By Stefan D-W Tisdale

SCI, Archivist

People who work on boats have always documented their work and their lives aboard. The forms of documentation have ranged between things that resemble historical research and archives to those that resemble journalism and many forms of art, whether in tattoos, scrimshaw, journaling, painting, drawing, printing, scrapbooks, shanties, sea ballads, or just “yarning” about their experiences.

For most of us, boats and the people who work on them are almost entirely invisible. They’re offshore and out of sight except for a few that moor in our communities—if you make the effort to go to those industrial parts. This lends them an intrigue that attracts artists who have no seafaring or even pleasure boating experience. Waterways and ships, especially those powered by the wind, are tempting metaphors for writers of poetry, songs, and narratives, along with visual artists. The alien experience of life aboard shifts perspective for those who only know life ashore.

Actual working mariners have seemed to gravitate to a few forms more than others. These have been shaped by the confines of a vessel underway, which offered time for creativity and an imperative for entertainment, but limited the space for expression. Long passages have lent themselves to singing, backed by small, portable instruments. Stories shared news and educated while entertaining, and the need to entertain drove the creative urge that took the story ever farther from its roots in truth and heightened the tale’s tallness. 

It seems that fewer mariners become visual artists, with the notable exception of John A. Noble, who crewed on schooners. Many of the great artists of maritime scenes, like J.M.W. Turner, Winslow Homer, Howard Pyle, Eugene Chigot, Gordon Grant, NC Wyeth, and John Stobart, were not mariners. Few with professional maritime experience have gone on to careers in music either, with the possible exception of towboater and river boat pilot John Hartford, who’s known for writing “Gentle on my Mind” but also penned “Steamboat Whistle Blues” and other songs of the inland waterways. The art form that seems to attract the largest number of professional mariners is writing. Many writers had experience working on boats, whether as sometime seafarers like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad or as inland mariners like Mark Twain. Poetry is even more common among mariners. The potential for a shorter form makes it more travel-friendly, and the slower pace of writing per word makes it ideal for the long, contemplative stretches aboard.

British Poet Laureate John Masefield trained for a career at sea and logged time before the mast before launching a career in writing that included “Sea Fever,” one of the most commonly cited seafaring poems (“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…”). Masefield visited SCI soon after receiving his laurels, but the place was rife with lesser-known poets, including John Cabbage, a seafarer who retired to take a job as a live-aboard captain on a NYC garbage scow since the work was more conducive to his composition. Cabbage saw three books of his poetry published: Eight Bells, Down the Dock, and Time and Tide. Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi also found that barge captain life fostered a writing career. He said it was the most money for the least work possible (New York Harbor barge captains were basically security guards with bilge pumps). With a lot of encouragement from his editor, he managed to produce the novel Cain’s Book during a year as captain of a stone scow in New York Harbor in the late 1950s.

But most boat workers and their arts remain obscure, perhaps only surfacing in the pages of The Lookout, notably in contests sponsored by SCI’s postwar Artists and Writers club. That club’s sponsoring committee included notable figures in poetry, music, painting, portraiture, sculpture, photography, cartoons, sports, and humor, as well as radio and movie scripts. The writer Christopher Morley served as the committee’s advisor. 

Like many in the group’s leadership, Morley was not a seafarer, but he and his literary friends in the Three Hours for Lunch Club pooled their resources to buy what they deemed the last operating sail-powered cargo ship, which they renamed Tusitala, the name given to Robert Louis Stevenson in his last decade by his neighbors on Samoa. Stevenson was not a professional mariner, but his father was a leading lighthouse engineer.

While few mariners made careers as visual artists, they did use visual media to document their work experience in ways that weren’t conventionally artistic. For mariners of the pre-digital era, scrapbooking was often a way to make sense of their experiences. Sometimes their involvement in scrapbooking was no more than sending photos to SCI, where staff sometimes collected them into scrapbooks. Others assembled printed materials and added them to their photos in large albums they assembled themselves. 

Perhaps the most prominently prolific maritime scrapbooker was named Captain Ralph E. “Doc” Cropley. Born in Marblehead, MA, in 1885, he enrolled at Harvard in 1902, where he was described as “more interested in seeing the ships come in at East Boston than in football.” While at Harvard, he began a lifelong friendship with upperclassman Franklin D. Roosevelt, who shared his interest in ships and gave him the nickname Doc.

Cropley left Harvard after two years to enter the banking business and stayed for 17 years as a partner at M. Bond & Co. before he chucked it all and went to sea at the age of 35. He shipped out as assistant purser of the liner President Arthur.

Shortly after Cropley’s big career change, FDR was struck by the illness that left him paralyzed. During the years of recovery that followed, he and Cropley made ship models together and added to Cropley’s growing collection of artifacts, scrapbooks, and maritime archival records.

In the early 1930s, it was FDR’s turn to help Cropley as he faced a cancer scare that convinced him that he was going to die. Roosevelt told the Smithsonian of Cropley’s collection, which they added to their collections. In 1939, Cropley became a research representative for the Maritime Commission.

In July 1947, Mr. Cropley went back to sea and sailed on freighters of the Moore-McCormack Lines and the United Fruit Company on routes to Europe, the Mediterranean, and the West Indies until his final retirement from the sea in 1950.

In 1953, he became the assistant curator and historian of SCI’s Marine Museum. He was instrumental in building SCI’s collection of ship models into one of the best of its kind in the country. He also continued to contribute to the Cropley collection at the Smithsonian as it grew to exceed 500 loose-leaf volumes—more than 100,000 pages of data and lore on shipping—and more than 40,000 pictures. A handful of his scrapbooks remain in SCI’s archives.

He spent his last years living at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights and died on November 16, 1959, at the Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn, just a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and within sight of SCI’s headquarters at 25 South Street.

Captain Ralph Cropley’s work is notable for the time and energy he put into his collecting and record-keeping, and for the fact that he was as much a working man who served on ships as he was a Harvard-educated banker who ran in circles that included close relationships with many world leaders, including FDR. His work gained prominence and an approximation of permanence not only at the Smithsonian and SCI’s Marine Museum but through numerous other maritime history organizations to which he contributed.

Today, maritime creativity and documentation continue to evolve in new forms. With smartphones placing photography and video tools in every mariner’s pocket, those who work at sea are sharing their experiences more widely than ever through social media, blogs, and other digital platforms. A notable example is tug captain and company owner Mike Vinik, who gained significant online attention for his photos documenting the towing of the SS United States to its final destination. Countless other mariners—across roles, genders, and nationalities—are building substantial audiences by offering glimpses into their daily lives and work. Whether expressed through traditional arts or modern digital storytelling, these efforts serve the same enduring purpose: to capture the realities of life on the water and bring greater visibility to a profession that often remains out of sight.