Bill Cooper’s Big Adventure: Stories Of Life Aboard WHOI’s Original Atlantis

Bill Cooper teaching a class in the Woods Hole Museum’s boat shop. COURTESY WOODS HOLE HISTORICAL MUSEUM.

WOODS HOLE – Bill Cooper loved to tell stories, especially of his time as a young man at sea.

When Cooper passed away at age 83 in 2011, his wife Judy gave the Woods Hole Historical Museum a 200-page manuscript her husband had been writing on and off for 15 years.

The memoir, originally written out in longhand by Bill and painstakingly typed up by Judy, were his memoirs of the years 1944 to 1948 when he was a deck hand on the Atlantis, the majestic 143-foot steel-hulled ketch that was the first research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, used from 1931 to 1966.

During his four years on the Atlantis, Cooper learned many of life’s lessons from the seasoned old sailors, true “deep water men from out of the past,” as Cooper wrote, who had rounded Cape Horn and lived to tell about it.

They taught him everything he knew about boats and sails, about weather and tides, about fairness and pride.

The Manuscript

The “Atlantis” COURTESY WOODS HOLE HISTORICAL MUSEUM.

Over the dinner table to his wife and five children and over many years in his boat shop, he would regale friends and customers with his tales of when, at age 17 he went to sea.

Later this winter, the museum will publish those memoirs as “Atlantis Stories,” Bill Cooper’s stories as he remembered them. The book is edited by two Woods Hole locals who have also spent years at sea, Arthur Gaines, who is a oceanographer emeritus at WHOI, and Jay Burnett, who spent 28 years on research vessels as a fisheries scientist at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

In editing the book, both Gaines and Burnett were struck by Cooper’s front row seat to history as seen from the deck of the famous research vessel, the events he witnessed, people he met, and things he learned, all told in Cooper’s straightforward style.