"Elissa, Spread Your Wings ..."

The Galveston Daily News

Oct. 8. 1985

By MAX RIZLEY, JR.

One wonders what the crewmembers on the grimy steamships anchored off Galveston must think as you sail past them, knifing through the green swells under a white cloud of bellying canvas, a ghost from a century ago.

You can't quite make out the figure on the bridge wing of the Panamanian bulker, but you imagine he is rubbing his eyes, then crossing himself and calling to the rest of the watch to come quickly, come quickly, see the phantom ship!

It's the stuff of which sea legends are made.

Maybe when he finally comes in to take on a load of grain, he'll pick up a paper and find out that what he saw was very real, that it was Galveston's 1877 iron barque Elissa, out on one of her annual day sails.

Or, maybe he won't, and he'll spend the rest of his life telling skeptical buddies at his home tavern about the ghost ship that sails the Gulf, eternally looking for a final port of call.

Elissa on the open sea is the embodiment of grace. Leave it to the brute steamships and tugboats to slam through the waves like a bull crashing a hedge. The lady picks up her skirts and rides each swell up, up, up, sits poised on the crest for just a moment, then glides down into the trough -- a gentle motion, but still insistent enough to worry a delicate stomach.

Her course is the result of a deal between man and nature. Nature provides a wind, at a direction of her discretion; man maneuvers Elissa's 19 sails to use that wind to his advantage. Orders fly as her captain, C.G. Bowman of San Diego's wooden-hulled Star of India, takes Elissa eastward out of the channel, then south along the coast against a brisk northeast breeze.

"Set the main t'gallant staysail ... Haul away!" is the call, and the line creaks through big wooden blocks as the volunteer crewmembers bend to the task. The stout canvas sail flutters fitfully as it seeks the wind, then finds it and billows taut. "Slack off, slack off ...Okay, make fast!"

There is no sound except the thrumming of the wind in the lines and the hiss of the sea as the sleek, sharp bow slices through the whitecaps.

It is a scene straight out of Moby Dick, peopled by lawyers, accountants and secretaries who give their weekends over to learning backstays, buntlines and braces for this one special day.

EIissa's helmsman -- only yesterday an orthopedic surgeon -- wrestles the great wooden wheel, one eye on the invisible road ahead, the other on the compass. High overhead, a department-store clerk with a knife in her belt and a safety rope around her waist shinnies out onto a yard to shake out a sail. On the poop deck, a high-school student is among a quartet urging an upper tops'l into position.

Time was, tall ships like Elissa were common in the world's ports. But then, man learned that with steam and diesel he could master the elements instead of bargain with them, and the graceful sailing ships disappeared. Now, when Elissa takes wing and dances among the oil rigs and shrimp boats off Galveston, it is an event to be photographed, and written up, and sung about:

"Elissa, spread your wings again
And point your bow across the far horizon.
Again you'll feel the thunder of the wind
Upon your rigging and your spars.
And once again the sea shall know
The queenliness and grace that mark your passage.
Elissa, spread your wings again
And show the world the wonder that your are."

"Elissa, Spread Your Wings"
By Ken Graydon

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