DATE: Tuesday, August 26, 1997              TAG: 9708260094

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: ANNAPOLIS                         LENGTH:  176 lines

TALL SHIPS, TALL DREAMSMELBOURNE SMITH IS AN ARTIST AND DESIGNER OF HISTORIC SAILING CRAFT WHO HOPES TO CREATE A REPLICA SCHOONER TO REPRESENT HAMPTON ROADS.

THE OLD FARMHOUSE that serves as home and office for Melbourne Smith has tall ships on every wall, trailing glory under clouds of sail.

The finely detailed watercolors bear the artist's signature, ``Melbourne,'' and a visitor quickly realizes that these paintings are not just depictions of historic vessels but visions that the artist himself, as designer and builder, has brought to life and taken out to sea.

``The fun is finding out how they work,'' Smith says, stopping in mid-ramble through his 1812 brick house, glancing up at the mahogany hulls of several half-models mounted on the wall. ``If it's a good sailing vessel, ah! there's just marvelous things you can do.''

``When it works, it really does work,'' he says, letting a big grin light his face. ``Putting it all together, it's magic.''

Melbourne Smith, named after the Australian seaport, is one of the country's most active historic-ship replica builders and promoters.

He built the original Pride of Baltimore, Maryland's floating ambassador of goodwill, and designed or built more than half a dozen other replicas that now grace the harbors of cities on both coasts.

And if several dozen things go right in the coming months, he will design the Schooner Virginia, a fast tall ship that a local group is hoping will represent Hampton Roads and the commonwealth at ports of call around the world.

The Schooner Virginia Project, a recently formed non-profit organization, has chosen Smith as designer of the proposed 118-foot replica of a pilot schooner that once guided ships into the port of Hampton Roads. The Virginia, built in 1917, was the flagship of the Virginia Pilots Association.

The Virginia's days were numbered because sail power was about to lose out to engine power, and she would end her days in a South American harbor in about 1930. Ironically, her claim to fame was not great battles won but sheer speed. As one of the last of a breed of working schooners to ply East Coast waters, the Virginia was nimble and lightning-fast.

The modern version, Smith says, should be able to outrun anything approaching her size in the world.

Especially if you let him sail it, he says with barely a twinkle of his sea-tested blue eyes.

His dash is matched by his enthusiasm.

Nothing represents a state or region like a tall ship, he contends. It's one thing to invite officials or business leaders to a hotel banquet room. ``To be invited on the Virginia: Wow, a full-rigged schooner in the harbor! People will give their eye teeth to visit. And to have an invitation to go on board, and maybe to go for a sail, there's nothing like it.''

Allan Rawls, who is building the Smith-designed Kalamar Nyckel, a Swedish trader, for Wilmington, Del., says Smith's strengths are ``his understanding of design, construction and the operation of traditional vessels.''

Smith, he adds, is ``definitely a character.''

Part of that character comes through in the retelling of adventures of a peripatetic life.

The 67-year-old Smith, born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, quit school when he was 14, worked as a sign painter in Niagara, N.Y., and then spent four years with the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets and two in the merchant service as deck hand on trans-Atlantic ships.

One of his first boats, a 72-foot trawler, turned out to be a disaster. He was going to live aboard and fix up the old boat from profits he would make selling his paintings. But the trawler foundered in the English Channel on the way to France. Smith, his wife and crew were saved but not hundreds of his paintings.

Undaunted, he bought a 105-foot, three-masted, engineless schooner in Gibraltar and partly financed its operation by ``smuggling'' whiskey - because authorities winked at it, it wasn't exactly illegal - into Spain.

But it makes a good story.

He sailed the still-engineless schooner to the West Indies, where he tried, but didn't succeed, in operating a chartering service.

So he took a job, not just any job, mind you, with the Guatemala navy - teniento comodoro, lieutenant commander - to teach sailing and navigation to that country's cadets. But a revolution sent him fleeing over the mountains to what is now Belize, and he settled there to build wooden boats.

Again, circumstances guided his life. On delivering a yacht to a buyer in Annapolis in 1967, he sold a painting to a sailing magazine and decided he liked the city so much he settled there.

As a marine artist, he has published more than 150 paintings of historic sailing ships for the Naval Institute Press, the American Heritage Press and others.

