Sailor Plots New Course for Museum

Descendant of New England whaling captains. Schooner hand. Maritime researcher. Wooden ship builder.

And now, curator of the Ventura County Maritime Museum.

At age 42, Christine L. Parker may not appear the proverbial old salt. But this is a woman who believes she was born 200 years too late and would rather be at the helm of a creaking whaling ship than almost anywhere else.

With Parker coming aboard last month, officials at the modest 5-year-old museum at Channel Islands Harbor believe they can sail her combination of practical wisdom and academic knowledge to larger seas.

“We’ve gone from being a dinky little thing in a dinky little port to being a credible institution,” said Harry Nelson, the local businessman whose nautical memorabilia composes 90% of the museum’s collection. “She’s one of six or seven [people] in the U.S. who have this kind of dual background, being involved academically and hands-on [with boats].”

*

Parker’s voyage to the museum has been long and circuitous.

She was born and raised in New Bedford, Mass., once an affluent whaling town 60 miles south of Boston that still boasts a museum devoted to the topic and a larger-than-life statue of a whaler raising his harpoon in front of the downtown library.

As a girl, she read old diaries written by her whaling ancestors more than a century before.

“Every child in New Bedford knows the whaling motto: A dead whale or a stove [crushed] boat,” she said. “For me it’s first-nature to be a sailor and to want or even to need to be near the ocean.”

Parker learned to sail at YMCA camp when she was 12, often taking to the waters of Apponagansett Bay with her father.

After graduating from high school in 1971, she attempted a conventional career path, studying anthropology at college. But a year later, Parker weighed academic anchor to help restore an 1886 oyster schooner and never really returned to the life of a full-time landlubber.

She was a cook on the Pride of Baltimore, a replica of a schooner that fought in the War of 1812. A shipyard worker on a replica of the famous HMS Bounty. Researcher for maritime museums. The author of numerous nautical articles. Editor of a book by Bill Gilkerson, a renowned painter of maritime themes.

Eventually, Parker married Melbourne Smith, a widely known designer and builder of historic wooden sailing ship replicas. Together they worked around the world, designing and building a veritable fleet of vessels that include the familiar tall ship the Californian and a $4.6-million reconstruction of the 19th century Navy brig Niagara.

“She can fry an egg or a side of bacon or she can plot a course to Madagascar,” said Gilkerson, who recommended her for the job in Oxnard, in a telephone interview from his Nova Scotia seaside home. “It takes a combination of experience and learning to know what you’re doing, and she’s got a sufficiency of both. . . . In working with her I have found her more learned than most of her colleagues who have master’s and doctorates.”

Parker is a self-proclaimed boat snob who shuns coddled fiberglass pleasure craft for the practical beauty of a wooden deck beneath her feet and canvas sail between her fingers.

“The art of creating the wooden boat is really an artistic one,” she said. “It is skill perfected to the level of craft. . . . I think we all hunger after challenges that reach the level of art.”

She has found a different sort of challenge at the Ventura County Maritime Museum, where she wound up after the end of her relationship with Smith.

With 20,000 visitors a year, the small museum located in a faux New England fishing village at the harbor isn’t exactly one of the county’s top tourist attractions.

Much of the museum’s potential remains untapped. It boasts the nation’s second-largest collection of ships by master model builder Ed Marple, and a solid collection of maritime art that arguably places it in the top five of such institutions in the nation, Nelson said.

Still, with a budget that wouldn’t keep the average yachtsman in caulking cotton, Parker simply wants to get going with a solid monthly rotating exhibit and labels identifying exhibits.

She also wants to overcome what she sees as the area’s lack of appreciation for maritime heritage. Despite the ocean’s proximity, Californians don’t have the cultural and historical ties to the sea that leach into the subconsciousness of New Englanders, she said.

“It’s not an easy sell,” Parker said, adding that an understanding of the sea is central to a person’s understanding of humanity. “It’s practically part of the definition of who we are as human beings--we’re sea creatures. . . . I feel like I’m trying to pick up the thread of the real experience and bring it back to the museum.”