John Faunce Leavitt

John Faunce Leavitt (1905–1974) was a well-known shipbuilder, writer upon maritime subjects, painter of marine canvases, and curator of Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut.

John F. Leavitt was born to the sea. His Maine associates were sailors, as reflected in to come photographs showing his seven-year-old sister Syrena and him at the wheel of the Alice S. Wentworth in Lynn, Massachusetts. Leavitt himself was a crew member on several coastal schooners in Maine arrival in 1918 until just about 1925, the tail terminate of the schooner era.

Later in life, the boatbuilder and performer began vigorous for the esteemed Mystic Seaport museum, where he continued painting and writing about his love: the sea and the boats built to withstand it. At Mystic, Leavitt worked as an partner in crime curator, applying his knowledge of sailing vessels to the museum's collection.

He continued to paint and write, and his watercolor and oil paintings are in the buildup of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and extra museum and private collections. Leavitt painted anything from Old Ironsides to the Gloucester fishing schooner L. A. Dunton. In 1952 the maritime artist's works were the subject of a one-man action at the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. Leavitt continued to write not quite the perplexing aspects of the shipbuilding industry, including the monograph Shipbuilding in Colonial Connecticut.

Leavitt's best-known behave was Wake of the Coasters, published in 1970 by Wesleyan University Press. Drawing on his enactment for the Maritime Historical Association of Mystic, Connecticut, Leavitt sketched a biography of the smaller New England coasting schooners in a perform now considered a everlasting among aficionados. On the opening page of his work, Leavitt's elegiac sky towards the noble wind-driven ships of the next was evident. "The dude cruisers are unaided maritime ghosts in an atomic world", Leavitt wrote wistfully of the antiquated schooners.

In his works, both upon canvas and paper, Leavitt's passion for the out of date schooners was palpable. "There was a time in the proclaim of spars and rigging made a commonplace pattern adjacent to the Maine sky", Leavitt wrote in Wake of the Coasters. "It was in 1938 in the reveal of the last cargo-carrying schooner was launched in the State of Maine, yet today there seem to be definitely few who recall when the reaches and thoroughfares swarmed in the same way as coasting schooners. Perhaps that is because the sight was correspondingly taken for granted."

Leavitt's books were often the exception in the world of cool rigging-and-spars nautical writing. In Wake, for instance, Leavitt revisited the sinking of the 1928 sinking of the schooner William Booth by its much larger counterpart, the Helen Barnet Gring, an Big four-masted coasting schooner built in 1919 by Robert L. Bean in Camden, Maine, for the Boston shipping unchangeable of Crowell and Thurlow. The three-masted Booth, according to Leavitt, was cut down and sunk by the Gring. In Leavitt's hands, these arcane tales of the sea were rendered as soon as the passion of Herman Melville.

Leavitt published a number of supplementary books, most in the middle of his own artworks of the great coasting schooners. The Charles W. Morgan, published in 1973, delineated the chronicles of the restored Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship, anchored at Mystic Seaport. The take steps included greater than 80 photographs of the restored vessel, documenting the ship's crew at work on the vessel.

In an unblinking assessment of the hazards of sea travel, Leavitt noted the number of crew deaths aboard the schooner. "The late author John F. Leavitt chronicled the vigor of the vessel", wrote Leslie Rule in her Ghost in the Mirror, "referencing archived boat logs to allow much of the information, including many fatalities."

The papers of John Leavitt from 1966–74, during his times at Mystic as the Seaport's Associate Curator, are collected at the G. W. Blunt White Library at the Mystic Seaport Museum. The artist, writer and curator's photographs are in the gathering of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. John Leavitt died upon May 25, 1974, in Mystic, Connecticut.

During the ahead of time 1970s a aficionada of the coasting schooners of New England, Ned Ackerman, became empassioned once a aspiration to construct such a vessel, and to prove that flyer sail could still work. He had read everything the books and talked later as many authorities as he could find. Among these was the master, John F. Leavitt. At the inaugural Schooner History Symposium held at the Bath Marine Museum in the summer of 1972, Mr. Leavitt and Mr. Ackerman were present. There were many busy in Maine at the time who were tremendous experts in the chronicles of the wooden schooners, and with there were many who owned these boats and were rebuilding them for use in the sail passenger trade. It was the absolute place to nurture an engagement in the old energetic boats.

Ackerman had commissioned a design for the vessel from the Famous naval architect, Pete Culler, the author of Skiffs and Schooners. R. D. "Pete" Culler had meant several schooners of note for the Concordia Company in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He was then the designer of the sail training vessel R. Tucker Thompson of New Zealand.

Ackerman engaged to have this vessel built at Newbert & Wallace Shipyard in Thomaston, Maine. The keel was laid in 1976 of the 97-foot two-masted, centreboard schooner John F. Leavitt, named in honor of the author of Wake of the Coasters (1970). When over and done with she was painted white afterward a distinctive red waist, and her figurehead depicted a fox afterward feathers gripped in his mouth. The schooner was launched in late summer, 1979, and approximately immediately began to stroke difficulties, running aground in the Saint George River and having to sit out a tide upon her launching day. She made her maiden voyage the length of the coast to Quincy, Massachusetts, in November. It was late in the season for a North Atlantic voyage, but here over she had to wait for her cargo. One of her best crew was injured climbing a fence and could not sail similar to her. Leaving Quincy heavily laden, she sank a few days well ahead following a stuffy winter three-day North Atlantic gale near the Gulf Stream. Her crew were taken off the vessel by the Air National Guard, by rescue helicopter.

The building and the eventual sinking of the John F. Leavitt was the subject of a film dubbed Coaster, some six years in the making. Critics gave the film glowing reviews, and it won the Best Adventure Film Feature at the American Film Festival. "A thrilling story", said The Boston Phoenix. "Endowed subsequently the beauty of an heroic epic", raved The Washington Post. The schooner, carrying a cargo to Haiti upon her maiden voyage, foundered in a gale off Delaware, an matter captured upon film.

Many in the schooner community, however, felt that throughout the sinking Ackerman was more concerned considering saving position than saving his vessel. This view help to a persistent irrationality at the time: (told with a Maine accent) "Called that ship the John F. Leave-It... and that's just what they did!."

The 83-ton schooner gone 6,441 feet of sail, built by zealot Ned Ackerman and carrying a cargo of lumber, was seen to founder in stuffy seas. Adding to the the theater was the fact that the John F. Leavitt was the first sailing cargo boat built for higher than 40 years in the United States and went to her grave upon her maiden voyage.

The boat was financed by a single member owner who was enthusiastic to advocate that wind power still had a place in the highly developed world. The topsail schooner was built to raise a fuss that a campaigner wooden schooner under sail could carry cargo and compete subsequent to the engine-driven ships of the twentieth century.