Honolulu Weekly

Despite whisperings to the contrary among the maritime community, the Falls of Clyde can stay at its present downtown location without paying rent for the indefinite future and is in no danger of sinking, according to multiple sources.

Bruce McEwan, president of the Friends of the Falls of Clyde, which took over the 130-year-old ship last fall to prevent the Bishop Museum from sinking it, said last week that he had signed a permit with Honolulu’s harbormaster that allows the square rigger to stay at Pier 7, near the Aloha Tower, on a month-to-month revocable permit.

The non-profit owners of the National Historic Landmark will not be required to pay rent, he said. McEwan spoke at a regular meeting of the Friends of the Falls at the Waikiki Yacht Club Friday.

While Joseph Lombardi, a Massachusetts ship surveyor hired by the Bishop Museum, had warned that it was in imminent danger of sinking, prompting its insurance company to withdraw coverage and the museum to announce its intention to scuttle her off Honolulu, a second examination by a local surveyor stated it was in fact in excellent shape. Insurance coverage resumed. The surveyor, Gary Naftel, represents Lloyd’s of London in the American Pacific and is the vice president of the Friends of the Falls of Clyde.

McEwan said that the Bishop Museum was considering paying the $60,000 required to remove some 20 feet of highly toxic asbestos wrapped a century ago on a pair of heating pipes and later covered in duct tape. Its removal is necessary for dry-dock staffers to safely work inside her hold.

The asbestos was one of several problems that for several months appeared to threaten the long-overdue dry-docking of the ship, the first in 20 years. The Falls will be hauled out at Marisco Ltd. in Kapolei whenever an opening arises, possibly as early as June, Naftel said.

The cost of the dry-dock is estimated at $100,000, with half going to the shipyard and the other half split between the tugboat company that will tow the Falls to Kapolei and the insurance that will cover the trip, McEwan and Naftel said.

The Friends filed a request for funding with the Atherton Foundation, which has already given a $5,000 grant, and with Aloha Petroleum, Ltd., the successor of Associated Oil Co., which owned and operated the Falls as one of world’s few bulk tankers between 1908 and 1922, carrying molasses to California and returning with kerosene. Even Matson Navigation Co., which brought the Falls to Hawaii in the first place and whose president, Robert Pfeiffer, donated $800,000 for maintenance, has finally started resuming contributions, after refusing to do so—with no explanation—for the first half-year following the ship’s sale to the Friends for a symbolic dollar. Matson’s contribution was on a modest scale: a container in which to store objects that Bishop Museum contractors had taken off the ship as they prepared to sink it and stored in the Maritime Center.

Last weekend, two dozen volunteers gathered to fill the container as Bishop Museum vice president Elizabeth Kam kept inventory.

McEwan and other Friends officers said a number of objects taken off the ship, notably brass portholes, had gone missing. Some had turned up on Craigslist and eBay or on the desks of senior Bishop Museum officials, while others have been recovered.

The general plan, according to both McEwan and Naftel, is to stabilize the Falls until the current financial storm passes and restoration can begin. A measure of the Friends’ bad luck is that the interest from a $500,000 endowment by Pfeiffer, which over the past decade averaged $30,000 a year and provided most of the money the museum spent on the ship’s upkeep, amounted to just $2,200 for the past two quarters, McEwan said.

As to the endowment itself, McEwan said the Bishop museum had agreed to hand it over to the Friends and the transaction is winding its way through probate court.

McEwan and Henry Gomes, the associate provost of Chaminade University who is president of Hawaii Maoli, a non-profit that raises money for other non-profits, met last week with Tim Johns, president of the Bishop Museum. They asked that the museum hold off selling the Hawaii Maritime Center for three months while the two groups study whether they could take over the building and make it work. Gomes and McEwan said the museum board pledged to do so, and a museum spokeswoman confirmed the informal agreement.

Since its construction in 1984 to complement the Falls moored alongside it, the center has been a steady money-loser, despite a stellar board of directors that included the heads of several of Hawaii’s biggest businesses, including Pfeiffer, the head of A&B. In 1994, as it prepared to default on a mortgage issued by the First Hawaiian Bank (formerly the Bishop National Bank of Hawaii and founded by Bishop Museum’s creator, Charles Reed Bishop), the Bishop Museum took over the building and the ship and eventually paid off the building’s mortgage. The land is owned by the state.

Given its record of attracting too few visitors to sustain itself, “Perhaps tourism should not be the [center’s] driving engine,” Gomes said. “The possibilities are wide open.” They include, he said, turning part of it into a day-care center and another part into a meeting hall. The museum part might also focus more on Polynesian voyaging and have an educational component, he said.

Looting a landmark

Last February, three tall ship experts attending a marine archeology meeting in Hawaii examined the Falls, one of nine iron-hulled square-riggers afloat.

“I was expecting to see a corpse, but it probably has the most original fabric of any old ship I’ve seen,” said Jamie White, a professional rigger of antique sailing ships, as he viewed the ship from the top of the the Maritime Center. “It’s nowhere near having to be sunk; if you left her here as is, it’ll probably last 100 years.

“I know of at least three square-rigged ships that were in much worse shape when restoration began and they’re sailing today,” added Paul Hundley, senior curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Both agreed the Falls could be brought back to her 1980s condition for “far less than $10 million”—a third of the sum the Bishop Museum said was needed. “Getting volunteers to come to Hawaii shouldn’t be hard, you just need a place to put them up,” said White.

Ray Ashley, president of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, said that for the most part the hull looked to be in “remarkably good condition. What I found most disturbing is the appearance of wanton destruction done to the ship, in effect what looks to be the pillage and looting of a National Historic Landmark.” —C.P.