8. The BSA Wiate-Powell and the American century: illustrated history of landships, 1858-2008
All Rights Reserved, 2023. See author's note.
The Wiate-Powell numbers among the most beloved landships, operating for sixty years and encountering everyone from Pancho Villa, Maine secessionists - and aliens.
Author’s note: As far as we are aware, all images are taken from public domain sources; please inform the author of any mistakes in this regard. In terms of any original sketches, these are amateur attempts based on the author’s own archival research. He welcomes improvement from any professional illustrators interested in enhancing this work. ~ CAH, 2023
In memory of Dad, who taught me a love for all things historical, and in homage to William Pène du Bois, who opened up my imagination.
Part One: Introduction and the Great Gravitational Shift
Part Two: The Sally Ann and Westward Expansion
Part Three: The Boudreaux Circus Ship and Reconstruction
Part Four: HML Transvaal and British Colonialism
Part Five: Le Maréchal Murat and the Helium Wars
Part Six: São Fitzcarrald and the Naughts Arms Race
Part Seven: The Sarhoş Selim and Ottoman Decline
The BSA Wiate-Powell, 1912
The Wiate-Powell numbers among the most beloved landships, operating for sixty years and encountering everyone from Pancho Villa, Maine secessionists - and aliens.
Class & Type: n/a (civilian outdoors adventure)
Crew: 3-5 adults, 20-30 youth volunteers
Capacity/Complement: one Boy Scout Troop (c. 30 boys)
Construction: ad hoc construction crew, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Hull: wood
Buoyancy: 1 x hot air balloon
Buoyancy source: on board campfire
Wheels/track: 4 rotating corner-wheels
Propulsion: burro, steam powered propellers
Sail Plan: n/a
Power plant: wood fire
Length: 74 ft
Beam: 74 ft
Decks: 1
Weight (empty): 18 tons
Clearance: 3.5 ft
Steering: burro drivers, propellers
Speed: 4-6 mph
Armor: n/a
Armament: n/a, 6 x .22 rifles
Communications: smoke, hand semaphore
Other Transportation: n/a
Amenities: rope swing, slide
Fate: retired, 1972, now a hiking destination
One of history’s most beloved landships is still visited by hordes of hikers and pilgrims every year: the BSA Wiate-Powell. Operational for over half a century, the Wiate-Powell trained thousands of young men and women in the way of landshipping.
She came together by the joint work of twin brothers, Waite and Wiate Phillips. Successful oilmen, the Phillips brothers were instrumental in bringing Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement to the United States. Sadly, Wiate died unexpectedly before the landship could be completed. To honor his memory, Waite pushed on with the project and co-named the ship after his brother and Lord Baden-Powell. The purpose of the ship was simple - to give young men an outdoors experience and train them in landship crewcraft.
The most unique features of the Wiate-Powell were its rustic aesthetic and its singular, central balloon, giving it an almost retro-feel. Among terranavisologists, the Wiate-Powell holds a special place, as many of these scholars did their own training aboard as young Boy Scouts or guest crewmen. In 1966, Girl Scouts were also included. Many of them later earned PhDs in the science and history of landshipping, most notably Dr. Irene Brewster Hopper, daughter of the famous US Navy admiral, Grace Hopper.
The Baden-Wiate’s first captain was an eccentric veteran of the Boer War commended by Lord Baden-Powell. Leftenant Colonel Teigue McMurray had distinguished himself in South Africa by his daring escape with Winston Churchill from a Boer prisoner of war camp. Once back in the United Kingdom, McMurray published an epic poem of his adventure in the Edinburgh Times, Mo Sheanadh Mòr, winning several literary prizes.
Baden-Powell convinced McMurray to move to New York to use his literary skills to further the aims of Scouting in the United States. But Teigue’s restless spirit needed greater adventure than the pen could provide, so in 1913, Baden-Powell recommended him to Waite for his new landship. It was an inspired fit.
Lt. Col. McMurray captained the BSA Wiate-Powell from 1913 until his death in 1944, making him a legend among landshippers. Among the thousands of boys who rotated under his care, it is estimated that more than three hundred crewed landships during the Second World War. These included two Medal of Honor winners, Major Horatio Bridge of the USL Custer, and Staff Sergeant Tubman “Tubs” Washington, an AA gunner credited with shooting down five enemy aircraft - the first and only landship ace in US history.
