New Horizons for Young Landlubbers

Education Program Aboard Schooner Gives Some Md. Youths Sea Legs, Too

ABOARD THE SULTANA -- In order to become a man of the sea, Kellan Paddy first had to kiss a fish.

Kellan, a Centreville 10-year-old with braces, held the small white perch in his hands aboard the Sultana, a reproduction of an 18th-century Royal Navy schooner used as a floating residential summer program for gifted Maryland middle schoolers. Kellan's young shipmates cackled with glee as his pursed lips got closer and barely touched his fishy friend. The perch twitched and snapped at him, evidently displeased.

"He bit you!" chuckled his fellow sailor Sydney McGovern, an 11-year-old from Kent Island.

Kellan took swigs from a cup of water and then spat over the side into the Chester River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore. "It was horrible," he said. Bad as it was, he was grinning broadly.

Kellan; eight other sixth-, seventh and eighth-graders; and six adults had signed up to live for five days in a space about the size of a school bus for the summer program, where a mixture of history, science and seamanship is dispensed. As a shoreline of farms and forests slid by, the Sultana's student crew scooped up fish with a trawling net, studied sextants, raised sails, tied knots and unrolled copies of the ship's log, which tersely narrated in an old-fashioned copperplate script the Conradian miseries of life in the age of sail.

Assigned the unpleasant duty of searching for contraband cargo and enforcing the tea tax in the American colonies from 1768 to 1772, the HMS Sultana ranged the Eastern Seaboard, getting shot at by uncooperative colonists and nearly swamping during an Atlantic storm. The crew wasn't even very successful at its mission.

"We searched at least 400 vessels and only made one seizure," said Chris Cerino, who directs Sultana Projects, a nonprofit educational organization that runs the ship. "It was sort of a disaster."

The ship's modern version, launched in 2001, has been more successful. It is the centerpiece for Sultana Projects, which was started in 1997 by a group of community leaders who wanted to preserve the Chesapeake's historic, environmental and cultural legacy.

Although the original Sultana was built in Boston and spent only 11 months of its four years in the Royal Navy on the Chesapeake Bay, other factors made it a logical pick to rebuild. Its small size made it more affordable, and complete engineering plans found in England ensured that the two-masted ship would be historically authentic. It cost $1.3 million in donations to build, and during most of the spring, summer and fall, adults pay $30 and children 11 and younger pay $15 for a two-hour cruise or $50 for the occasional all-day sail on the Chesapeake.

But its primary mission is educational: During a typical school year nearly 5,000 students set foot on the Sultana, soaking in the history on field trips, short sails and the summer program.

The summer class costs $375 and is open to gifted and talented sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders from public and private schools. (Because of the recession, however, the program might not be funded in next year's state budget. The organizers are looking for private sponsorship or considering increases in the tuition, which would cost about twice as much without state aid.)

The original crew of 25 souls lived in cramped, unhealthy conditions. The sailors were constantly exposed to the elements, ate hardtack and were subjected to the Articles of War, which favored flogging and death as punishments. (This disciplinary code was imposed even when Britain was at peace.) If the students learned anything, it was that they wouldn't have liked life aboard the original Sultana very much.