Bringing History to Life - Horace Whitfield II

This article describes the work of Horace Whitfield on the Elizabeth II. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.

Citation for this article is: Rees, Franceine."Bringing History to Life . . . ECU Alumnus Commands" ECU Report, Volume 16, No. 6, January 1985.

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Aboard the galleon Elizabeth II , moored across from the Manteo waterfront, it's easy to imagine oneself transported to the sixteenth century.The wooden hull with its marks of the ax and adze gleams with brightly painted trim and a pungent coating of linseed oil.

As she rests in her berth, the ship's sails are furled. Below deck she is clear of cargo; above, a half dozen sailors clad in the garments of Elizabethan mariners are busy making the square-rigged bark shipshape. They speak with the lilting brogue of Devonshire or in the London speech we recognize as "cockney" English; a gentleman adventurer paces among them, trading gives with the old salts.

This is "living history," a re-enactment of an important part of our past -- Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke expeditions which brought the first English colonists to the North Carolina shore 400 years ago. The setting is an authentically constructed sixteenth century vessel; the mariners, professional actors trained to interpret the hardy seamen they portray.

At the helm is the ship's youthful captain, Master Thomas Cavendish, calm and dignified of manner, soberly dressed in dark doublet and knee breeches.His fine clothing, plumed cap and gold earring bespeak the captain's superior rank; his confidence as a leader indicates his intimate knowledge of this ship and her workings.

Indeed, East Carolina University alumnus Horace Whitfield II, who brings Master Cavendish to life, knows his picturesque merchantman vessel inside and out, fore and aft, from the tip of her tallest mast to the bottom of her hull.

As captain of the ship, Whitfield is responsible for her care and eventual movements through coastal waters. He is also director of the state's new Elizabeth II Hisotric Site, a sizable complex which includes a visitors' center with auditorium, exhibition area and shop; winding trails over path and pier that lead to the ship; and the ship itself.As director, he supervises the site's staff of 20 persons, more during the summer months when the historical interpretation is in full process.

"I often feel pulled in two different directions -- I know I am," says Captain Whitfield. "There are people who see me in these two functions and say you can't have a site manager and a ship's manager both in one person.Their feeling is that both jobs are big enough to require the attention of one individual, and there are times when I know I'm neglecting one job or the other," he confessed.

Whitfield's double function naturally keeps him very, very busy. "I can't remember when I've taken a day off," he said. Sometimes he's in his office catching up on adminstrative paperwork or meeting with representatives from state agencies or the ship's support organization.Even in winter, when he's less frequently called up on to appear in the guise of Thomas Cavendish he must often be aboard ship, overseeing the necessary maintenance procedures or training groups of volunteers who'll be helping to sail the ship when she travels to other ports during the remainder of the America's 400th Anniversary Celebration.

"That's a drawback to my doing both these jobs," he said. "When people come to the ship they expect to see me in the cabiin or on deck.Instead they might find me in the office talking on the phone. "Ultimately he hopes his operations manager can take over most of the administrative duties, because, he declares, "When the ship moves, I'm going to be with the ship."

Whitfield does find a certain efficiency in the dual-role arrangement: "If there's something I know that th eship needs, I don't have to convince someone else sitting in the office he should ask for it.I just come in and order it myself.I have an understanding of the ship that no one else has."

Soon after taking on his duties as director of the historic site, Whitfield spent several days in Massachusetts with the administrators of the Mayflower II site. "They've had almost 30 years of doing the very thing that we are beginning now. And I can see that some of the problems we face they've not been able to resolve, such as how do you do twentieth century maintenance in a sixteenth centry interpretation?

"It's a rather schizoid feeling, living with a foot in each of the eras, and it's a hard thing to justify one to the other sometimes. How can you be Thomas Cavendish and get down there with a tube of polysulfide caulking compound and a caulking gun?"

While acknowledging that historical interpretation is the ship's chief function, he stresses the need for careful maintenance. "If you don't do the things the ship needs, you simply won't have a deck to stand on.But when there are anywhere from a thousand to twelve hundred people a day coming aboard the ship, we have difficulty finding time to take care of upkeep chores."

The young captain's interest in the ship begin in 1979, upon first hearing news of the proposal to build a commemorative vessel for the quadricentennial observance. The ship was inspired by "the Elizabeth, o ffiftie tunnes," one vessel in the small fleet led to the New World in 1585 by Sir Richard Grenville under Raleigh's sponsorship.

