© Michael Heller

A PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

Just An Old Boat

These are two photos from an April 1998 picture layout on the old yacht Navette

Sometimes a story needs some words:

 

By Michael Heller

Halsey Herreshoff comes from a family of yacht designers and boat builders. He is the son of Sid Herreshoff and the grandson of "the wizard" Capt. Nat Herreshoff. Their family has designed and built boats, in Bristol, Road Island, since the beginning of the century. Last week Halsey was in Punta Gorda, to speak to the Punta Gorda Sailing Club. While most of his presentation centered around the 1905 Atlantic Challenge Race and the numerous classic Sailboats his family was responsible for, Halsey digressed for a minute or two about a steam powered vessel his grandfather designed for New York financier J.P. Morgan, in 1917. The boat was a 114 foot streamliner called Navette, which Morgan used, in the summer, to commute from his home in Glen Cove Long Island to his office on Wall Street. "It was a nice way of avoiding the traffic" Halsey said. "The vessel is now on the Caloosahatchee River, in La Bell, Florida," he said, "sunken underwater," he added. "When I was there we found a big alligator guarding it. Otherwise I was going to go under and and have a look" he said. Herreshoff spoke last Wednesday, and Navette haunted me for the next two days. On Saturday morning I loaded up my underwater camera, put a clip of "snake rounds" in my 45, and headed south to La Belle.

It had been almost 20 years since I was in La Belle, but the town hadn't changed much. At bait shop, on the city boat ramp, I met David Johnson. David was familiar with Navette, and to my surprise produced a book on Herreshoff designed boats which he said he had bought at a garage sale, only a month before. Anchored on page 245 was a drawing of Navette. I took in the pages with a building intensity, and Johnson drew a crude map to the area where Navette lay. Ten minutes later I pulled into an almost abandoned trailer park, on a dead end canal. On Johnson's map the area was adjacent to the boat.

In the park I met Michael Morris and his teenage son Shawn. "I've been playing on that boat since I was a little kid. It's down thar," Shawn said, pointing at a thicket of underbrush. We crossed through the abandonded rubble of lives that have now moved on and then fought our way through a stand of palmettos and down a steep embankment covered with pine needles and dried leaves. Below us, obscured partially by vines and underbrush was the unmistakable wooden form of Navette. Not afloat, but not sunken either, she is the Titanic. A dead vessel that is still very much alive. Then there was the unmistakable sound of a big gator-tail thrashing in the dark water below. As I searched for him my eyes caught a reflection from the still intact glass on a stately row of windows, glistening in the afternoon sun. A chill ran up my spine and tickled the small hairs on the back of my neck. History lay at my feet.

Marjorie Warren and her sister Dorothy lived on Navette, cruising the boat on the Caloosahatchee in the grand old style. According to Herreshoff, Navette was purchased by Marjorie's father who refitted her with steam engines of his own design. After WWII he brought the boat to Florida. The two sisters lived in a makeshift structure on the aft deck, but after they stopped plugging the holes and moved ashore. Then around 1972, Navette began to settle onto the bottom. "See them oil drums? They tried to float her with 'em," Shawn says, turning his head sadly away, and whispering "but, it didn't work."

I follow Shawn, and climb out onto an overhanging palm and then step down onto an oak bough that serves as a 10 foot gangway to Navette. Looking around, I try to locate a place on the decaying wood of the port side deck that will support me. I pick a spot atop a stringer and lower myself aboard. There are flakes of a reddish and white paint still in evidence on the woodwork. The deck flexes as I move carefully forward, following Shawn on a path over the cabin roof where it seems a dingy was once attached. I pick out the strong points on the frames of the hatchways as we move across the 14-foot three-inch beam, to starboard.

We go further forward, past the cabin, to another hatch, one that opens into the engine room. Half submerged, the giant boiler once enclosed in a polished brass casing, stills stands solid against the water. "You can go down inside, if you want" Shawn says, as he puts his hands on the hatchway and lowers himself, waist deep, into the water. His slender body barely ripples the surface as he sinks down to the submerged deck below.

Shawn has been here before, many times. He is comfortable, like one of the crew, aboard Navette. "You used to be able to go back to the main cabin," Shawn says, "but now its under water." I lean down to make a photograph of the inside, carefully placing my hand between a colony of lazy ants and a sticky web, with a spider near by. Later, when I hitch a ride back to Navette from the Hendry County boat ramp, Harvey Higgens' wife tells me of a visit to Navette when a huge black snake chased them off the deck. But I don't know about the snake now.

Shawn climbs out of the boiler room and we move ahead, down the starboard side past the galley and the dining room, until the separated bow section comes into view. There, the planking becomes flimsy and we turn back, crossing in front of a steam pipe where the stack must have been, and returning to the port side, below a thick growth of vines. Hyacinth now floats where the chain locker and anchor once lay. In the wood, a clean-cut round hole still shows signs of a metal fitting, once installed. Higgens later said that he and some of the other locals "took some of the teak decking and metal fittings from Navette" after she was abandoned.

Shawn climbs off the port side rail and drops into the gator's water without so much as a glance. Moving out from the branches overhead I stand tall, trying to imagine being aboard on a cool summer morning and chatting with J.P. Morgan. I close my eyes, and we are coming up the East River, turning into a section of the New York waterway known as Hells Gate. I can feel the quiet power of the twin triple-expansion steam engines turning the screws, driving Navette into the waters of the Hudson.

"Good morning Mr. Morgan" I say, "She is a beautiful boat, and thank you for having me aboard."

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