Mariners' Museum, by James S. Wamsley, as it appeared in National Geographic Traveler, November/December 1997, pages 88 - 92. Reprinted without permission. Set sail across the seas and centuries at what may be America's finest Mariners' Museum. Occupying its own 550-acre park in Newport News, Virginia, the Mariners' Museum serves as flagship for a fleet of nautical attractions around Hampton Roads, one of America's greatest ports. These are the ships of dreams, sailing untroubled through seas of time and space. Suspended in near-darkness, yet bathed in soft radiance that lights every detail of gaudy sterncastle, noble figurehead, and wreathlike cannon port, they pull me into a magical miniature world (scale one-quarter inch to the foot). Intent on a closer look at an English man-of-war of 1687, I carelessly press my nose onto its spotless glass case, leaving a faint smudge. With a guilty side-long glance I whip out my handkerchief and wipe it off. The little ships of August Crabtree, arguably the greatest ship modeler who ever lived, are one reason I return at regular intervals to the Mariners' Museum at Newport News, Virginia. But the Crabtree fleet comprises only 16 of the museum's 1,450 ship models. Toss in 90 historic figureheads, more than 11,000 paintings and assorted graphic renderings, almost 700 antique navigational devices (quadrants, compasses, astrolabes), 500 pieces of scrimshaw, it comes to at least 35,000 maritime artifacts. And that doesn't count more than one million archival items, plus more than half a million historic photographic negatives and prints. This collection, housed in a rambling, whalebone-hued complex deep in a 550-acre park near the great port of Hampton Roads, holds the fruits of a global search now 67 years old. With the museum's founding in 1930, its agents began a worldwide hunt for relics of humankind at sea. This would be no regional museum; there would be no specialty, no limiting brackets of period. Wherever a bow parted the waves, they'd follow. "Preserve the culture of the sea," said founder Archer M. Huntington, son of Collis P. Huntington, the railroad baron who founded the nearby Newport News Shipbuilding company. The younger Huntington's timing was perfect: not only was there still a good (though fast disappearing) selection of objects from the age of sail and early days of steam, but the Great Depression had begun, and nautical antiques were cheap. Nevermore. Ship carvings and scrimshaw are among today's aristocrats of folk art. Paintings by the Bard brothers, Antonio Jacobsen, and Fitz Hugh Lane send the mercury soaring at Christie's and Sotheby's: a prime Lane may bring over two million dollars. The museum has such works in profusion. But some objects in the Mariners' Museum are of such singularity, such ineffable glamour, that they deserve to be called priceless. At one display case in the Great Hall of Steam, for instance, I linger by a sturdy oil lantern with a cracked red glass lens. I think about a stormy night off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It was December 31, 1862, and the little ironclad Monitor of the Union Navy - less than a year after its famous standoff with the Confederate Virginia (nee Merrimack) - was being towed by a Union side-wheeler through the treacherous "Graveyard of the Atlantic." A red distress lantern flared on Monitor and then disappeared. The historic but unseaworthy warship had slipped beneath the waves. Discovered by sonar in 1973, Monitor has yielded over a hundred artifacts, including the distress lantern, which went down signaling for help that came too late. The museum doesn't neglect the other warrior in that duel that ended the age of wooden ships. A few feet away, the pitted black steering wheel of the Confederate ironclad Virginia hangs on the wall. And there's a massive chunk of Rebel iron plating smashed and buckled by one of Monitor's cannonballs. Small personal items, like a cane carried by a Virginia officer, add human scale to the clash of the ironclads that occurred only seven miles away, in Hampton Roads. Spine-shivering sagas are recalled almost everywhere I look in the ten permanent galleries of the Mariners' Museum. Consider one corner devoted to Titanic. Here is a pale silk scarf that Mrs. John Jacob Astor gave to a steerage-class mother, infant in arms, as the rush to the lifeboats began. Wrapped in the scarf, the baby was dropped over the side into a lifeboat, later to be joined by his mother during the most famous shipwreck of them all. And what about the most famous mutiny? Could objects from the storied Bounty melodrama have made their way here? Indeed they have, and heavy ones they are: Bounty's blacksmith's anvil and vise. Such relics transport us to epic scenes of adventure or tragedy. But other subjects appeal for different reasons. Take the gallery dedicated to naval architect William Francis Gibbs, not exactly a household name, but a giant of 20th-century ship design. His 6,000-plus vessels ranged from the World War II Liberty ship to his star-crossed masterpiece, built here in Newport News: that fastest of all liners, S.S. United States, whose career, begun in 1952, was cut brief by the advent of jets, yet which still languishes, a spectral hulk, at a Philadelphia dock. "I was on her first cruise, when she got the blue riband," says Marty Steffens, referring to the traditional ribbon claimed by the fastest transatlantic steamer. Marty, now one of the museum's 180 volunteer docents, made eight Atlantic crossings on the ship as a young engineering officer. "We had to wear white overalls, white officers' hats, clean gloves, and shined shoes when we went to the engine room. They would bring the first-class passengers down by elevator, sometimes in ballroom gowns, at 2 a.m. The engine room was always spotless." Many United States adornments, stripped