You'll Sink Our Battleship!

Retired U.S. Navy Captain Christopher Melhuish stands on the plank deck of the USS Constitution as a tug gently nudges the ship he commanded from 1997 to 1999 into Boston Harbor. Onboard with him are two other former commanders, as well as about 150 Navy chief petty officer candidates clad in blue overalls, hoisting thick lines to set the sails. The wind catches the sails, and the storied frigate--the oldest commissioned warship still afloat--comes to life. The sailors cheer.

A decade ago, the very idea of the Constitution under sail was enough to generate bulwark-to-bulwark news coverage. On this perfect August day, though, only a sparse crowd watches from Castle Island. True, it's a Friday, and the outing was given little advance publicity.

But the nonchalance that now greets the Constitution's occasional forays into the harbor only fuels Melhuish's view of the ship--that it's become a "pier-side relic" taken for granted by Bostonians, who at the same time claim it as their exclusive property.

It's also a view that puts Melhuish at odds with another former Constitution commander, Robert Gillen, who, as it happens, is standing just a few feet away near the mast. As a kid, the Charlestown native used to swim over to the ship and climb up its weathered oak sides. After helming the Constitution from 1978 to 1980, he ran the nationwide "Pennies Campaign" that raised $260,000 from schoolchildren and other donors to pay for the new sails the Constitution unfurled in 1997. He and Melhuish largely ignore each other throughout the journey, except when they're ceremonially piped on- and off-board. To those familiar with the backstory, this is hardly a surprise: The two men have come to lead the opposing sides of a high-stakes battle over the future of the 210-year-old national treasure.

The debate centers on the Navy's ongoing planning for the upcoming bicentennial of the War of 1812, in which the Constitution played a famously pivotal role. Melhuish--who's convinced the Constitution is sound enough to safely withstand journeys much greater than its regular harbor tours--has a grand vision for the event: He wants to station the ship off Baltimore's Fort McHenry, site of the British bombardment that inspired Francis Scott Key to write what became "The Star-Spangled Banner." Such a display, he says, "would stop the country cold." But in order for it to happen, the Navy would have to change long-standing rules that strictly confine the ship to Massachusetts Bay, and allow it to sail only under very favorable conditions. To loosen those constraints and permit open-ocean travel, says Gillen and his camp, is to put the ship in serious jeopardy, and could even lead to the unthinkable: sinking Old Ironsides. It's a dire prediction, to be sure. But the way Gillen and company see it, there's evidence to suggest that, going forward, the Navy should take extreme caution with the most irreplaceable part of its fleet.

The roots of the dispute over what the Constitution should and should not be allowed to do date back a decade, to the $12 million overhaul the ship underwent between 1992 and 1996. One of the big targets of those repairs was the ship's severe "hog," a 14-inch warp it had developed along the length of its keel that was destabilizing the vessel and pulling its boards out of flush. To correct the problem, the Naval Historical Center (NHC), the Navy department in charge of the ship's maintenance, came up with a historically faithful fix by installing a series of long "diagonal riders," wooden supports that run along the curve of the hull. Had the repair crew not been able to pull off that solution, "we would have had to take the ship out of water," says Donald Turner, who was NHC production manager at the time.

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