David Hill, Lenovo and IBM’s former head of design and brand identity, and the man who redefined corporate blogging twenty years ago with the late, lamented Design Matters blog, has a new website.
ThinkNextDesign reflects the man’s impeccable design taste and showcases his greatest hits in a graceful gallery of everything from minicomputers to Trackpoint caps for the pointing stick on Thinkpads.
It also revives some of his best writing from Design Matters, the Lenovo blog the two of us reminiscenced about last month with Thomas Rogers, host of the podcast Laptop Retrospective.
Design is far more than form or function. It’s the tangible expression of a brand’s identity, values, and promise. While a brand defines what a company stands for, design gives those aspirations form and substance. Design uniquely delivers value: visually, physically, and experientially.
I woke up in the dark of this very cold January morning, with the furnace chugging away and ice skimming over Cotuit Bay, and my thoughts turned a dozen miles south from where I write, to a bleak scene that unfolded 108 years ago in the middle of Nantucket Sound when the Cross Rip lightship was solidly locked in and lost during the Great Freeze of 1918.
The end of January and beginning of February are the heart of the meteorological winter on Cape Cod, and on schedule the Great Freeze commenced on January 21, 1918 when temperatures plunged to zero and didn’t rise above that bleak point for five days. It was so cold (how cold was it Dave?) that Providence, Rhode Island reported a brutal 17 degrees below zero, and Narragansett Bay froze solid, blocking any vessels from entering or departing Newport. Buzzards Bay was locked tight with ice from the Canal to Quick’s Hole in the Elizabeth Islands. Nantucket Sound was frozen from Woods Hole east to Great Point on Nantucket. The island of Nantucket was cut off from ferry service and supplies for more than two weeks.
In the middle of the Sound sat LV-6 — the Cross Rip lightship — a 60-year old, 80-foot long former coastal schooner converted into a navigational aid by the US Lighthouse Service. Her three masts had been chopped down and replaced by an iron skeleton mast. She had once been stationed for years five miles south of Cotuit on Succonnesset Shoals but moved to Cross Rip in 1915, one of a half-dozen lightships stationed across the Sound to guide shipping through the tangle of shoals from Hedge Fence to Shovelful Shoal east of Great Point. Each lightship in “Lightship Alley” (described as a “conga-line”) displayed a unique set of lights, sounded a distinctive fog signal, and were painted different colors to aid in their identification. Before the Cape Cod Canal opened in 1914, thousands of ships passed through Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds every year, threading their way past Hedge Fence, Succonnesset, Horseshoe Shoal, Handkerchief Shoal at the southern tip of Monomoy, before entering the open seas of the Atlantic to round the outer Cape on their way to Boston and Maine.
The Cross Rip lightship was manned by six Cape Codders. Her captain, Richard E.B. Phillips was home at Dennisport on a scheduled furlough, leaving mate Henry F. Joy, also of Dennisport, in command. The ship was stationed south of Horseshoe and north of Norton Shoals at the virtual midpoint of the thirty-mile wide expanse of Nantucket Sound. Aboard with Joy were: the ship’s machinist, Francis M. Johnson of Yarmouth; the cook, William Rose of North Harwich; seamen Almon F. Wixon and Arthur C. Joy of Dennisport, and E.H. Phillips of West Dennis.
Lightship duty was tedious during the best of weather, and terrible the rest of the time. The ships had no engines or sails to speak of, and were moored to massive anchors in rough waters, especially the lightships at the eastern entrance to the Sound which were exposed to the full impact of the Atlantic Ocean. One lightship crewman once expressed his hatred of lightship life and declared he’d prefer to be convicted and send to state prison. The lightships had an unnerving habit of dragging anchor and being blown off station. In late December, 1867, the first Cross Rip lightship parted its anchor cable in a vicious blizzard and was blown out of Nantucket Sound into the open Atlantic where she started to sink. A passing ship bound from Maine to New Orleans saved the crew and carried them all the way to Louisiana. The Handkerchief lightship drifted 50 miles southwest from Monomoy to No Man’s Land south of Martha’s Vineyard in 1879. According to Thomas Leach’s excellent history, The Lightships of Nantucket Sound, “The Pollock Rip lightship became known as “the Happy Wanderer” for the number of times it moved off station or broke free.” During the 1944 hurricane, the 12 men aboard Vineyard Lightship #73 lost their lives when the ship sank off of Cuttyhunk. According to Captain W. Russell Webster, the official records “contain 273 instances of lightships being blown adrift or dragged off station in severe weather or moving ice. Five lightships were lost under such conditions.”
The crews of the lightships kept the lights shining and the fog signal ringing or blowing. They also went to the aid of stricken vessels. In 1914, the crew of the Cross Rip lightship —under the command of Captain Phillips — helped rescue the crew of the three-masted schooner John Paul that foundered in the Sound during a January blizzard. The crews were regularly relieved and brought ashore for brief breaks, but they also could stranded past their scheduled tour of duty if conditions made it impossible for the relief boat to reach them.
