Abstract
Maritime museums are a specialist subset of museums and, for many, their key characteristic is the preservation of old ships. They might have collections and libraries, they might preserve key dockside buildings, but the ardent enthusiasts who founded these American maritime museums all looked to the preservation of historic ships as their raison d’être. Small craft could be preserved inside buildings but large ships had to be preserved in the water, where they were lovingly restored with the intention of sailing them from time to time. The conservation problems, however, were enormous, the costs a bottomless pit and, in general, it was ships that formed the prime source of problems for most of the museums discussed.
Lindgren selected six museums for his study, five on the East Coast of the USA and one on the West Coast. The oldest was the East India Marine Hall, founded by the East India Marine Society of Salem in 1825 to house its cabinet of objects acquired through trade with China, India and the South Seas. It was eventually merged to become the current Peabody Essex Museum. The New Bedford Whaling Museum, just south of Cape Cod, was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century to extol the fast-disappearing whaling industry and tell a story of Yankee manliness and self-reliance. A little further down the coast, Mystic Seaport was founded by the Maine Historical Association as a re-imagined nineteenth-century waterfront village; it opened its first building in 1931 and acquired its first ship in 1941. It remains the most successful and is generally regarded as the standard-bearer of maritime museums. The Mariners Museum in Newport, Virginia, opened in 1933 and had a tricky relationship with the local shipbuilding yards and the naval defence–industrial complex of the post-war economy.
A contrasting story is found in the San Francisco Maritime Museum, which opened in 1951, acquired the historic square-rigger Balclutha and became deeply involved with waterfront preservation. Forced eventually to turn to federal funding, it was taken over and remains run by the National Park Service in a type of private–public partnership. The National Park Service, however, knew nothing about ships and was beholden to Washington's changing paymasters and ideology. Finally, inspired by San Francisco, New York's South Street Seaport Museum was founded in 1961 to save the city's maritime heritage and preserve a decaying waterfront with ‘a street of ships’. The urban regeneration of Lower Manhattan, however, brought developers with shopping malls and noisy festivals. The museum was dealt a further severe blow by 9/11 and the superstorm of 2012, and remains fragile.
Lindgren raises five questions in his introduction: how and why these museums were formed and influenced by their contemporary contexts; how they addressed perceived failings in American society, the economy and sea policy; how artefacts embodied abstract notions such as community or country, as well as how and why they evolved very differently; and, finally, what these artefacts tell us about the changing definition of ‘maritime’ and the ocean’s culture, economy and future. These are large questions, but the virtue of using six very different institutions is that it allows the author to make relevant comparisons. Each institution has a very different history. The constant throughout, however, is the desire to preserve ships and the eye-watering costs of doing so.
Maritime museums are all about connections to the sea in a world where the sea is increasingly distant from ordinary people and seldom regarded as a core element of national politics and identity. The stories of the museums’ founders describe heroic efforts to preserve disappearing ways of life and their artefacts, which were seen as crucial to the American way of life and the rugged individualism that characterised it. The stories these museums told, however, were often problematic, as the problem of appealing to audiences invited an emphasis on nostalgia and meant that unsavoury elements were downplayed – for example, the exploitation of crews in the whaling and commercial shipping industries. Few included the contribution of sailors of colour or the craft of Native Americans. Mystic Seaport was unusual in including girls and women, both in its stories and its sail-training programmes, where ideas of fostering masculinity were the norm. The author is particularly revealing on the economic and political factors which shaped many of the museums’ development, and Senator Ted Kennedy emerges as an unsung hero in efforts to rally federal support.
Economic fragility, however, was ever present, and not helped by overestimates of potential visitors in development schemes. The difficulties of using museums as a key element in urban regeneration are highlighted by the stories of San Francisco and New York, because the agendas of the museums were very different to those of the city councils, and these museums were also not able to withstand pressures from keen property developers. Lindgren tells astonishing stories of the political shenanigans that occurred. One curious result is that the USA now has three designated ‘national’ maritime museums.
What really constituted proper historic-ship conservation and what was the meaning of ‘authenticity’ in maritime museums was also hotly debated. Should such museums be about stories of seafaring and experiences of the sea or should the museums be about ship preservation, scholarship and collections? Scholarship has often been threatened, with libraries moved or disposed of, and publishing suspended. Ships were equally threatened by natural disasters; they sometimes sank, escalating costs. Finance was always problematic.
This is a well-written and thoroughly researched account, a ‘warts and all’ history with a strong sense of what went on behind the scenes. The proliferation of acronyms for organisations can get confusing for non-American readers, although a list is included, but a map would have been helpful. Above all, Lindgren brings to it his passionate engagement with maritime museums, their collections and the richness of the stories they tell. His work should be read by all concerned with conservation, museums and the preservation of maritime heritage, and how the stories museums tell are shaped and reshaped by many factors.