The pink: a ship named for its stern

What is a pink ship?

By the middle of the 1700s, a pink meant any ship with a very narrow stern. William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine of 1769, a widely used sailors’ dictionary, defined it in just that way, and added that any vessel, however small, with a stern shaped like this was called “pink-sterned”. Encyclopaedias printed the same short definition for the next forty years.

That makes the pink different from types such as the sloop or the brigantine, which were named for their masts and sails. A pink was named for its hull. Many had full, rounded sides that swelled out in the middle and then narrowed sharply towards the back, which left plenty of room below deck for cargo.

What did a pink look like?

Seen from behind, a pink looked pinched. Instead of ending in a wide, flat stern with big cabin windows, like a merchant frigate or a warship, its planks curved in to meet near the sternpost, the upright timber that carried the rudder. On later pink-sterned boats, the upper sides even carried on past the rudder, forming a narrow, pointed shelf at the back.

Above the hull, almost anything was possible. Masts and sails come in two broad kinds: square sails hang across the ship from horizontal poles called yards, while fore-and-aft sails run along the length of the ship. English pinks were usually square-rigged, and some were rigged like full ships with three masts. The Royal Navy’s pink Paramour, launched at Deptford in 1694, was one of these: a three-masted vessel of 89 tons that carried six guns.

Pink, pinas, pinco: why are the names so confusing?

Sailors around 1715 used ship-type words loosely, and “pink” is one of the loosest. The same sound turns up in several languages for quite different boats.

• The Dutch pinck was a small, sturdy fishing boat with a rounded hull and a flat bottom, launched straight off the beaches of villages such as Egmond and Scheveningen. The type goes back to around 1400.
• The Dutch pinas, or pinnace in English, was a different kind of ship altogether, with a broad stern rather than a pinched one.
• The Mediterranean pinco was a three-masted merchant ship with triangular lateen sails, used across the Mediterranean from the 1700s.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes that “pink” first meant a small coasting and fishing boat, but in the 1600s and 1700s it was also used for much bigger ships, including warships. The word probably comes from the Dutch, but its exact origin is uncertain. It has nothing to do with the colour.

What were pinks used for around 1715?

Mostly for carrying goods. A round, roomy hull held a lot of cargo for its size, which made pinks useful in the coastal and ocean trades of Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands. They were not just for short trips. In 1732 the “Pink John & William of Sunderland” carried 169 German emigrants, known as Palatines, from Rotterdam to Philadelphia, according to the Pennsylvania council’s records.

The English navy found uses for pinks too, and in 1696 the king lent the pink Paramour to the astronomer Edmond Halley. Between 1698 and 1701 Halley captained her on voyages that measured how far compass needles pointed away from true north across the Atlantic, information sailors needed to find their way.

Which pink did Black Sam Bellamy capture?

On about 26 April 1717, off Nantucket, Black Sam Bellamy’s pirates captured the Mary Anne of Dublin. The record of the pirates’ trial calls her “a free Trading Vessel or Pink”. She was owned in Ireland, her master was Andrew Crumpstey, and she was carrying a cargo made up mostly of wine, Madeira wine according to later accounts.

Bellamy moved the captain and most of the crew onto his own ship, the Whydah, and put seven pirates aboard the Mary Anne with three of her own sailors. That night a storm drove the pirate ships onto the outer shore of Cape Cod. The Whydah broke up off Wellfleet with the loss of most of her crew. The Mary Anne ran aground further south, near Orleans and Chatham, and all ten people aboard survived.

They did not stay free for long. Her cook reported the pirates to the authorities, and by nightfall all seven were in the jail at Barnstable, and in October 1717 they were tried in Boston. One of them, Thomas South, who said he had wanted to escape from the pirates, was acquitted, and so was Thomas Davis, a carpenter from the Whydah. The other six men from the Mary Anne were hanged on 15 November 1717.

Did other pirates sail pinks?

Pirates took whatever ships came their way, and pinks were common merchant ships, so some ended up in pirate hands. According to the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, a book that is partly embellished, Edward Low captured a pink called the Rose in the Azores in 1722 and took her for his own use. She was later lost while his crew were careening her, which meant heeling the ship over on a beach to clean her bottom.

Did the pink stern survive after the 1700s?

Yes. In New England, fishing boats with a pinched, pointed stern became common after the American Revolution. At Essex, Massachusetts, a boat with a pointed “pink” stern was called a Chebacco boat, while the same boat with a square stern was a “dogbody”. Their larger successors, schooner-rigged fishing boats called pinkies, reached their biggest size, about 50 to 60 feet on deck, by the 1820s. These are later than the game’s era, but they kept the old name alive.