Restoring America's Most Iconic 18th-Century Battleship to Its Former Glory

America was at the crossroads. Throughout the 60s, radical political ideas challenged the conservative order, and there was revolution. Riots exploded in the cities, troops were called out, and there was bloodshed. The 70s found the nation at war. Though the country seemed united against the enemy, dissension divided Americans one against the other, and many left the country rather than fight a war they considered immoral and unjust. Then in the 80s and 90s, America struggled to secure its position in a rapidly changing world. Acts of terrorism by Middle Eastern governments increasingly disrupted commerce and transport. Much of the American public felt that problems at home should be our national focus, and Washington was cautious about becoming involved in the new European alliances. But Washington was retiring after his second term as president, and the politics of the new Congress of 1798 were sharply divided on our nation's course. One of the deepest divisions was on the future of an American navy, and soon the cry would go up for free trade and sailors' rights. America has few symbols as enduring as old iron science. A technological marvel of her time, the USS Constitution gave our young republic its first victories at sea. Now restored to her original splendor by skilled craftspeople and children from all over America who contributed their pennies for her new sails, Constitution reaffirms America's dreams as her crew sails her into the 21st century. On July 21st, 1997, USS Constitution celebrated her 200th birthday by sailing for the first time in 116 years. Following in the footsteps of thousands who served on her, yet another generation of young sailors are learning leadership and the almost forgotten skills of sailing the great frigates of the past. After being on it for a while and stuff, you get to basically how to function, how they worked like a hundred years ago and stuff like that and see kind of get kind of the same feeling the same outlook what they had. What does she mean to me? She means life, liberty, and freedom. She means everything. This was the start of it all. This here is the United States right here. The Constitution. To me, it's the heart and soul of the Navy, and there's no other place I would rather start it than here. To me personally, I'm sitting on history. I mean, I've always been a real history buff and just sitting on the ship and just to feel the to feel the spirit that's in the ship every single day. Constitution, she's a symbol to a lot of people, and she's a different symbol to many different people around the world. The ship is named after a document that we still we still live by after 200 years. If that ship could talk, I'd just love to hear the stories you could tell. Treaty of Paris, 1783. The United States was a free and independent nation, so recognized by Great Britain and by the rest of the world. But if we had gained our independence, we had lost something as well. We had lost membership in the British Empire. We had lost the protection of the Royal Navy. The new United States had one of the largest merchant marines in the world, but it was a merchant marine undefended, exposed. American ships could now venture to all parts of the world if they so dared, but at great risk. For it was there in the Mediterranean that we encountered the Barbary Corsairs. In the summer of 1793, it grew to a crisis. Several vessels were seized in the Mediterranean. No longer could the issue be ignored. A movement was now underway in the Congress to build an American Navy. Joshua Humphreys, Philadelphia shipwright, ship designer, was engaged to design these vessels, and work was gotten underway. Humphreys had some ideas, and in the first week of January of 94, he wrote a letter to one of his politically powerful friends, Robert Morris. And in this letter, he set forth his philosophy that the ships be frigates, that they be longer than frigates than normally built, somewhat wider, heavily built, and heavily armed. So he essentially was saying what we need is a super frigate. And the real genius of Humphreys was that he managed to do it, and he came up with a unique structural feature that made it possible. And this basically is just referred to as the diagonal riders, but in fact, it involved a whole series of structures of which the diagonal riders were, you might say, the keystone. These great huge blocks of pre-stressed timber, three pair of them heading aft, three more heading forward, the rearmost forward one, the forward most rear one, meet each other down there by the keel, and they press against each other. The others are tenoned into the keelswim, that piece of wood above the keel. These diagonal riders transmit the weight from other structures up above down to these positions, and then through the riders themselves down there, where these guys here cancel out those guys back there. Here in the main hold, we can get a sense of the great sweep of these diagonal riders as they rise from the bilges up the ship's side until they end in a bird's beak cut, braced up against the deck beams of the deck above. I'm