By late January 1918 Nantucket Sound was completely frozen over. A rare occurrence, the ice meant no shipping could traverse the Sound, making the Cross Rip lightship’s mission irrelevant. As provisions dwindled on the ship and the harsh conditions made life intolerable and precarious. Chief Mate Henry Joy is said to have walked across the ice to the coast guard station on Nantucket to ask for permission to abandon the ship. Ordered to return, he dejectedly walked back to his doom.
Boston Sunday Post, February 2, 1918
On February 4 the pressure of the ice pack around the Cross Rip caused her to part her mooring cables. Rising temperatures thawed the ice and it started to move with the strong tidal currents, carrying the trapped lightship with it out to sea. On February 5, the lightkeeper at Nantucket’s Great Point light spotted the trapped ship sliding helplessly out of the Sound, past the light, and into the open Atlantic. Her ensign was flying upside down, the maritime signal of extreme distress.
The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror of 16 February, 1918 reported: “Considerable concern is felt for the safety of the little Cross Rip lightship, which was dragged from her moorings in Nantucket Sound, about twelve miles north of this island, by the heavy ice which started moving by the 50-mile northwest wind between Monday night and Tuesday morning, when the record low temperature was recorded all over New England.
“The lightship gradually swept through the sound, rounding Great Point still fast in the ice, absolutely helpless; and early Tuesday afternoon she passed out of sight by Great Round shoal in the direction of the dreaded Rose and Crown shoals, where the bones of many a good vessel now rest.”
The news of LV-6’s plight spread. Ships were dispatched by the US Navy and Coast Guard to find the missing lightship. Frederick B. Thurber, commander of a minesweeper stationed in Newport, RI, recalled the search in the March 1962 issue of the United States Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings:
“During this period the Cross Rip Light Ship went adrift around Great Point on the northeast point of Nantucket, drifted over the shoals, and sank with all hands. The Commander of the Mine Force had made repeated requests for radio, as at times we were sweeping 40 or 50 miles off the beach but the answer came back that the sweepers did not rate it. After my report that if we had had a radio, we could have gotten to the Cross Rip Light Ship before she grounded and could have saved the men, a radio was supplied.”
The search for LV-6 was called off on February 18. The Hyannis Patriot reported, “Naval vessels have searched far and wide for the ship daily since she was swept from view in the midst of an ice field so extensive that it was impossible for steamers to force their way through.”
In early March 1918, the worst fears about the fate of the Cross Rip lightship were confirmed when fishermen aboard the fishing schooner Kineo more than 100 miles away on Georges Bank dragged up in their nets a small flag and a boat rudder stamped with the words “Cross Rip.”
More wreckage was dredged from the sea in 1933 by the government dredge W.L. Marshall while working at the eastern entrance to the Sound. According to the New Bedford Standard Times, “Workmen drew … attention to splintered bits of oak ribs and planks which blocked suction pumps several times. An eight-inch piece of a broken windlass was also sucked up.”
In the 1960s a New Bedford dragger found theship’s bell off of Nauset Beach in Orleans. The lightship’s wooden quarter board was found on the beach at Dennisport’s Depot Street in 1919, coincidentally the same street where mate Henry Joy lived. It is on display at the Josiah Dennis Manse Museum’s maritime room.
The missing Cross Rip lightship was soon replaced by a relief ship, and the last lightship in Nantucket Sound was retired in 1969, the need for the vessels done in by the Cape Cod Canal and modern navigational aids such as LORAN and eventually GPS.
The Viking explorer Erik the Red pulled an epic branding stunt in the 9th century when he named Greenland “Grœnland” to entice more Norsemen to its definitely-not-green shores from Iceland. Green it is not: save for a few meager patches of vegetation that struggle to survive along the southern coast in the short summer months.
As our President heads to Europe flexing his imperial ambitions to take Greenland away from the Danes, it’s worth revisiting the island’s history with America and revisiting Sloan Wilson’s great novel, Ice Brothers, about his experiences patrolling the frozen coast during World War II.
Colonialism and American Claims
One thing to note about the prehistoric settlement of the island is that the first settlements (which didn’t survive) were made by people migrating from North America. Also worth noting is that the present population of Inuits migrated east across the Northwest Passage in 1200, afterErik the Red established the first Norse settlements.
Those Viking settlements died out and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that the Danes sent missionaries to Greenland to convert whatever Norse people were living there from their pagan ways to Christianity. Finding no surviving Norse, the missionaries baptised the Inuit, set up some coastal trading stations and other than European whalers working in the Davis Strait, the place moldered until the 19th century when Danish interest intensified.
American made territorial claims on northern Greenland in the late 19th century when the Arctic explorer Robert Peary explored the coast and established for the first time that the landmass did not extend all the way to the North Pole. In 1917 the US conceded its claims to Greenland when it bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark.
