The Unwieldy Giants of the Sound
After a grueling trip from Australia, a captain declares five-masted schooners unfit for the deep-water lumber trade.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Port Townsend, Dec. 30. Practical experience has demonstrated that five-masted schooners are not a success for deep-water voyaging. Capt. Davis has just arrived in port from Australia via Honolulu with the five-masted schooner Gov. Ames. He has made arrangements to either rig the Ames into a four-masted barkentine or take the vessel back to the Atlantic coast. Capt. Hale will be down from Port Blakeley in a few days and make an estimate with reference to the feasibility of the proposed change. Five-masted schooners are not adapted to making long voyages. There is too much wear and tear, and the unsteadiness of the sails in sweeping the decks are a source of great annoyance. For coast voyages small schooners are very profitable, but a vessel the size of the Ames, with a carrying capacity of nearly 2,000,000 feet of lumber, cannot always get coast engagements.
“Five-masted schooners are not adapted to making long voyages. There is too much wear and tear.”
The transition from sail to steam in the 1890s was marked by these short-lived experiments in mega-vessel design. Today, this era is remembered as the climax of the Pacific Northwest's 'timber rush,' where maritime technology was pushed to its breaking point to satisfy the insatiable hunger for wood.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.