Partly out of frustration in trying to learn navigation from a then-standard textbook with no drawings, he set his mind to illustrating. As a result, ``Dutton's Navigation and Piloting,'' the bible on the subject used by the Naval Academy, now includes scores of his how-to sketches. Other books have followed, such as a tome on nautical etiquette and the lavishly illustrated ``Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze River,'' including Chinese characters.

Boat builder, painter, illustrator. Now what?

Well, he hadn't tried compass adjusting. The Naval Academy and the Coast Guard, among others, asked him to make the delicate adjustments that must regularly be made to their compasses.

And, oh yes, marine surveyor.

In 1975, Baltimore was offered a replica of a Baltimore clipper, and local officials were eager to use it as a symbol of a reborn city. The city turned to Smith to evaluate it.

A piece of plywood junk, he told them. They were crushed, but Smith had a better idea: ``If you really want a Baltimore clipper, why don't you let me build one for you?''

And he did. With a crew of skilled shipwrights and wood from Central America, he built the 84-foot Pride for $450,000 - considerably less than other bidders - in 10 months.

In jest, he suggested naming the vessel Blaze Starr after the famous Baltimore stripper, and Johnny Unitas, the equally famous quarterback. They were aghast, he says, and when he got to ``Pride,'' the name he really wanted them to choose, he says they agreed on the spot.

It was intended as a floating showpiece that would remain at the port, but Smith persuaded the city to put it under sail. Ten months after construction began, Smith was at the wheel of the proud new ship as its first captain, sailing to Bermuda.

The Pride sank in a freak storm in the Bahamas in 1986 and was quickly replaced by the Pride of Baltimore II. The vessel, which recently completed a European tour and this Christmas leaves for Asia, has been so successful it has been imitated by several states.

In many cases, it has been Smith leading the charge.

He designed the Gloucester schooner Spirit of Massachusetts for the New England Historical Seaport in Boston; designed and built the revenue schooner Californian, which was launched in San Diego; and researched, designed and built a replica of the 281-ton flagship commanded by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry - known for uttering, ``Don't give up the ship!'' - for the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission in Erie, Pa.

He has sailed as navigator in Newport, R.I.-Bermuda, trans-Atlantic and America's Cup team races and captained numerous yachts on their way to ports in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.

Smith has chalked up enough adventures to qualify as a raconteur. But at the same time, he downplays the stories, describing one race as ``five days of misery so you can have 50 weeks to talk about it.''

At home, Smith seems energized by his subject and his craft, hauling open deep drawers to show designs and blueprints. He points with pride to the cupola atop the house that he built with ship's timbers. Out back there's a huge workshop filled with tall ship gizmos and beside it a pile of Central American rosewood that will go into another project.

He's comfortably ensconced in the farmhouse in the midst of a subdivision north of the city with his wife, Calixta, a naval architect from the Philippines, and his oversized Labrador retriever, Spanker.

Smith is not a romantic when it comes to sailing.

``When you read about life on clipper ships or life on whalers, it was dreadful,'' he says. ``There were terrible long hours and miserable conditions. How those guys did it is just amazing. But there was no other way to go. People didn't sail because they wanted to but because they had to.''

Even so, the stories lend romance. People don't go to see historic ships like the Niagara because of their beauty, he says, but because of their stories.

With the Virginia, a boat so sleek that admirers said it appeared to be racing when lying at anchor, the story is speed. It was built to race out to meet ships coming into Hampton Roads, the James River and the Chesapeake Bay.

``She'll certainly be the fastest historical vessel around,'' says Smith. ``She followed a long line of other schooners, each one built on the strengths of the one before. She's the ultimate example of a sailing schooner.''

Because of that, he says, the Pride of Baltimore II, a fast boat in its own right but a more cumbersome, older clipper design, might never race the Virginia.

But then the salesman in Smith takes over. ``What they could do is challenge the Pride and have the citizens of Virginia and Maryland put up the money. Winner take all. Or have the pick of their favorite charity. Then the Pride will have to race. It doesn't matter who wins: It will raise hundreds of thousands, an awful lot of money and for a noble purpose.''

When the promoters of the Virginia asked Smith if he'd guarantee that the boat he designed would, in fact, beat the Pride, he says he told them, ``It depends on who sails her; if you let me sail her, I will.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

JOHN GILLIS/Associated Press

Photo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Historic-ship designer Melbourne Smith points out details of the

Maryland Federalist, a replica of a 1788 vessel he created for

display in the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis. KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY ARTIST

SHIP REPLICAS

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