Displaying Its Wealth

NEWPORT NEWS, VA. - A button from the uniform of British Admiral Horatio Nelson, relics from the HMS Bounty, and a brass telescope inscribed with the name "Oliver Hazard Perry" are on exhibit in The Mariner's Museum's newest permanent gallery.

The Collections Gallery, which opened July 27, showcases about 100 unusual and rarely-seen artifacts from the museum's collection of more than 35,000 maritime items. Sections of the gallery will be changed periodically, allowing visitors to view many items in the museum collection for the first time.

The exhibition includes rare books, decorative boxes, buttons, cannons, china, drawings, engravings, guns, hats, navigational instruments, paintings, ship logs, ship models, scrimshaw, swords, a steam engine, tattooing equipment and watercolors from the museum's collections. Each artifact tells a story of man's experiences with the sea.

International in scope, the museum's collection includes ship models, navigational equipment, scrimshaw, paintings, decorative arts, figureheads and working steam engines. The museum's research library and archives hold rare books, ship registers and logs, vessel plans, charts and maps, manuscripts, periodicals, photographs, memorabilia and archival items. Approximately five percent of the museum's collection is on exhibit.

Following the museum's founding in 1930, three field representatives searched extensively for artifacts to establish the museum's collection of objects pertaining to nautical subjects, things, and interests. Nicknamed the whirling dervishes, they scoured great harbor cities for relics of the sea - figureheads, ship bills, scrimshaw, anchors, ship models, paintings and prints, binnacles, barometers and maritime decorative arts.

Quickly-disappearing remnants of the age of sail were gathered on their trips to Europe and the Caribbean, and by museum contacts around the world. For 66 years, the museum has continued to develop a collection of unparalleled size, scope and depth.

The museum's collections include approximately 1,000,000 archival items; 350,000 negatives and 279,000 photographic prints; 75,000 library volumes; 11,390 paintings, drawings, prints, watercolors, and engravings; 1,300 ship models; 669 navigational and scientific instruments; 500 pieces of scrimshaw; and 90 figureheads.

The Eldredge collection is believed to be one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of steamship historical material in the world, comprising more than 27,000 items amassed by New Yorker Elwin M. Eldredge over 40 years. The collection includes paintings by ship portraitists James Bard and Antonio Jacobsen, prints, posters, photographs, ship models, steamship memorabilia and chinaware, accompanied by an extensive historical record of each vessel represented.

Ship plans and photographs donated by Newport News Shipbuilding, one of the world's largest shipbuilders, document the construction of ocean liners and tankers from the mid-1880s to the 1960s.

The museum holds the Chris-Craft company archives from 1922 through 1980 Ï a collection considered to be one of the most complete histories of a boat building company. The collection includes boat equipment records (hull cards), photographs, boat plans, sales materials, boat engineering data and master engine records.

Sixteen intricately detailed miniature ships, hand-crafted by August F. Crabtree, document the evolution of the sailing ships.

Nearly 30,000 photographs, many of yachting and America's Cup races, taken by New York photographer Edwin Levick, were acquired by the museum in 1961 after being rescued from forgotten file cabinets in a New York City stock photo house.

Other collection highlights include Samuel Clemens' (Mark Twain's) steamboat pilot's certificate, dated April 9, 1859; Captain John Smith's map (1639), which depicts early English exploration of the Chesapeake Bay region; the polar bear figurehead from the arctic vessel Bear, presented to the museum by Admiral Richard Byrd when he returned from his Antarctic expedition in 1935; and a model of the Rotterdam of 1908 - one of the finest ocean liners of its day, donated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a collector of maritime memorabilia.

Also in the museum's holdings is a one-and-one-half ton gilt eagle figurehead from the U.S. Navy frigate Lancaster, rescued from a chandler's shop in Boston in the 1930s; a bull boat crafted for the museum by Crows Heart, an 83-year-old chief of the Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota. The boat is part of the museum's small craft collection, which includes vessels from five continents; and Miss Belle Isle, a 1925, 26-foot, ten-passenger runabout, considered one of the oldest Chris-Craft boats in existence.

The Mariner's Museum, at 100 Museum Drive, Newport News, Va., is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm. Telephone, 800/581-7245.