Mystic was a leading seaport on the Mystic river which flows into Long Island sound providing access to the sea, although it was settled in the 1640s it wasn’t until the 18th century that the manufacturing and maritime trades really took off. The main attraction of the town is now the Mystic Sea Port which was opened in 1929 and is one of the nations leading maritime museums, we had brought our tickets from tourist information yesterday so after breakfast we walked down to the Sea Port, this is actually a really large museum and they have a few square riggers in port that had previously been used for Whaling. Unfortunately the tail end of Hurricane Jose is making its way up the east coast so it was really windy, although luckily the rain mostly stayed away. The Whale boat Charles W Morgan had a demonstration of how they raised the sails on a square rigger so we decided to go and watch this. Unfortunately because of the wind although two hardy soles climbed up the rigging, they were not able to unfurl the sales as it would probably have caused the boat to crash into the dock! We talked to the crew for a while and found out that it was launched on July 21st 181 and made 37 voyages. It Whaled for 80 years and for 50 of those years it was managed by J & W R Wing and Co earning them $1,400,000! As a way to raise funds for her continued restoration and maintenance the chairman of the charity came up with the idea of actually sailing her round part of New England, this did the trick and they received enough money to carry out the maintenance and she set sail on her 38th voyage on 17th May 2014, during this time she visited 8 ports and returned to Mystic on 6th August 2014, the person we spoke to had actually been part of that cruise and we were surprised to learn that her top speed was only about 9 knots! We spent about half an hour walking round the boat and talking to the crew then went back to our tour of the other buildings. They have everything that you would need to fit out a ship for a long voyage, a sail / rigging loft where sails and rigging where made, a hoop shop (to make the hoops for the mast) and a ropewalk where they made the rope which was probably the longest building I have seen, we decided it could probably make 250 feet of rope in one length. One of the things I hadn’t realised is that on the whaling ships, they didn’t actually load the barrels and fill them once they caught a whale, they effectively took barrel ‘kits’ that the cooper had made and assembled them as required, talking to the cooper he said that a good cooper could make two barrels a day whereas a cooper on board ship would be able to assemble somewhere between eight and ten a day as required. They had a much more modern ship the Joseph Conrad which was actually an iron Dutch ship built in 1882 and was used to train Dutch naval cadets, it could house 80 boys at a time and by the time it was sold in 1934 more than 4000 boys had completed their six months training on her. One small blip in her history was that she was struck by a British freighter in 1905 and sank killing 22 cadets, but she was repaired and continued the training around the Baltic. She was privately owned for a while then purchased by the American navy in 1945 and made a national treasure and moved to Mystic in 1947. The final area is where they are restoring the Mayflower II this is the replica that was built in the 1950’s and looks to be in a very bad way! They are planning to have the work completed in 30 months (it started in 2016) so that it can be used in the 400 anniversary celebrations of the Pilgrim fathers landing in America, I am not sure that it is going to be finished but I am sure they know what they are doing. Although they are using modern tools, they do seem to be doing a lot of the work by hand so hopefully it will be a fairly faithful restoration. It was almost 2pm by the time we had finished walking round so we decided to walk up to the town of Mystic, although it may have been a thriving community in the height of the fishing / whaling period to be honest without the aquarium and the sea port I am not sure there would be a village at all now, every shop is either a tourist shop or a cafe / restaurant, however this did mean that we didn’t have a problem finding somewhere for lunch. After lunch we had a bit more of a walk round the town then just after we had crossed over the bridge it was lifted, it would seem that they lift the bridge every hour at 40 minutes past if there are boats waiting to come through or not! By this time the wind had picked up quite a bit so we decided to head back to the hotel for a bit of a relax before setting off to our next town tomorrow when hopefully the storm will have blown through!
