Nautical treasure sailboat goes to Biloxi museum

State News

December 1, 2009

Anonymous Picayune Item Tue Dec 01, 2009, 10:00 AM CST

New Orleans — A Biloxi museum is getting a sailboat that was left to Tulane University — along with nearly $390,000 — in exchange for a promise to preserve it for at least 99 years.

The Nydia, built about 1898 at the Johnson Shipyard, “represents the ultimate in boat-building skills, a pure example of Biloxi boat building,” said Robin Krohn David, executive director of the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum in Biloxi.

In the 1950s, a youthful Ralph Wood Pringle joined a short list of mariners allowed to take the helm of Albert Baldwin Wood’s beloved sailboat.

“She was very fast and a lot of fun,” said Pringle, of Diamondhead, Miss.

“She was balanced perfectly,” he recalled. “You would hold the tiller and there would be no pressure on it. He had the mast raked just right, tilted just a little aft.”

Pringle — a great-nephew of Wood, the brilliant general superintendent of the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board during the 1940s and 1950s — recently wrested the Nydia from Wood’s alma mater, Tulane University. He and others have secured a new, high-profile home for the nautical treasure on the Mississippi Gulf Coast: the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum in Biloxi.

The Nydia “is the only known Johnson boat left,” said David.

Alongside Biloxi’s Back Bay, the Nydia was constructed of cypress and steam-bent oak at the shipyard owned by William N. Johnson, a Biloxi native with a reputation for fabricating fast boats.

“She will be placed on display in the main atrium with her mast rigged,” said David.

The return of the Nydia marked the end of a court challenge questioning Tulane’s stewardship of the sailboat.

Wood, who also had a house in New Orleans, had a powerful electric spotlight mounted outside his house in Biloxi to shine on the sloop. He arranged an extraordinary pact with Tulane for his beloved boat to be cared for long after his death, which came aboard the boat he loved.

He died of a heart attack shortly after setting sail for Horn Island on May 10, 1956. He was 77.

In his will, Wood agreed to provide Tulane with his “residuary estate” in exchange for a commitment to carefully preserve the Nydia for at least 99 years. An internal university e-mail notes Tulane received $388,000 from Wood’s estate in the mid-1970s.

The boat was displayed at first in a climate-controlled case on the university’s Uptown campus, but put in storage in spring 2004 to accommodate improvements to the Tulane student center.

It had been on display since the early 1960s, said Robert Bruce Jr., secretary of the Friends of the Nydia — a group informally created in 2002 and formally organized in 2004 to preserve the wooden gaff-rigged sailing sloop and celebrate the local history of recreational sailing.

Pringle and Wood’s great-niece, Jane “Susie” Pringle Seal of Bay St. Louis, Miss., filed a state lawsuit in April 2007, saying Tulane was not living up to its agreement. But Wood’s descendants had complained that the boat was neglected years earlier.

A check on Sept. 24, 2003, found that “Overgrown vegetation obscured the view of Nydia, bullet holes were in the glass portion of the enclosure, standing water was on the floor of the enclosure, bird or animal droppings were on the forecabin and loose-leaf paper and a hair comb were on the foredeck,” according to one exhibit in the suit.

An internal Tulane communication noted that the Wood heirs had written university President Scott Cowen about the boat’s condition on Oct. 1, 2003.

The Nydia was moved from storage Aug. 9, 2005 — weeks before Hurricane Katrina — to a Tulane research center in Belle Chasse.

Tulane has never said it failed to keep its promise to Wood. “Tulane has cared for and exhibited the boat for close to 50 years,” said Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesman.

The lawsuit was settled out of court on July 1.

The next day, the “Nydia was moved from Tulane’s Belle Chase campus to ... the Seaway Marine Center in Gulfport,” Bruce said.

Strecker said both sides agreed that other details about the settlement will stay private. The Nydia’s scheduled inclusion among other maritime artifacts in the Biloxi museum will begin a new exhibition phase for the vessel. And it will allow the sloop to again receive the adoration and care desired by the engineering genius who died in her embrace.

“There was really no public viewing of it” since its removal from the Uptown campus, said U.S. District Judge Peter Beer, chairman of the Friends of Nydia. “Now, of course, it is going to get a lot of viewing at the museum.”

“The whole thing is a happy ending for everyone,” said Beer. “The heirs are happy. The Friends of Nydia are happy. And Tulane’s happy it does not have to search for a spot to put the boat on display.”

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