The engineering for the Wiate-Powell was simple - one, large central hot air balloon fed by a carefully tended campfire in the middle of the square-shaped ship. Propulsion was even simpler - four teams of four burros on each side of the ship. They pulled the ship in one of the four directions as guided, with the trailing team of burros tagging along behind. The four large wheels were coupled to the corners of the hull in such a way that they would then turn in the direction the burros pulled.
To aid in steering and propulsion, steam powered propellers were attached to the balloon, fed by pipes attached to a furnace fueled by the campfire. Running all of this were the Boy Scout troops that rotated through the Wiate-Powell in two-four week shifts nine months of the year, with Winters reserved for refitting. Typically, McMurray put the boys through three full days of training before setting off on the ship’s set route between Cimarron and Carlsbad, New Mexico.
The most frequent complaint of program graduates was McMurray’s strict adherence to the Therblig human motion system invented by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (of “Cheaper by the Dozen” fame). Some scouts reported growing more in their counting skills than in actual crewcraft - and from that day on, not able to eat a meal without numbering how many motions it took to put pea to fork to mouth.
The scouts aboard the Wiate-Powell had an abundance of close calls and adventures over the decades. Certainly, since 1947, every scout and family member has heard the stories about mysterious lights and other unexplained encounters near Roswell on each occasion the landship passed by.
In fact, crewing aboard the Wiate-Powell became such a rite-of-passage for Boy Scouts that it soon simply became known as “the Route.” A scout either had either completed the Route or he had not. While the BSA developed a landship merit badge any scout could earn, earning one at home was not the same as adventure aboard the Wiate-Powell. Likewise, the land sailing skill award was largely looked upon with disdain and discontinued almost as soon as it was introduced.
Many of these adventures have been captured by the dozens of coffee table style books popularly available, so we have no need to enumerate them all. Nevertheless, three incidents deserve particular mention.
The first great adventure of the Wiate-Powell involved personalities no less than Pancho Villa and “Black Jack” Pershing during the brief conflict on the US-Mexican border in 1916-1917. Through a series of mishaps involving an overconfident Scoutmaster, the Wiate-Powell ventured south of Carlsbad towards the Mexican border. General Villa, seeing the ship, sent a platoon of mounted soldiers to requisition it for his use. In turn, a company from the U.S. 6th Infantry Regiment spotted the raiders and maneuvered to counter. A tense cease-fire ensued, with both sides claiming the landship for their own armies over Lt. Col. McMurray’s vociferous objections, in both English and Gaelic.
The situation was resolved by the intervention of Father Anton Docher, a French Franciscan missionary to the Pueblo Indians. He persuaded both Villa and Pershing to let the Wiate-Powell go and to honor a 48-hour cease fire. He even arranged for a joint meal between Villa and Pershing and their officers with the local Pueblo tribe the next day, in the hopes that a lasting peace might be achieved. Such was not to be, but the story of his efforts spread far and wide. In 1919, King Albert I of Belgium, himself a First World War combat veteran, paid a pilgrimage to Father Docher, awarding him with the Médaille Royale de la Paix (Koninklijke Vredesmedaille).
The second great adventure was far simpler, but no less terrifying for those aboard the Wiate-Powell at the time. In 1935, the Wiate-Powell and other scouts at Philmont ranch had teamed up with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to improve roadways on the nearby San Juan Indian Reservation. An overly ambitious CCC worker from Newark, NJ wanted to see if the landship could do a “full twenty-three skidoo” and overheated the campfire beneath the balloon. The Wiate-Powell began to slowly rise entirely off the ground, taking the half dozen scouts still aboard with it. Clearly, the Great Gravitational Shift of 1855 has brought dangers as well as benefits to mankind.
Thankfully for the scouts - and the CCC worker - the ship’s small armory of .22 Winchester rifles was off board for target practice. Thinking fast, McMurray ordered a patrol of scouts to shoot at the balloon while it was still only forty feet off the ground. Thankfully, it was not a hard target to hit and after being holed several dozen times, the Wiate-Powell glided back to earth, if not gently, about two miles away.