seated on a standard knee. Each of these knees you see here is above the upper end of one of those diagonal riders, and helps transmit the ship's weight down to it. Inboard of it, you can see this joggled seam in the deck. This represents the interlock of the thick planks. There are four lines of these running the entire length of the hull, and on the two outboard lines, there exists a series of stanchions running up to support the beams of the deck above, the gun deck, and above each of these stanchions is located one of the great guns on that deck. Here we see another version of a standard knee connecting one of the lines of thick planks to the bow of the ship. There is another such knee near the stern connecting it there. Through this means then we have four continuous structures banding the entire length of the ship. This horizontal member is one of the breast hooks in the ship, intended to unite the curving form of the bow into one solid piece. The sloping green area between the deck and the side of the ship is called spherketing. It too is made up of interlocking pieces that in their entirety provide a solid belt holding the shape of the ship throughout its circumference. We're now on the gun deck, the highest level in the ship involved in Joshua Humphrey's innovative structure. Again, we have four lines of interconnected thick plank running the entire length of the deck. We again have the spherketing interlocked forming a belt all around this level. The summation is we have this entire girder of strength designed by Joshua Humphreys to make this truly Old Ironside. After initial problems with her launch, Constitution was finally afloat in October of 1797. In 1798, she had her first assignment to protect our merchant vessels from French vessels in the new revolutionary France. By 1803, she was on her way to the Mediterranean under the command of Commodore Edward Preble. The Barbary states had again stepped up their seizure of American vessels and the appearance of Preble's squadron in the company of several other frigates quickly brought the Emperor of Morocco to sign a peace treaty. Meanwhile, the frigate Philadelphia, under command of William Bainbridge, one of Constitution's future captains, had been captured by Tripolitans and the crew held for ransom. After sizing up the situation at Tripoli, Preble sent Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and a number of volunteers on a nighttime raid to board and burn the Philadelphia in Tripoli's inner harbor. Following the success of this operation, Preble blockaded and attacked Tripoli. After much ferocious hand-to-hand combat, the Tripolitan fleet withdrew. After another attack and several bombardments of the city, the Bay of Tripoli severely modified his ransom demands for Philadelphia's crew and accepted a peace treaty. Constitution had passed her first test under fire. The wars of the French Revolution drew the world's two great superpowers into conflict, France versus Great Britain. The United States benefited from this war because as the British drove the French merchant marine from the seas, American ships came to take their place. At the same time, however, the British could not long tolerate the American merchant marine doing what the French had once done, and the British began to torment American commerce. One of the methods that the British tormented us with was something called impressment. This was a rough-and-ready form of selective service. The British would be likely to stop an American ship on the high seas. Then the British officer would ask the American seamen if any of them were British subjects. They might all deny it, but they could not prove that they were not British subjects, and so some of these men would find themselves recruited, impressed into the service of his majesty. It was an outrage to take American citizens in this fashion, but the British Navy, the most powerful in the world, and a navy much in need of men, kept up the practice nonetheless. Now the impressment of our seamen and the taking of our ships has been going on for many years. You refreshed my memory when you mentioned that. It just reached the breaking point. That's what it really was. The ironic thing about it was the British government had decided to back off, and the message was on the way across the Atlantic when we declared war. Oh really? Yes. We had faster communications. It wouldn't have happened. By about three weeks. Did you? Yes. Well, that's quite a long time and important in those days, wasn't it? What's the nickname of the ship, anybody? Old Ironsides. All right, does anybody know why it's Old Ironsides? About two o'clock in the afternoon on the 19th of August, about 600 miles due east of Boston, the lookout at the foremost sighted a sail on the larboard bow. By about 3 30, Hull knew it was a British frigate. The British ship fired a broadside. Hull watched to see where the shot landed and then steered in that direction to throw the British aim off. When he was coming up on the starboard quarter of Guerriere at a range of about half a pistol shot, they opened up with these double-shotted broadsides. It was a firestorm over there, and 20 minutes