Added: 12/25/2005 |
Maine schooners are phenomenon of the past ageFor our contemporaries the word "schooner" may sound rather old-fashioned and bring into their minds pictures of Old World. If you want to ask me about maine schooners you dig deeper into details. Let's reveal the history of schooners step by step.
Firstly, what is schooner? It is a type of ship with two or more masts and sets of sail. A two-masted schooner is technically a yacht, as a sailing ship, must have at least three masts. There was no set maximum number of masts for a schooner. A small schooner has two or three masts, but they were built with as many as six or seven masts to carry a larger volume of cargo. Most schooners are either gaff or schooner rigged. Alternatives include the topsail schooner with one or two square rigged topsails on the foremast, and the staysail schooner with staysails only on the foremast.
Schooners history started in the 16th century. We should say the Dutch "Thank you", for such invention. Further schooners were developed in North America from the time of the American Revolution. Schooners built by the Dutch were quite maneuverable and could be sailed by a smaller crew than some other sailing vessels. Schooners were used to carry cargo in many different environments, from ocean voyages, to coastal runs and on large inland bodies of water.
Maine schooners, both cargo and fishing, were once a common sight at every wharf and shipyard in New England. A marvel in the age of commercial sail, the schooner was the primary means of transporting cargo and seafood. The old coasters and tern schooners played a vital role in our local commerce, shipyard activities and maritime history.
During the late 1800's and the early decades of this century, ports along the northeastern U.S. coast, and especially the Maine coast, were filled with hundreds of schooners. Maine schooners were the most numerous. In their heyday of the late 1800s over 2000 schooners carried cargo back and forth across the Great Lakes.
Of the really big maine schooners - the four, five and six masters designed primarily for the coal trade and predominantly constructed naturally in Maine - virtually nothing remains. In their day, these were truly queens of the east coast. The largest maine schooners, the giant six-masted ones, could carry 6,000 tons of coal, yet operated with a crew of only 13. Despite their efficiency, steamships drove the schooners from the seas. Many of the big schooners were abandoned in coves and backwaters along the Maine coast as traffic dropped of during the 1920's and 1930's.
Today Maine schooners, coastal and deep-sea workhorses for decades, are all but gone. A few of the smallest schooners, two-masters, survive in charter fleets and museums. The three masters are gone, save for a few isolated examples which do not represent the traditional "downeast" schooners. Nowadays only a few splintered wrecks and bones remain to remind us of these great ships, the last representatives of the lost age. And you were right thinking that the age of schooners has passed.
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