Phoenix of the Seas

Phoenix of the Seas is the three-oceans, three-centuries saga of the Ernestina-Morrissey, official State Ship of Massachusetts. Crowded onto the pages are accounts of the adventures of this heritage vessel, many of them perilous, and introductions to the many remarkable people whose lives she touched, beginning with her launching in Essex, Massachusetts in 1894 as the Effie M. Morrissey. For ten years she sailed out of Gloucester, fishing for cod on the storm-wracked Grand Banks. Then, under Canadian and Newfoundland ownership, she fished and ran cargo as far north as Labrador. Seemingly worn out, she was claimed by famed Arctic captain Bob Bartlett, who had been navigator for Admiral Robert Peary's attempts to reach the North Pole. Bartlett sailed her to the Arctic for the next twenty years, first on scientific expeditions sponsored by institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Institute, then on military missions in the Arctic attached to both U.S. Army and Navy commands. Almost abandoned again after Bartlett's death, she was rescued by a Cape Verdean trader, Henrique Mendes, who sailed her as a packet ship on transatlantic voyages between Cape Verde and Providence, Rhode Island. In this incarnation she became a vital link between Cape Verdean-Americans in America and the families they had left behind on the islands. Eventually deteriorated almost beyond repair, she was repatriated to America through a fund-raising campaign and the generosity of the Cape Verdean government. From 1983 to 2004 she sailed out of New Bedford, educating thousands of schoolchildren on the wonders of their ocean environment. Saved again in 2014 by funding from the Massachusetts state government and generous philanthropists, she is now undergoing complete restoration. Thereafter, this Phoenix of the Seas will again spread her white wings over the waves.