From small coaster to large vessel
The schooner began as a fairly small, handy vessel with fore-and-aft sails. In the nineteenth century it grew into something quite different: a large, multi-masted ship that could carry bulk cargoes with a small crew, and a racing yacht admired for its speed. This article follows that later growth.
A schooner has at least two masts, with fore-and-aft sails on each. Generally the foremast is shorter than the mainmast, or equal to it. Larger schooners added a third, fourth and later even more masts, giving them a distinctive appearance of masts in a line, each carrying similar sails. Many also carried square topsails on the foremast, for use when running before the wind, and these were often called topsail schooners.
The America and yacht racing
The most famous schooner of the century was the yacht America, built in New York in 1851. She was designed by George Steers and built for a syndicate headed by John Cox Stevens, and she was sent across the Atlantic to race in Britain. In August 1851 she won a race around the Isle of Wight, sailing against a fleet of British yachts, and the trophy she took home became known as the America’s Cup. The cup was later given to the New York Yacht Club to be contested internationally.
The America had a sharp bow, a hull shaped to let water pass cleanly, and well-cut sails. British observers were impressed, and the race helped to prompt changes in British yacht design. For the long contest that followed from that victory, see America Cup racing. After the yacht herself changed hands, she served in several roles, including as a naval vessel during the American Civil War, and was later preserved only in part.
Schooners continued to be important as yachts for the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Large schooners were built for wealthy owners and for the New York and other yacht clubs. They raced in regattas and ocean contests. The three-masted schooner Atlantic won a transatlantic race in 1905 and is reported to have set a long-standing record for sailing across the ocean in that period.
Coasting schooners
The commercial story of the schooner, particularly in the United States, took a different path. By the second half of the nineteenth century, American builders were producing larger schooners with three, four and then more masts for the coastal trade. They carried coal, timber, ice, stone and other bulk goods up and down the Atlantic coast, between the ports of New England, the mid-Atlantic and the southern states. The reason was economic: a schooner needed a much smaller crew than a square-rigged ship of the same cargo capacity, because the fore-and-aft sails could be handled from the deck, often with the help of a small steam engine to hoist the sails.
Maine, especially the city of Bath, was one of the best-known centres for their construction. Four-masted schooners became a standard type for coal. Some builders went further. The Thomas W. Lawson, launched in 1902, was a steel seven-masted schooner and for a time among the largest sailing vessels of the kind ever built. She was lost off the Isles of Scilly in 1907. The Wyoming, a wooden six-masted schooner built in 1909, was among the largest wooden sailing vessels built. These ships are often described as showing the limits of the type, because very long wooden hulls tended to flex in a seaway and to leak.
By the early twentieth century, steamers and tugs towing strings of barges were taking over the coal trade. Many big schooners were converted to barges or laid up, and by the middle of the twentieth century the type had largely disappeared from commercial service.
The Great Lakes
Schooners were also an important part of the shipping on the Great Lakes of North America. Sailing schooners carried grain, timber, iron ore and coal between lake ports in the nineteenth century, with Chicago, Buffalo and Cleveland among the main destinations. Lake schooners were shaped partly by the canals and locks of the region, which limited the size of ships able to pass between the lakes.
It is worth keeping the history straight here. The large lake freighters that most people associate with the Great Lakes today are steamships, and later motor ships, with the engine and the wheelhouse at one end and a long cargo hold between. They gradually replaced the schooners in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, in the same way that steam and the steamship era replaced sail on the oceans. Many lake schooners were converted into towed barges, which kept some of the old hulls working for decades. Their wrecks, preserved by the cold fresh water, are of interest to archaeologists and divers.
Fishing and other uses
Schooners were also developed for fishing, notably from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and from Nova Scotia, where schooners such as Bluenose, launched in 1921 at Lunenburg, combined fishing duties with racing. The fishing schooner belongs to the earlier origin story of the type.
Why the large schooner faded
Several reasons are usually given for the decline.
- Steamships became cheaper and more reliable, and could keep to a timetable.
- Railways and, later, roads and pipelines competed for bulk goods.
- Very large wooden hulls were costly to maintain.
- The skills needed to build and sail them became scarcer.
Yet the large schooner left a clear mark. It showed how far a fore-and-aft rig could be scaled with a small crew, and its yacht form connected the type with the sport of racing. Modern sail-training and charter schooners continue the tradition on a smaller scale.