Lady of Good Voyage at Fulton Market, January 1976. Photo by Ted Miles.
A Fast and Able Type Lives on:
Thirty Surviving Gloucesterillen By Ted Miles Assistant Curator National Maritime Historical Society
What we call the Gloucester schooner came into being toward the end of the last century. Built for the hotly competitive fishing trade, without benefit of power, the Gloucesterman, like the clipper before her, was a thoroughbred racehorse of the sea and was sailed in a manner to make her a legend in her time. In the first decade of this century, engines became small enough to fill our streets with autos and the fisheries with powered craft. At first engines were put in what was essentially a Gloucester hull, usually a little heavier in the haunches, like the L.A. Dunton at Mystic, built in the 1920s. By the 1930s, sailing rigs were reduced or eliminated, and a boxier (usually square-sterned) "dragger" hull replaced the sailing Gloucesterman. Lady of Good Voyage, Pilgrim and Puritan, still extant, built in the 1940s, are perhaps the last Gloucestermen built in the U.S. for commercial fishing. The type name "Gloucesterman" was extended to vessels built in Canada's Maritime Provinces. Its essential hull shape and rig was used in John Alden's famous schooner yachts of the 1920s and 30s-lovingly preserved and actively sailed by their owners todayand is celebrated in the replica of the Canadian Bluenose. Here Ted Miles 4
lists and describes survivors of the type, beginning with the Lettie G. Howard, now at South Street Seaport Museum. The next oldest-and the oldest survivor of the larger "offshore" class-is the Effie M. Morrissey . A widespread effort is under way to save her, with the support of the National Society.-ED. Few workaday, utilitarian ships have so captured the imagination of painters and photographers as have the distinctive and world-famous Gloucester fishing schooners. Winslow Homer painted her again and again; she (and the way of life she represented) inspired authors like Rudyard Kipling and Edmund Gilligan, and films like "Captains Courageous"-a classic familiar to generations of sea-struck children and grownups. The graceful hulls, boiling along under a mountain of piled-on canvas, in a race to beat the fleet to market in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with the twin light towers of Rockport and windswept sky for background, still inspire artists to reach for camera or brush. Even the clipper ships, in their brief day of glory, are hard-pressed to vie for grim determination and daring with the Gloucestermen, for whom speed on the homeward voyage spelt success and fortune. Captain Tommy Bohlin of the Nannie Bohlin is reputed to have pulled five sets of spars out of his vessels, piling sail on lofty sail when wind and sea were up.
In the days when the Grand Banks were fished under sail, the Gloucesterman was used from New York, all along the New England coast, and on Down East to the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Many ended up in the Caribbean fishing and coasting trades as well. Interest in the type has been revived lately with the construction of a replica of the Canadian schooner Bluenose. The new Bluenose II acted as the welcoming craft at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967, and since has made tours to the United States. Currently she daysails out of Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia with groups of summer visitors . The original Bluenose was built to compete in the International Fisherman's Races held off Gloucester and Halifax in the 1920s and 30s. She dominated these events, which were hotly contested but in the end inconclusive as to which port sent out the superior schooner. Bluenose put up a gallant fight against the power-driven schooner, ending her days in Caribbean trading. One of her old crewmen in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, told me that she was so fast she could do three trips to the Banks in the time most other schooners took to do two. By the 1930s most American owners had abandoned sailing vessels and switched to power-driven draggers for bottom fishing. For a decade or so con-