World War II
Greenland first gained strategic importance during the Battle of the Atlantic. Henrik Kaufman, Danish minister to the United States, signed a treaty with the USA permitting the building of stations and bases on Greenland. Apparently Kaufman didn’t tell anyone in the Danish government about his concession and he was accused of “high treason” and fired. The Americans built 14 bases on Greenland in WWII, using them to ferry aircraft to Europe and as naval bases to counter the threat of German U-Boats.
The Germans also established weather stations on the east coast to provide them with early forecasts of weather systems moving across the Atlantic in what has been termed the “North Atlantic Weather War.” Sloan Wilson’s 1979 Ice Brothers is a fictional account of Wilson’s experiences with the U.S. Coast Guard and the cat-and-mouse game that took place between the Americans and Germans during the war.
I can’t, and won’t opine on President Trump’s designs on Greenland aside from pointing out the U.S. has enjoyed, for more than a century, a history of territorial claims, military bases, and a record of patrolling and supporting its frozen neighbor to the northeast.
I’ll end with Rockwell Kent’s painting, Early November, North Greenland, 1933
Bob Weir passed away today (1.10.26) at the age of 78. His Ace album was the soundtrack of one of my favorite summers in the early 70s. Singing “Black-Throated Wind” while hitchhiking back to college through New Bedford on a dismal grey day is a memory to hang onto.
The legendary yacht designer and builder Nathanael Greene Herreshoff once quipped: “There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black.”
Keep in mind Captain Nat was talking about yachts, not whaling ships, which were almost always painted black except for one special occasion.
Whaling ships in the 19th century were remarkable for their durability and uniform design, turned out by the hundreds at shipyards on the shores of Mattapoisett, Fairhaven, and New Bedford. They were factory ships constructed to last for two or three decades of continuous sailing, their rigging, decks, and copper sheathed bottoms revived in between voyages by gangs riggers and shipwrights. The last surviving wooden whaler, Mystic Seaport’s Charles W Morgan, was built in 1841 and retired from whaling in 1921 after 37 voyages over 80 years.
In my research for my book, The Marginal Sea, I assumed all whaling ships were painted black. Why not? Almost every painting of whaling ships depicts a black hull, or, on occasion, a white checkerboard scheme along the sheer of the hull to give the false impression of a warship’s gun ports to fool pirates and other marauders. Because many ships were owned by pacifist Quaker merchants, their fleet were usually piously painted all black.
Last winter, while touring the library at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, I happened upon a copy of a gorgeous book, O’er the Wide and Tractless Seaby Michael P. Dyer. I requested a copy through the CLAMS Library service and a few days picked it up from the Cotuit Library.
Published in 2017, the book presents the history of art produced during two centuries of American whaling, from scrimshaw and illustrated sailors’ journals to formal marine paintings. Dyer, the former Curator of History at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, invested two decades of exhaustive research into the work, and the text accompanying the lavish illustrations is, by itself, an important addition to American maritime history scholarship.
As I read the book I came upon a painting by the maritime artist Charles Sidney Raleigh (1830-1925) of the whaling bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. What caught my eye was the color of her hull, a spectral, ghostly white.
Charles Sidney Raleigh’s painting of the bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. Note the whaler in the background painted with the white stripe and fake gunport pattern.
Dyer’s caption explained that whaling ships were sometimes painted white on their maiden voyages — evoking the image of a bride in a white gown — a detail I had never known before. Evidently the ship would be painted the more practical black when she returned to New Bedford, as one would imagine a white hull would get very grimy after three years of hard whaling in the North Pacific.
My book describes the wreck of the New Bedford whaling bark Ocean Wave in a blizzard that swept over Siberia’s Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk. Captained by Hiram Baker of Pocasset, the Ocean Wave was lost with all hands — three dozen men — when she was caught by surprise on the lee shore of Elbow Island on the night of October 12, 1858. Baker “slipped his chains” and abandoned his anchors to make a desperate run for cover in the shelter of the Shantars. The ship struck the fangs of the Pinnacle Rocks where her wreckage was discovered the following spring when the whaling fleet returned to Southwest Bay to hunt bowhead whales.
Captain Hiram Baker’s cenotaph in the Cataumet Cemetery
The Ocean Wave was on her maiden voyage. But was she painted white? The only witnesses to see her before the wreck were the captain and crew of the Nantucket whaler Phoenix. None of the accounts of the wreck that night 167 years ago mention the color of the Ocean Wave, but it is the type of detail that I wanted to include in my book.
I wrote Michael Dyer to get his advice. Was the Ocean Wave painted white for her maiden voyage?
He kindly replied: “Without direct evidence, I would hesitate to state definitively that the vessel was painted white. There are as many examples of vessels launched that were not painted white as there are references to white-painted ones. On the other hand there are examples of vessels painted white on their maiden voyages, like the Hunter and a Charles S. Raleigh painting of the Wanderer and another of the Catalpa.”
