June 15, 2010

On Saturday 15 May, seven students from the northwest Pennsylvania schools Allegheny College and Edinboro University set sail on the Flagship Niagara.  For the next three weeks the students – now “sail trainees” – were full members of the ship’s crew, working, eating, and sleeping alongside professional sailors and dedicated volunteers.  In their first hours, the students would have agreed entirely with Richard Henry Dana’s assertion in the first chapter of Two Years Before the Mast, that “there is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.”  As one student wrote in their reflective journal on that first day, “I had NO IDEA what was going on.  People were shouting orders, then repeating them, then pulling, tying, or coiling the ropes.  It was insane.”  Yet, as the days wore on, the fog of that insanity started to clear, and the students began to make sense of their new world and embraced it wholeheartedly, to the point where none of them wanted to leave at the end of their three-week class. They began to “speak sailor,” as another student described it.

Many of the students wrote a concluding comment in their journals on the last day.  Those comments are reflective of the cumulative, “life-changing” nature of the experience.  As one wrote, “the combination of sail training with historical study has granted me what I believe to be an incredible historical insight.  Aside from the benefits to my historical philosophy, this experience has served to boost confidence and show me parts of myself that could be markedly improved and increased my quality of life.”  Another said, “overall, I feel like this trip was amazing and I would recommend it to anyone.  It is a really great experience.  I learned a lot.  Not only about sailing, but friendship, leadership, teamwork and etc.”  But perhaps the most evocative comment was this one, from a student who doubted if they would prosper in this environment:  “There are few words to describe my experience aboard the Niagara. . . . There’s no freedom like the freedom that this crew experiences. . . . I feel like I want to live alone in a shack for the rest of my life if I can’t have this.”

The seven students from Allegheny and Edinboro set out to study the War of 1812 and the historical life of sail.  They accomplished that goal, but along the way they became part of an historical community of sailors and preservationists.  They put themselves last, ship and shipmates first.  They accepted leadership and lead others.  They accepted responsibility and saw their peers do the same.  They came as close as one can to re-creating the nineteenth century community of sail.  And they would all do it again, in a heartbeat.  To quote the Niagara’s Chief Mate, “Once part of Niagara’s crew, always part of Niagara’s crew.”

Ian Binnington, Ph.D.
Department of History
Allegheny College
Instructor, History 508, ” History Under Sail: The Flagship
Niagara and the Great Lakes,” Summer 2010