The USS Constellation was about 800 miles off the U.S. coast and bound for Europe when a ferocious Atlantic gale bore down, churning the sea until it was "boiling at the bows and breaking into sheets of spray that drove on board in clouds," wrote Cmdr. Caspar F. Goodrich.
It was the fall of 1892, and the Constellation was on its final transatlantic voyage. The sloop of war -- the last all-sail warship built for the U.S. Navy -- was almost 40 years old and not in pristine condition. But, Goodrich wrote, the Constellation was a "gallant craft."
The USS Constellation, pictured at home in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, visits Annapolis this week. The Civil War ship was built in 1854.
(Photos Hans Ericsson For The Washington Post)
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"It was an anxious moment which I could never forget," Goodrich wrote of the unexpected gale. "I saw to my horror, two mighty, overwhelming wave crests rush together, leap up and sweep down upon the Constellation. . . . Frankly, I had thought her done for."
Goodrich, who died in 1925, was neither the first nor the last to incorrectly sound the ship's death knell. In 1889, the ship nearly foundered off Cape Henry near Virginia Beach. The ship sailed under its own power for the last time in 1893. By 1954, it was taking on thousands of gallons of water a day as it sat, essentially abandoned, in the Boston Naval Shipyard.
In 1955, it was tugged in a dry dock to Baltimore, where it eventually decayed to the point that it was condemned by the Navy in 1994.
"Basically, she was about to fall apart," said Chris Rowsom, executive director of the USS Constellation Museum in Baltimore, of the ship's condition that year.
But this year, on the 150th anniversary of the boat's construction, the Constellation has undergone something of a renaissance.
On Tuesday, aided by tugboats, it was to venture past the Key Bridge and into the Chesapeake Bay for the first time in a half-century, then dock for several days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. The return trip is scheduled for next week.
The ship "really is the pinnacle of the sailing warship design," said Kennedy Hickman, curator of the USS Constellation Museum. "It represents the end of the age of sail in the U.S. Navy."
In the past 10 years, the 1854 ship has been largely rebuilt, restored to what it probably looked like during its heyday.
Some of its cannons are made of fiberglass, and the masts and bowsprit are reconstructions. Much of the boat's hull is made from multilayered wood laminate. But the timbers that make up its skeleton are original, as is much of the boat's interior, including finely wrought -- though extensively weathered -- officers' quarters.
About 50 percent of the ship is original, Rowsom said.
"Basically the ship on the outside has been restored, and now we're working on the inside," he said.
For years, Constellation enthusiasts, and even many naval historians, believed that the ship in Baltimore's Inner Harbor was built in 1797.