later the mizzen went by the board and rendered Guerriere unmanageable, unmaneuverable, and it made her swing in and she hit Constitution right here. And Hull just took up a position off her larboard bow and let go two full broadsides at her, and then when he saw he was getting no response he moved across her bow, and somebody goofed. They collided again. Both sides attempted to board, unsuccessful, and then they pulled apart, and as they pulled apart the whole shock of the affair brought the other two masts on Guerriere down. End of the row. They're shooting their cannonballs at us, bouncing right off the sides of the ship. The sailors on board exclaimed, Huzzah! Her side's made of iron. And we had our first victory, and psychologically it was a tremendous victory. In terms of combat, it was nothing. The loss of a single frigate to the massive Royal Navy, which had about a thousand ships to our 17 at this point, was like a flea bite on an elephant. But psychologically for us it was tremendous, and a very perceptive reporter for the London Times wrote upon hearing of the loss of Guerriere, it's not that in and of itself this is too significant, but the fact of it can set the tone of the war. And as we look back on it now, these many years later, it did. A little over six weeks after returning to Boston, Constitution sailed once more, this time under the command of William Bainbridge. Constitution and Hornet proceeded to the coast of Brazil, and on the 29th of December, some miles to the northeast of South Salvador, caught sight of two vessels. By afternoon's end, Constitution had defeated HMS Java in heavy fighting that left Bainbridge wounded and British Captain Lambert dying. Aside from setting the tone of the war, when news of the Java loss got to the Admiralty, the word went out, official orders, British frigates will not seek battle with American 44-gun frigates unless they're in squadron strength. Once again, both in terms of damage survived and in terms of fighting power, Joshua Humphrey's formula proved itself. When Bainbridge came back, he was transferred from command of Constitution so that somebody else could have a chance. And in June of 1813, Charles Stewart was ordered up from Norfolk to take command of the ship. About 180 miles northeast of Madera this one afternoon, the 20th of February 1815, about 1.30 in the afternoon, the lookout spies a contact well ahead in the haze on the A little while later, a second one is seen somewhat more to the right. The two British ships maneuver till they are together. We're a few minutes shy of sunset when Constitution ranges up on the starboard side of this little British column. Stewart orders one gun fired between them. That was his invitation to engage. In no time at all, both sides are flailing away with everything. Within 20 minutes, smoke has so engulfed the ships they can't see one another anymore. Stewart checks fire so he can see somebody to shoot at for sure. It's the rearmost of the two British ships that he sees first. And when he sees her, she seems to be trying to maneuver to cross him astern to rake him, to shoot down his length, which is deadly. Seeing this, Stewart orders a broadside into the cloud of smoke where the leading Brit ought to be. He looses his foresail. He looses his headsails so they're no longer drawing wind. He backs sails on his mainmast and he reverses his course. He backs his ship down. This surprises the after British ship, which finally finds itself not several hundred yards away, but almost right out of the muzzle of Constantine's gun, and she gets full treatment. In very short order, this British ship is a wreck. The masts are tottering and she stumbles off upwind and goes dead in the water. Stewart, seeing what's happened to this enemy, then looks ahead to his other one. Stewart claps on his sails to regain forward motion. Wears short to cut under the stern of this forward enemy, unleashes two double broadsides into his stern at very short range, and he continues around until he's once again heading for the first one, who appears to be trying to come back into the fight. The sun has now set. Stewart pulls up on the larboard quarter and is ready to unleash all hell again when that enemy surrenders. Stewart takes possession of his majesty's white frigate Siamese, which takes about an hour. He then gets underway again and goes to look for the other one. He'd hardly been underway 15 minutes when they caught sight of the other enemy coming toward him. And in short order, these foe passed one another on parallel courses going in opposite directions, and each unleashed a broadside at the other. But the big difference was, even as they were passing, Stewart put his rudder over and cut short under the enemy once again and raked him from the rear. The enemy staggered, changed course to run with the wind, and tried to get away. As Constitution drew into the enemy's wake, Stewart moved his forward-most 24-pounders around, so they fired through the two bridle ports dead ahead. And as he closed gradually in on the enemy, he was chewing it to bits from the stern forward. And finally, about 10 o'clock that night, the enemy turned, dropped