J u ly / A u g u s t 2 0 1 7 7 3 The Arts courtesy herb adams; Courtesy of The Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, Maine; meaghan maurice; maine maritime museum By Herb Adams There was a time when no good ship sailed from Casco Bay without a figurehead beneath her bow. The finest came from Portland’s Nahum Littlefield, a master of this lost American art. uring the mid-19th century, when Portland was at the helm of the wooden shipbuilding trade, at least half a dozen ship carvers worked the Portland waterfront, cutting boards for vessels from Freeport to Kennebunk. While the Patten, McLellan, and Sewall shipyards in Bath were hives of industrious engineering, the ship carver’s work more closely resembled an art form. The craftsmen would spend their days fashioning stern boards and tailboards; elegant scrollwork inscribed with the vessel’s name to be mounted at the ship’s bow; and 20-foot gilded eagles, wings outspread above banners emblazoned with the vessel’s homeport. But of these works, it was the figurehead that symbolized the personality, even the life, of the ship itself. Ornate, imposing figures cut from Maine timber dashed across the seas in the form of exotic ladies; mermaids and mermen; or colorfully carved figures of Lincoln or Columbus, flung to far-away places by a Nahum Littlefield’s ship figurehead carving shop on Central Wharf,now Chandler’sWharf,in Portland,1880.Posing in the loft of the busy Littlefield shop,Nahum Littlefield (1833-1916) is likely the dark-haired man to the left in the loft doorway, caught by the camera between two worlds: the end of the wooden ship era and the dawn of steel ships. Left:The Maine Maritime Museum houses the oldest known figurehead in Maine,the ClarissaAnn (1824).