The African Queen | Key Largo — the boat itself, still under steam

She was built in 1912 at Lytham in Lancashire, a thirty-foot riveted steam launch named Livingstone, and shipped out to work the Victoria Nile and Lake Albert for the railway. Forty years later she was a film star. Then she was a hulk rotting in a pasture near Ocala, Florida.

An attorney named Jim Hendricks found her there in 1982 and spent his own money putting her back together. She was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 18 February 1992. A full restoration in 2012 gave her an internal steel frame and a new boiler, and she has been working ever since.

She lies at Marina Del Mar in Key Largo, at 99701 Overseas Highway. She is not an exhibit. She runs ninety-minute canal cruises through the Port Largo canals several times a day, and the captain will generally let you take the tiller.

There is no glass case, no rope line, no museum lighting. You step down onto the deck plates and the boiler is warm against your leg, and the whistle is loud enough to be rude. Very few objects from 1951 will still take your weight.

Photo: the African Queen at Key Largo, via Wikimedia Commons.