ROCKLAND—Artist Annie Bailey was one of the artists featured in The Farnsworth Art Museum’s [Collective] annual BASH on April 1. The sold-out event revolved around a circus theme and her contribution was in the form of an old storytelling art form — the crankie, which is a sequential scroll painting that moves through a box to depict a story, much like a silent movie.

“I’ve been quite fascinated with the Royal Tar for several years and I thought the crankie would be a great platform to share this local tale,” said Bailey, who spent much of her life working on and playing on boats, both in Penobscot Bay and across the globe.

For those not familiar with the story of the Royal Tar, it was a steamer heading from St. John to Portland with 85 passengers and a menagerie of circus animals, a wax museum and a brass band aboard when it sank in 1836 between Vinalhaven and Isle au Haut. (More can be found out about that disastrous shipwreck here).

With her background in hand drawn animation, Bailey made the crankie out of a roll of vellum, which she painted with scenes using india ink. The resulting piece is 35 feet long. The box surrounding the crankie she found in her attic. The turning dowels the paper was attached to were made from curtain rods she found at the dump. She credits Patty King at the Rockland Library who helped her do extensive research and her father, Steve Bailey, who helped  build the box.

Watch the accompanying video and follow along as Bailey describes each scene unfolding.

“The steamship you see at the beginning has paddlewheels and it’s got square-rigged sails in addition to its steam engine,” she said. “The menagerie you see going up the ramp was a very common form of entertainment in 1836 — the moving circus,” she said. “These are the animals boarding the Royal Tar in St. John, New Brunswick. They’d just done a big show, and they were headed back to Boston.  The Royal Tar was just a transport vessel for all of these people and animals heading back home.” 

In the next scene are figures waving goodbye.

“I had to edit some of these scenes in the video so you don’t see all of them, but the next thing you see is the animals in cages below decks,” she said. “The cages are stacked upon each other with this cacophony of noise odor and movement.There would have been a lot of rocking back and forth and I wanted to show how scared the animals would have been all crammed together.”

The next scene depicts the movement of the Royal Tar making its way through the ocean. “I was showing time passing and the significant part of that is the mackerel sky, which are the clouds you usually see before a storm in Penobscot Bay,” she said. “The smoke behind the steamship actually turns into a map of the Maine coastline and that map depicts the place where the Royal Tar sank. You can see it right between North Haven and Vinalhaven.”

The next image is below decks in the boiler room. “They had an elephant aboard and he was tied down on the deck above and because he weighed so much,” she explained. “The crew had to shim large pieces of wood above the boiler to stabilize the deck. The chief engineer in charge of keeping the boilers running had been up all night the night before dealing with some issue and left his second engineer in charge. The second engineer, for some reason, didn’t notice that the water level had emptied in the boilers and a fire started. The large pieces of wood caught fire quickly. That’s what you see in that image.”

The next image is looking down on the deck of the Royal Tar as the fire starts spreading and you see people running and the elephant trumpeting in fear.

“You also see a  lifeboat in this image,” she said. “Because they’d over-packed the steamship with animals and people they removed a few of the lifeboats and left them ashore. So, in this one lifeboat leaving is the second engineer. The story is he saved himself and some crew but not any women, children or animals and he rowed off to Isle au Haut. When the captain saw him doing that, he was very angry and tried to set the jib and mainsail and sail toward them.”

The scene changes with the elephants and the destruction of the boat with smoke and fire as they are trying to raise the SOS distress flag. “There was a US Coast Guard vessel nearby, but it couldn’t rescue them because it had a cargo of gunpowder aboard and they couldn’t get too close,” she said. “But they were able to get one lifeboat back and forth to the vessel and retrieve a number of passengers.”

As the story goes, 32 passengers were rescued, but all of the menagerie animals supposedly perished. The scene goes to flat calm and cuts to vultures sitting on the elephant’s skeleton. “Behind them is Brimstone island, where the Royal Tar sank,” she said. “One of the stories I found in my research is that an elephant skeleton washed up on Brimstone island and those are the vultures surrounding its carcass. I also talked to someone who knows the family who claims a Bengal tiger managed to swim to shore and live on one of the islands until it was shot. One of the islanders still has its skin hanging on the wall.”

Thus scrolls out the saddest show on Earth as the crankie’s dowels stop turning.

For more info on Annie Bailey’s work visit: http://www.anniebaileyart.com/index.html

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com