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| MET plots course for history lessons at sea
Two weeks before the mast By Hope Green
From the shore, it looks easy. When tall ships make their Atlantic ports of call in modern-day festivals, they appear to skim the water of their own accord, their full white sails perfectly angled against shifting puffs of air. One can barely make out the tiny humans toiling to keep all that ghostlike majesty afloat and on course. This summer, however, some adventurous BU students will experience firsthand the blistered feet, the chill damp of a night shift on deck, and a taste of the isolation that afflicted the 18th-century mariner when land was so far from view. There will be rewards, too, for participants in Maritime History in the Atlantic World, a four-credit course offered twice this summer through Metropolitan College, which surveys the development of European and American sea power from the 15th through 19th centuries. Classes will be taught entirely on board the square-rigger HMS Rose, a 1970 replica of an 18th-century Royal Navy frigate and the world's largest active wooden sailing vessel. The two groups of 30 students will spend 2 days docked and 12 at sea, traveling from Boston Harbor to Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. Between daily lectures, they will learn how to steer, navigate, tie sailor's knots, and climb 80-foot masts. "When you are actually sleeping on board and furling the sails at sea while the wind is blowing," says MET instructor Timothy Walker, a GRS doctoral candidate in history, "you get a real sense of how arduous it once was for people to go from place to place. I think we have lost sight of how the overseas empires of all the European powers were really tied together by this maritime highway." Walker developed his course in conjunction with the HMS Rose Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization in Connecticut that owns the ship and runs educational voyages for high school students and adults. As far as he knows, this will be the first college-level program ever conducted on a square-rigger. Though smaller than the USS Constitution, docked at Boston's Charlestown Navy Yard, the 500-ton Rose has a similar three-masted configuration. "The sailing ship in the 18th century was the most
complicated machine humans had ever built up to that time," Walker says.
"It was raised to a high level of development because it was the most
efficient means of moving people and goods. I think students will get
a sense of that complexity when they are asked to help in the performance
of the vessel alongside a professional crew who are literally teaching
them the ropes."
Traditional studies of maritime heritage, Walker says, fell out of favor during the 1970s and '80s, when historians focused more on social phenomena and less on sea battles. Today the field is enjoying a resurgence, however, as scholars are taking a cultural-history approach to the Atlantic carrying trades. Walker says he aims to bridge the old and new perspectives in his course with a slate of lectures on the politics of colonization, the slave trade, and the role of women and blacks, as well as navigational arts and naval warfare. Students will be graded on practical seamanship, two short essay exams, a 12-page paper, and their participation in chores. To be sure, life at sea will require some adjustment. Everyone will sleep belo |
