The schooner: New England’s two-masted workhorse

What is a schooner?

A schooner is defined by its sails, not its hull. It has at least two masts, and every mast carries fore-and-aft sails. A fore-and-aft sail hangs from the mast and a pole called the boom, so it lies along the length of the boat, like a curtain drawn from front to back. Square sails, the other kind, hang across the ship from horizontal poles called yards, like a sheet on a washing line.

The schooners of the early 1700s had two masts. The mast at the back (the mainmast) carried a sail at least as big as the one in front (the foremast), and triangular sails called jibs stretched forward to a pole sticking out of the bow, the bowsprit. Some schooners also set a small square sail high on the foremast for running before the wind. Ships with three, four or more masts came much later.

Why could a small crew sail a schooner?

The trick was splitting the sail. A sloop of the same size had one huge mainsail, which took a lot of muscle to raise, lower and shorten in a storm. A schooner divided the same amount of canvas between two masts, so each sail was smaller and easier to manage. Historians of the rig point out that a schooner needed fewer hands than a sloop of the same size, and museum curators today say the rig suited a small crew.

Fore-and-aft sails also let a vessel sail closer to the wind than a square-rigger, which mattered when working along a coast full of headlands and changing breezes. Schooners drew little water, so they could use shallow harbours and creeks, and they were roomy and cheap to build. Big square-rigged ships were better for long ocean crossings, but for short, busy voyages the schooner was hard to beat.

Where did the schooner come from?

Two-masted boats with fore-and-aft sails appear in Dutch paintings from the early 1600s, and by the late 1600s pictures suggest the rig was common in both Holland and England. The earliest fully recorded schooner is the Royal Transport, a royal yacht with 18 guns built in England in 1695 for King William III. She was admired for her speed, and in 1698 William gave her to Tsar Peter the Great of Russia.

In North America, small two-masted boats had been fishing and trading along the New England coast for decades. The Smithsonian notes that the New England “ketch”, a two-masted boat with a crew of about four, drops out of the written records in the early 1700s just as the schooner appears, and some scholars think only the name changed. The word “schooner” itself is first recorded in 1716, in Boston. Nobody is sure where it comes from. One idea links it to an old New England and Scottish word, “scoon” or “scon”, for skipping a stone across water. The Dutch word schoener was borrowed from English, not the other way round.

Was the first schooner built in Gloucester in 1713?

That is the famous story. Tradition says that Captain Andrew Robinson launched a new kind of vessel at Gloucester, Massachusetts, around 1713. As she slid into the water a bystander cried out that she “scoons”, and Robinson answered that a “scooner” she should be.

There is some real evidence behind it. Andrew Robinson was a genuine Gloucester fisherman and sloop captain. Moses Prince, who visited Gloucester, wrote in his diary that Captain Robinson was the man who first gave the name schooner to a vessel. A letter of 1721, quoted in a later history of Gloucester, adds that Robinson built his first schooner about eight years earlier, which gives the date 1713. But the lively launch-day exchange does not appear in that early note; it shows up in writing much later.

So historians usually put it this way: Robinson may well have built an early New England schooner and helped give the type its name, but he did not invent the rig, which already existed in Europe. Encyclopaedia Britannica still says the first true schooner was “probably” built at Gloucester.

What were schooners used for around 1715?

Fishing came first. Massachusetts towns such as Gloucester and Marblehead lived by catching cod, drying and salting it, and selling it abroad. After about 1715 Marblehead’s fish trade grew quickly, and its fishermen began using bigger vessels that could go further out towards the fishing banks. By the 1740s and 1750s, records show Marblehead schooners of about 50 to 65 tons carrying fish to Lisbon and the West Indies.

Schooners also joined the coastal and island trade. New England farmers and fishermen sent salt cod, food and lumber south to the Caribbean, where sugar plantations were worked by enslaved Africans, and brought back molasses, sugar and rum. In 1715 sloops probably still carried most of that trade, but schooners took a growing share as the century went on.

Did privateers, smugglers and pirates use schooners?

Later in the 1700s, yes. Because they were fast and handy, schooners became favourites of privateers, privately owned ships licensed by a government to attack enemy shipping in wartime, and New England builders made schooners fast enough to outrun enemies. The Royal Navy used them too. In 1764 it bought six “Marblehead schooners” to patrol American waters and catch smugglers. One of them, the Gaspee, an eight-gun schooner with 19 men, was burned by angry Rhode Islanders in 1772.

For the pirates of the game’s era, though, the sloop was the usual ship. A few pirates did use them: in 1723 John Phillips seized a fishing schooner in Newfoundland and raided in her until 1724. But most of the famous raiding schooners belong to the later 1700s and early 1800s.

How did schooners take over American waters?

By the end of the 1700s the schooner had become the most important vessel in North America, used for fishing on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and for carrying cargo up and down the coast. After 1800 European shipbuilders copied it, and three-masted schooners appeared. Around 1900, shipyards in Maine and elsewhere built enormous cargo schooners with four, five, six and even seven masts.