his sail, and quit. Here's his philosophy. Builder bigger, heavier, stronger, faster. Did it work? Well, she fought three major battles in the War of 1812 and she got chased three times. She went on the battles and never got caught. I think Joshua Humphreys did pretty well. As a matter of fact, he did so well that this basic design became the standard for frigates around the world for as long as there were sailing warships. She's a good boat. Constitution's frontline career ended at the time that our country was first coming into its own as a political power. During the following years, she played a role in that political landscape by acting as a kind of vessel of U.S. diplomacy. Again and again, she came back into the public imagination as a symbol of our heritage and of our growing world influence. She also held sway in the imaginations of painters and writers during the first half of the 19th century. Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem, Old Ironsides, has been learned by generations of American schoolchildren. I tear her tattered ensign down, long as it waved on high, and many an eye has danced to see that banner in the sky. Beneath it rung a battle shout and burst the cannon's roar. The meteor of the ocean air shall sweep the clouds no more. Her deck, once red with hero's blood, when knelt the vanquished foe, when winds were hurrying o'er the flood and waves were white below, no more shall feel the victor's tread or know the conquered knee. The harpies of the shore shall pluck the eagle of the sea. Oh, better that her shattered hulk should sink beneath the wave. Her thunders shook the mighty deep, and there should be her grave. Nail to the mast her holy flag, set every threadbare sail, and give her to the gods of storms, the lightning, and the gale. In the spring of 1853, as Constitution was heading toward the west coast of Africa on her last mission as a warship to help curb the slave trade, James Fenimore Cooper wrote in Putnam's Monthly, it is seldom indeed that men have ever come to respect a mere machine, as this vessel is loved and respected. And we hope the day may be far distant when this noble frigate will cease to occupy her place on the list of the Marine of the Republic. It's getting to be an honor of itself to have commanded her, and a long catalog of names belonging to gallant and skillful seamen has already been gathered into the record of the past that claim this enviable distinction. Neither disaster nor disgrace ever befell any man who filled this honorable station. After a major rebuild in 1858, Constitution became a training ship for Annapolis naval cadets, and aside from a somewhat dubious rebuild in 1873-76, her fortune sagged, as did her hull, until in 1881 she ceased her sailing career altogether. By 1883, she'd been fitted with a housing structure as a receiving ship at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1927, a more complete reconstruction began under the supervision of Lieutenant John Abel Lord. Although much of this restoration was based upon the 1850s historical configuration of Constitution, the thoroughness of it prepared her for four years of touring the country under tow by tugs. Sailing out of Boston in 1931, through the Panama Canal and up the West Coast, she visited 92 ports. Greeted everywhere by throngs of visitors, she once more showed her symbolic power to lift American spirits which had fallen during the depths of the Great Depression. After her great tour, she became a permanent museum in the Charlestown Naval Yard. A major restoration in the 70s set the policy of returning her to her 1812 condition in all future restorations. Although she was towed out into the harbor each year, her sailing days now seemed only history. Then in 1992 began a new restoration that would realize both the heritage of USS Constitution and her role as one of the great sailing vessels of all time. It started with the decision to achieve historical accuracy by embracing change. The biggest problem I had was dawn term. The attitude that was always taken to the shipyard is that the restoration was correct. If we replaced something, we picked up a template of the unit we were replacing and put it back exactly as it was. So I had trouble getting over that. I didn't want to see change take place. I didn't think change was proper and where I could fight it, I fought it. It wasn't until we got the president's plan from England and we did a lot of research on Joshua Humphrey papers and I looked into them a little deeper that I began to realize that most of the stuff in that made a lot of sense and there were a lot of small things done on the ship that had reduced the overall strength of the ship. There was no real sense in thinking of strengthening the ship until we could get it straightened out and my supervisor, Charlie Dean, was the first one probably to mention sand blocks to me. So the ship sat on sand which enabled us to auger the sand out, relieve the pressure at that particular keel block, repack the keel block, recut it and settle the ship repeatedly by doing that up and down the keel line length eighth of an inch at a time. Since she's a fighter, you don't