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Sailing Ship Elissa by Patricia Bellis Bixel Jim Cruz, Photography Editor |
For more than a hundred years the four-hundred-ton barque Elissa worked the world's waters, first as a sailing ship and then as a motor vessel. Built in 1877 when steam vessels were beginning to overtake large sailing ships as prime cargo carriers, Elissa survived for more than a century on the strength of her hull and on the economic niche that ships of her size could fill.
Stripped of her three masts and her sails, heavily modified, and in line for the salvage yard, Elissa was discovered in the 1960s in Piraeus, Greece. Coincidentally, the Galveston Historical Foundation began looking for a ship to restore as a working example of the heyday of sail along the Texas coast.
In Sailing Ship Elissa, Patricia Bellis Bixel provides a complete history of the ship: her building and launching in Aberdeen, Scotland; her prime years of sailing under British, Norwegian, and Swedish flags; her decline as a Greek smuggler; and her eventual restoration as a tall ship for Texas. Included also is a view of the life of staff and crew on board the ship during a sailing season today.
Photographs by Jim Cruz and others wonderfully illustrate Elissa's history and bring to life the difficulties of restoration, the labors of her crew, and the grace and beauty of a sailing ship whether docked or underway.
Today, Elissa is an ambassador for Galveston and Texas whether moored at her home berth at the Texas Seaport Museum, making short training sails into the Gulf of Mexico, participating in parades of tall ships, or calling in Charleston, Annapolis, or New Orleans. With professional officers and a mostly volunteer crew, Elissa provides a means of understanding the life of a nineteenth-century sailor, a rigorous world in which conditions could be miserable but discipline, routine, and community had their own rewards.
PATRICIA BELLIS BIXEL has been an Elissa volunteer since 1983 and served as director of the Elissa from 1988 to 1990. She received her Ph.D. in history from Rice University in May, 1997, and is currently assistant editor of the Journal of Southern History. JIM CRUZ, a freelance professional photographer, has been a member of the Elissa's crew since 1989.
Number Seventy-six: The Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University
Sailing Ship Elissa
ISBN 0-89096-826-8 cloth $22.95
8 1/2x11. 144 pp.
64 b&w photos. 3 line drawings. App. Bib. Index.
Maritime History. Texana. Photography.
Publication Date: October 1998.
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