Sailing Ship Elissa

For more than a hundred years the four-hundred-ton barque Elissa worked the world's waters, first as a sailing ship and then as a motor vessel. Built in 1877 when steam vessels were beginning to overtake large sailing ships as prime cargo careers, Elissa survived for more than a century on the strength of her hull and on the economic niche that ships of her size could fill. Stripped of her three masts and her sails, heavily modified, and in line for the salvage yard, Elissa was discovered in the 1960s in Piraeus, Greece. Coincidentally, the Galveston Historical Foundation began looking for a ship to restore as a working example of the heyday of sail along the Texas coast. In Sailing Ship Elissa, Patricia Bellis Bixel provides a complete history of the ship: her building and launching in Aberdeen, Scotland; her prime years of sailing under British, Norwegian, and Swedish flags; her decline as a Greek smuggler; and her eventual restoration as a tall ship for Texas. Included also is a view of the life of staff and crew on board the ship during a sailing season today. Photographs by Jim Cruz and others wonderfully illustrate Elissa's history and bring to life the difficulties of restoration, the labors of her crew, and the grace and beauty of a sailing ship whether docked or underway. Today, Elissa is an ambassador for Galveston and Texas whether moored at her home berth at the Texas Seaport Museum, making short training sails into the Gulf of Mexico, participating in parades of tall ships, or calling in Charleston, Annapolis, or New Orleans. With professional officers and a mostly volunteer crew, Elissa provides a means of understanding the life of a nineteenth-century sailor, arigorous world in which conditions could be miserable but the discipline, routine, and community of sea life had their own rewards.