Honolulu Weekly

Generations of island residents have come to consider the four-masted schooner Falls of Clyde as much a permanent part of the waterfront as Aloha Tower itself. The National Park Service seemed to agree, designating the ship a National Historic Monument in 1989. And so, while the Falls has struggled to find proper financing over the years, few were prepared for Bishop Museum’s dramatic announcement last year that plans were in the works for Falls of Clyde to be scuttled. Christopher Pala explores just how things went so wrong, and asks whether the museum ,as it has claimed, truly did everything it could to preserve a beloved local –and international–landmark.

The management of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum has long claimed that it has bent over backward to maintain and repair the Falls of Clyde, the 266-foot square rigger that was once the flagship of Hawai’i’s merchant marine, spending far more money than it should have to preserve this last vestige of the island’s maritime glory, declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989. As late as April 2007, a museum vice-president, Blair Collis, said in a press release, “With its history so closely linked to the history of Honolulu Harbor, it’s important that we protect and preserve the Falls of Clyde at Hawai’i Maritime Center for future generations of Hawai’i’s children.”

But an examination of documents and financial records connected to the Hawai’i Maritime Center, which the museum acquired in 1994, reveal a different picture, corroborated by sources inside the museum:

• For most of that period, the institution spent little more on the Falls than the few tens of thousands of dollars produced by a $500,000 endowment set up in 1994 by the late Robert J. Pfeiffer, then chairman of the Alexander & Baldwin holding company.

• The museum failed to perform minimal maintenance on the ship, such as installing zinc anodes that would have stopped hull corrosion at a cost of only a few thousand dollars a year.

• The work that was done did more damage than good to the ship, according to two ship surveyors, one hired to assist the museum in determining the ship’s fate.

• The museum consistently misrepresented the source of the first $300,000 grant as coming from the Save America’s Treasures Fund, when in fact it came from another, much laxer part of the National Park Service.

• The museum’s campaign to give the ship away raised eyebrows in the historical maritime community because it seemed designed to achieve just the opposite.

• From April of last year, the museum appeared intent on having the ship sunk off Honolulu and avoiding giving it to a group called the Friends of the Falls of Clyde, which wanted to save it and try to eventually raise enough money to restore it and keep her as a floating museum. The Friends were eventually able to buy the boat on September 25 for a symbolic $1, but not before the museum had destroyed the ship’s steel rigging, raising the future cost of restoration.

No hands on deck

In 1968, after Lani Booth, the heir to a family fortune, bequeathed the Bishop Museum $1 million, its director, Roland Force, persuaded a reluctant museum board of directors to acquire the Falls from a group called the Falls of Clyde Maritime Museum, headed by Honolulu Advertiser columnist Bob Krauss, and spend a quarter of the donation on it. The Falls had served as a floating fuel dock in Alaska from 1922 to 1958. In 1963, its owners decided to sink it and turn it into a breakwater in Canada. At the last minute, a group of enthusiasts in Hawai’i led by Krauss brought it back to Honolulu and, over the next two decades, had her restored, except that she never received sails.

In the early ’80s, the Bishop handed the Falls to the Hawai’i Maritime Museum, since re-named Hawai’i Maritime Center. But the center “never put in enough resources to make it viable,” said C. Dudley Pratt, then chairman of Hawaiian Electric Industries and a member of the boards of both the center and the museum. “And the state didn’t support us at all.”

The center board members contributed “very little money and a lot of talk,” Pratt said. When the center became unable to pay its mortgage, the museum for the second time acquired the center and the ship.

Pratt described the museum’s management as “strictly a stepchild operation” and resigned in protest from the Bishop board when the museum dissolved the Maritime Center board. “They get things and they don’t care for them, it’s appalling,” he said.

Robert Potter, a retired University of Hawai’i professor who started working as a volunteer on the ship in 1991, agreed with Platt’s assessment, saying “The museum was just ignoring it. I’m sure they could of found lots of volunteers if they’d looked for them in an organized way, but they never did.”

