The Lettie G. Howard

From ferries this week, we move on to sailing ships. The Lettie G. Howard is currently a New Yorker, owned by Manhattan’s South Street Seaport Museum, but she is a New Englander by birth, built in 1893 in Essex, Massachusetts. Here she is shown berthed in Salem, Mass.

A wooden schooner, this kind of vessel was used by American fishermen, and the Lettie G. Howard worked first out of Gloucester, and later was put to work for many years in the waters off the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. She came to the South Street Seaport Museum in 1968, and began restoration in 1991 as a training and museum ship. Declared a National Historical Landmark in 1989, you can find her sailing along our New England coast.


The Museum offers courses in sailing, navigation and seamanship alongside a professional crew. For more on the details of this beautiful schooner and the programs offered by the South Street Seaport Museum, have a look at this website.

Sea Gods, Fishermen, and Whalemen

Continuing with our look at a couple of statues this week, above is a statue from New Bedford’s Tonnessa Park, on the “Dock Walk”. We move from an historical figure to a representation of a mythical one. The 10-foot sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington was described as a mythical sea god when she offered the statue to the city in 1962. Neptune isn’t mentioned in the description, but if it’s not of Neptune, perhaps he had brothers.

The mighty myth, whoever he is, holds a cod in his left hand, and a sturgeon in his right, with a collection of marine life at his feet. More than a fanciful work of art, it is a memorial, according to the sculptress, of “those seamen whose only graves are on the ocean floor.”

Standing before a working harbor, the “Memorial to Whalemen and Fishermen” is a reminder that a life, or a job, at sea carries great risk. It also reminds us that those who are lost are not forgotten.

Chatham Commercial Fishing

Above is a photo of what goes on at the Chatham, Massachusetts wharf on an average day. The commercial fishing boats come in, unload their catch, and seagulls swarm over the treasure.

Chatham and Provincetown are the two towns on the Cape in which commercial fishing remains as an important local industry. These days the fishermen have to seek their catch farther and farther out to sea.


Here is a link to a site for more interesting information on the history of Chatham commercial fishing and a way of life that is not just a part of some colorful past, but as important now as ever.