Honolulu Weekly

Falls of Clyde / At the Bishop Museum’s Honolulu Maritime Center subsidiary on Pier 7, a back-lit picture of a smiling, lei-clad Robert J. Pfeiffer seems to look through the building’s bay windows at the 19th-century square-rigger Falls of Clyde moored just outside.

Pfeiffer had a passion for ships that took him to sea as a teenager and propelled him to the top of the state’s premier shipping company, the Matson Navigation Co., and its parent company, Alexander & Baldwin.

He also had an enduring love for the Falls, which was once the flagship of the Matson line and is now a National Historic Landmark. In 1994, Pfeiffer established a half-million-dollar endowment for the Falls’ maintenance, and in 2001, he donated another $300,000 for the same purpose, matching a grant from the federal government.

But even though the Bishop Museum awarded him its Charles Reed Bishop medal when he retired in 1995 (he died in 2003), it has not shared his enthusiasm for the 266-foot-long ship.

Four months after the museum decided to sell the Falls for a symbolic dollar to a non-profit group, the Friends of the Falls of Clyde are still waiting for access to the endowment and are scrambling for cash.

Bruce McEwan, a shipping executive who is president of the Friends, says the bill of sale signed last September 30 reads that the museum must “provide the Friends the assistance needed to transfer trusteeship of the R.J. Pfeiffer Endowment for the Falls of Clyde to the Friends.”

“We’ve raised less than $20,000 so far, and we’ve spent most of it,” he said. “But when I asked Blair [Collis, the Bishop’s senior vice president and chief operating officer] when we were going to get control of the trust, he told me that since there’s no date in that paragraph, he can’t say when.”

The Friends agreed to take the ship to the Marisco dry-dock at Barbers’ Point to ascertain the state of its hull, but the trip had to be cancelled a few weeks ago when a storm swept through Hawaii.

In order to pay for the repairs that the dry-dock examination—the first in two decades—will reveal, the Friends are hoping that a way can be found to spend some of the Pfeiffer endowment’s principal to fix the ship without violating the law or the spirit of the endowment.

“But they won’t even give us the documents that go with the endowment, and without them we can’t get the lawyers started on this,” added McEwan.

Dudley Pratt, a former member of the Bishop Museum’s board of directors and that of the Maritime Center, said the Friends should take the museum to court. “This delay is ridiculous,” he said.

It won’t be the first time the museum has been accused of withholding money donated by Pfeiffer for the ship. Of the $300,000 gift Pfeiffer made to match an identical grant by the National Park Service, only $350,000 of the total of $600,000 was spent on repairing the ship, according to the Friends and to Joe Lombardi, a ship surveyor familiar with the ship.

E-mails and telephone messages to Collis, the Bishop vice-president, drew no response.

The museum had announced a year ago that it could no longer afford to keep the ship and would sink it off Honolulu. Only a few weeks before the intended scuttling date, it agreed to hand over the ship to the Friends, which had been fighting to prevent the sinking.

The Falls, which was never fitted with an engine, is one of seven iron-hulled square riggers left in the world, and the second-largest. It was built in 1878 in Scotland and carried passengers, molasses and oil from Hawaii to California from 1899 to 1922. Rendered obsolete by slower but more liable steamships, the Falls served as a floating fuel dock in Alaska for four decades. After the ship’s owners decided to sink it, a group of enthusiasts had the vessel towed back to Hawaii, where it was lovingly restored by thousands of volunteers in the ’70s and ’80s. But under ownership from the Bishop Museum, it was allowed to deteriorate, and restoring it to its 1980s condition is now considered prohibitively expensive.

The Friends, however, believe the vessel can be stabilized and made safe until enough money can be raised to restore it as a museum.

—Christopher Pala