A mystery “shippe” loaded with New Haven’s original mercantile dreams was sighted centuries after its disappearance, right at the center of modern-day New Haven commerce.
The sighting took place this past Sunday by the corner of Chapel and Church. There, Leland Torrence, owner of Leland Torrence Enterprises, and a crew carried a 7,500-pound artifact from the old Exchange Building: a “medallion” depicting the great shippe. Unlike a UFO “sighting,” this one definitely happened — we know that because they above video captured it.
The terrazzo panel was headed for storage, en route to its planned future home: the Canal Dock boathouse under construction on Long Wharf.
The panel has a history, beginning with its placement in downtown New Haven buildings, then its disappearance, then its rediscovery. Tom Butler, a project manager with the Fusco Corporation, who remembered seeing the panel in Liggett’s Drugstore as a kid, had a crew find and recover the depiction inside a wall when Fusco renovated the Exchange Building in the 1980s. Now the public at large will be able to view it once the boathouse opens.
The shippe itself has a longer history.
That history began back in 1646, when New Haven was a colony. Civic leaders came up with an idea to transform New Haven’s economy overnight — and fight an ominous regional economic trend, the emergence of Boston and what was then New Amsterdam as dominant commercial ports. The idea involved a big ship, or, as it would come to be known, a Great Shippe.
The civic leaders dreamed of the fledgling colony becoming a center of international trade. They dreamed of getting rich. So leading merchants formed the Shippe Fellowship Company. As one historian, David E. Philips, would later write, they “engaged a Rhode Island builder to construct a ship which they hoped would reverse the colony’s trade decline. By January, 1647, the 150-ton cargo vessel had been loaded heavily with about all the tradeable goods the people of New Haven could scrape together.”
The civic leaders’ transformative vision never materialized; in fact, the Puritans never heard from the Great Shippe’s crew again. They did get one more look at the ship and at their vision: one day, according to the lore surrounding New Haven’s history, the Great Shippe appeared in the sky. Once. Then the apparition vanished, never to be seen again.
Until now. Who knows? From its new perch by the harbor, it may have a front seat at what could be a new generation of grand New Haven mercantile dreams.
Last summer I was visiting a historical house/museum in a toney Cape Code town and right in the middle of the very enthusiastic and elderly tour guides description of "the captain's" voyages and subsequent business success, without really thinking about it I blurted out, "what was his cargo?" (...long pause in which crickets could be heard chirping...change of subject to something new englandy olde tymee; I think it was a loom or a bird carving or something...)