When the actual building of the commemorative ship began in 1981, Whitfield was there as an eager volunteer carpenter and devoted leader in her support group, Friends of Elizabeth II. His involvement with the ship is the culmination of a decade mostly spent near and on the water, learning and practicing the seaman's craft, exploring coastal waters.

Whitfield's long-held interest in sailing developed while he was still an ECU student, during summer work with the editor of his fraternity magazine. Weekdays were spent in the reconstruction of old houses, Sundays in recreational sailing. After graduation in 1973 with a BA degree in English, Whitfield worked several months in a Raleigh hospital psychiatric ward before surrendering to the lure of the sea and moving to Manteo.

"People see a vessel under sail, and it stirs something in them. The romance of sailing had a strong appeal for me," he said. "I wanted to live at the coast and learn more about boats and the water.When I first came, I told people I would be here long enough to build a boat and sail away." Actually Whitfield spent two years teaching at Manteo High School while working parttime as mate on the commercial fishing vessel, Kiel-Dawn. Still haunted by dreams of his own boat, he designed and built his 26-foot sailboat, Greedless. He supported his boat and himself with temporary jobs as mate on larger boats, carpenter in boatbuilding shops and even groundskeeper for the Florida Oceanographic Society -- he had sailed the Greedless down the South Atlantic coast and back, a leisurely cruise of nearly a year.

During his Greedless days, Whitfield experimented with very basic living, subsisting for several months at "poverty level" to test his endurance and self-sufficiency. It was while resting on his boat to recover from a knee injury that Whitfield recognized he had passed his self-imposed hardship test. "I knew I was ready to do something else. I wanted to get married and raise a family, establish myself in a career -- use my talents," he recalled.

These goals are being met -- he has a wife and family and is certainly using his talents in a fulfilling career.But Captain Whitfield is already looking ahead to the future, maybe ten or twelve years from now when he will want to take his family on a long cruise, maybe even around the world. Whitfield believes every sailor dreams of circumnavigating the globe, and finds it "fortuitous" that his counterpart Thomas Cavendish, was the second Englishman (after Sir Francis Drake) to sail around the world.

"It's a great challenge, to see places most people never see, to have insights into other socieities and cultures, to learn first-hand about the geography of the planet, different climactic conditions. Even if you're thinking just of oceans and wave actions, it's a great challenge to overcome the physical aspects of moving in an environment that is always changing."

For the present, however, he finds sufficient challenge in his dual role at the Elizabeth II operation, which, in its initial months, was the center of feverish activity.Anyone less tranquil by nature than Captain Whitfield might have wrung his hands and quit the whole project or felt tempted to jump overboard.

The vessel was constructed, christened and launched amid a cloud of controversy as the Army Corps of Engineers unexpectedly rejected the state's request for help with the dredging needed to move large craft from Shallowbag Bay into connecting waterways. Captain Whitfield hastens to point out that the funds asked for are comparable to the amount required to widen and pave a mile of highway and that large recreational boats, not just the Elizabeth II, would benefit from dredging.

"We've had to narrow the scope of the dredging, which is basically similar to dredging proposals in coastal towns up and down the North Carolina coast. We can at least have a viable channel in and out, "Whitfield says confidently. Bids on the dredging project have been accepted, with work set to begin soon."The paperwork connected with this has been continual," he said.

Shallow waters were a problem four centuries ago, Whitfield noted. "One of the reasons the colonists knew they needed to go to Chesapeake Bay was the lack of a safe deep-water harbor here. But their pilot put them out here; they were forced out over the objection of Governor John White, because of the conflict the mariners had with the colonists.So they landed here, even though they had established the fact that there were better harbors in other places.

Shallow, silted-up waters make moving a ship hazardous or even impossible. The Elizabeth II has a "draft" of eight feet, which means that when afloat, the ship displaces about a hundred tons of water, requiring a depth of at least eight feet. But, says Whitfield, the ships that sailed here originally "drew perhaps twelve, even fifteen feet of water and anchored offshore."

Aside from the dredging issue, a good deal of pleasant hubbub was generated at the opening ceremonies of the 400th Anniversary observance last summer, at which the ship was commissioned by Governor James B. Hunt and England's Princess Anne. A parade of yachts led by retired TV news anchor Walter Cronkite formed an official America's 400th Anniversary Flotilla, sailing into the Shallowbag Bay in view of the Elizabeth II.

The captain enjoyed his encounter with the visiting notables, greeting Princess Anne with a courtly bow in his Cavendish garb, speaking in the Elizabethan parlance he has mastered for his Cavendish role.

"The Princess was most relieved when I dropped character," he says, chuckling. "I found her to be most amiable and very knowledgeable. She asked me questions from which I inferred that she had either 'done her homework' or that she knew what it was she was seeing."

The July opening focused widespread attention on the ship as the keynote of the 400th celebration, resulting in huge crowds of visitors during the summer weeks that followed.

"In August there were a total of 105,000 people visiting the state's 22 designated historic sites, and we had 30,000 of that total," Whitfiled says proudly. "We're new, we're large and growing, and we can elevate the whole Historic Sites program through the precedents we set."

Whitfield is full of plans, at varying stages of fruition, for expansion of the Elizabeth II site. He'd like to have another vessel built, this one a smaller ship -- a pinnace, typical of those used for fishing, coastal trade and exploration.

"These were mostly open, with a single deck.A vessel of this type would certainly draw less water and could be taken to more places," he explained. If the pinnace is built, it will probably take shape in the working boat shop on the Manteo waterfront. The shop, designed to have great "educational and interpretive value," is expected to produce a limited number of the small ship's boats similar to those used to get from the main ship to land.The prototype is being built at the maritime museum in Beaufort.

Other possibilities for enhancing the site include various aspects of shipboard life, Whitfield noted. "There are all sorts of activities we can portray.There was much foraging for food; anytime they touched land, they were resupplied. They were looking for fresh water, digging down into the sand. We could dig a pit here and make charred wood -- basically charcoal -- for use aboard the ship."

In addition to his roles as captain and site director, Whitfield has another maritime responsibility -- member of the Coast Guard Reserve.

"I'm a boatswain's mate -- third class.That's not very high, a little bit better than the rank of seaman, but I haven't tried to advance.Administrative duty would mean less time on the boat," he confided. "It's nice to be able to go for a weekend and have somebody else tell me what to do, for a change. I'm using my Coast Guard experience as a chance to learn more about search and rescue techniques, towing procedures, handling small boats -- all relevant to my job." He also likes to ride ferries so he can talk to the pilots and watch them work.

Horace Whitfield's desire to refine his knowledge of navigation isn't just a wish to learn to use modern techniques and state-of-the-art equipment; as part of his portrayal of his counterpart Cavendish he wants to discover what that long-ago young mariner must have known.

"They had navigational techniques that would baffle the minds of many people living today," Whitfield said. "They didn't have the refined instruments that were beginning to develop, but they had a fairly advanced understanding of navigational principles.As seafarers, they were moving from the realm of art to that of science.

"The English couldn't compare with the Spanish or the Portuguese for voyaging, so they relied on Portuguese or Spanish pilots. Those countries protected their information because seafaring was a trade secret.When an English merchant ship captured a Spanish ship they would grab the pilot, interrogate him, get his charts and maps, translate his logs. They would pore over all this and try to glean information that they didn't already have.

"It was definitely an age of discovery!"

Whitfield has been amused to learn of the conflicts that new knowledge caused between the old "shellback" mariners and the savants, the learned men who had studied new information translated from other languages.

"The savants would come to the old mariners and say, 'This is how you should do it,' and the sailors would answer, 'But it's been done this way for all these years and there's no reason to change.' It's typical of any era, this competition.

"People like Cavendish who were young and adventurous and had the means to purchase a ship, as well as the ambition and drive to learn new things, see new places . . . they are the ones who make things happen.On a ship as small as the Elizabeth , Cavendish would have been navigator as well as owner and captain; so he must have had the knowledge he needed to succeed in sailing as well as the ability to manage financially and politically to meethis goals."

Like Raleigh and Drake, Thomas Cavendish was a true Renaissance adventurer, Whitfield believes -- intelligent, skilled, daring and diplomatic.

"We look at these men and admire them for their ability to do so many things and do them well. To me this is the challenge of this job. To fill it adequately, really, a person needs to capture the energy and spirit of the Renaissance.He should try to be a modern-day Renaissance man."