Book by Rice Staff Member Tells Story of the Historic Elissa

A Grand Old Ship

Book by Rice Staff Member Tells Story of the Historic Elissa

“Sailing Ship Elissa,” a book by Patricia Bellis Bixel, assistant editor of the Journal of Southern History, tells the story of the tall ship Elissa. The ship has called Galveston home since 1979 and is now a permanent exhibit of that city’s Texas Seaport Museum.

BY MARY SEATON DIX
Special to the Rice News
March 25, 1999

On July 4, 1986, New York cheered as the Elissa, her 19 sails billowing in a good breeze, sailed past the Statue of Liberty, two grand old ladies meeting each other for the first time. When last the Elissa, then a busy merchant ship, had called in New York in 1884 the statue was not yet in place. And now the Elissa was coming from Galveston to help Lady Liberty celebrate her centennial.

That the ship survived to take part in these ceremonies is a remarkable story well told by Patricia Bellis Bixel, a graduate of Rice twice-over (bachelor of arts, 1978, and doctorate, 1997, with a defection to Duke for a master’s degree in 1979) and now assistant editor of the Journal of Southern History on the Rice campus.

The book, published by Texas A&M Press in 1998, is “Sailing Ship Elissa,” and Bixel is exceptionally well-qualified to write the history of the tall ship and its rescue and restoration. Employed by the Galveston Historical Foundation from 1983 to 1991 and at one time coordinator of permanent exhibits for the Texas Seaport Museum, she became an enthusiastic volunteer on the Elissa. Her telling of its voyage to New York in 1986 is a firsthand account; she joined the crew at Charleston, S.C., and remained a part of the adventure for the rest of the summer.

The history of the Elissa could easily have had another ending. Launched in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1877, the barge shipped out with a load of coal for South America and returned with lumber from Pernambuco. Carrying general cargoes all over the world for her British owners, she might be described as “the pickup truck of her time,” explained Bixel. In 1883 the Elissa sailed into Galveston with a load of bananas from Mexico, the first of two calls at this port and visits that would later prove providential for the ship’s preservation. At the end of the century the Elissa was sold to a Scandinavian shipping firm and by 1930, now with an engine, passed to Finnish owners. With each transfer came a new name and changed appearance until only an expert could see the outlines of the old Elissa.

The author’s narrative of the discovery and eventual restoration of the Elissa is lively. The first hurdle was saving the ship from a scrap yard in Greece and getting it into condition for a trans-Atlantic crossing. Towed by a tug, which looked like “a fat man with a toy poodle on a leash,” Bixel wrote, the Elissa arrived in Galveston in July 1979.

There the real work of restoration began. Hitler’s bombs had destroyed the shipbuilders records, making it necessary to study comparable ships and devise logical plans for the Elissa. Not surprisingly, costs mounted and not the least of the perils that endangered the ship’s future were financial. Bixel’s book is dedicated to Harris L. Kempner, an ardent sailor and sponsor of the Elissa, who at critical moments attracted other supporters to the cause of restoration. When the grand opening was held on July 4, 1982, the reader joins the participants in a collective sigh of relief and rejoicing.

Bixel’s knowledge of maritime history is impressive but never intrusive. Besides her love of the ship and its history, she has a strong sense of the importance of sea trade in the development of Texas. She reminds us that in the 19th century 90 percent of the people and goods that reached the state came through the port of Galveston and encourages a visit to the Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa to recapture a time when the Gulf of Mexico was Texas’ link to the rest of the world.