Unspoiled by Fame

Venture Capitalism, Maritime Style: The 17th-century schooner Famebrought back wartime spoils for its original captain. Mike Rutstein C’86 will launch a replica of the profitable ship. 

In the summer of 1812, William Webb, the first captain of the schooner Fame, set sail from Salem, Massachusetts, hoping to strike it rich as a plundering privateer. With war against Britain newly erupted, Webb and his crew of working-class investors purchased Fame as a warship, since using it for trade in silks and tea from Asia meant almost certain capture in wartime. Now fighters themselves, they sailed to Maine in search of enemy merchant ships. And with unbelievable luck, they chanced upon two British vessels within days of setting out, captured them, and brought home 10 times the price of Fame in spoils. 

Today, Mike Rutstein C’86—modern-day captain and owner of an under-construction replica of Fame—may have less luck capturing foreign cruisers and submarines with his wooden ship, but he plans to put Fame back in business nonetheless. The goal is to have the replica sailing by late April, taking it from the construction site in Essex to Salem Sound, where he will give the paying public tours of the harbor—and a bit of ship history. 

“Privateers were maritime venture capitalists,” explains Rutstein. They risked their lives for profit to compensate for the economic slow-down accompanying the war. “Like venture capital, privateering was a high-risk, high-stakes game. Even the officers and crew were working for shares rather than salary,” he says. “You could make your fortune, or you could spend the rest of the war in a prison hulk.” 

A sailor all his life, Rutstein was originally intrigued by Fame’s mysterious history. “People often tell stories about Fame without knowing the true story,” he says. Rutstein himself found a painting identified as being of Fame in at least two modern history books that turned out to depict a different vessel altogether (www. SchoonerFame.com). Research into surviving privateering logs and court documents has helped to provide a more accurate picture of the ship’s origins and appearance. 

Fame under construction.

Rutstein also looks upon Fame’s reconstruction as a chance to teach about the War of 1812. In his booklet, Fame: The Salem Privateer, Rutstein points out that privateering was so popular that during the war, 517 American privateers took to sea, outgunning and outfighting the U.S. Navy’s tiny fleet of 23 vessels. “The Navy and the USS Constitution in particular get all the ink nowadays, but America’s privateers had a far greater impact on the war than the famous victories of ‘Old Ironsides.’” 

Privateers could not plunder without permission, however. “Without a government commission, you were a pirate,” Rutstein says. “But otherwise, you could go out and make war against whomever your country was at war with” as long as captured vessels, or “prizes,” were first taken to a U.S. “prize court” to determine that the prize was fair game. 

As Rutstein speaks on the telephone, a loud whistle blows in the background at the H.A. Burnham Shipyard in Essex, where the new Fame is fast fleshing out: “A hundred years ago, the ship builders would have dropped what they’re doing and gone to lunch” at that whistle. 

The physical labor of a ship builder has become part of everyday life for Rutstein, though he jokingly admits that “you wouldn’t want to sail on any ship that I built [on my own].” Harold Burnham, an eighth-generation master boat designer, has been guiding him through the painstaking process. Each bit of construction material must be custom made. 

Between cutting the bolts that Burnham specifies and chopping down spruce trees on nearby Hog Island, Rutstein also gives several tours a week of the construction site. His seven-year-old daughter already has the bonnet and apron she will wear during tours this summer, when his family members will deck themselves in 19th-century-style apparel. As snacks, the crew of Fame will be selling “hard tack,” a ship biscuit designed to keep without refrigeration. “It’s pretty gross stuff—but authentic.”

Sarah Blackman C’03

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