The reconstructed Virginia on the Kennebec River in Bath, ME, sitting about seven miles north of her namesake’s origin in Phippsburg in 1608. It was the first English ship built in the Americas. Behind me and over the bridge at BIW, today sit two Navy Destroyers in mid-build.

Two things come to mind, one much lighter than the other, but not unrelated.

First the light one. Whenever I’ve seen this ship, usually while driving over the Sagadahoc Bridge, I think of Sam Bush’s “Same Ol’ River”:

I wish that I could be a Pirate
I’d sail the ocean blue
Way before the big liners
Started sailing them too
I’d bury most of my treasures
So I would leave a big hole
And the only real sense of pleasure that I’d get
Is that I’d sail free in my soul

The second thing is a “paragraph” from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. (If you’ve read Sebald, you understand the scare quotes 🙂.) Sebald is sitting in the English town of Southwold and reflecting on the history of naval warefare. It’s a haunting reflection. I put most of the paragraph up on the other blog, but here’s the clinching line:

The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required — from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth — to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone.

Here’s an image of Willem van de Velde‘s The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, which Sebald included in black and white in the book: