Quentin Snediker, director of the Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard at Mystic, explains how many of the timbers to be used in the restoration were salvaged from hurricane-felled trees.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

STONINGTON, Conn. — There were days, Stephen C. White remembers, when the swabs would scramble along the masts and yards of the Charles W. Morgan, unfurling sails so tourists could imagine how the 168-year-old whaling ship looked at sea.

Sometimes the Morgan’s sails would swell with the wind, he said, and the thick lines that held it fast to the wharf at Mystic Seaport would snap straight and taut as it lunged toward the Mystic River, and the sea.

“She’s trying to go,” said White, the president of Mystic Seaport. “But she’s pulled back.”

Maybe not for long.

The Morgan, 105 feet long and called the last American wooden whaler, has been out of the water for a year, stripped of its masts and held up by metal braces in a dry dock at the seaport. It’s still open to tourists, who can watch workers as they crawl about the ship inside and out, working on a $6-million restoration.

The seaport board in September authorized a fundraising effort for $2 million more, and transformed the restoration into a resurrection. Now they aren’t just fixing the Morgan to float alongside a dock. They are rebuilding it to sail again.

The dream is to have the ship rebuilt and rigged by 2013, White said. The ship could then go on tour, sailing to Newport and its old home port of New Bedford. Then, its hold loaded with equipment to study rather than kill, the Morgan would et sail for the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast, where, White said, it will “make peace with the whales.”

“You can’t lead a life just tied to the pier,” White said of the flagship of the seaport’s 500-boat fleet. “She’s only telling a portion of her story, tied to that pier.”

That story began in New Bedford in 1841, when the Morgan slid down the ways at the Hillman Bros. Shipyard. The ship was at sea almost constantly for the next 80 years, sailing from New Bedford and later San Francisco on 37 whaling voyages; the longest nearly five years, the shortest eight months.

The Morgan retired to New Bedford in 1921, put on display by the wealthy grandson of a former captain. But he died in 1935 and left no endowment to pay for its care.

By 1941, in danger of becoming a derelict, the ship was turned over to what was then the Mystic-based Marine Historical Society. To the society, the Morgan was a chance to become more than an artifact museum.

It worked. The Morgan, named for its original owner, a New Bedford whaling merchant, put Mystic on the map. Its arrival led to donations of other ships. Period buildings set for demolition elsewhere were taken apart and reassembled there, gradually creating in 1948 the village that was dubbed Mystic Seaport. Today it covers 19 acres and draws more than 300,000 visitors a year.

“To a large extent, she has helped create what Mystic Seaport is today,” White said. “Without her, we’d be a nice collection of maritime objects.”

Sailing the ship again will change more than the Morgan, he said. It will transform the whole village. Though the seaport has authentic buildings, and workers who sometimes mend and repair sails for others’ ships, he said putting the Morgan to sea means the reenactors of the village will no longer be reenacting. Those roles they have been performing will become real-life work in service of their own oceangoing sailing ship.

“Now the shipwrights have a reason for being here,” White said. “The sailmakers have a reason for being here. Now we’re living it.”

But before that can happen, Quentin Snedicker and his crew have to finish their work on the Morgan.

The ship undergoes some type of serious restoration every few decades, said Snediker, director of the seaport’s Henry B. duPont Preservation Shipyard. As long as it’s maintained, the ship can last, theoretically, forever.

Ironically, because saltwater preserves wood, some of the best-preserved pieces are below the water line. Many of the hull planks are original to the 1841 construction.

But inside, it’s not so good.

“We found what we expected — unfortunately,” Snediker said. “She’s every bit as bad as you’d expect after 168 years.”

Many of the thick, curved ribs that rise from the keel to the decks, the basic skeleton of the ship, are cracked and shrunken, surrounded by dark brown wood dust. With a few exceptions, replacements will have to be carefully hewn and installed, one by one.

The Morgan is registered as a National Historic Landmark, so the work has to be done in ways that preserve its original appearance. The wood has to be planed with tools authentic to the 19th century, Snediker said; the materials have to be the same.

And that was a challenge. Many of the ship’s most important structural elements are made of live oak. Live oak, which has evergreen foliage, grows in the South and is a tremendously dense, strong wood that resists rot. Its thick branches grow in long, sweeping curves that make it ideal for use in making ships.

Finding enough of it might have been a problem, until August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi coast. And Sandra Lobrano called.

Live oaks live for 800 years, growing to gargantuan sizes, reaching out with undulating branches as thick as other trees’ trunks. As much as the Morgan is treasured by the people in Mystic, the live oaks of coastal Mississippi are cherished by the people there. The trees line streets, reaching across from either side to form long, green awnings. They dominate backyards, where generations of families swing from swings hung from their branches. Families hold picnics, and even weddings, in the shade of their oaks.

A ring of them grows on the Long Beach, Miss., property where Lobrano and her husband, Charles, live. She has chronicled the lives of her children by photographing them climbing their branches. As alive as the Morgan is to White and Snedicker, so Lobrano’s oaks are to her. They aren’t stolid landmarks, but living entities with personalities and histories.

“The live oak is not very aggressive,” she said. “They’re very docile trees. They will grow around the other trees; their branches will go down to the ground and go back up.”

The oaks in her yard had been there for centuries until Katrina hit. That’s when Lobrano lost one of her old men.

She’d named the tree Bienville, after a French explorer of the Mississippi coast. It stood in her yard for more than three centuries, but the heavy winds of Katrina were enough to knock it down.

The idea of Bienville cut up and rotting in a landfill was intolerable, she said. She called ship restorers in Baltimore and Boston. They said they didn’t need any, but they gave her Snediker’s phone number.

He came down, and Lobrano introduced him to others who had lost trees. He wound up heading back to Connecticut with 300 tons of live oak.

“Bienville took up a whole truck,” she said proudly. “An 18-wheeler to carry all his limbs and everything.”

Lobrano said she enjoys the symmetry of an icon of the South living on in the planks and beams of an icon of the North.

“He was such a beautiful tree,” she said. “I’m so thankful that he is going to be part of a wonderful ship.”

jhill@projo.com