Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (11 page)

In 1993, Walbridge returned to Cedar Key as the skipper of the schooner
New Way
, a vessel operated by VisionQuest. The goal of the group, one newspaper reported at the time, was “to teach youngsters how to break out of a cycle of failure and become successful by taking risks and trying new activities.” The first lessons Walbridge taught were the names of all the lines on the
New Way
and how to tie mariner’s knots.

Later, Walbridge was skipper aboard the
Heritage of Miami
, an eighty-five-foot schooner used by the Boy Scouts of America in its High Adventure program. The boat sailed from Islamorada in the Florida Keys to the Dry Tortugas, seventy miles west of Key West, on weeklong tours every week.

Barbara Maggio, whose husband, Joe, was the well-known force behind the schooner, was amazed at what Walbridge accomplished each week. She was particularly impressed the week the son of Vermont’s first director of the state’s Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired took a group of blind Scouts sailing for an entire week.

Schooner sailing was fine, but like any tall ship enthusiast, Walbridge was looking forward toward the next, bigger vessel. He got his opportunity in 1993 when Joe Maggio told Richard Bailey, skipper of the square-rigged ship
Rose
, about Walbridge.

Bailey was a year younger than Walbridge, and the age difference would usually have concerned Bailey. “His résumé was what made me accept his candidacy. He was a little old for a tall ship. You imagine the mates will be only marginally older than deckhands, who are eighteen,” Bailey explained. “I had previously had the experience of finding that deckhands of age twenty-five or thirty had a hard time interacting with mates younger than them.” But he found Walbridge not only fit but “he was also personable, a very agreeable kind of guy.”

Walbridge held a hundred-ton master’s license when he arrived aboard
Rose
. He wanted to get some time on bigger ships to upgrade his license, Bailey said. The captain of less complex schooners, Walbridge happily began his life on a square-rigger as an able-bodied seaman, just a regular crew member. “Within a few months, he moved up through the ranks. I think we may have bumped him up to first mate in ’94 when I was gone,” said Bailey.

Walbridge quickly demonstrated that he had immense aptitude as a sailor and equally immense aptitude for anything mechanical. “We came to rely on him for his opinions about mechanical issues. The second year, we put a piston rod through the side of an engine, and he got it fixed in forty-eight hours,” Bailey said.

In the summer of 1994, Bailey got to know something about
Bounty
. He had taken leave from his helm—and promoted Walbridge to first mate—and was asked to run
Bounty
for short trips here and there. In the fall of that year,
Bounty
—owned by an offshoot of the Fall River, Massachusetts, Chamber of Commerce—needed someone to skipper the ship to St. Petersburg. Bailey assembled a crew and took
Bounty
as far as Wilmington, North Carolina, where it was to stay for a few weeks.

“While it was laid up in Wilmington, they asked me if I knew someone who could be the ship keeper while it was there,” Bailey said. “I knew Robin was available. I called him and he came down and familiarized himself with the ship.” Then Walbridge became
Bounty
’s caretaker. The job was lent some adventure when, during the night, someone cast off
Bounty
’s dock lines, and Walbridge, alone on board, managed to get his drifting charge back alongside the dock.

Rose
had been Robin Walbridge’s only schooling in tall ships before he took over
Bounty
in Wilmington. There were differences.
Rose
was fourteen feet taller than
Bounty
, with a bit greater tonnage. But the biggest difference was the type of hull.
Rose
was a replica of a frigate, a naval gunship. As a ship designed to haul coal,
Bounty
was round and strong, and Captain Bligh’s mentor, Captain Cook, had chosen the collier over the frigate because it lacked the frigate’s array of gunports, openings through which heavy seas could wash over the vessel.

Bailey often joked that
Rose
was like a horse,
Bounty
like a cow. But when the chance came in 1995 to become master of the bovine
Bounty
, Robin Walbridge committed himself to a long-term relationship.

Riding the Storm Out . . . Day 2

I’m sure that Bounty’s crew would be overwhelmed by all the prayers and best wishes that have been given. Rest assured that the Bounty is safe and in very capable hands.

