THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, November 10, 1995 TAG: 9511090109
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 25 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Olde Towne Journal
SOURCE: Alan Flanders
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to find anyone visiting the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum who doesn't come away impressed at Portsmouth's claim to naval history.
The oldest federal shipyard, the construction site of one of the nation's original six frigates, the 1801 USS Chesapeake; the nation's first U.S. Naval Hospital, America's earliest stone drydock, the birthplace of the ironclad, and the Navy's first battleship, destroyer and aircraft carrier are indeed an imposing list of historic boasts that are backed up by official historical records. And it's a list that most marketing agents all the way to Boston would be proud to have as a tourist draw.
Now, thanks to a recent out-of-town query, Portsmouth may very well have another national claim to nautical history as the site from which the clipper ship was first originated.
It's routine for Alice Hanes to field historical questions from around the area, but the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum curator admits she gets particular pleasure working the more difficult ones. Recently she received one from a man doing research on naval architect John Willis Griffiths.
``I get quite a few calls from people across the United States looking for an ancestor who they think might have worked in the shipyard,'' said Hanes. ``When I started researching on the query about Griffiths, he was quite a mystery.''
But he wasn't a mystery for long, as Hanes kept on the case.
``Finally, of all places, I found a two-page biographical sketch in the Dictionary of American Biography,'' she said. ``I was delighted to find that he was assigned to the shipyard here as a naval constructor and made quite a name for himself in ship design.''
Indeed, native New Yorker John W. Griffiths did make a name for himself. The dictionary records that he first learned shipbuilding in the early 1800s under his father who was a shipwright.
According to the Dictionary of American Biography, ``His special talents soon made him a draftsman; he served for a while, apparently, at the Portsmouth, Va., Navy Yard. . . .He first attracted attention in 1836 by a series of original articles on naval architecture in the Portsmouth Advocate, and five years later, exhibited at the American Institute in New York the model of a clipper ship embodying some of his novel theories. . . .Though the Ann McKim, built at Baltimore in 1832, is often called the pioneer clipper, Griffiths is credited with designing the first `extreme clipper ship,' the Rainbow, 750 tons, launched in 1845 for the China trade.''
Another notable general reference, Peter Kemp's The Oxford Companion To Ships and The Sea, gives credit to Griffiths as well stating, ``As early as 1832 an enlarged Baltimore clipper, the Ann McKim, had been given square rig; but the first true clipper ship is generally held to have been the Rainbow built in 1834 at New York.''
Alexander Laing's authoritative text on marine design, entitled appropriately American Ships, assigns Griffiths a seven-page section in a chapter called ``The Origins of the Clippers.'' Laing concentrated more on the scientific principles of draftsmanship and design that Griffiths became most notable for, recognizing Griffiths as having ``established naval architecture in the United States as a profession based in theoretical hydrostatics.''
Laing went on to give Griffiths credit for the more radically designed clipper noting, ``He argued not merely for sharp, hollow water lines forward but for carrying them upward with an outward flare to join a concave stem or cutwater. This was the clipper bow - about as much an innovation as can be claimed or any shape in the gradual evolution of shipping.''
Building ships for speed to California after the Gold Rush, Griffiths made further alterations to his clippers for more efficient, and above all faster, passages to China to bring back their cargoes of cherished and easily perishable teas.
Even though Griffiths' prototype Rainbow vanished on her fifth run to China, his Sea Witch was launched on Dec. 8, 1846. According to Laing, her records are still something to admire to this day.
``She made the best time ever, over segments of the ocean chosen by contemporary merchant-sportsmen for race courses: on the voyage ending March 25, 1849,'' he wrote, ``she circled the world in 194 sailing days, having made the fastest direct passages from New York to Valparaiso, from Callao to China, and from China to New York. The last of these in 74 days 14 hours was the world's first permanent sailing record.''
Among marine historians, Griffiths' Sea Witch is held in as high esteem as Rainbow. In her, Griffiths must have poured all of his genius.
The foremost clipper historian, Carl C. Cutler in his Greyhounds of the Sea, wrote, ``Before her brief life had ended, the Sea Witch had broken more records than a ship of her inches had ever broken . . . She was the first vessel to go around the Horn to California in less than one hundred days. Twice she broke the record for speed from Canton to the United States, and neither of these passages has ever been equalled by any ship under sail.''
In addition to ship design, Griffiths, in partnership with William W. Bates, revealed some considerable literary talents as co-founder and co-editor of the prestigious United States Nautical Magazine and Naval Journal in 1854. An interesting association of friendships began to grow within the pages of the journal and in real life about this time between Samuel Pook, a former chief constructor at Gosport, and his younger apprentice, John L. Porter, who were frequent contributors to the publication.
The legacy of Griffiths' work has stood the test of time as names like the great racing yacht America, Flying Cloud and Cutty Sark were built upon the heritage of John Willis Griffiths' Rainbow and Sea Witch.
Portsmouth has a strong case to claim itself as the site from which Griffiths first launched his theories into print, from which the era of the clipper ships was derived.
We can all be thankful that what looks to be another ``first'' for Portsmouth to claim won't be a last for curator Alice Hanes. Like she says, ``I get questions every day, and I follow them up until I get a good answer!'' ILLUSTRATION: The Sea Witch, above, built by naval architect John Willis
Griffiths, at left, was launched Dec. 8, 1846, after the Rainbow,
his prototype, disappeared on its fifth trip to China.
by CNB