of her launch.
“We’re taking her from a static display to back to life,” the captain, Navy Cmdr. Michael Beck, says proudly.
It’s the most dramatic of the many ways that things have changed aboard the Constitution for her birthday.
The $12 million restoration replaced her copper plating, rotting planks and broken pegs and strengthened her keel, correcting an 18-inch sag. Because the ship has outlived most of the southern old growth forests that supplied her timber, laminated wood was substituted for some pieces of the sturdy oak that gave Old Ironsides her name.
Looking like a dowager who has had a facelift and some parts replaced, she glories in a shining coat of fresh black and white paint, taut black rigging and about an acre of new sails. Even the centuries-old carved wooden eagles flanking the gangplank look new.
Where the gregarious Navy seamen who people the ship would once point out a cannon and describe how much it weighed, they now depict the smoke-filled deck, the deafening gunbursts and the rest of the scene of battle, for example. Instead of numbingly reciting the dimensions of the main mast, they compare it to the nearby Bunker Hill Monument; it’s only four feet shorter.
And most weekday mornings from 7 until 9, visitors can watch from pierside as the crew prepares for the July 21 sailing, pausing in their duties only to salute as the American flag is raised to the gaff at 8 with an accompanying cannonburst.
It isn’t easy. The 27 miles of rigging had to be recreated from 1920s photographs and no one alive remembers how to sail this 200-year-old square-rigged warship. Naval historians were forced to dig up the 1819 “Young Sea Officer’s Sheet,” instructions given captains in the British Royal Navy.
“Suppose the ship to be on the starboard tack and that the wind shifts suddenly ahead,” it reads. “In this case, the main tack is raised, the main sheet, after braces and lee braces let go, the aft yards braced about, the larboard main tack got on board and the starboard sheet aft; the jib and staysail sheets shifted over the stays, the spritsail yard topped and the helm righted.” And so on, for 70 pages.
Beck, the Constitution’s 64th commanding officer, explains the movements to the crew on a model he carries with him, fashioned from a flat piece of wood with popsicle-stick yardarms pivoting on thumbtacks.
The normal crew of 70 will swell to 120 active-duty sailors and reservists for the brief cruise under sail. The original crew included 270 seamen, 50 Marines (who served as sentries, landing parties and, in combat, snipers in the rigging), 48 officers and 30 boys to carry powder.
Tugboats will nudge the vessel from her berth to Boston Harbor, where she’ll sail north to Marblehead, surrounded by a flotilla of Navy and Coast Guard escorts.
Plenty of modern touches have become apparent since the crew began to train in earnest in the rigging and the masts last fall. The Constitution’s original crew didn’t wear hard hats and safety harnesses, for instance, and their captain probably never sent them ashore to do laps around the tennis courts for inadvertently spinning the yardarm in the wrong direction.
The Constitution was launched in the summer of 1797, one of six powerful frigates commissioned by President George Washington to protect U.S. merchant ships. Her sides were built of dense Georgia timber felled by slaves, her deck of wood from South Carolina and her masts of New England white pine.
She bombarded Tripoli to punish the Barbary pirates who were demanding tribute payments and forced a peace treaty that was signed aboard her deck in 1805.
But it was against the British that the Constitution scored the greatest of her many victories, defeating HMS Guerriere in the first U.S. naval battle of the War of 1812 and one of the greatest sea battles of all time; HMS Java off the Brazilian coast; and two British warships that attacked her simultaneously in the war’s last major naval battle, turning her yardarms and shifting direction in the middle of the fight–an accomplishment more readily appreciated watching the Constitution’s current crew trying to do the same thing unharassed with the ship tied to a dock.
The Constitution last traveled under sail in 1881 on the way to New York for repairs, but Old Ironsides still was powerful enough by 1905 to sink the Navy secretary, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, who suggested scuttling her; schoolchildren raised $154,000 in pennies to restore the aging vessel.
The number of visitors has nearly doubled in the last four years and more than 30,000 people applied last year for the chance to come along on one of 10 brief shakedown cruises inside Boston Harbor, when the ship was towed by tugboats; there was room for fewer than 1,000.
Until she was refloated after renovations, it was never certain that the 2,200-ton Constitution could even be sailed again under her own power.
DETAILS ON USS CONSTITUTION
The USS Constitution is open daily at 9:30 a.m. Visitors are welcome aboard until sunset, although tours are given only until 3:50 p.m. Admission is free. Sail training is scheduled through July 18 from about 7 until 9 a.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
The ship is scheduled to sail under its own power on July 21 for the first time in 116 years in celebration of its bicentennial. Only officers, the crew and dignitaries will be aboard.
The Constitution is berthed at Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston’s Charlestown section. Follow the red line that denotes the Freedom Trail or take a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus from Haymarket Station near Faneuil Hall downtown. Bus fare is 60 cents.
The USS Constitution Museum, in a converted drydock pumphouse, has ship’s logs, journals, charts and weapons related to the ship. A bicentennial exhibit, “Old Ironsides in War and Peace,” traces her 200-year-old history. Also on display are photographs and objects related to the 1992-1996 restoration of the Constitution. The museum is open daily. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for children. Call 617-426-1812.
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For more information about Boston, including a Summer ’97 Travel Planner, contact the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. 888-SEE-BOSTON.
