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In
the late winter of 1997, I was traveling through Essex, Massachusetts,
for some reason or other, when I remembered that the marine surveyor
Paul Haley had told me of a schooner being built there. He said
that the builder, a 29-year-old descendant of a whole slew of Essex
shipbuilders, was probably reincarnated – a latter-day version
of a long-dead shipwright. Paul meant it, because there was absolutely
no way, he said, that a man of this age and experience could lay
the keel of a heavy sawn-frame vessel the day before Christmas,
build it outside with no roof and no prior experience on such a
job, keep it running on a six-month schedule, and do a good job
of it to boot. Yet here was Harold Burnham doing just that.
Being in that area and recalling Paul’s comments, I found my
way to the job site and the archetypal Essex image: a schooner perched
on the building ways, her husky frames reaching for the sky. Such
a thing had not been seen in Essex for 50 years. At 65’, this
new boat, to be called the THOMAS E. LANNON, was a half-size version
of the archetype, but the boat was all business nonetheless: heavy
sawn oak frames, locust trunnel fastenings, oak bottom planking.
Harold Burnham was there, and we talked briefly, but I recall only
clips. "I’ve got to get a line on the boat before lunch…,"
he told me, and he moved on in a very controlled, hurried manner,
eyeing a line of topside planking. He didn’t stop once, as
he was only steps ahead of a man with an adze who was waiting to
dub where Harold marked the frames. There was, clearly, no time
to talk that day.
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The
LANNON on charter, late summer 1997 |
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made a note to return. Then winter turned to spring, spring became
summer, and other projects intervened. In July, I made another unplanned
swing through Essex and met Tom Ellis, whose newly launched schooner,
the THOMAS E. LANNON, had, in short time, become a raging success
with his charter guests. Later I visited the boat, which was docked
at neighboring Gloucester. Nobody was aboard, but it was clear from
even a cursory inspection that her young builder was wise beyond his
years. I really must, I thought, go have a talk with Harold.
Rewind. In the middle 1600s, a man named Burnham launched a boat
into the salt marsh that connects Chebacco Parish, Ipswich, Massachusetts,
to the Atlantic Ocean. No one knows for sure what kind of boat it
was, although speculation has it that it was double-ended and built
in an attic. Likewise, no one knows for sure whether the story is
true that two men sailed the boat all the way to the Bay of Fundy
and back, although anyone with Chebacco blood would like to believe
that. In fact, no one knows whether any of this story is true at
all, because the record is just too scant. But, since nobody’s
protesting this local legend, it seems an appropriate point at which
to introduce Harold Burnham’s background.
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