She’s a steady hand on Old Ironsides
CHARLESTOWN, MASS.– Maintaining the USS Constitution, a ship that has needed near-constant restoration since it was built in 1797, requires a blend of artistic talent, patience, and love of history.
Liz Frost has spent years building these qualities as the lone sailmaker at the Charlestown Navy Yard, where the Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship currently afloat, is docked. Reverence for the past is in her blood: she’s a Daughter of the American Revolution and a distant cousin to poet Robert Frost.
Her reverence is a calling, one that gets her out of bed at 4 each morning so she can drive from her home in Eliot, Maine, to be at the ship by 6, winter or summer. Although the ship’s tourism season now has died down, her job is no less busy; winter is when indoor repair projects pick up.
After completing a four-year program on plastics and fabrication at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and three years outfitting nuclear submarines, Frost joined the team restoring the Constitution for its 1997 bicentennial launch, and stayed on.
“You know those Navy buttons that say ‘From Sails to Atoms’?” says Frost, 55, a former art teacher. “Well, I’ve gone from atoms to sails.”
The Navy training helped, but it was Frost’s earlier life as an artist, especially her work on stone lithography, that gave her the steady hand needed for the monumental work of caulking, coppering, and sewing for the 204-foot ship. As the only woman in the maintenance work and repair unit of the Naval Historical Center Detachment Boston, Frost is part Betsy Ross, part Rosie the Riveter.
“A lot of what we do is tedious,” says Frost. “But I don’t mind tedious.”
Frost speaks with images, pen in hand. She illustrates her work, drawing bottom and side views of the caulking mallet made for her by ship’s blacksmith Steve Nichols or the flared sides of her sail bench, where she sits to sew reef points (reinforced grommets used to shorten sails) into the rigging.
Frost’s first job was pulling miles of hemp caulk from between the oak planks, then unwinding and tapping in layer after layer of new hemp.
It was rugged work. ‘”You are hammering above your head for hours at a stretch,” says Frost. “I felt like Schwarzenegger after a few months.” Her feminine hammer-stroke, which she describes as, “You know, the you-throw-like-a-girl” motion, had to be adapted, she said. But when the job shifted to pounding copper nails into the hull, the men copied her.
“The nails have no real heads, so it’s very easy to miss,” says Frost. “The nail shoots out and pings you in the face. I thought: forget tradition. I’m going to use my needle-nose pliers to hold that little sucker in there.” The “girl thing” became the standard.
Frost later replaced the ship’s top fabrics expert and began sewing tarps, making a bowsprit cover and doing machine work on the existing sails. “I have a sewing background, and when I came here and saw the huge commercial Singer sewing machine, I was all over it,” says Frost.
Rigging supervisor Bob Burbank wanted Frost to make the flying jib, the ship’s foremost sail, and another sail called the spanker, to gain the experience, then replace others as needed. So Frost journeyed on her own time to a sail loft in East Boothbay Harbor, Maine to learn from Natt Wilson, an authority on tall ship sail restoration. “She took a keen interest in the craft and was very skilled,” says Wilson, who made the Constitution’s four main sails.
The ship’s scale is daunting.
“It’s like having an elephant as your first pet,” says Frost.
The Constitution spread 33 sails in 1812, when it famously destroyed the British frigate Guerriere and tore through the ocean at 16 knots. It has always been a high-maintenance ship, needing extensive repair within four years of its launch. It now has 11 sails and can fly them only when there are enough hands on deck, such as during the annual training of the Navy’s chief selects (an enlisted rank below chief petty officer). Between the marching and singing of “Anchors Aweigh” about 60 chief selects will set the thousand-pound sails and venture out.
“It’s for tradition and education, but mainly just for fun,” Frost says.
Keeping the sailing tradition alive and serving as a repository of boat and shipbuilding knowledge is one of the Constitution’s ancillary missions.
One way it achieves this is through Constitution across the Nation, an outreach program with which Frost frequently travels. Navy personnel visit schools (a lesson plan has been developed) and present maritime history.
Frost’s team typically arrives at a school midweek, hauling a cannon and mockup of a cross section of the ship to a local museum. She brings her sail bench, its bags of tools dropped snugly into its circular wells. “Mine is pretty fancy, nicely painted, and covered in leather,” Frost says. “It’s the yuppie in me.” The teacher is there, too. She spreads out the many books she’s collected and when a book chooses someone — a Gulf War veteran or a Boy Scout learning about knots — she lets the lucky one keep it.
Others flip through her book of sails, see the vastness of a topsail when shown in perspective against the size of a man, and ask questions. Most want to know why the new sails are not made of flax but of a synthetic fabric called Oceanus. “We needed lightweight sails that could wick water and could be dyed any color,” she says.
The ship launched under sail power in 1997 for the first time in 116 years. In those images Frost has found a spiritual home.
“I was once on a barge, one of the Constitution Guard leading the ship out (it goes out 6 to 10 times per year), and I was drinking coffee, chatting away,” says Frost. “I turned, and there was the Constitution: the lines, the change in color from sail and rope, to wood, to copper, the flag, the people on deck, it’s an art form you can’t help but be moved by.”
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