want to lose a third or better of the ship's length by not putting cannon there. So we have cannon all the way to the bow and the stern. With these great weights out here and here, what happens? You tend to droop. Yeah, hogging is the technical term. You tend to droop. How do you upset that? That's what the designer of this ship, Joshua Humphreys, came up with. Something nobody had ever done before and you're looking at them here behind me. Yes, sir. The diagonal riders. Ships were being built. Reports are being given to Congress. The keel has been laid. The hull is being planked. The diagonal riders are installed. The breast hooks are installed. The masts are being made. The boats are finished and ready for sales. It's one thing to say there were diagonal riders, another to say what are they? The second question was also would they be effective in addressing the problems with within the ship? DTRC, David Taylor Research Center, which is the engineering branch of the Navy, was asked to do model testing of the effectiveness of diagonal riders within Constitution. They began by running computer simulations of two-dimensional analysis and came back to us and said there's no effectiveness in the addition of diagonal riders within the hull. We did what Humphreys would have done and that is we actually scale modeled Constitution, modeled the diagonal riders in the 1 to 16 scale model of the ship and showed a 10% increase in stiffness with the diagonal riders installed within the hull. DTRC was invited to come up and observe our testing and results. They signed off on it and said, yeah, you guys are doing it right and with that information, Charlie redefined our objective to go beyond simple repair of the ship and extend the overhaul to a true restoration in which the structural components within the hull, the diagonal riders, the strakes, standard knees, midship knees, and stanchions were to be installed this time rather than waiting until the next overhaul scheduled for 2010 or 2015. We actually physically modeled, built a box template of the exact dimension of the diagonal rider to be installed. Those were removed one at a time. The offsets generated and simply a table of offsets packed to the laminator and nine months later the glued laminate diagonal rider arrived on site. Throughout the restoration, divers periodically checked Constitution to see how well the diagonal riders had corrected her hogging problem. Measured along a wire run from stem to stern, she had started with a maximum adjusted hog of almost 14 inches in 1992. This is 22. I've got 18 and 38. The figure was less than one-third that by 1995 after installation of the diagonal riders. It was still holding well just before her sailing in 1997. Constitution's restoration continued to reveal the innovations that had made her such a remarkable ship. Coppering of her hull had protected her from sea worms and reduced maintenance. Masts consisted of four pieces of wood banded together, assured that they would not easily be broken by cannonballs. The modern innovation of new DuPont fiber will lengthen the life of her sails, yet these same sails were crafted in the traditional manner. See right here, keep that, keep the whipping in the middle of the grommet, pull them apart and they have to be seized like our fruit eating. Built with money collected from school children by the Ironside's pennies campaign, these sails were the beginning of the plan to sail Constitution for her 200th anniversary. You just don't take her out to sea unknowingly. The ship is pretty well thoroughly surveyed. Engineers have been throughout the ship studying all aspects of her materials and rig and sails, masts, hull, so she's pretty well understood. There aren't any unknowns. Engineers have placed markers. You can see the little brass strip here with a reference line. You're watching how the transom structure moves in relation to the frames. The little brass strip is measured up against a reference line which they've made earlier so that they can track how this crack is opening or closing as the ship moves. There are all ways to look at the Constitution. It's a national treasure. There's only one. You want to be very, very careful with what you do and I certainly wouldn't want to proceed without having all that data in hand, having that thoroughly analyzed so we understand exactly what we would be doing in the Constitution. We built a 125th scale model so that we would match up with the capabilities of the tank at the U.S. Naval Academy. We just modeled the elements that we needed to get the drag forces on the ship and see how it would respond to wind and wave. In the video clip, you see the model at 23 knots of wind. The model is heeling 8 to 10 degrees. The wind, as in any sailboat, totally dominates the ship motion. When you added the waves on top of the wind, you get very little increase. There is a swell element in Massachusetts Bay that comes in at about 10 seconds and when that swell occurs, it's at the natural roll period of Constitution and it would set the ship to rolling 24 degrees, 12 degrees port and starboard. But with this information, we were able to change the towing scheme, put