Some Notes on Shipbuilding and Shipping in Colonial VirginiaEvans, Cerinda W.
History
Some Notes on Shipbuilding and Shipping in Colonial Virginia
Evans, Cerinda W.
Ferries -- Virginia; Shipbuilding -- Virginia; Shipping -- Virginia; Ships; Virginia -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
The frame of a snow, which was to have been built by Thomas Rawlings,
a ship-carpenter, for Mr. John Hood, merchant of Prince George County,
was advertised for sale in 1745. The snow was to have been sixty feet
keel; twenty-three feet, eight inches beam; ten feet hold; and four
feet between decks. Also advertised for sale about the same time was a
schooner, trimmed and well-fitted with sails and rigging to carry
fifty hogsheads of tobacco. In March, 1746, the sloop _Little Betty_,
burden fifty tons, was offered for sale with her sails, anchors,
furniture, and tackle.
The advertisements of Virginia-built vessels in the 1750's, and in the
1760's, show a steady increase in the size of sloops and ships. The
following are mentioned: a brig of eighty tons; several snows, one to
carry 250 hogsheads of tobacco; and several schooners. Schooner rigged
boats appeared in the colony early in the eighteenth century, and
gradually increased in size and importance. During the second half of
the eighteenth century, the schooner displaced the sloop as the
principal coastwise vessel, and emerged during the Revolution as a
distinctive American type. "The most spectacular event in the history
of naval architecture in the eighteenth century was the emergence of
the Chesapeake Bay clipper-schooner," says Arthur Pierce Middleton.
In April, 1767, John Hatley Norton came from London to be his father's
agent with headquarters in Yorktown. He wrote home that his cousins,
the Walker Brothers, had a shipyard at Hampton, and were building
ships of new white oak, well calculated for the West Indies trade. A
letter from John M. Jordon & Company, London, in 1770, reads in part
as follows: "Mr. William Acrill desires you will make insurance of his
brig, _America_, Captain William C. Latimer; in case of loss to
receive four hundred pounds. She is chartered by a gentleman on the
Rappahannock; and is now in Hampton Roads, and will sail tomorrow or
next day; and in case she arrives safe, you are to receive her
freight, and sell the vessel, provided you can get four hundred pounds
for her."
Occasionally, we find an account of the use of a vessel of some kind
or other for pleasure. In Fithian's _Journal and Letters_, the author
writes in 1773, that his employer, Mr. Robert Carter of Nomini,
prepared for a voyage in his schooner _Harriot_ (named for his
daughter), to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for oysters. The schooner
was of forty tons burden, thirty-eight feet in length, fourteen feet
beam, six feet in depth of hold, carried 1400 bushels of grain, and
was valued at forty pounds sterling. Again from the _Journal_: "From
Horn Point, we agreed to ride to one Mr. Camel's, who is Comptroller
of the customs here. Before dinner, we borrowed the Comptroller's
barge, which is an overgrown canoe, and diverted ourselves in the
river which lies fronting his house."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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