Tall Ships Festival cruises into Cleveland this week

By Sarah Crump

Plain Dealer Reporter

CLEVELAND

What is it about tall ships that enthralls us?

About 100,000 people are expected to jam the docks at the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority beginning Wednesday to see 11 of the bygone vessels cruising into North Coast Harbor from Lake Erie. Some have masts that soar 100 feet above their decks.

Robin Walbridge, captain of the HMS Bounty, one of the ships sailing in for the 2010 Cleveland Tall Ships Festival, knows why we are so intrigued.

Once upon a time, he says, we all wanted to be pirates.

“Maybe it was only for 15 minutes,” says Walbridge, 60, who has spent 30 years working on tall ships, “but everyone, whether they were 6, 16 or 60, has wanted to go away to sea.”

Though the original Bounty never flew a skull and crossbones, Walbridge’s modern copy has a pirate connection. Built as the backdrop for the dueling egos of Marlon Brando as 1st Lt. Fletcher Christian and Trevor Howard as Capt. William Bligh in 1962’s “Mutiny on the Bounty,” it made an appearance in 2006’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

But the sight that will really shiver our timbers will be Wednesday from about 4 to 7 p.m. That’s when the 11 ships will cruise the lakefront one by one, their sky-high tiers of marshmallow sails — a dozen or more — will seem to bump the clouds during the Parade of Sail.

As a bonus this year, Harborfest 2010, a four-day music festival, will coincide with the tall ships’ stay. Harborfest offers the best free place in Cleveland, Voinovich Park, to view the Parade of Sail, with narrated commentary on each ship, followed by a free luau.

Christine Hughes, historian at the Naval History & Heritage Command in Washington, D.C., says the tall ships are works of art. “There’s beauty in a mass of sails and rigging,” she says, that feeds the desire of modern man “to divest of his automaton self.”

“There is nothing more spectacular than a tall ship under full sail,” says Charles A. “Arnie” de la Porte, who spent years as an officer in the Dutch Merchant Marine and the country’s royal navy. “They beckon to far-off horizons.”

De la Porte, a member of the Rotary Club of Cleveland, urged the club to step up when no sponsor could be found for this year’s festival, also having taken place in 2006, 2003 and 2001. The Cleveland Rotary, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary, donated $100,000 as seed money for the $1 million celebration of the seafaring days of the 18th and 19th centuries.

When we see these majestic barons of the sea, we get a sense of freedom and are cast back in time, says T.J. McCallum, associate professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University.

“It lets us leave our present-day lives and see what folks would have seen 100 years ago if they were standing in the same place,” McCallum says. “Boats are freedom in our minds. We’re going somewhere, and we’re going to assume that it’s to a place more positive than where we came from.”

Many early immigrants who made their hopeful way to America on such ships (before the advent of non-wind-dependent steamers) would have agreed. They yearned to be free of the grasp of starvation, servitude and governments they could not endure. Why else would they have spent months of up-and-down discomfort on a boat with no heat, no plumbing, no privacy and no guarantee they would see land again.

After all, a short time after they left port, the grand vessels became less than pinpoints on the vast Atlantic. There was no way to communicate with land. But when we see tall ships, we are hypnotized by the image of us standing on deck, wind whipping our hair. We become historical revisionists, subbing glamour for reality — windblown hair for scurvy.

By our modern standards, reality wasn’t nice. Sailors on the Bounty slept with the live chickens, goats and sheep that were brought along for fresh meat. But it wasn’t so bad compared with most poor landlubbers, says the Bounty’s Walbridge. “I’m sure the sailors ate better.”

In fact, for all his bad rap in the movies, Bligh was a good captain, Walbridge believes. He kept barrels of sauerkraut on board to prevent the dreaded scurvy on his voyage to pluck live breadfruit trees in Tahiti to be transported to the West Indies. When the sailors turned up their British noses at pickled cabbage — a strange dish to them — Bligh used some naval psychology: He told them it was only for the officers.