Wooden sailing ships stir the imagination and recall our region's maritime history. The practice of building sailboats from wood is a highly specialized art here on the Eastern Shore. One of our living links to the ancient skill is Jim Brighton, an 80-year-old boat builder in Cambridge, Maryland. He apprenticed under one of the greats, Captain James B. Richardson. Delmarva Public Media's Kevin Diaz has the story.
There are few places left on the Chesapeake Bay where the tradition of building skipjacks and other wooden boats is still practiced as a living art. One of them is in Cambridge, Maryland, the state's only deep water port outside of Baltimore. At the heart of it all are the boat works of the Richardson Maritime Museum, named after Captain James B. Richardson, a prominent local boat builder and a legendary shipwright. Richardson has long since passed, but his legacy is still maintained by his 80-year-old son-in-law, Jim Brighton. We talked to Brighton about his mentor.
“Jim comes from a long line of ship builders. They came out of France, went into England. They were Huguenots. They fought for the king and they were deeded land over here in the 1660s. That's how his family got here.”
What's his reputation here in the Chesapeake Bay?
“Jim's reputation actually extended well beyond that. We had people calling from New Zealand, Australia, all over the world who were interested in building Skipjacks”, said Brighton.
Brighton became a boat builder almost by accident. He married Richardson's daughter and when her mother became ill, the couple moved to Cambridge to help care for her. That was in 1968. Brighton was working on helicopters for Boeing at the time. He was 21, fresh out of college. Moving to Cambridge, he just needed to find work. His father-in-law put him to work in the boat works.
“They essentially said, yeah, you can come to work for us and we'll teach you how to do this. Although they also said that at my age, I probably couldn't catch on.”
So did you catch on?
“I like to think so”, Brighton mused.
For the rest of us, there may be some romance in the wooden ships of yore, but to Jim Brighton,
“It started out as just a job. I mean, they had a pretty good time with me. You got to remember, these men all started in the trades when they were teenagers.”
After a little on the job training, the older men in the shop decided Brighton had learned enough to take on his first solo project, a 28-foot skipjack named the Peregrine.
“I came in one morning and they said to me, well, we think you've learned enough. You can build a boat. And they said, we're going to have you build a boat this winter. Part of that process was, I wasn't necessarily nervous, but I knew they would let me work all day on something and figure something out on my own, and then the next morning one of them would come by and say, 'well, let me show you something Jim', and teach me how I could have done it maybe in two hours instead of eight,” Brighton recounted.
The Peregrine turned out to be a well-founded boat. Now, 50 years later, she's been brought back to Cambridge for renovations. Brighton was there at the Boatworks to greet her.
“I have mixed emotions about it. Once they leave the shop, I mean, a lot of the boats we built, we took care of over the years, but you're always curious about what happens to them or what have you. But there's not a great emotional attachment”, he admitted.
Brighton is still not one to get sentimental about wooden ships, though he's worked on some of the most storied vessels from our local maritime history. These include the replica of the Dove, which first brought English settlers to Maryland and the Constellation in Baltimore, the Navy's last sail only warship. Does he worry the art is fading? Well, somewhat.
“There's a group coming behind us. It is not as large as it used to be, but there are some good shipwrights and riggers that are around”, Brighton said.
But he worries money is always hard to come by and there are fewer and fewer projects. Still, the allure of wooden boats lives on, at least in places like Cambridge and at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's.
“I think it's the very fact of the time period that they represent and we all look back at that. And like anything else in our lives, what do we remember? We remember the good things.”
With Colin Bright in Cambridge, this is Kevin Diaz for Delmarva Public Media.
