Schooner Roseway calls on Tiverton — Calm before the storm for Cuba-bound school ship

By Bruce Burdett
Posted 10/6/16

The 91-year-old schooner Roseway, one of the last of the Grand Banks fishing schooners, paid an overnight call on Tiverton last Tuesday evening.

The 112-footer (137 feet counting spars) sailed up …

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Schooner Roseway calls on Tiverton — Calm before the storm for Cuba-bound school ship

Posted

The 91-year-old schooner Roseway, one of the last of the Grand Banks fishing schooners, paid an overnight call on Tiverton last Tuesday evening.

The 112-footer (137 feet counting spars) sailed up the Sakonnet River and dropped anchor about midway between Tiverton and Portsmouth — and straight out front from Bill and Mal Humphrey’s Sunset View Drive home on Nanaquaket Neck in Tiverton.

The occasion, Mr. Humphrey said, was a fund raiser hosted at his house for the vessel and its sail training mission.

“They were coming down from Boston and headed for Cuba and St. Croix and we had asked them to stop by if they could.”

The Humphreys have a long dock but depths there are at most around 10 feet. Since Roseway draws 15 feet, the schooner had to anchor out.

“The captain came ashore by himself” to meet the fundraiser guests and spoke about the ship, its mission and their upcoming voyage to Cuba. Roseway will be the first US tall ship to visit Cuba in over half a century and, while there, intends to take Cuban youngsters aboard for a sail.

The rest of the crew and its contingent of students from Proctor Academy in New Hampshire stayed aboard the ship — “They had homework to do,” Mr. Humphrey said.

The captain was served hors d’oeuvres but declined a cocktail — “He was on duty.”

During the party, visitors were able to get a closer look at Roseway aboard Scott Humphrey’s powerboat which was docked there for the occasion.

Roseway remained anchored overnight with red mizzen sail hoisted to keep the vessel straight into the wind. At sunrise, the crew hoisted sail and set out down the Sakonnet for a stop in Mystic, Conn., aided by a favorable northerly breeze.

Mr. Humphrey said the captain was keeping an eye on the weather forecasts regarding what would become Hurricane Matthew in the Caribbean. That storm did indeed impact the ship’s course — by Monday afternoon, Roseway had taken a detour far up the Delaware River and over to inner Chesapeake Bay.

Mr. Humphrey said that he and his wife came to know about Roseway and World Ocean School during visits to the ship’s winter homeport of St. Croix.

“They do wonderful work with the community and with the kids in St. Croix, the inner city of Boston and elsewhere,” work that the Humphreys have supported over the years.

Long, varied history

A history of the ship states that:

Roseway was designed as a fishing yacht by John James and built in 1925 in his family’s shipyard in Essex, Massachusetts … She was commissioned by Harold Hathaway of Taunton, Massachusetts, and was named after an acquaintance of Hathaway’s “who always got her way.”

Roseway was built and maintained to an exceedingly high standard, using a special stand of white oak from Hathaway’s property in Taunton and was maintained to a standard that was unheard of in the commercial fishing fleet.

During World War II, Roseway was fitted with a .50-caliber machine gun and assigned to the First Naval District (New England). Roseway helped guide ships through the minefields and anti-submarine netting protecting the Boston Harbor.

She served as a pilot ship for 32 years and was the last pilot schooner in the United States when she was reluctantly retired in 1973.

In 1973, Roseway began her transformation to a windjammer when she was bought by a group of Boston businessmen who rebuilt her below-decks to meet Coast Guard passenger-carrying requirements with 14 cabins. In 1977, Roseway and the Adventure (built in Essex in 1926) starred in the television remake of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous.

In 2002 after a bank foreclosure, Roseway was donated to the World Ocean School which took her to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, for a two-year restoration. In May 2006 Roseway and the World Ocean School relocated to Boston.

That same year, Roseway embarked on a passage to St. Croix USVI which would become her winter home.

After 90 years of service, she is one of only six original Grand Banks schooners, and the only schooner specifically designed to beat the Nova Scotians in the international fishing vessel races of the 1920s and 1930s.

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