Bounty’s current voyage is a calculated decision . . . NOT AT ALL . . . irresponsible or with a lack of foresight as some have suggested. . . . The fact of the matter is . . . A SHIP IS SAFER AT SEA THAN IN PORT!

In the next few posts I will try to quell some fears and help to explain some of the dynamics that are in Bounty’s favor.

—
Bounty
Facebook entry, 11:30 a.m., Saturday, October 27, 2012

Bounty
had crossed the Gulf Stream sometime before Robin Walbridge ordered the course change Saturday morning. She was sailing in warmer water southeast of the stream, even as she headed southwest, back toward the East Coast. During the afternoon, she was making a speed of seven knots on the GPS that was mounted in the Nav Shack. That was about the same as her average speed since leaving Long Island Sound. The ride was still comfortable, even in the building seas and winds that had reached twenty-five knots. That wasn’t a surprise to the crew, but might have been for others.

Some detractors who knew little about
Bounty
dismissed her as a “movie prop,” but her construction was anything but throwaway. On his occasional stints aboard
Bounty
during the 1990s, Richard Bailey, skipper of the
Rose
, found her “stoutly built by Nova Scotia craftsmen who knew what they were doing. A lot of effort and thought went into building her.”

Bounty
had needed her young strength because MGM was intent on filming its movie
Mutiny on the Bounty
on location in Tahiti. They asked a naval architect to design a ship capable of the voyage halfway around the world.
Bounty
left Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, sailed through the Panama Canal, and crossed much of the Pacific Ocean before it was on scene.

The reality of life at sea then was substituted for by the imagination of Hollywood. It is somewhat instructive to compare the portrayal of William Bligh—played by Trevor Howard—in that movie with
Bounty
’s skipper in 2012, Robin Walbridge.

In MGM’s version of the tale,
Bounty
set sail in 1787 from England, a ship in the Royal Navy commissioned for a commercial venture. She was to take on a cargo of breadfruit harvested in Tahiti and deliver it to the Caribbean, where plantation owners wanted to experiment with the plant as food for slaves. Breadfruit had replaced rice in the Pacific as the crop of choice. Up to two hundred of the grapefruit-size, coarse-skinned fruit grew on one eighty-five-foot-tall tree. The implications for the Caribbean, where plantation owners were apparently seeking a better profit margin through the stomachs of slaves, were promising. Thus far, MGM’s film dealt with fact.

But then the plot took liberties, creating a despotic Bligh against whom audiences could jeer and a handsome, sensitive Fletcher Christian—Marlon Brando—whom they could cheer.

Filming in Ultra Panavision 70 for the first time, the cameras—powered by large generators in
Bounty
’s hold—framed Bligh in a series of wrathful acts.

First, he snatches more than his share of cheese, and when he’s confronted by an ordinary seaman who accuses the skipper of the pilferage, Bligh orders the man whipped for showing disrespect to a superior.

Brando’s Christian is offended, but Bligh states, “Cruelty with a purpose is not cruelty, it is efficiency.”

Bligh—who had served with Captain Cook in his earlier expeditions—has choices of routes to get to Tahiti. The longer route is east around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. He attempts the shorter, more treacherous route, around South America’s Cape Horn, but after failing to make the rounding and wasting precious time, Bligh eventually takes the eastern route and pushes the crew to get back on schedule, cutting their rations rather than stopping to resupply.

All may not be forgotten by the crew when they reach Tahiti, but they become preoccupied with the willingness of the local women. Even Christian falls for one, the daughter of the local king.

Bligh, however, is stewing. The breadfruit plants are dormant and not ready for harvest, and while his crew frolics and three members attempt to desert—they’re stopped by Christian and imprisoned by Bligh—the captain’s fury grows.

Once the breadfruit is finally harvested, Bligh loads the hold with twice as many plants as planned. That means that water that should have been shipped for the crew must now be used to water the plants, and the new water rations add fuel to the crew’s displeasure, leading one crew member to attack Bligh, who orders the fellow keelhauled and killed.