In fact, the head of the CCC, Robert Fechner, was so mortified and worried about his congressional funding that he offered to pay for repairs out of his own pocket. From that point on, McMurray often referred to the refitted Wiate-Powell as his “little feching woman,” a phrase repeated in Scouting households across America - resulting in many a mouth getting washed out with soap.
The third great adventure we will recount had as peaceable an ending as the first two, but certainly could have gone in a different direction. It occurred in the summer of 1954 under the Wiate-Powell’s third captain, retired US Army Major Banks Furn. A scout troop from Aroostook County, Maine was completing the Route when several scouts took things into their own hands outside of Santa Rosa.
It was a tumultuous era, with several independence movements underway in the Americas. On March 1st of that year, four Puerto Rican nationalists stormed the US Capitol, wounding five congressmen. Likewise, the Quebec sovereignty movement was gaining new steam. As a bilingual troop with several Québécois families, this also clearly had an influence on the boys. It likely did not help matters that the troop’s Scoutmaster was an immigrated Labradorian who was vociferous in his opposition to Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 union with Canada.
In any case, something got into the boys’ heads. As Furn and the other adults were in town “buying supplies,” the Maine troop seized the Wiate-Powell and began to sail it northwest towards the Navajo nation. Moreover, via both smoke signal and semaphore, they declared their “independence” from the United States as their own sovereign, albeit moveable, country. They ran up an out-of-date Maine state flag and called themselves the nation of “Dirigo.”
The upstart scouts claimed that their borders extended as far as the landship’s tethered burros reached in every direction, wherever they were - and that they would defend their land with their six Winchester .22 rifles. The “Scout Rebellion” became a national sensation on all three networks for the next two weeks, a happy distraction from civil rights strife and Soviet atomic progress.
Mindful that he was dealing with minors, Governor John Simms erred on the side of restraint, hoping to wait the boys out. For two weeks, whenever messages were sent to the ship from from the BSA at Philmont Ranch or the New Mexico Mounted Patrol, all they received back were semaphore flag signals spelling, “M-E-R-D-E.”
Unfortunately for Simms, the head of the national BSA of the time, E. Urner Goodman, was good friends with J. Edgar Hoover. It did not help matters that Pravda was beginning to run daily updates of the “brave young freedom fighters standing up to racial prejudice and capitalist corruption in the heart of America.” Soon, pressure began to mount for the governor to end this embarrassment to American sovereignty.
On the afternoon of June 18, 1954, outside of Jemez Springs, a hundred state patrolmen and rangers stealthily approached the Wiate-Powell only to find the scouts dead asleep in the shade and the burros peacefully grazing on the desert grass. The boys, it seemed, had simply tuckered out. Interviews from many of the scouts and others involved can be seen on the episode of PBS’s American Experience, “To God and My Country: Boy Scouts, Patriotism and the Cold War” (April 1, 2002).
And thus ended the brief history of the sovereign nation of Dirigo. But that did not end the history of the Wiate-Powell or the love that generations continue to feel for her. Even after her retirement in 1972, thousands of scouts and other hikers make the journey to her final resting spot to pay their respects and camp next to her hull. Her profile is featured on the coveted Philmont arrowhead patch, awarded only to scouts who complete the Philmont trek, including a stop at the BSA Wiate-Powell.
Thousands of pilgrims from various religious traditions have also visited the site of the beloved landship, with reported accounts of various healings or visions. As this volume is strictly committed to indisputable science and historical fact, we will leave it to interested readers to investigate these claims on their own.
One last postscript must be written about the Wiate-Powell. In 1932, the Australian government looked upon her design with favor and bought the rights to make a duplicate version for their ongoing efforts to curb the Emu population. Unfortunately for the Aussies, it did not go well. Photos of Emus overrunning hapless ANZAC landshippers published in papers from Sydney to Perth caused no end of embarrassment for the government and brought a hasty end to the Great Emu War.
COMING UP NEXT: THE SML VON STEUBEN & THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE
My thanks to sharp reader, Greg Borgard, who points out an important historical detail that I missed -
"You didn't mention the conflict that arose between Phillips and the head of Sea Scouting, James Austin Wilder, who insisted that all navigable ships (land and sea) belonged in the Sea Scouts. Powell himself tried to broker peace, but Wilder always felt slighted."
https://twitter.com/GBorgard/status/1681846853174788098