In the nuclear and space age, squaresails still belly to the wind, wooden blocks still creak, halyards slap against tall masts and the quarterdeck is an honest location. For many bluewater sailors, one of the finest examples of this fast-disappearing “splendid anachronism” can be seen in the USCGC Eagle, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy's training barque that is still actively operating as one of the world's great sailing ships.
The Eagle, originally named the Horst Wessel, was built in 1936 by Blohm and Voss in Hamburg, Germany. She served as a German naval training ship and then as a cargo ship during World War II. After the war, the U.S. Coast Guard claimed her as a war reparation.
While other academies and training centers have largely abandoned old-fashioned methods of seamanship training for newer laboratories, simulation devices, and programmed instruction facilities, the Coast Guard continues to regard experience under sail as an additional prerequisite for its commissioned officer corps.
The Eagle is seen as a proving ground for cadets—a place where learning is accomplished by doing, and leadership is forced to rise to the occasion.
From the moment cadets step aboard, they discover that, surprisingly, sailing a ship like the Eagle is far more complicated than operating the most advanced Coast Guard cutter. The maze of standing and running rigging and the multitude of sails are the basic tools used to harness the wind. They must be understood and mastered before the ship can go anywhere.
Even more valuable, the principles of cause and effect are readily apparent—the slowest-learning cadet can see and feel the delicate balance of the ship as she responds to the pressure of wind, sea, and weather.
The correct halyard, when hauled, hoists the desired sail; the yards, when braced at the proper angle, cause the sails to draw and the ship to forge ahead. The tools man has created and must control can be seen, touched, and acted upon.
Seagoing officers in modern ships sometimes fail to recognize the effect of the wind and the waves on maneuverability. Graduates of the Eagle never forget.
The officer who, from necessity, has spliced a parted line, climbed a gyrating mast, balanced on the foot-ropes while struggling to douse flapping sails, and slept in a hammock cannot fail to have respect for his environment—a ship in the sea.
On the following pages the Eagle is seen as she was outfitted and sailed by cadets who, for the most part, were getting their first taste of a sailing ship. This voyage, a routine one of a few days from New London, Connecticut, to Portland, Maine, was completed 1 August 1969, but for these young men, as indeed it is for all sailors, it is what happened while underway that really mattered.