Then Bligh discovers Christian giving a sick seaman water and strikes his mate, who returns the blow. Bligh issues a death sentence, to be carried out at the next port.

So Christian—Brando—leads a mutiny, sets Bligh adrift in a boat with the crew members loyal to the captain, and steers
Bounty
back toward Tahiti and its ladies, whom the mutineers take to the Pitcairn Islands, where they hide from the British authorities.

Walbridge was unlike the fictional version of Bligh, in most respects. Quiet, calculating, and self-assured as he was, Walbridge seldom if ever disputed another crew member’s ideas. He simply had ideas of his own. Five years before Walbridge assumed
Bounty
’s helm, the ship starred in a second movie,
Treasure Island
, starring Charlton Heston as Long John Silver. The film was the product of Turner Network Television and was meant for cable-television distribution. The film was panned by critics, so Walbridge was well served to have missed it.

Now the ship’s days in a starring role were over.
Bounty
was thirty years old, well beyond middle age in ship years. So her future roles were in the supporting-actress category. She was not selected for the first
Pirates of the Caribbean
movie. But she played the role of the
Edinburgh Trader
in
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
and
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
. She also appeared in the opening of
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
.

Walbridge, the captain who eschewed attention for himself when visitors came aboard
Bounty
, was pleased with his ship’s movie roles. In August 2012, he told Ned Lightner in Belfast, Maine, “I actually have to say for myself personally I really like the movie industry. I find everybody in the industry really respectful. One of the big questions I hear all the time is ‘How much damage did they do to the ship?’ Things like that. I find them very, very respectful of the props, of the ship, of the people.”

Lightner asked Walbridge’s opinion of
Pirates of the Caribbean
star Johnny Depp. Walbridge gushed, “He was extremely nice, he was very, very easy to work with, very humble. For somebody of his status, he was just a great person to work with.”

Walbridge said he was most impressed by the effort moviemaking took. “We’re shooting probably like a twelve-hour day, and if they can get ninety seconds of screen time, they consider they’ve had a very good day,” he told Lightner.

Bounty
had made her mark in films because, like an elegant Hollywood beauty, she had good bones. The shipwrights in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, had provided them.

The owners of the Smith and Rhuland shipyard put out a call in early 1960 for workers for their new project. The owners had signed a contract with MGM for $750,000 to build what, at the time, was the most expensive movie prop ever. They had hired a naval architect to use the plans for the original
Bounty
—plans held by the British Admiralty—and expand them by about 50 percent to create a replica that could house everything the movie crew would need to sail to Tahiti and film the movie.

Gerald Zwicker, then about twenty-four, had just returned home to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, after spending time working with his brother in Marlborough, Massachusetts, as a carpenter. He was listening to the radio and heard about the shipyard jobs. He applied and the next day was on the payroll. The keel was being assembled, and Zwicker was on the crew that drove galvanized bolts an inch in diameter and four feet long through the keel timbers.

Next, Zwicker was put to work assembling the ribs—the vertical wooden frames that would give
Bounty
’s hull its curved shape. It was heavy work, and where a job might take six men, only three were assigned to this particular task, making the task even heavier.

Smith and Rhuland, Zwicker felt, was a good company, so unlike some of his colleagues, he didn’t complain about the hard labor. Each morning, Zwicker drove the fifteen miles from Bridgewater to Lunenburg, picking up five other workers as he went. In their eight-hour day, they took on whatever work the yard needed. When the ribs were done and shaped with sharp adzes, the men started attaching the planking, using squared, six-inch, galvanized nails and trunnels—thick dowels driven into slightly smaller holes drilled through the planks and into the frames.

Zwicker would see the 1941 Dodge truck, driven by an older man, arrive at the yard with a load of wooden pegs for the trunnels. The man harvested the wood locally in a stand of hackmatack, a tree now called tamarack. At the shipyard, workers shaped the pegs into cylindrical trunnels.