The sha1pshooters emerged in the 1840s, with the slightly hollow , racy bows that also appeared on larger ships in this decade. Th ey carried more canvas than their predecessors and were fa st, reliable sailers .
Th e pinkies preceded the sharpshooter and outlasted them , but were never as popular. Th e Smuggler of 1877 was a clipper schooner. Th ese schooners were shmp-ended ,shallow, beamy and over- can vassed. Fast, yes , but unstable, resulting in heavy losses.
Dennison J. Lawlor' s plumb-stemmed design f or a fishing schooner, based on his experience with yachts and pilot schooners, had a deeper hull and greater stability than th e clippers. Shown here is the Lawlor-designed Harry L. Belden of 1889.
J /
and lumber, carrying along a brace of squaresails to take advantage of the beckoning trade winds. The reputation of the bankers for speed, and of the sailor-fishermen for their seamanship and knowledge of the coast recommended the crude co lonial schooners for service in the nascent American Navy and as privateers during the Revolution. Along with the high-pooped heel tappers , at least two other distinct schooner types had emerged by the eve of the War of 18 J 2. One was a smaller fishing craft being spawned in awesome quantities on the banks of the Chebacco River where it was and is bridged by the road between Gloucester and Ipswich. This community , built around family shipyards , was Ipswich ' s south parish , called by the Indian name of Chebacco, which in 1819 was incorporated as the town of Essex. These " Chebacco boats" rarely exceeded thirty tons and forty feet and might qualify as primitive schooners, for the foremast was stepped way up in the "eyes," practically in the stern , catboatwise, and they carried neither bowsprit nor jib, only a pair of gaff-headed sails. Some were double-enders; others, with square sterns, were known as "dogbodies. " Narrower and sharper than the heeltappers, with a deeper grip on the water and no doubt faster, the peaked-stem pinkies that appeared after the War of 1812 were keen on the windward haul and much superior as mackerel chasers. Their more cramped cabins, however, and the rocking-horse sterns that kept them happily cantering in a seaway, also kept them out of the mainstream of schooner design, the more to the liking oftheirold-fasioned adherents who hung on to a dwindling few of the stoutly built Methuselahs and nursed these ghosts of a bygone era from the twilight of colonial times into the dawn of the air age. By early in the 1840s ice was being cut from the ponds of Cape Ann in the winter and packed in sawdust in icehouses for year-round distribution. Chopped ice quickly replaced the live well in the market schooners , and ever so much more satisfactorily. And the extension of the railroad from Boston to Gloucester in 1847 put a new premium on speed: the first boat in to Gloucester (or Boston ' s T Wharf) with a well-iced fare of fresh halibut, haddock or mackerel won the top dollar from the dealers in the bidding. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that the tragic loss of the cream ofMarblehead's fleet in the gale of 1846 was Gloucester' s gain . Out of the competitive ferment of
those watershed 1840s emerged a true departure in fishing-schooner design. They called them "sharpshooters," long of hull and straight of keel, sharp bilges, and graced with the first susp icion of that slightly hollow, racy, slici ng bow that would be the immortal mark of the clipper ships. The sharpshooters were at first eyed with susp icion by the oldtirners on the Gloucester waterfront, who predicted that any vessel deprived of a good bluff bow wo uld nose under and drown herself anchored on the tideripped shoals of the Georges. In reality, as fair-weather sailers the sharpshooters proved bearny enough to stand up to more canvas than any of their predecessors, faster than anything ever seen out of Gloucester, and sufficiently shoal of draft to continue berthing in the shallow, mostly undredged and frequently undredgeable docks of the inner harbor. Nor did they nose-d ive. After the Civil War, fishing and shipbuilding were vigorously resumed. Regular steamship service between Boston and Gloucester opened up a whol e new channel for fisheries products. And two of the four technolog ical revolutions to overcome the conservative industry (the third and fourth were the otter trawl and the quick-freezing process) practically overnight catapulted Gloucester into the mass-production business and raised the town (incorporated as a city in 1873) to its dominant position as the leading fishing port in the world. The first of these great innovations was the perfection of the purse se ine with which in one swoop the mackerel fishermen, if lucky, were enabled to net an entire school or the better part of it within a matter of minutes. What a contrast to the old way, one by one and two by two over the rail! The second postbellurn pi scatorial revolution involved the widespread adoption of dory-trawling, a pursuit that ipso facto was not as innovative as its multiple appli cation to the ingenious, and all too frequently in its consequences awful , conception of the schooner as mother ship. Now one man, instead of fishing with four hooks at one time, could fish with four hundred-and at only ten times the ri sk to himself. As the fort unes of Gloucester rose with the tide of world demand, dealers and processors and packers, owners and skippers, bankers and builders pushed and pushed for the high line, for the top stock, for the fastest vessel, for the most reckless crew , forever haranguing for speed, for that press of sail. "Drive her, boys , drive her! " Jim Connolly loved to SEA HISTORY , SPRING 1989