the ship on a hawser as soon as we get out to where we would possibly encounter that type of swell so we were sure we didn't endanger the tug or the ship itself. Yeah, so much has been written about Constitution in terms of her battle, her histories, and the personalities and the captains and the crew, neglecting the fact that it's the original engineering design of the ship, solving the design criteria, fast speed under sail and carrying heavy armament that is really the reason why Constitution was successful. The end state was not to sail Constitution, it was to restore Constitution. Charlie Deans was the mastermind, of course, of the restoration of the ship and I think he must have been thinking that somebody's going to want to sail this ship because if you look at the way he restored the ship, he put it in pristine condition but he left no screw unturned, he left no knot improperly tied so that when we made the decision, let's sail, there was nothing else we had to do material readiness-wise to the ship. It was ready to sail. All we needed was sails and a crew who were trained to sail it. Here in Constitution, we have a very strong vision and picture of the future. Our mission, representing the values and ideals of not only the Naval Service but the nation, is a compelling vision to these young people. It's an important vision and sailing the ship into the 21st century is an important vision. I have my personal belief of why the ship should sail but every one of them needs to be able to answer the question. The bounty was so valuable to us, you know, all the terms that you've heard, now you can see it come to life. That's what happened with us when we do all the training here. We got on bounty and it just came to life. Constitution's crew learned square-rigged sailing aboard HMS Bounty, a 169-foot replica of Captain Bly's famous ship. Built for the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, she was preserved by MGM Studios at the insistence of the movie's lead, Marlon Brando. Now she's run by the Bounty Foundation, whose experienced crew teaches square-rigged sailing on the East Coast. The course, once again you're going lower to higher. The course, cruise, bunch of leeches for the topsoil. Cruise, bunch of leeches for the topsoil. You got it. This here's the plume. Okay, the inner sheet, the corner sheet is. This is what pulls it up. Pulls the corners up. Into the corners, into the center. Then you bunch the leeches. You got an inner, outer, and a leech. The leech is the outer edge of the sail, right? That's where this is, on the outer edge. So it pulls it in even further. Then you have the inner bunch. You know how the, uh, a curtain goes up in a movie theater? Right. Well, the inner takes the inner up, and then the outer takes the outer up. So it makes it like a nice little curtain. Forward top. Make your lines ready and switch. Back to where you were at. Cruise, bunch, leeches, sheets. Jump in it. Ready? Work together. Everybody, forward, down, and in. Ready? Hands up. Hands up. Forward, back, and in. There you go. Make that line off. Release your lines. You're going to have somebody hand-tend the cruise. No. Hand-tend them lines. Take them off the fins. When you're ready, stand by. Give me the report. I want to know. And then we'll be standing by for a parade wear in just a few seconds because we're going into these boats over here. When we go to wear a ship, we will always be what we call bracing to the wind, okay? What that means, you see where the flag is right now? The wind's coming from right here. When you put those yards directly into the wind, that sail is going to flutter. That's what we want. It's the same thing as striking. You're taking the drive out. As the ship is moving, the wind direction is going to move too. You know, understand what I'm saying? So what I want you to do is always keep that sail fluttering. If the sail starts filling forward, you've got to pull a little more. You understand what I'm saying? If the sail starts backwinding and the yard's gone past the wind, it's starting to fill, stop. You want to keep those sails fluttering. Just keep them fluttering, okay? Parade wear! Uphill. In the right direction, then you check it. But right, if you'd have checked it before, you'd have been headed towards these docks here. The ship's too big to do that. Then you can take one turn off. See what the wind's doing to you first. You're being backwinded. So now, all right, three more strokes to the right. Just watch what the wind's doing to you. That's all. All right, all right. We want all the yards to move with the main course. That's this lower yard on this main mast. All the yards should be lined up with this yard. If it don't move, you don't move. If it moves, you move. See how beautiful it is? You don't even need no yellow. Look at that. See that? That's what you want. It's a beautiful thing. All you're doing is tending. Because what happens, when they lower the yard, your braces is here. It's like this now, okay? On your braces. When they lower the yard, you're going to start pulling on those braces. So you want to slack the braces on, okay? But you want to keep control