This year the schooner Mercantile turned 100 years old! Here is a history of this amazing vessel from the archives of National Register of Historic Places Registration Form:
The most common American vessel type was the two-masted coastingschooner. Developed in the mid-to-late 18th century, these
vessels reached a more or less standard form by the mid-19th
century, a design that continued to be built into the first
decades of the 20th century. The only variation of note in the
two-masted schooner, aside from the underwater form of the hull,
or the lines, was the presence of a centerboard. Tens of
thousands of these vessels were built and operated on the
Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf coasts, and on the Great Lakes in the
19th and early 20th centuries. The "freight trucks" of their
time, the coasting schooners carried coal, bricks, iron ore,
grain, oysters, and numerous other bulk products between ports.
In addition to Mercantile, there are now only four surviving twomasted
coasting schooners in the United States Lewis R. French(1871), Stephen Taber (1871), Governor Stone (1877), and Grace
Bailey (1882), all the subjects of separate studies.
In 1943, Mercantile became a member of the fleet of windjammers
developed by Frank Swift for the commercial conveyance of
passengers along the Maine coast. Its significance, therefore,
lies not only in its design and association with maritime
history, but equally for its association with Swift's early and
unique approach to the preservation of historic vessels.
Mercantile was built by the Billings family in Little Deer Isle,
Maine, over three winter seasons, finally being launched in 1916.
Like the Bailey, she is a shoal draft, centerboard schooner,
drawing 10 ' 7" with the centerboard down and 5' with the
centerboard up. She was owned and operated by the Billings
family from 1916 to 1943, and then was briefly in the coasting
and mackerel fisheries trades in the Narragansett Bay area of
Massachusetts. In 1943 she was purchased by Captain Frank Swift
of Camden, Maine, for use as a "windjammer." Her subsequent
ownership history is:
Frank Swift, Camden, Maine 1943-1961
Jim Nisbit, Camden, Maine 1961-1969
Leslie E. Bex, Jr., Camden, Maine 1969-1986
Schooner Mercantile, Inc., Camden, Maine 1986-present
MERCANTILE AS A COASTING SCHOONER
The two-masted schooner Mercantile is one of only three historic
coasting vessels surviving in Maine. "Coasting," i.e., the
transport of cargo from one Atlantic Coast port to another from
the early nineteenth century to about the outbreak of World War
II, was once "so common that nobody paid much attention to
them." 1 However, before examining their development and
function, it should be clear what these small vessels were not.
Designed to run fairly close to shore, these schooners were
neither fishing vessels with the ability to ride out a gale on
off-shore fishing grounds, nor did they ever approach the scale
of the four-, five-, and six-masted great coal schooners which
arose to transport that commodity from southern to northern
seaports. While the occasional multi-master even made a trans-
Atlantic crossing, the coasters stayed close to home. Deepwater
men often accused coastwise sailors of setting their course by
the bark of a dog."
One of the earliest depictions of a schooner appears in an
engraving by the Dutch artist Van de Velde, who died in 1707,
which shows a two-masted vessel with a gaff-rigged sail on each
mast. By 1780, Falconer's Universal Dictionary of the Marinedefined a schooner as:
A small vessel with two masts, whose main-sail and
fore-sail are suspended from gaffs reaching out below
by booms, whose foremost ends are hooked to an iron,
which clasps the mast so as to turn therein as upon an
axis, when the after-ends are swung from one side of
the vessel to the other.
The origin of the term "schooner" is itself obscure. The Oxford
Universal Dictionary assigns it a date of 1716 and suggest an
American origin, 4 while Webster's calls the word of "origin
unknown." It has also been noted that in Scotland, "to schoon"
is to skim along the water.
"Coasters," in the United States, according to the late Howard I.
Chapelle, "have been schooners since 1800, if not earlier. The
Nicholas Dean, interview with Captain W. J. Lewis Parker,
Camden, Maine, May 1990.
MERCANTILE (Schooner)
United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
early coasting trade was carried out in vessels of all types."
It is said that "the straight fore-and-aft-rigged schooner is
decidedly a coastwise vessel, and attempts to use such craft for
long voyages on the high seas have invariably been disappointing
and disillusioning, if not disastrous to the adventurers."
However, coasters ventured into the Caribbean, the American
schooner Success being reported in Jamaica, bound for San Domingo
in 1801. Other surviving accounts from the later 19th century
describe a considerable Caribbean trade. 10 The schooner
supplanted the square-rigged vessels in the coasting trade for
very practical reasons:
The fore-and-aft rig came to be preferred for coasting
vessels for several reasons. Fewer sailors were
required to handle the vessel, and a schooner could be
worked into and out of harbors and rivers more easily
than any square-rigged craft. Her trips could also, as
a rule, be made in quicker time, as she could sail
close into the wind, and it was hardly necessary for
her to sail from Maine to New York by way of the
Bermudas, as some square-rigged vessels have done
during baffling winds.
Along the Maine coast, for many years the little schooner filled
the transportation niche today occupied by vehicles ranging from
pickups to two-ton trucks. First, until roughly 50 years ago,
many of Maine's secondary roads could hardly be classed as "all
weather," and along the numerous peninsulas, north-south
transport of staples such as firewood and hay was, during the
spring "mud season," more easily and safely achieved by water.
Second, Maine's deeply indented coastline made waterborne
commerce a matter of economy. It is but 293 miles by road from
the Maine-New Hampshire border at Kittery to Maine's eastern-most
city, Freeport, 12 but the state has some 3,500 miles of
coastline. 3 In addition, to a greater extent in the 19th
century than now, Maine's numerous small islands required
transport of freight.
