How Sail Fueled the Industrial Revolution— Sailing Colliers and the Steamship Fleet
n 1909, just over 100 years after Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat first sailed up the Hudson River, the largest wooden sailing vessel ever built was launched from the Percy & Small Shipyard in Bath, Maine. The six-masted schooner Wyoming was built as a collier—a sail freighter specifically designed to haul coal. Colliers had been used since the Middle Ages to supply cities with coal, but with the advent of steamboats and industrialization they took on new importance. The seventeen-year Fulton-Livingston steamboat monopoly was broken just four years before the Delaware & Hudson Canal opened in 1828, bringing high-quality anthracite coal from Pennsylvania to Kingston, New York, and from there to the Hudson Valley and beyond. This huge influx of inexpensive, high quality coal to the cradle of steamboat navigation dramatically helped expand the use of steamboats as competition to sail’s near 5,000-year monopoly on waterborne travel. As technology improved, steamships began plying the open ocean as well as inland waterways. But they had a serious The collier Wyoming. Massive schooners still had a role limitation—their range was dictated by the amount of fuel they could carry. in the steamship era, carrying coal to stations around Sailing colliers, which burned none of their cargo en route, supplied steamboat the country and around the globe to fuel the engines of fueling stations worldwide until after the First World War, enabling steamboats the ships that made most sailing vessel work obsolete. to expand their reach and travel ever-increasing distances. The global importance of coaling ports to projecting the commercial and naval power of 19th-century empires is easy to see by the publications they inspired, such as the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Coaling, Docking, and Repairing Facilities of the Ports of the World, issued from the 1880s to at least the 1910s. These publications gave the amount of coal imported to and available at places like Singapore, a critical coaling station between China and the Suez Canal. By 1887, the Southeast Asian island port city was importing 240,000 tons of coal annually from England alone. The importance of coal to navies and merchant fleets worldwide continued to grow and was the topic of many heated debates and reports in the US, UK, and elsewhere. Coal for industrializing cities along the US coast was provided by sail freighters like the Wyoming into the 1920s.
maine maritime museum collection
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by Carla Lesh, Sarah Wassberg Johnson, and Steven Woods Hudson River Maritime Museum
hudson river maritime museum collection
Today, 30-40% of global maritime trade is dedicated to transporting fossil fuels, and ships are looking to keep that fuel as cargo and not use it up in the transport. The twin problems of high fuel costs and climate change have raised the same question faced by fuel shippers 150 years ago. More shippers are looking to the 19th and early 20th centuries for inspiration, as sail power is being reintroduced to the international shipping business. Lessons from the 1970s oil crisis have been revived for using free wind power to move cargo worldwide. Kingston, New York: A sloop and schooner loading coal at Island Dock in the late 19th century. 30
SEA HISTORY 179, SUMMER 2022