of it. You don't want the yards swinging around. Okay? Got it? What's up, sir? Ready? Take off pins. We're going to bring the stern around through the wind, and then we're going to strike all the sails. We're then going to brace all yards, square to the ship, and they send kids along to put in a harbor pearl, a nice pretty pearl, and we'll drive the ship to the pier. Brace all yards, square to the ship, slack port, all starboard. Guys, I'll be watching you're being timed. That's well. I feel very comfortable and very confident in what I'm doing now, and I feel that I can seal Constitution and the Fordmaster in the jibs with the utmost confidence. Really, what we had to work on is just getting acclimated to being real, you know, sailors as in rigging, squares, you know, the language, all these things. I mean, that's what you have to actually, that's where we had to pick up and learn, and we have to go beyond. You know, we have to actually put a lot of history and a lot of different things in our head that, you know, you're not going to find except maybe in a history class. The Constitution sailors are really good at their jobs, not just on board the ship, but also in their offices, and these are dedicated crew members who have squared away uniforms, and they don't cut corners. When you see the people out there on the ship, basically, you're looking at sailors who are learning to sail the ship, yet after they're done with their learning, they come back into their offices and continue to run the command. Sometimes your whole day is filled with sailor training. Sometimes you come in here and you won't get a chance to do anything because you have to go back out into the ship. I was kind of blown away when I first came here. I have four boys, and my oldest son said to me, Daddy, what does this ship have to do with me? And unfortunately, I couldn't answer him, and I found that our Black brothers were on ships throughout New England, throughout the world, really. So I think we really need to rethink our history in that aspect. David Devious was a Black boy born in Boston, and he joined the Navy in 1813 and became a crew member in Constitution, fought in her final battle against the Siamese Levant in early 1815, and then when the ship came back to Boston and became inactive, he left the service. When she was reactivated for service in the Mediterranean between 1821 and 1824, David was back aboard again. In New England, Black men were seven times more likely than white men to go to sea because of their lack of property, their limited opportunity for employment. So, you know, the sea offered them a chance to advance. As a matter of fact, this was probably the only place where a Black man could actually advance to a level to where he would make more money than his white counterpart. So I found that to be very interesting, and I could see where we would run off to sea. I certainly would if I got better treatment. I feel like this is probably one of the best spots I could be to begin with, and then I feel like this is a spot that my mother would be happy for where I was at. Right now, we're about, say, anywhere between a 90 to a 95 percent ready to sail the ship. The day of the sail, we should be about 100, 110. Everyone's kind of getting a little butterflies now because of the sail, but we've worked very hard over the past couple months, and this Sunday it's going to pay off. We did sea trials on Tuesday the 8th. It almost brought a tear to my eye to see a 200-year-old ship still want to go and go and just wanted to let loose from the tug lines, but I guess she'll get her chance on Monday. I have no words for it. I can't fathom my feelings because they're so built up right now. I'm just psyched and I'm ready for the weekend. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that's fitting together, and I think we're ready for showtime and show our stuff. So so Well, it's one of great pride in the U.S. Navy and in its history. The history of our country is expressed by the U.S. Navy, and to be aboard this vessel, which of course was the living proof of the bravery and the courage of our pioneers in taking out to sea and beyond our own borders our ideas of liberty and independence. If it hadn't been for old Ironsides and our first victories at sea, we wouldn't have established that principle for a long time to come, perhaps. So we're here enjoying some living history with this wonderful relic of our past. I think it it'll help people appreciate manpower a little bit more nowadays because we're like in a technological age right now and everything's being run by computers, and now this would be a best, you know, the best kind of shot to show the world that manpower still, you know, is good for the world today. It's important that we keep the history alive, and this is live history. Reading something in a book is one thing, but seeing it happen full dimension is another thing. It's quite exciting. I think this is probably my 15 minutes of fame, and you know if I had to choose being a movie star or doing this, I'd probably be doing this because this would mean a lot more than being in a movie, but being able to be a part of history.