Forged by Nature: The Oldest Windjammer in the United States

My dad is a forester. So very not boat-related. Kelly: But every year growing up, she would visit the coast, and something would happen to her. Becky: I’d come up for about a week in the summer to visit my grandmother in Duthbe, right on the water.

And just something just always felt right about being in Maine. We’d open the windows as far as they would go as we were going by the clam flats and just soak it in. Because just the salt air, the feeling, the people here, it just feels right. Kelly: Becky loved coming to Maine.

And over time, what she realized she really loved was boats. Becky: When I was a teenager, I started reading a lot of books about sailing and sailing history. I read the books, devoured them. Kelly: And then … Becky: When I was 17, I got my first job on a boat.

I remember the first moment that I stepped on board and I wrote down in my journal that night, I’m on a ship. I’m on a ship. I can’t believe I’m on a ship. I’m Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Maine Office of Tourism. It’s Maine week on the show, so each day we are introducing you to a person from that great state: people who live and work in Maine and who fuel their creativity with its rugged beauty.

Today, it’s Becky Sigwright, who now captains a wind-powered boat that has been sailing around Maine since before the invention of the telephone. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Kelly: After that first job on a ship at 17, Becky trained and trained until she made captain.

Now she captains the country’s oldest windjammer. That’s a sailing ship powered only by the wind. It’s called the Lewis R. French.

It was built in 1871 in South Bristol, Maine, and has been active ever since. Originally it was a freighter carrying cargo. Today it carries human cargo around the coast. Becky: These days, the Lewis R.

French stays busy sailing out of Camden Harbor on three-, four-, five-, and six-night cruises. We can take up to 21 guests. We have a crew of five. We have a cook, a deckhand, two deckhands actually, a first mate, and the captain, usually me.

Kelly: The Lewis R. French is 65 feet long with six huge sails. By the way, that is a lot bigger than your normal sailboat. A large wheel, like a classic pirate ship wheel, steers the boat.

And because it’s a windjammer, there’s no inboard motor. Becky guides this thing to where the wind takes her. Becky: We just go wherever makes the most sense for the weather that we have and for the people that we have on board. Every time we go sailing, it’s always an adventure.

It’s always something new. There’s so many peninsulas and islands and places you just can’t get to by car. Kelly: Which means it’s a really cool way to see the rugged parts of Maine. Becky: Everything that we can think of that’s Maine, we try to distill it into this experience: sitting on a beach eating lobster from a schooner is about as main as you can get.

Kelly: And passengers can help sail the ship. Becky: Like helping to raise the sails, raise the anchor, furl the sails. Alright, so what we do is we throw our weight forward, okay, and then we fall back in the line, and then we pull down, push the pit. All in one smooth motion.

Yep. Forward, back, back, again, forward, back, come on, forward. Kelly: Boats have been a huge part of Maine’s economy for a long time. Back in the day, there was a big lumber industry in Maine, and a ton of that lumber was used to build ships, which could then be sent all over the world.

Plus, for centuries, of course, fishing and lobstering by boat have been a major part of the economy in Maine. And then there was just shipping of all kinds of stuff, things like fabrics. The East Coast, from New York to Boston and up to Nova Scotia, was where a lot of transatlantic cargo docked in the 19th and early 20th century. In other words, Maine’s ports were vital and full of boats like Becky’s.

Becky: So schooners like this were absolutely the lifeblood of Maine. There was a lighthouse keeper into Penobscot Bay in the 1890s, I believe. He kept a tally of all of the schooners that he saw going by the lighthouse carrying cargo. And in that year, he tallied 16,000.

Kelly: It’s not impossible that the Lewis R. French, Becky’s boat, was among that 16,000 tallied by the lighthouse keeper. In the French’s early years, the boat hauled freight. Then, as Becky says, she went fishing, working in the seafood trade.

But in 1929, the boat caught fire. This, unfortunately, was common back then. Becky: There used to be thousands and thousands of these boats, and they weren’t expected to last very long.

At a certain point, it was cheaper to just build a new one than to try to maintain and rebuild the existing boat. Kelly: The French didn’t burn away completely. Much of its bones were still there. Becky: She was rebuilt to be a sardine carrier, and she moved down east a little further.

And she did that for about 50 years. And then in the 1970s, this guy, Captain John Foss, bought the French and rebuilt it and restored her back as closely as he could, back to what she’d been when she was built.

Kelly: Captain Foss kept the boat historically accurate, but made it more functional and more comfortable. At this point, rehabbing the ship to carry cargo didn’t make sense. It was the 1970s, and internal combustion engines had become the norm on industrial ships. Relying on the wind was a bit of a novelty.

