Mystic Seaport Museum is one of four museums in the country to be recognized with a 2020 Sustainability Excellence Award, presented by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).

First presented in 2014, the awards recognize sustainability efforts in facilities, programming, and exhibits in both large and small institutions. In the last five years, the award program has recognized 20 different museums for their efforts.

Mystic Seaport Museum received a Special Award of Merit for its accomplishments in eliminating single-use plastic on its entire 19-acre site. The awards jury “was impressed by the institution’s comprehensive approach: the attention paid to inculcating behavior change; addressing cost challenges; data collection and analysis; and the detailed documentation of its process,” the award announcement stated.

“The Mystic Seaport [Museum] is a powerful example that illustrates a deep dive in one sustainability topic that was consistently tackled with rigor,” said Joyce S. Lee, the Jury Chair for the Facility Award.

The Sustainability Excellence Awards, which strongly encourage museum energy benchmarking to address climate action, are sponsored by the Environment and Climate Network, a professional network of AAM members committed to establishing museums as leaders in environmental sustainability. The other museums receiving 2020 awards are the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures in Urbana, IL, the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, WA, and the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, PA.

Reducing Single-Use Plastics

In February 2019, Mystic Seaport Museum announced an initiative to work toward eliminating single-use plastics on its 19-acre site on the Mystic River. In collaboration with its reatail and food service partners, Event Network and Coastal Gourmet, the Museum implemented a long list of single-use plastic reductions in the bake shop, Museum Store, restaurants, event catering, the Sailing Center, and across the grounds, which includes elimination of plastic straws, cups, lids, takeaway containers, and bags; the addition of reusable bags, water bottles, coffee mugs, and many other eco-friendly products in the Museum store; installation of three water bottle refill stations; promotion of noted days throughout the year such as Earth Day, Plastic Free July, World Oceans Day, and America Recycles Day, and many other efforts.

We recently had to make the difficult and upsetting decision to reduce our workforce. This move was taken only as a last resort to preserve our ability to reopen to the public when this crisis has passed.

Some have understood the move to mean that the Museum is permanently closing.  Contrary to media reports, that conclusion is absolutely not the case. Be assured the business of the Museum continues. There is a corps of dedicated staff members who are making sure the institution’s collections – ashore and afloat – the campus, and its intellectual assets are preserved and maintained. They will ensure we will be in a position to reopen to the public as soon as the State of Connecticut issues us permission to do so and we are certain we can do so safely.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect us all in broad and unpredictable ways. Normally, at this time of year we would be putting the final touches on planning for Pirate Days, holding classes and workshops and hosting school programs all over the campus, preparing the Maritime Gallery for its spring show, opening up the Boathouse, and getting ready for our annual Members meeting. Obviously, that is not the situation we find ourselves in today and we are in the process of rescheduling exhibitions and programs to a later date.

On March 12, we made the difficult, but proactive, choice to close the Museum to the public through the end of the month. Staff were asked to work while observing social distancing and other recommended practices. Then, our Governor issued Executive Order 7H requiring that non-essential businesses close and that public stay home, now through at least the month of April. Faced with these facts and an even more uncertain future, we had to make the difficult decision to significantly reduce our level of staffing. As we are unable to open our doors to the public to generate revenue, we had to take action to preserve and maintain financial sustainability during this unprecedented period of economic turmoil. We have responded in the same manner as many other businesses in our region, and indeed our country.

In the meantime, we are leveraging our digital capabilities to bring the Museum to you via online classes for children and adults via Zoom, YouTube, and our social media channels. We just launched a new digital content hub where all of these pieces, new and old, will be gathered for you to find in one convenient place. You can find it at stories.mysticseaport.org/. It is free and open to anyone who wants to explore maritime history.

This is not the first time Mystic Seaport Museum has overcome adversity. We were founded 90 years ago at the onset of the Great Depression, and we have survived all of the trials and travails of American society since that time, such as World War II, the September 11 attacks, and the Great Recession.  We are a resilient organization and we will emerge as strong as ever.

We need your help while we wait for the day we can open our gates and welcome visitors again. Please consider making an unrestricted gift to the Museum–the timing has never been more urgent! We are deeply appreciative of our community. Now we need your generous support so we can weather the COVID-19 Pandemic and reopen again. Together we can come through this challenge.