Finally, many of the products requiring transport were produced
at or near the shore. These included brick, fired from estuarine
clay; granite, often quarried on off-shore islands; and wood,
rafted to a convenient loading point. The coasters carried box
boards and empty cans to sardine canneries and delivered the
processed fish.
Such vessels were handy, economical, and easily built
of readily accessible materials, perfectly suited to
their task, and their number was legion. They were the
errand boys, the short-haul freight droghers, and the
passenger busses form many a year, and their
contribution to the coastal community life, especially
in New England, was substantial.
They were unromantic little vessels, described by a man who spent
his youth in them as "no more than sea-going tipcarts, hauling
their prosaic cargoes from one coastal port to another." He
added, however, that "without them the country could hardly have
been settled." Another of the few historians who has bothered
to examine the small coasters described them as:
the errand boys of the coast. They averaged around a
hundred tons and were found in every river, bay, and
inlet from Quoddy to Cape Fear. To southern cities
they delivered the products of Maine farms, shores,
forests and local industries... In turn they brought
back southern pitch pine, pitch and turpentine to the
yards in which they had been built.
By the early 1880s, a definite small coaster type had been in
existence for at least 20 years, and probably longer. In his
1882 Report on the Shipbuilding Industry of the United States,
Henry Hall described it as "centerboard vessels with flat
bottoms. In all cases, however, the models are full, the beam
large, the bow sharp and long, the run clean and the sheer
considerable forward." To Hall, such schooners had "the jaunty
air of a yacht." He observed that "schooners with sharp bottoms
do not pay, and few are built." Chapelle described them as
"2-masted fore-and-aft rigged schooners 50 to 75 feet long,
having short, high quarterdecks with bulwarks or turned-stanchion
rails."
Such are Grace Bailey and Mercantile, two of the last four
survivors of this type of vessel, the third being the Lewis R.
French and the fourth being the Stephen Taber. Their
significance to the coastal Maine scene in general was summed up
by the late John F. Leavitt, who has already been cited. In his
Wake of the Coasters, published in 1970, Leavitt reminisced;
There was a time when spars and rigging made a
commonplace pattern against the Maine sky. It was in
1938 when the last cargo-carrying schooner was launched
in the State of Maine, yet today there seem to be very
few who remember when the reaches and thoroughfares
swarmed with coasting schooners. Perhaps that is
because the sight was so taken for granted. On the
other hand, until the advent of good roads in the
middle to later 1920s, most of the isolated towns east
of Portland depended upon the schooners for connection
with the outside world, particularly during that part
of the year when the dirt roads were nearly
impassable.
Nine years after John F. Leavitt wrote the passage quoted above,
there was an attempt to revive the working cargo schooner on the
Maine coast. Launched in 1979, the 97-foot, two-masted John F.
Leavitt obtained a cargo for the Caribbean and was lost on her
maiden voyage. In addition, though subsidized by a matching
grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, in that same year
students at the Maine Maritime Museum's Apprentice shop built a
smaller schooner, the 42-foot Vernon Langille, and began a
program of freighting firewood out to offshore islands. Lancrille
is still afloat, but the experiment was ultimately abandoned. 21
For all practical purposes, the coasting schooner ceased to be
economically viable in the 1930s. No four-, five-, or six-masted
schooner survives today save as a derelict hulk; while three
three-masted schooners remain, two as west coast museum vessels
and one, Victory Chimes, carries passengers as a Maine
windjammer. One early two-masted cargo schooner, Alvin Clark,
survives at Trenton, Mississippi, though in deteriorated
condition.
MERCANTILE AS A MAINE WINDJAMMER
However, on the Maine coast Grace Bailey, Mercantile, and Stephen
Taber not only have survived but turn a profit for their owners
because, in 1936, Captain Frank Swift conceived the idea of
converting small two-masted cargo schooner to passenger vessels.
In an early brochure, undated but probably from near the
beginning of his venture, Swift offered a one week cruise for $32
or a two week cruise for $60 and described the trips as follows:
These schooners are not yachts just picturesque downeast
sailing vessels, clipper bowed and able, with
billowing sails and hempen rigging.
Each Monday, from July 4th until September 10th, the
Annie Kimball and the Lvdia Webster will sail from
Camden, Maine, for a week's cruise not to follow an
exact itinerary but to use the winds and tides to make
the cruise most interesting.
Swift purchased Grace Bailey in 1940 and Mercantile in 1943. 23
Today, fifteen "windjammers" operate out of mid-coast Maine: ten
out of Rockland, one out of Rockport, and four out of Camden.
They no longer carry lumber and granite, but, as is often
remarked, "the only cargo that loads and unloads itself." 24
It must be emphasized that a week on a windjammer is more in the
nature of a "maritime experience" than "sail training," per se.
Passengers are encouraged but not required to lend a hand as
needed. In addition to whatever better understanding of
Americas's maritime heritage the windjammers foster in
laypersons, on a practical level they are also an instrument for
the preservation of both schooner sail handling and maintenance
and the wooden shipwright's skills as well. For example, Grace
Bailey's recent thirteen month refit employed an average of ten
hands at any one time, with Mercantile's earlier refit running at
roughly the same figure. 25 The 1988-89 renovation of Mercantile
was carried out under the direction of Captain Ray Williamson,
the only essential difference between work on Mercantile and work
on Bailey being that Mercantile renovation occurred in two
sequential stages.
With over 40 years in the arts he brings a wealth of artistic expression to his new designer fashions. Doug's photos will transport you to a place where life is simple and the unspoiled beauty will take your breath away.
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