from the ship in an auction 13 years ago, found a final berth in the Mariners' Museum. Marty points out some late art deco sculpted glass panels from the first-class lounge, a round glass table set for dinner with fine porcelain, silver, and crystal; the aluminum wall chart where the ship's progress was marked on the New York-Southampton run. "But" - he shakes his head abruptly - "now she's an absolute shipwreck. Lifeboats gone, radar tower gone, nothing inside. I wish they'd scrap her. It's a heartbreaker." Indeed, the fragile impermanence of all ships, and the danger to those who sail them, are why these museum galleries exert such a seductive appeal. The figurehead collection strikes me as a kind of personification of brave ships long gone. One, the stupendous 3,200-pound gilt eagle from the U.S. Navy frigate Lancaster, is the museum's signature piece. Beautiful it is, but I prefer the winsome "Lady With a Rose," thought to have adorned an 1810 ship, Rose in Bloom. Curator Tony Lewis explains that figureheads began in ancient times as the actual heads of sacrificed animals. By the 19th century they had evolved into emblems for attracting business and crews alike along the day's crowded docks. Mariners liked to sail on ships with attractive figureheads, often of current celebrities. The museum's Jenny Lind, the soprano "Swedish nightingale," tilts her head coquettishly, a faint smile on her carved lips. "She was a huge star, but a kind of girl next door and devout Christian," Tony Lewis says. "Sailors loved her. Perhaps 35 vessels carried figureheads named for her." From our utilitarian age, it's hard to imagine centuries when ships resembled elaborate pastries, and were often about as seaworthy. The exquisite models of the crab tree collection trace the story from ancient times to the first Cunarder, Britannia, of 1840. But others, too, had a gift for miniaturization, including anonymous prisoners of war during the Napoleonic period. Their warship models have a ghostly radiance down to the tiniest detail: they're made of bones from the prisoners' meals, carved and polished to perfection in some dungeon circa 1810. Yet of all the models here, I am most fascinated by Commonwealth, a side-wheel steamer crafted by a goldsmith in 1864. This glittering masterpiece of 18-karat gold and coin silver was a gift to the ship's retiring captain. The model's base is a music box that plays ten tunes of the 1860s. Push a button and a recording re-creates "Ye Banks and Braes O' Bonnie Doon," a melody happy yet haunting, a link across the void of years. The museum's main concession to its location is the kaleidoscopic Chesapeake Bay Gallery. Here, amid dioramas of colonial shipyards, the story of lighthouses, relics of vanished steamboats, and the waterman's timeless world of oystering and crabbing, I feel a bit overwhelmed by too many sharp and disconnected mental turns. I'm glad to move on to the Age of Exploration Gallery, where the focus seems tighter, despite the enormity of the subject: the great sagas of the 15th through 18th centuries. Well-done videos outline the deeds of Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, and the like. I dwell on the navigational instruments of their time: beautifully crafted astrolabes, compasses, barometers. A battered wooden reel-like device, still wound with knotted rope, explains how and why ships count their speed in knots. I save the paintings for last. Although choice works are spread throughout the museum, one gallery is dedicated just to art. Here is the soul of seafaring, captured by painters across three centuries. The best include "Gloucester Inner Harbor" by Fitz Hugh Lane ("The first American marine artist to gain international notoriety," says curator Lewis) and "Wreck of the Halsewell" by George Morland, a chilling 1786 depiction of a then-famous disaster. I like to focus on such permanent treasures in the museum's collections, but not at the expense of temporary themed exhibitions and special events held in the 550-acre park, with its five-mile walking trail across 14 pedestrian bridges. Each October, for instance, during Fall Fest, antique motorboats disport on 167-acre Lake Maury. Music is another Fall Fest tradition, from sea chanteys to jazz. Or there might be an 18th-century puppet show about the notorious pirate Blackbeard, whose head in 1718, the story goes, was brought back to Hampton Roads for public display. In any given week, I might see temporary exhibitions on lighthouses, pirate life, ship carving, tattoos, or historic maritime disasters. I won't sign up for classes in building wooden boats (although many do), but I like talking to living-history figures - lighthouse keepers, indentured servants, or Confederate sailors, camped on the grounds with eerie authenticity. A ceaseless flow of change and activity extends to permanent galleries, all of which are now gearing up to address a subtle but far-reaching theme: sea power. The Great Hall of Steam will be re-configured into a clear picture of commercial shipping's critical role. A new permanent Naval Gallery will present the evolution of military might. Such scholarly efforts will not obscure the glory and tragedy told by these collections. I stop to gaze at some Liverpool jugs inscribed with toasts to vanished ships, then stop again at some sailors' fancy valentines, at a map of Virginia drawn by Capt. John Smith, at a uniform button from Horatio Nelson's coat. It's enough to make a man consider shipping out. As I drive away to negotiate busy I-64, a line from Herman Melville floats out of nowhere: "Let me snuff thee up, sea breeze! and whinny in thy spray." Just show me where to sign. (Traveler contributor Jim Wamsley first had his timbers shivered on a Korean War troopship. Photographer Mark Thiessen has just come aboard the National Geographic staff.)