The Catalpa
I don’t want to take poetic license with the historical record, and lard up my description of the Ocean Wave’s final hours with some purple prose like “…the ghostly white ship fought for her life in the foaming sea and gusts of Siberian snow” so I’ll follow Michael Dyer’s advice and speculate that the ship might have been painted white, but the only men who knew for sure are long lost to the sea and the past.
Here’s Michael Dyer’s 2018 lecture at the Nantucket Whaling Museum about his book:
I started this blog in 2001. It began on Google’s platform, a self-conscious diary that began with a post remembering an former colleague, the late Susie Forrest, who shared a desk with me at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in the early 1980s, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 before dying far too young a few months after 9/11. I was working in a suburb of Zurich then, sitting in an office in Oberengstringen on a Saturday afternoon feeling the the urge to write some words, any words.
A couple thousand posts later — some best forgotten, some fondly recalled — I have never looked back at my archives to retrace the past. Sure, a blog post here and there when I’m trying to remember some incident or person forgotten along the way, but for the most part I’ve avoided re-reading and wincing over purple prose, typographical errors, or simple stupidity.
There have been prolific years when I posted nearly every day, and barren ones when I never posted, or rarely at all. The early years on WordPress were self-hosted, a nerve-wracking slog of manually updating, backing up, and weeding through waves of spam comments. I’ve been hacked. I’ve crashed. And eventually I migrated the whole affair over to Automattic, the corporate parent of WordPress and never looked back, grateful to them for managing the back end while I focus on the words and pictures.
Dries Buytaert, the inventor of the Drupal content management system, wrote a poignant explanation for why he continues to blog after twenty years. In his post, “A blog is a biography” he captures the reason I keep writing and hitting the publish button:
I never knew my great grandparents. They left no diary, no letters, only a handful of photographs. Sometimes I look at those photos and wonder what they cared about. What were their days like? What made them laugh? What problems were they working through?
Then I realize it could be different for my descendants. A long-running blog like mine is effectively an autobiography.
I’ve been working on a book about events that took place in 1858, one hundred years before I was born. The source material is a scant collection of memoirs, letters, ship’s logbooks, and newspaper clippings. The two men at the heart of the story left behind no more than a dozen photographs. From a few shreds of the past I’ve tried pieced together the story of their lives, but constantly have marvelled at how meager a record they left behind, and wrestled with how to honestly fill in the gaps without turning their stories into fiction.
I’m working on a story now about a Cape Cod whaling captain named Ebenezer Franklin Nye. Last summer I visited a graveyard in the village of Cataumet to look at the graves of two other sailors who died in a shipwreck. Near their stones stood Nye’s marker, a cenotaph to the man “who lost his life in the Arctic, winter of 1879-80. Aged 57 Years.“
Nye never wr0te his autobiography, memoirs, or reminiscences. As I dug into the story of his life I failed to find a single sentence written by him. He was quoted by others, his name appears in some newspapers, and his remarkable career is noted in a Nye family history, but so far I’ve been unable to find any photograph of the man nor any words written by his own hand. His life is forgotten, yet based on what little has been recorded, it was remarkable, a colorful career of shipwreck, survival, capture, escape and heroism.
In the 1990s digital cameras started to appear. I recall a quote by some Silicon Valley CEO who said the biggest impact of the technology (other than putting Kodak out of business) would be a profound change in the perceived preciousness of a snapshot. The cost and expensive process of pre-digital photography meant every picture was carefully composed before the shutter was pressed. A roll of film was finite. At best there were three dozen opportunities per roll. With digital cameras the CEO predicted, “My kids will probably take hundreds of pictures of each other’s butts.” Within a few years photographs went from prized memories to disposable jpegs.
In 1860 the taking of a single photograph was a major occasion that involved visiting a studio, wearing a Civil War uniform, posed stiffly gainst some evocative backdrop, head clamped into a brace to hold the subject still until the image could be magically applied to the chemically treated glass plate. The result was framed under glass, hung on the wall, and cherished as that person’s one and only likeness.
Contrast that venerated scarcity with the abundance of a Flickr galley, or the verbal breadcrumbs of a blog, and one has to wonder if our descendants will know us that much better than we know our ancestors? Or even care to see a picture of pastrami and rye we ate at Katz’s deli?
This blog isn’t my diary, it isn’t my memoir nor my autobiography, it isn’t handmade with quill and ink on vellum by candlelight. It’s ephemeral, it’s transitory, it’s a bunch of bits tenuously living in some data center somewhere. At least Ebenezer Nye’s final fate is carved into stone — “lost his life in the Arctic” — while ours flits by in a cacophony of ephemeral tweets and tik-toks.
In my previous post I shared a YouTube video about another blog from my past: David Hill’s Design Matters. That was a very good blog, something I am very proud to be part of, but it’s gone now, a memory captured in snapshots only preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Did it deserve to be preserved and remembered like Ebenezer Nye?
On this snowy morning of the first day of the new year, I leave you with this lyric by the late, great Lowell George:
It’s so easy to slip It’s so easy to fall And let your memory drift And do nothin’ at all All the love that you missed All the people that you can’t recall Do they really exist at all?
