Schooners

A schooner carries its sails fore and aft rather than square across, which means it can work closer to the wind and be handled by a much smaller crew than a square-rigger of the same size. On a coast with a thousand harbors and constant short-haul cargo, that was the decisive advantage, and it is why American coastal trade ran on schooners for a century.

The economics pushed them to grow. Every added mast meant more cargo without much more crew, so two masts became three, three became four, and by the 1880s the big coal schooners were carrying four and five. Six-masters were built after 1900, all of them in Maine and Massachusetts. And then there was the Thomas W. Lawson, launched at Quincy in 1902 with seven masts and a steel hull, the only seven-masted schooner ever built. She was too big to handle well, drew too much water for most of the ports she was meant to serve, and was lost off the Scilly Isles in 1907 with almost all hands.

The cargo was unglamorous and constant: coal north from Virginia and Pennsylvania ports, ice and granite and lime south out of Maine, lumber, plaster, salt fish. A coasting schooner was a truck.

Maine built an outsized share of them. Bath, Thomaston, Camden, Rockland and Waldoboro had yards running continuously through the nineteenth century, working with local white pine and oak, and the launch of a large vessel was a town event photographed as such. Bath alone launched hundreds of vessels and is still building ships.

The Grand Banks fishing fleet is the other half of this category and it produced the best photography. Gloucester and Boston schooners sailed to the banks off Newfoundland and put men over the side in two-man dories to set trawl lines, then collected them again. It was appallingly dangerous — fog separated dories from their vessel routinely, and Gloucester lost hundreds of men in some decades. The vessels were built for speed because the first boat back with fish got the price, which is what made the fishermen’s races of the 1920s between the American and Canadian fleets a genuine contest rather than a pageant.

Photographers followed them. Nathaniel Stebbins in Boston photographed thousands of vessels under sail over forty years, and his negatives are the reason so many specific schooners can be identified by name today.

Coastal schooners were frequently family operations, with a captain’s wife and children living aboard for years at a stretch. Photographs showing laundry strung between the masts or a child on deck are recording a household rather than a novelty, and a fair number of captains’ wives navigated.

Sail lasted longer in this trade than anywhere else, because a schooner burned no fuel and a cargo of coal was not in a hurry. Some were still working the coast into the 1930s and a handful past that, by then usually with an engine fitted and their rig cut down. The last of them ended up in the summer passenger trade along the Maine coast, which is where a few survive today.

The Agency That Photographed New York Every Day for Twenty Years