The Lawson in 1902, the year of her launch. Courtesy The Seamen's Bank for Savings.
The Thomas W. Lawson First or last of the great sailing bulk carriers? By Simon Watts The voyaging effort-the effort that opened the modern world-is born of vision, finance, and available resources. The shift from the system where the ship's rig caught power from the wind to the harnessing of hot gases in power plants inside the ship took a century: from the successful steaming of the North River Steamboat in 1807, to the year 1907 when engine-powered tonnage first exceeded sailing tonnage in the US. Even before she was launched 78 years ago, the seven-masted steel schooner Thomas W. Lawson had her detractors. Designed to carry 8,000 tons, nearly twice the cargo ever moved under sail, she was referred to as a maritime error of colossal proportions, and as a dramatic and senseless freak built more for size and advertising than for successful trading and ultimate profit. It was also insinuated that she was built largely to gratify the vanity of her chief financial backer-Thomas Lawson. A successful Boston businessman, Tom Lawson was a well known (some said notorious) stock market operator. He had made his considerable fortune speculating in copper. At the time of the Lawson's building, he was president of the Bay State Gas Company. The Coastwise Transportation Company, on the other hand, builders of the Lawson, was a little-known company that operated a small fleet of coastal steamers, a schooner and one barge. Its president, 24
Toward the end of this era of transition, Yankee shipbuilders built bigger and bigger ships rigged as multi-mast schooners, designed to move large cargoes with minimum crew costs. Here Mr. Watts, a writer and student of maritime history resident in Putney, Vermont, looks at the short, ill-starred career of the ship that was their greatest venture in this direction-a sailing ship that carried fuel for steam and internal combustion engines.
Captain John F. Crowley, had considered the possibility of building a large sailing bulk carrier for some time before he and Lawson came together to build the supership . The well known naval architect B.B. Crowninshield, whose work had contributed to more seaworthy designs for the Gloucester fishing fleet, was named as designer of the vessel, and a contract was given to the Fore River Ship and Engine Building Company and work began in 1901. Even before sliding down the ways on July 10, 1902 at Quincy, Massachusetts, the Lawson was well known . A deep, narrow vessel, she carried her great waterline length of 368 feet on only 50 feet of beam. She had three steel decks throughout her length and six cargo hatches feeding holds 35 feet deep. Fully loaded, she drew 25 Vi feet. Her most dramatic feature, apart from her immense size, was her sevenmasted fore-and-aft rig. The masts, 193 feet tall, were of the height reached in the
California clippers half a century earlier, but seemed dwarfed by the size of the ship. Each was made up of a steel lower mast surmounted by a 58-foot topmast of Oregon pine. Rigged as a schooner with four jibs and a staysail, the Lawson is supposed to have carried 43,000 square feet of sail-almost an acre. Although old photographs show her with both topsails and topmast staysails, these were in fact seldom set and later on were done away with altogether. The hundreds of iron mast hoops made a distinctive rattling as the ship rolled in a beam sea. The Lawson was once described by the coxwain of a Cornish lifeboat as being "as long as from here to next week,'' and there is a persistent legend that her masts were named for the days of the week. However the legend is denied in a terse and unequivocal letter written in 1932 by one of her captains, Elmer Crowley. This letter, still in the files of the peabody Museum at Salem, states that the masts were called: SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1980