FREEPORT, Maine — Photojournalist Paul Cunningham ignored the biting west wind Thursday morning as he prowled around a float where the wooden sailing vessel Virginia is tied up for the winter. When Cunningham got near the bow, he lifted his cane and pointed.
“See how blunt the bow is,” he said, “we had a heck of a time bending those timbers. The first few we put on all split.”
Cunningham would know.
He spent 12 years helping build the boat while documenting each painstaking step with his camera. Now, two years after the Virginia was officially launched, the photographer has finally sorted through the 10,000 or more frames he shot and collected them into a book titled “Recreating Maine’s First Ship.”
Cunningham will be signing copies in Bath, where the ship was built, on Saturday.
Cunningham, 76, grew up near the water in Freeport and began his career as a science teacher in Gardiner. But his devotion to photography soon led him to a life in photojournalism. He got a job at The Times Record in 1990 and retired as the chief photographer there in 2008.
The Virginia book began in 2012 when Cunningham ran into an old friend, Rob Stevens, at a boat show. He knew Stevens from a previous photojournalism project. In the late 1990s, Cunningham followed Stevens as he built the Snorri in Phippsburg, a replica viking ship made to recreate Leif Ericson’s voyage from Newfoundland to North America.
Stevens told Cunningham he and a group of volunteers had just started work on the Virginia, a replica of the first ship built by Europeans in North America. Settlers at the Popham Colony, in what’s now Phippsburg, began constructing the original Virginia shortly after they landed in 1607. Then, after a hard, hungry winter, colonists used the Virginia to sail back home to England, abandoning their colony.
Credit: Paul Cunningham
Soon after meeting Stevens, Cunningham started visiting the boat shed in Bath where the Virginia was taking shape, camera in hand. On his first few visits, Cunningham documented volunteers as they shaped huge, foundational, white oak timbers for the boat’s keel, stern and bow.
Cunningham was so impressed by the project, he soon joined the work crew and ended up in charge of the operation’s large, 20-inch planing machine.
“It was the chance of a lifetime,” Cunningham said, “not just to shoot pictures but to actually help.”
Everyone involved knew it was to be a long project, but Cunningham said he had no idea he’d be at it for more than a decade.
“I was just taking pictures, which comes naturally,” he said. “When I started, I had my own knees. Now they’re both made out of titanium.”
Cunningham’s exhaustive book covers everything from the Virginia’s keel-laying, to decking and caulking, to the launch and on through the boat’s sea trials. Cunningham was even there when volunteers cut down a huge tree which became the ship’s mast. He also documented Stevens’ wedding, which took place at the boatyard.
“It’s all the blood, sweat and tears — literally,” Cunningham said. “We all got injured in one form or another, and cried when we got frustrated at some point, and we sweated in the summer and froze in the winter.”
A two-page spread, about two thirds of the way through the 100-page book, is filled with 104 pictures showing each volunteer who put time into the project. Only one is missing: Cunningham.
“Some were there a week, some were there a month, some were there 10 years but every one of them was an integral part of this,” he said, “and that’s why I wanted to do a book — for them. My picture is at the back of the book.”
Even though the book marks a milestone, Cunningham said he’s not done yet. He’s still photographing the Virginia and its crew now that it’s afloat and he’s also got one or two more new photoprojects in mind already.
That said, Cunningham doesn’t expect he’ll ever work on such an enormous, meaningful photo story again.
“Seeing it end has been the hardest part of the project” he said. “Seeing these guys, working together, for 10 or 12 years, now that it’s done, everything just feels a little hollow.”