An examination of the center’s tax records over the past decade show that its average revenue was in the order of $700,000 a year, of which perhaps a third went to its employees, who on average numbered four. Several sources familiar with the budget said the museum usually spent only about $50,000 a year on the ship–much of it interest from a fund set up in 1994 by Pfeiffer, the former head of A&B, which owns Matson Navigation, according to Collis, the Bishop official. (It was Captain William Matson, a Swede, who in 1899 bought the Falls and based her in Honolulu, where she was turned into a tanker, carrying molasses to California and returning with kerosene until 1922.)

A quest for booty

In November 2001, the office of Sen. Daniel K. Inouye announced the fiscal year’s earmarks, which included $300,000 for the Falls of Clyde. “This appropriation for the Save America’s Treasures budget would be used by the Bishop Museum to preserve the Falls of Clyde,” a statement read. It was matched by a donation by Pfeiffer.

The grant earmarked by Inouye, in fact, went through another part of the Interior Department budget called the National Recreation and Preservation Account, which entails much looser supervision–from Honolulu, not Washington–of how the money is spent. Also, Save America’s Treasures grants entail an obligation to care for the object of the grant for at least 50 years, while the other fund does not, according to Hampton Tucker, Chief of the Historic Preservation Grants Division of the National Park Service, who administers the Save America’s Treasures grants.

Tucker said he had no idea why the museum had never sought help from his fund. “I would encourage the new owners to apply for a grant,” said Tucker. “They are for up to $700,000 and must be matched by private contributions.”

In 2002, the museum commissioned Dorian Travers, who had worked on the ship years earlier as a deckhand, to design a work plan around the grant. He presented it in March 2003 and a summary of it was forwarded to the National Park Service and accepted.

In early 2007, a group of fans of the Falls paid for the hiring of Joseph Lombardi, a Massachusetts ship surveyor experienced in historic ships, to examine the Falls and list what repairs it needed.

What he found, he said, was a ship that had degraded more in the previous 20 years than any he had ever surveyed. This led that group of fans, led by Clifford Laughton, to withdraw. In addition, he said, only part of the preservation plan had been carried out.

The plan called for spending $346,604 for sand-blasting the interior of the hull, and the rest, a total of $271,243, for repairing the rigging ($144,100), improving the mooring system ($13,673), fixing the leaking deck ($30,000) and buying a cathodic protection system–a more complex way than simple zinc anodes to stop corrosion of the hull through electrolysis ($4,070).

Lombardi and Travers, the author of the plan, agreed in interviews that in fact, the only part of the plan that was done was the sandblasting. There was no evidence that the $271,243 for the rest of the work was ever spent for the purpose for which is was sought — except for the anti-corrosion equipment, which was bought, never maintained and promptly stopped working, and routine maintenance and repair, which the grants were not supposed to pay for. Gary “Skip” Naftel, a Honolulu ship surveyor who became the vice president of the Friends of the Falls of Clyde, the ship’s new owners, concurred.

Lombardi called the sandblasting work “an abomination” and said it had done more damage than good. He had it stopped as soon as he soon as he arrived.

“Sandblasting of an iron hull should never be done!” wrote Olaf Engvig, author of Viking to Victorian, Exploring the Use of Iron in Shipbuilding, in an e-mail. “It will carry away the “soft” iron as well. Black spots of slag in a ships plate will be identified as rust and make any sandblaster continue until he has worked his way through the plate leaving a hole. He will conclude the plate was bad, when, in fact, it was not. To sandblast an iron built ship means ruining good material.”

Lombardi said he was unable to understand why at least part of the $600,000 grant was not spent on dry-docking it. “You normally dry-dock a ship like this every five years, and this one hadn’t been dry-docked in 20,” he said.

An examination of the Maritime Center’s tax records bear out Lombardi and Travers’ claim: the only item that appears is the sandblasting, for $345,732, paid to Consolidated Painting LLC, over three years ending in June 2007, at which point the museum wrote to the National Park Service and declared the work accomplished. Consolidated Painting’s owner, Joseph Ferrara, confirmed the amount but denied that his company’s work had damaged the hull.

The museum’s final report to the National Park Service mentions the preservation plan, but it details only the sandblasting and minor routine maintenance. It states that “other items that were repaired included the rigging and top and upper masts,” but gives no further details of a project that was to have cost $144,100.

The Honolulu staff of the National Park Service, which administered the grant, declined to comment. Holly Bundock, a spokeswoman in Washington, said that since there was no Park Service requirement that this grant be matched, the service was satisfied as long as its own $300,000 was spent as specified, even though the original budget submitted to the Park Service was for $600,000.

Mutiny

In an interview, Collis, now the Bishop’s chief operating officer, was asked why the museum didn’t spend the full amount of the grants and where the money was in fact spent. He strongly denied that all the money wasn’t spent, calling such a suggestion “laughable.”

At first he suggested that the government grant earmarked by Inouye “was a matching grant, so we put up our own money, it wasn’t like it paid for the sandblasting job.”

When it was pointed out that the museum’s own press releases said that the matching was done by Pfeiffer, not the museum, he denied that Pfeiffer had made that grant and said that the museum only had access to the interest from the 1994 endowment that Pfeiffer had made for the Falls. “That creates income of $30,000 a year, we can’t touch the principal,” he said.

Collis went on to assert that Ferrara, the owner of the company that did the sandblasting, “tells me he spent close to $1 million on that project, but we only paid him around $600,000.” Ferrara denied telling Collis this, saying that while he did lose some money on that job, it was because Collis took too long to make key decisions.

Collis insisted throughout the interview that the grant had gone through the Save America’s Treasures office, as does its own press releases, available online, although the cooperative agreement between the park service and the museum makes it clear the park service staff are in Honolulu, not Washington, where the Save America’s Treasures grant is located.

He said he had no explanation of why the corrosion control equipment was never maintained.

Requests for interviews with Elizabeth Tatar, which the National Park service lists as the museum’s person in charge of executing the grant, and with museum president Tim Johns were refused.

The museum also drew criticism for announcing this year that the ship would be sunk if a buyer willing to spend in excess of $30 million could not be found by this past summer.

“I was completely disgusted by this approach, and so was everyone I talked to,” said Peter Stanford, president emeritus of the National Maritime Historical Society and vice president and co-founder of the World Ship Trust, in a telephone interview from New York. “The $30 million was far above what would be needed to make her safe and able to take visitors,” he said. “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening like this. Normally it takes a couple of years to find an appropriate new owner.”

The Friends, led by Bruce McEwan, vice president of Young Brothers, and Naftel, the surveyor, coalesced after the museum announced its intention to scuttle the ship, trying to prevent the sinking while scrambling to raise money, incorporate as a non-profit and get insurance for the ship.

As late as September 25, the day the Bishop board voted to accept the Friends’ proposal to buy the Falls for a symbolic dollar, Collis, in an e-mail to McEwan, said the written commitment the Friends had obtained from the Marisco dry-dock in Wai’anae was insufficiently hard. “This has to be addressed immediately as per the requirement of the agreement or I suspect the board will not vote in favor of transferring the ship,” Collis wrote.

Still, that evening, the board voted to accept the offer, but the hostility between the two groups was palpable on the day of the handover ceremony.

After the signing of the papers, the handing over of a dollar bill and the launch of a “Million Quarters Campaign” modeled on Bob Krauss’ “Million Penny Campaign” for the Falls, Johns, the museum president, smilingly took the lectern to announce he was making a personal contribution to the campaign.

The amount? $100.

“It was an insult,” growled Naftel.