I had a chance to talk with David Hill, the VP of Corporate Identity and Design at Lenovo and the blogger behind Design Matters, Lenovo’s first blog that launched in 2006. Thomas Rogers at Laptop Retrospective invited us to reminiscence about the blog, how it came to be, and the impact it had. The blog was retired when Lenovo took another approach to social media, but lives on for the most part thanks to the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive.
Edward “Ned” Ackerman passed away earlier this year. He was eighty-three years old, a scholar, a shipwright, and a sailor who once spent his youthful summers in Cotuit at “Rookwood”, the old Augustus Thorndike Perkins estate also known as “Sandalwood” that sits on the bluff overlooking Inner Harbor by Little River.
In the 1970s, when Ned was in his mid-thirties, he captured headlines as a self-described “merchant-adventurer” who believed the time had come to revive the sail-powered coastal schooners of the past as a cost-effective way to ship goods along the coast and south to the Caribbean. His dream was both audacious and well timed, taking form in a Thomaston, Maine shipyard after the price shocks of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo when Americans were stunned by gasoline shortages, a tripling of oil prices, and long lines at the gas pumps.
For three years Ackerman worked with the shipwrights at the Newbert & Wallace shipyard to build a 97-foot, two-masted schooner designed by the Hyannis boat builder and designer, Robert “Pete” Culler. Christened the John F. Leavitt after the author of Wake of the Coasters, and Mystic Seaport assistant curator, John Leavitt, the schooner was launched in July 1979.
Six months later and the Leavitt was abandoned on her maiden voyage, 187 miles southeast of Long Island on December 28, 1979. Her construction and first voyage carrying a cargo of lumber and tanning chemicals from Quincy, Massachusetts to Haiti were chronicled in the documentary film, Coaster, released in 1983.
The Cotuit Connection
Ned was born in 1942 in Tucson, Arizona, the son of Ruth Wellman Ackerman and Edward Angot Ackerman. His mother’s family, the Wellmans, were from Montclair, New Jersey. The Wellmans spent summers in Cotuit, buying land around Cordwood Landing as well as considerable acreage in Mashpee on both sides of the Santuit River that included the Maushop stables.
Ned attended private school in Tucson, was a National Merit Scholar, and earned a Rifleman’s badge from the NRA. He was named an alternate to the U.S. Air Force Academy by Senator Barry Goldwater, but earned his BA and MA in English at the University of Arizona where he joined a fraternity and drove a sportscar in rallies sponsored by the Sportscar Club of America. His younger siblings were Todd and Jill.
He married his first wife, Margaret, in 1965 while working as a teaching assistant in the U. of Arizona English department. Ned pursued a doctorate in Middle English and Norman French at the University of Pennsylvania, but didn’t complete his studies, moving instead to New England to teach English at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s he purchased large tracts of land in Cotuit, west of Old Post Road, from Theron Apollonio, subdividing the property into the neighborhood known today at Cotuit Bay Shores. The proceeds from that development and stock market investments allowed him to purchase a 300-acre farm in Dover, N.H.. In 1973 Ackerman commissioned Newbert & Wallace of Thomaston, Maine to build his first schooner: the 45-foot Fiddler’s Green. Ned isn’t listed in Larry Odence’s history of the Cotuit Skiff as having ever owned or skippered a skiff during his summers in Cotuit, however he evidently learned how to navigate and sail aboard the Fiddler’s Green, sailing her along the New England coast and eventually bringing her to Cotuit and the Crosby yard in Osterville.
The Wooden Boat Revival
Ned was inspired to undertake a revival of shipping freight by sail by John Leavitt’s history of coastal schooners: Wake of the Coasters. Ackerman approached Pete Culler, who, while not a trained naval architect, had established a reputation as a designer and builder of small traditional boats and had published three books about boatbuilding. Ned commission Pete to design a schooner for coastal shipping. Culler delivered plans for what would become the John F. Leavitt. He was present for the laying of her oak keel, but passed away at the age of 68 in 1978 before the ship was finished.
Ackerman sought, and received, lots of publicity throughout the construction of the Leavitt. He hired a public relations firm and commissioned a documentary about the project that was produced and directed by Jon Craig Cloutier of Kittery Point, Maine. The public’s interest in the Leavitt was well timed: oil prices were rising and the counterculture was proclaiming “Split Wood, Not Atoms.” Opponents picketed the Seabrook nuclear power plant under construction only miles from Ackerman’s Dover dairy farm. A revival in wooden boats was sparked by the restoration and preservation experts at Mystic Seaport, and the founding of WoodenBoat magazine by Jon Wilson out of an off-the-grid cabin in Brooklin, Maine in 1974. The coast of Maine was the epicenter of the wooden boat renaissance. After more than decade of Fiberglass, many sailors longed to return to the halcyon days of the past when wooden boats had a sense of soul that the new plastic, epoxied “Tupperware” boats lacked.