And a lot of those old wind-powered ships had been allowed to break down or burn or were just taken off the water. Becky: Boats like this aren’t really around. They’re in museums behind glass. The oldest windjammer is a pretty neat distinction because she’s not part of a museum.

You know, the people that come on board can touch things, can be a part of things. Kelly: So when John Foss fixed up the French in the 1970s, he did it with the goal of making it a passenger boat. At that time, the tourism industry was growing in Maine, and windjamming—going out on these old sail-driven cargo ships—was getting a reputation as a powerful experience among people who did not mind doing some hard work while they were on vacation.

But Becky says windjamming as a tourist attraction did not take off right away. Becky: The windjamming industry was invented in 1936. This guy, Frank Swift, worked as a deckhand on a cargo-carrying windjammer. And then the next summer, he thought it was an awful lot of fun, so he chartered one and tried to get people to come up and go sailing with him for fun—because it was just such an incredible experience—along the coast of Maine.

The very first people that he got to come sailing was a pair of schoolteachers from Boston, and they came onboard and saw the accommodations and walked right off. Kelly: Becky says things have changed a lot since then. Today, passengers on her windjammer have toilets, comfortable beds, outlets, and potable water in their bathrooms. It’s not a luxury vacation, but no one is forced to help out on deck.

That said, most people do like to help Becky draw up the anchor, raise the sails, or steer the sailboat. When they actually have a particularly repetitive task, Captain Becky even leads her temporary deck hands in a sea shanty. Becky: Well, a lobster on the beach wouldn’t do us any harm. No, a lobster on the beach wouldn’t do us any harm.

The lobster on the beach wouldn’t do us any harm, for we’ll all hang on behind. And we’ll roll the old chariot along. We’ll roll the old chariot along. And we’ll all hang on behind.

Kelly: Becky says she does take comfort seriously, even if that comfort is a little retro. The French has an old-fashioned wood stove on board. Becky: It’s always warm, it’s always dry in there. No matter how nasty and wet and windy and cold and rainy and foggy and gross it may be to be outside, there’s always a warm, cozy, comfortable place to be.

It wouldn’t be like that if it was a propane stove. It wouldn’t have the same ambiance, it wouldn’t have the same feeling. It’s important to do hard things, and it’s important to be out in the rough weather and all of that, but it’s just as important to have a comfortable, dry, warm place to be when it’s done.

Kelly: So you’re all warm and dry and cozy on the boat, but then you get to get off the boat and see places along hundreds of miles of Maine’s coast that many people just don’t get to see. Becky: The actual layout of the land here is very conducive to sailing. Penobscot Bay, where we do probably 90 percent of our sailing trips, it’s surrounded on three and a half sides by islands. And the islands are in a large part open to the public.

The Maine Island Trail Association maintains hundreds of islands along the coast, and they welcome us to come visit. Kelly: A lot of the islands up there are technically private land, but many of the landowners have agreed to open the islands to visitors. Becky: There’s just so many unique places for us to stop, and there’s lots and lots of options for good anchorages and safe harbors for us when it’s time to stop at the end of the day.

Kelly: If you’ve been there, you know the coast of Maine is beautiful. Becky says seeing it by boat is amazing. Becky: Seeing the main coastline from the water is very, very different than seeing it from land. Seeing it from land, it’s very pretty, but from the water you get the whole big picture.

You see it differently. The coast of Maine has thousands and thousands of islands, and many of them don’t have bridges. But a lot of the coast is just not accessible. Most people don’t have boats.

So we’re kind of their avenue to explore. Kelly: These days there are about 10 boats in Maine’s wind jamming tourist fleet. Lewis R. French, of course, is the oldest.

And even though it’s hard sometimes, Captain Becky still loves being at sea. Doing the work, doing things the patient way. Becky: Being the captain has—it can be very demanding. You need to be a good decision maker.

Um, kind of have a plan A and a plan B and a plan D. Honestly, it requires some guts. Boats absolutely have souls. I don’t know if it’s a product of the people that have been on the boat and have kind of left a piece of themselves in it, or if it’s just something that the boat starts with.

But either way, the French 100 percent has a soul. She has—yeah, she has opinions. I’m absolutely a romantic. Just the idea of being away from land, away from the modern world.

It’s the hard way to do things in a lot of ways. Like we don’t use winches, but it’s part of the fun. It’s soothing, it’s healing, it’s healthy, it’s rejuvenating, peaceful. And just the feeling of moving through the water, moving through the air with nothing propelling you except for the wind is amazing.

It’s incre—I can’t say enough. But as soon as we get the sails up, everything just is quiet. Everything just kind of clicks into place and it feels right. It’s like taking a deep breath.

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