Today, fully restored and rigged in the traditional manner -- no turnbuckles on her shrounds, only lignum vitae deadeyes and rope lanyards to tension the rigging -- ELISSA is a living, working sailing ship.
It is said of ELISSA that she has "the world's longest wake." This is not a term bestowed lightly. She was in fact actively trading (albeit under modified, reduced, and eventually absent rigs) -- from 1877 into the late 1960s, when her crew of Adriatic Sea cigarette smugglers finally left her to await the torch at a Greek scrapyard -- and from 1982 into the 21st century, once again with the wind in her sails, a "bone in her teeth," and the sun gleaming off her lovingly-tended brightwork and brass.
Her volunteer sailing crew of "tinkers and tailors, shoemakers and all," in the words of one old sea shanty, spend the winter weekends studying ELISSA's anatomy and rig, along with the skills and the language peculiar to handling a vintage square-rigger, preserving not only the artifact, but the art, of a bygone and romantic era.
And in the freshening winds of a Texas Coast spring, each year, they free her from her moorings for a week of sea trials on the Gulf of Mexico. For ELISSA, it is a chance to spread her canvas wings and let her jibboom once again chase that ever-elusive horizon; for her crew, it is a backbreaking labor of love, sweating and straining at halyards, capstans and the anchor windlass as did their predecessors in the century before last.
As Galveston Island's sailing goodwill ambassador, ELISSA also makes longer passages as time and finances permit -- where, as befits any lovely Texas lady, she is inevitably the "belle of the ball." Fleets of yachts and motorcraft greet her whenever she enters a new harbor; her arrival at the dock is attended by great crowds, brass bands, and banks of TV and newspaper cameras.
When she traveled to New York Harbor for the 1986 centennial salute to the Statue of Liberty, ELISSA turned heads even amid that grand gathering of the world's square-riggers. Not only were her beauty and the outstanding success of her restoration hailed, but it was also pointed out that she was the only member of that august flotilla to have visited New York Harbor before Miss Liberty herself had been erected.
ELISSA is homeported at the Texas Seaport Museum, Pier 21, Galveston, Texas. For more information about TSM's programs and ELISSA, stop by the museum or call (409) 763-1877, or visit the museum website at http://www.tsm-elissa.org/
Elissa and her image are copyrighted by the Texas Seaport Museum.