Ackerman worked alongside with the crew at Newbert & Wallace on the building of the Leavitt, gaining press coverage in the September 3, 1979 issue of Time Magazine shortly after the launching earlier that summer. In a story by national correspondent Hays Gorey, titled, “In Maine: A Bold Launching into the Past,” Ackerman, then 36 years old, said the Leavitt was intended to turn a profit, carrying cargo by sail for the first time in 40 years. “Someday there may not be any more fuel-driven trucks or motor ships at any price. But wind is plentiful,” he told Time. The story of Ackerman and the Leavitt went national as the wire services covered the story and newspapers from coast to coast reprinted it.. WoodenBoat put the launching on the cover of its November/December 1979 issue. The age of sail-powered shipping had returned and Ned Ackerman’s quixotic quest to prove it could be done was front page news.
The Leavitt is Launched
The Leavitt ignominiously ran aground in the mud of the St. George River when she was launched at Thomaston and had to wait for the tide to come in before she floated free. Sailors are superstitious and the grounding was, in hindsight, taken as a symbol of bad tidings to come by the peanut gallery that criticized Ackerman’s dream. The schooner had a dramatic sheer — the curve of her hull as seen from the side, a common design feature Culler put into most of his boats — a playful, almost whimsical arc that was accentuated by a bold red stripe painted along the white hull and Ackerman’s own modification to raise the stern of the boat even higher than Culler’s original plan called for so the helmsman could see what was happening on the foredeck over the cabin top. The critics (and there were many) claimed the Leavitt was more a yacht than a working schooner, overbuilt at the expense of a capacious cargo hold. But corners were cut, perhaps due to Ackerman’s inexperience or short funds.
The decision was made not to install an auxiliary diesel engine on the schooner. Ackerman was determined to avoid a Coast Guard inspection of the ship; hence the length was kept under 100 feet and the engine was omitted in favor of a small powered “yawl boat” that would tow the Leavitt into harbor and nudge her alongside a dock whenever she took on or offloaded cargo. Ned was upfront about his desire to avoid a Coast Guard certification, thus the schooner departed without the blessing of the authorities.
Some omissions would later prove fatal. A bilge pump wasn’t installed in the main cargo hold. A sight glass to measure the depth of water in the bilge under the cargo hold wasn’t installed, essential to determine if the ship was leaking when the hold was filled and the hatches secured. A diesel donkey engine installed by the foremast wasn’t a marine engine and lacked a crucial valve that would prove fatal to the ship later on.
Sail plan of the John F. Leavitt
After a number of delays getting underway from Maine, the Leavitt sailed to Quincy, Massachusetts in the late fall of 1979 to take on a cargo of lumber and tanning chemicals for delivery to Haiti. The crew included William Cowan, 21, first mate; Steven Bailey, 30, second mate; Paul O’Donnell, 27 deckhand; Alex Hadden, 21, deckhand; Cynthia Slater, 23, cook; William T. Duane, 42, supercargo ; filmmaker Jon Craig Cloutier, and cameraman Robert Eckhardt.
“Of the working crew — that is, the mates, deckhands, and cook — offshore experience in schooners was minimal, though all had served time in coastal passenger schooners and I suspect each had more sea time under their belts than the skipper, Ned Ackerman.”
Peter Spectre, “North Atlantic Shakedown: The Abandonment of the John F. Leavitt” WoodenBoat, #33.
She ran aground again in Boston Harbor, breaking off the end of her jibboom when her yawl boat tugged her off a shoal on her way into Quincy. There she pulled alongside the dock and lay idle for six weeks, dogged by delays in loading the cargo aboard, waiting for navigational equipment to be installed, and losing an experienced crew member who injured himself while scaling a fence. The Leavitt languished at the pier in Quincy into December, skim ice freezing around her during the cold nights. Finally, on December 20th, she set sail for Port Au Prince, Haiti. She was towed out of Boston Harbor by her yawl boat.
A photo taken of the Leavitt as she departed Boston Harbor through the Hull Gut, powered by her yawl boat, showed her heavily laden with cargo, trimmed down by the bow, with only a scant foot of freeboard between her deck that was stacked with lumber and the surface of the sea. Again, the critics said in hindsight she was improperly loaded for the conditions expected on the North Atlantic ocean in wintertime. Her sails were hoisted and she sailed slowly out into the Atlantic, bound around Cape Cod and Nantucket on her first voyage.
The first couple days were uneventful and calm. The ship slatted slowly around Provincetown and began to pick up speed as she skirted the Cape running on a beam reach before a northeast wind. The first calamity of the voyage came when the wind shifted to the northwest and the sails accidently jibed, slamming over out of control, damaging a radio antenna, and shaking up the sailors who hadn’t rigged preventers.
