Becky Sigwright didn't grow up around boats. Her parents worked in forests and offices in New Hampshire, nowhere near water. But every summer as a child, she'd visit her grandmother in Duthbe, Maine, and something about the salt air and the coast just stuck.
By 17, she had her first job on a ship. "I wrote down in my journal that night," she remembers. "I'm on a ship. I can't believe I'm on a ship."
Today, Sigwright is captain of the Lewis R. French, a 65-foot schooner built in 1871 in South Bristol, Maine. It's the oldest windjammer—a sailing ship powered entirely by wind—still operating in the United States. Every summer, she takes up to 21 passengers on three- to six-night cruises out of Camden Harbor, a crew of five working the sails while guests help raise canvas and sing sea shanties.
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Start Your News DetoxA ship built to work
The French wasn't always a pleasure cruise. In the 19th century, Maine's ports were the engine of American commerce. A lighthouse keeper in Penobscot Bay counted 16,000 schooners passing in a single year, all carrying freight across the Atlantic and along the coast. The French hauled cargo, then fish, then sardines. In 1929 it caught fire—a common end for wooden ships—but it was rebuilt and worked another 50 years.
In the 1970s, Captain John Foss bought the French and restored it to its 1871 design, betting that tourists would pay to experience what sailors once took for granted. The idea wasn't new. A deckhand named Frank Swift had invented the "windjamming" industry in 1936, chartering a cargo ship to take schoolteachers from Boston out for fun. They took one look at the cramped quarters and walked off the boat.
The French learned from that lesson. Modern passengers have beds, toilets, and fresh water. But Sigwright kept the wood stove—the old-fashioned kind that fills the cabin with warmth and smell, not just heat. "It wouldn't have the same feeling," she says, "if it was a propane stove."
What you can't see from land
What draws people now isn't nostalgia for hardship. It's access. Maine's coast has thousands of islands, most without bridges. From the water, you see the whole picture—the rocky inlets, the remote islands, the geography that shaped the state's entire history. You can't get there by car.
For Sigwright, captaining the oldest windjammer in America means sharing what pulled her in as a child: the feeling that something about being on Maine's water just feels right. The French keeps sailing, 153 years after it was built, because some ships are too good to let go.
Learn more about public access to Maine's islands through the Maine Island Trail Association, a nonprofit maintaining trails and campsites across the state's waters.