Sincerely,

 

 

 

Steve White
President

 

You can make your gift to support the mission of Mystic Seaport Museum online:

Donate

 

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Join our vice president for Watercraft Preservation and Programs, Chris Gasiorek, as he tours the back room of our watercraft hall, the “Broom Closet.”

 By Frank Reed

Mystic Seaport Museum offers one of the world’s best classes in both modern and historical celestial navigation. Among the classes is a unique workshop, “Celestial Navigation in the Age of Sail,” which focuses on 19th-century navigation in the whaling era using primary source evidence from the voyages of the Museum’s Charles W. Morgan. The Museum also offer the workshop “Lunars: Finding Longitude by Lunar Distances,” which is the only class in the history, modern practice, and science of lunars that is offered anywhere in the world.

The special celestial observations called lunars were once the epitome of the science of celestial navigation. In the late 18th century through the middle of the 19th century, when chronometers (accurate clocks for use at sea) were rare and expensive, navigators could use the Moon as a natural clock in the sky. As the Moon travels around the celestial sphere, making one revolution in a month, shifting from one constellation to another each night, navigators would measure its position relative to the Sun and stars and determine the absolute time, the so-called Greenwich Time, to the nearest 15-30 seconds. By comparing absolute time with local time, which was found from a simple altitude of the Sun or a star, navigators could determine their longitude, their distance east/west from the prime meridian at Greenwich.

In the logbook of the first voyage of the Charles W. Morgan in the early 1840s, we find instances where the crew recorded their longitude as determined by Lunar (often spelled eccentrically as “Luner”). Other logbooks in the collection of Mystic Seaport Museum, especially in earlier decades, include numerous examples of navigating by lunars.

Shooting a lunar was a bit art, a bit science, and a bit magic for a person aboard a vessel 150 to 250 years ago who was not trained in the method. A navigator would hold a sextant more or less sideways, catching the Sun or one of the standard lunars stars in the instrument’s primary view and rotating the sextant until the Moon appeared superimposed by reflection from the movable index mirror. Then by carefully, delicately adjusting the instrument, the Sun or star would be aligned until it just touched the bright limb or edge of the Moon. The exact angle in degrees, minutes, and seconds would then be read from the finely-engraved arc. With the measured angle in hand, the navigator would retire below deck to work some calculations, removing the effects of refraction and especially parallax (the shift in the Moon’s position caused by being relatively close to the Earth, only a quarter of a million miles away). The math might take 15 minutes. The cleared distance would be compared with pre-computed distances listed in the Nautical Almanac for every three hours of Greenwich Time. If the observed and corrected distance was some fraction of the angle between the listed distances, then the navigator knew that his or her own Greenwich Time was that same fraction through the three-hour interval.

Lunars died out slowly during the 19th century, at least in maritime practice, as chronometers, those exquisite marine clocks that could carry Greenwich Time around the world, became less expensive and more common. By the end of the 19th century, lunars had become so rare that Joshua Slocum, the first solo circumnavigator, bragged in 1899 about a single lunar observation performed near the Marqueses on his long voyage. In his Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum wrote a nice epitaph for 19th-century lunars: “The work of the lunarian … is beautifully edifying, and there is nothing in the realm of navigation that lifts one’s heart up more in adoration.” Meanwhile, another author had declared lunars “as dead as Julius Caesar” in the previous decade!

And yet even in the 21st century, when we have no need for them for time or longitude, navigators study and make themselves experts at lunars for the challenge and because they remain the ultimate test of a navigator’s skill with a sextant. To do lunars right, navigators must be masters of their sextants and of their math. And once we’ve learned the tricks, they’re fun, too! Lunars are much easier than their traditional reputation suggests, and any navigator can benefit from learning how to shoot and work them.

In the Lunar class at Mystic Seaport Museum, we cover the finer points of adjusting sextants and achieving the highest accuracy from the instruments. We look at the history using primary source materials from the Museum’s collection, and we learn about the intriguing math and science that makes these sights possible and practical. We even discuss the strange renaissance in lunars that occurred in the late 1960s when astronauts shot lunars on their way to the Moon. Weather-permitting, we shoot lunars from the deck of the Charles W. Morgan, just as those early crews did in the middle of the 19th century.

Frank Reed has taught navigation classes at Mystic Seaport Museum for more than a decade. He is a recent guest expert in celestial navigation on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk science talk show on the National Geographic Channel.

 

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Join Chris Gasiorek, our vice president of Watercraft Preservation and Programs, for an impromptu tour of our watercraft collection.