The wind blew harder after shifting to the northwest. The seas mounted higher, building into confused swells that came at the ship from different directions. When the wind topped 30 knots the decision was made to heave-to, drop the sails and rig a storm trysail, and to try to ride with the bow into the wind. But the schooner wouldn’t turn to windward. She rolling sluggishly in the troughs of the waves which broke over her side and flooded the decks. One of the mainsails jammed as it was lowered, dragging and filling in the water. The cargo boom — a heavy spar used as a crane when loading and unloading cargo — was insecurely lashed down with a light line, which snapped, turning the spar into a dangerous out of control battering ram that smashed over and over into the bulwark of the schooner’s deck. Hydraulic fluid from the donkey engine on the foredeck spilled out of an overflow pipe that hadn’t been fitted with a check valve. The fluid made the deck treacherously slick and impassable for the crew. As the schooner rolled in the seas the cargo boom continued to scythe across the deck and crash into the bulwarks, a menace to any sailor who dared to venture forward on the slipper deck to try to bring it under control. The yawl boat, hanging from the transom on its davits when it should have been on deck lashed down, was swamped by the waves and had to be cut free.
In hindsight, experienced mariners said the Leavitt could have run before the wind under bare poles, streaming lines or a drogue astern, and scudded southeast towards Bermuda. But with the radio’s range cut down by the damaged antenna, Captain Ackerman had to make a decision before the Leavitt drifted out of radio range: should he call a “mayday “and abandon ship, or try to tough out the winter storm hundreds of miles off shore. As the ship rolled sluggishly in the troughs, a Russian freighter approached and hailedon the radio to inquire if assistance was required. The Americans requested the Russians stand by them through the night until daylight could reveal any damage to the new schooner. The heavy cargo boom and foretopmast, which had been lashed down on deck, were out of control and battering the rail of the ship. The crew attempted to bring the swinging spars under control, but hydraulic fluid leaking from the donkey engine made the decks to slippery for them to safely move about. The ship was taking on water and the crew pumped continuously. Ackerman later said the swinging cargo boom had smashed over the covering board that sealed the main cargo hold.
Others in the crew said the ship was never in danger of sinking.
On the morning of December 27, one week into the voyage, Ackerman picked up the microphone and called a mayday.
The weak radio call was picked up by an amateur radio operator in New Jersey who relayed the message to the Coast Guard. The Leavitt was 260 miles southeast of Long Island, too far away for the Coast Guard’s helicopters to reach her. So the rescue was handed off to the New York Air National Guard unit in Westhampton, Long Island. Two Army helicopters, capable of being refueled in flight by a tanker plane, were scrambled and dispatched in the afternoon to rescue the crew of the Leavitt. Just before sunset on the 27th they found the stricken schooner and dropped two rescue swimmers into the water to swim their way to the Leavitt. The swimmers got aboard and helped the crew launch the two life rafts. The crew were winched from the life rafts onto the helicopters and were safe ashore on Long Island within a few hours.
The film crew saved most of their film. However the film of the rescue was not recovered. The Leavitt was never seen again.
The Inquisition
In 2001 WoodenBoat magazine published “The Loss of the John F. Leavitt – A naval architect’s opinion” by Andy Davis. (March/April 2001, #159). Davis notes that Pete Culer, the designer, “had no formal training in naval architecture, but many people without technical backgrounds have designed successful small vessels in the past…Culler was proud to be an intuitive designer. He was an experienced sailor, and usually his intuition served him well.”
Davis placed the blame for the sinking on the “failures of vital mechanical and emergency systems.” But overall, his indictment was that the Leavitt was a “design failure for many reasons. The most egregious failure, especially since the vessel had been designed to carry cargo, was its low cargo-carrying capacity.” Based on the vessel’s lack of “deadweight” capacity, Davis concluded “the business plan for the Leavitt was a fantasy; however, it was a highly developed fantasy….The Leavitt’s shape, driven as it was by the designer’s aesthetic, was incompatible with a real, commercially successful, cargo vessel.”
Davis, in his post-mortem, modeled the transverse stability of the Leavitt using CAD software. Transverse stability is the attribute in naval architecture which Davis called the “source of the vessel’s greatest design failure.” Simply put, Davis deemed the Leavitt “extremely vulnerable to capsize.” Yet, as Davis admits, “No one ever indicated that it was the fear of capsize that led the crew to abandon the vessel….it’s quite possible that a more experienced captain and crew could have managed the vessel through the storm and brought it safely into port. It’s possible that the Leavitt would then have been sailed without incident for years. It’s also quite likely that it could have rapidly and catastrophically capsized at any time.”
The abandoning of the John F. Leavitt was national news, coming as it did in the slow news cycle between Christmas and New Years. The headlines were brutal. The Evening Express in Portland, Maine asked the question ‘Did inexperience play a vital role?” The Lewiston Daily Sun: “Schooner Sinking Shocks Boatyard Owner.”
Ackerman and the crew were tight-lipped about the demise of the schooner, saying confidentiality agreements signed with the filmmaker forbade them from speaking about the voyage. Ackerman spoke to the press once the helicopters deposited him and his crew on Long Island: “This boat was a manifestation of a dream. It hurts.” In 1992 he told a reporter from the Portland Press Herald: “There is always the worry you yelled too soon. Everyone said I jumped too quick, that the weather wasn’t that bad. Everybody who wasn’t there had an opinion. But everyone who was on the boat is glad to be alive.”
