Skip to main content

A Vision On The Hudson

March 2023
1min read


“Sailing is like dancing, see, and I love to dance.” The boat that Captain Allan Aunapu likes most to dance with is the Clearwater (above)—the first Hudson River sloop built in this century.

The Clearivater ’s ancestry goes back to the days when the Dutch traded on the Hudson in their flat-bottomed sloops. After the British took over in 1664 a blend of English and Dutch design to handle the river’s fluky winds and mean currents produced the famed nineteenth-century Hudson River sloop— broad in the beam, high in the stern, with an enormous mainsail. The boats averaged sixty to ninety feet in length and had masts over a hundred feet tall. At one time as many as eight hundred carried passengers and cargo between Albany and Manhattan. But steam— locomotives as well as boats—began to take over along the Hudson Valley in the early 1800’s, and by the end of the century the sloops were gone. With steam came industry, large centers of population, and pollution. Today the river is a receptacle for more than 200,000,000 gallons of raw sewage a day.

Four years ago a number of Hudson Valley residents, including folk singer Pete Seeger, decided that a return of the old sloop might help spark a sense of pride in the river and its heritage. They formed the Hudson River Sloop Restoration, Inc., and raised $175,000 to have the Gamage Shipyard in Maine build a seventy-six-foot replica, which they christened Clearwater . Last summer she sailed the river with a cargo of singers, including Seeger, and put on seven festivals with a message—care about your river and help clean it up. At the sloop’s helm was twenty-eight-year-old Captain Aunapu, who though no musician, can be decidedly lyrical when talking about the Clearwater on the Hudson: “When you’re running with a good wind up the river with that sixty-six-foot boom swung out over the water and maybe a full moon hanging off the end, or you’re sailing through the Highlands and you have to tack right up close to the brow of the land and the wind comes down hard from between the mountains, you’re dancing, dancing with the wind and the tides and the land in the most magnificent machine man ever invented. We want always to keep her under sail, never turn on her engine. We don’t want people to look up and just see a mast being pushed through the water; we want their eyes to light up with a vision of what a beautiful part of his environment man can be.”

This spring the Clearwater is sailing south to Washington, D. C., where she will lend her special grace to the national environmental teach-in on April 22.


“We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery—Croesus on a garbage heap.” —John W. Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1970"

Authored by: The Editors

Here is the Nonsuch, a ketch well named, plunging through North Atlantic waves in 1668 on her way to the founding of Canada’s most famous business enterprise

Authored by: David McCullough

At one time it was the largest cotton mill in the world. Now, in the name of progress, one of New England’s most historic and unusual urban areas is being carved into parking lots

Authored by: David Lavender

A TRICENTENNIAL REPORT Having worked like a beaver to overcome three centuries of plunging thermometers, recalcitrant Indians, and fierce competitors from Quebec and the U.S.A., it remains today the continent’s most durable trading enterprise

Authored by: Frank Kintrea

The notorious financier’s properties included railroads, yachts, and newspapers, but none was more precious to him than Lyndhurst, the family castle on the Hudson. It would have distressed him to know that it now belongs to you and me

Authored by: W. A. Swanberg

Wartime America’s nerves were jumpy. One foggy night on a deserted Long Island beach a young coastguardsman heard the muffled engines of a submarine offshore, and suddenly eight shadowy figures loomed up out of the mist

When Ida Tarbell set out to probe the operations of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, it seemed like David against Goliath all over again

Authored by: John G. Mitchell

"We have permanently safeguarded an irreplaceable primitive area," said President Truman as he dedicated Everglades National Park in 1947. Bit what is permanence, and what is "safeguarded"? Did he speak too soon?

Featured Articles

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.