Some doubted the Leavitt ever sank, and was still drifting abandoned somewhere in the North Atlantic, kept afloat by her cargo of lumber. A Coast Guard cutter, the Chase, was dispatched to the spot where she was last seen, but she was gone. A life raft was recovered. A salvage crew mustered out of Warwick, Rhode Island searched for the hulk in an airplane. Rumors spread that a Russian fishing trawler had found the schooner, pumped her out, and towed her back to Russia where she sailed for decades afterwards.
Boos and Hisses
In 1981 the documentary film by Jon Craig Cloutier, , titled “Coaster” was released in theaters. Emmett Meara wrote a review The Bangor Daily News on August 15 with the headline “Film booed and hissed at Camden.”
Meara wrote:
“Many who became part of the dream and romance of the idea of the Leavitt will never, ever forgive Ned Ackerman…..the theme of the film, with a basso profundo announcer reading what appears to be Ackerman’s journal, is done in the style of an Old Spice aftershave commercial. Many of the Ackerman comments brought laughter from second-show audience on Wednesday night.”
“”It was bogus,” said one of the workers at Newbert and Wallace, where the Leavitt was built.
“”It was great,” said an avid Camden sailor.
“”They never showed the movie. They showed a two-hour cartoon instead,” said a merchant seaman.”
The Washington Post’s review of Coaster concluded: “Ackerman probably did the right thing. But he proved the wrong point. And since he is a first-class publicity hound, he proved it big.”
Coaster was available for viewing on YouTube for a while, but it was removed recently due to a copyright infringement claim by Jon Craig Cloutier and is no longer accessible. Cloutier passed away on April 8, 2025. There is talk of restoring the film.
Jon Wilson, the founding editor of WoodenBoat magazine wrote in an editorial:
“The foundering of the John F. Leavitt on her maiden voyage left a lot of people disappointed, and a few people very angry …To begin with, we discovered that the members of the crew had, at some time previous, signed agreements with the film company that has been shooting since the keel was laid. The agreements prevented the crew from revealing the story surrounding the Leavitt’s foundering and abandonment. The film’s producer was unable, he said, to furnish us with any details, or to provide any answers to any questions. Even the owner of the Leavitt, Ned Ackerman, was unable or unwilling to discuss the events….At the same time, Ned Ackerman announced that he was going to answer no more questions from the press, but was going to work at the production of a book on the subject, in which all would be clarified.”
The Leavitt was sarcastically nicknamed the “John F. Leave-it.”
The disappointed and angry fans and critics of Ned Ackerman and his dream vented their ire in the letters-to-the-editor column of WoodenBoat.
Francis E. Bowker, master of the schooner Brilliant in Mystic, Connecticut: “About the only advice I can remember giving Ned was to get a half-model of an actual coaster and keep away from Pete Culler.”
Joe Maggio, master of the schooner William H. Albury: ”To try and do and learn what they knew from hand to mate to master, by a 36-year-old school teacher going straight to the command of such a ship because he is a good promoter, would make these men nauseous.”
Jim Reineck: “….my spirit rebels against watching the abuse it received at the hands of an obviously ignorant captain. It is an insult to the courage, knowledge and wisdom of the many captains who cut their teeth on years of apprenticing to gain the experience necessary to command a ship and its men, for us to support a man such as Ned Ackerman in his profiting from such a performance.
Otto Kurz: “…the few times I conversed with Mr. Ackerman left me with the distinct impression that prudence is not his most outstanding quality.”
Philip Bolger, a Gloucester boat designer: “Here was, I thought, a group of novices led by a self-centered dilettante.”
After the Leavitt
Ned Ackerman never wrote a book about the Leavitt. After the end of his dream to revive shipping-by-sail, he seemed to quietly fade into the background, continuing to live in Camden, Maine where he raised a family, dabbled in real estate development, and eventually build another schooner, by himself, in a barn at the base of the Camden Snow Bowl. That schooner, the Charm, sails today out of Belfast, Maine, a “dude schooner” that carries tourists on excursions. She’s a pretty schooner, with a more traditional look to her than the Leavitt.
In Cotuit, the Ackerman home – Rookwood – at 621 Old Post Road was sold in 1982 by Ned’s sister Jill. Ned’s brother Todd applied for a permit to build a 165-foot long pier near the Cotuit Narrows, but withdrew the plan after neighbors objected. Jill sold Maushop Farm and the family property along the Santuit River, and now lives in Marstons Mills.
Ned Ackerman’s passing in 2025 seems to have gone unnoticed. No obituary can be found, but memories of his quest and the schooner he built and lost will long linger along the waterfronts of New England.
If you want a glimpse of Ned, the Leavitt, and some scenes from Coaster, this video is worth watching:
