Catalog entry

Very little is known about Lane's connections to Baltimore, however, in 1850 he did make one lithograph and several paintings. Additionally, the Maryland Historical Society exhibition catalog for 1856 lists a drawing owned by a "Mr. Lucas."

In general, brigs were small to medium size merchant vessels, generally ranging between 80 and 120 feet in hull length. Their hull forms ranged from sharp-ended (for greater speed; see Brig "Antelope" in Boston Harbor, 1863 (inv. 43)) to “kettle-bottom” (a contemporary term for full-ended with wide hull bottom for maximum cargo capacity; see Ships in Ice off Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, 1850s (inv. 44) and Boston Harbor, c.1850 (inv. 48)). The former were widely used in the packet trade (coastwise or transoceanic); the latter were bulk-carriers designed for long passages on regular routes. (1) This rig was favored by Gloucester merchants in the Surinam Trade, which led to vessels so-rigged being referred to by recent historians as Surinam brigs (see Brig "Cadet" in Gloucester Harbor, late 1840s (inv. 13) and Gloucester Harbor at Dusk, c.1852 (inv. 563)). (2)

Brigs are two-masted square-rigged vessels which fall into three categories:

Full-rigged brigs—simply called brigs—were fully square-rigged on both masts. A sub-type—called a snow—had a trysail mast on the aft side of the lower main mast, on which the spanker, with its gaff and boom, was set. (3)

Brigantines were square-rigged on the fore mast, but set only square topsails on the main mast. This type was rarely seen in America in Lane’s time, but was still used for some naval vessels and European merchant vessels. The term is commonly misapplied to hermaphrodite brigs. (4)

Hermaphrodite brigs—more commonly called half-brigs by American seamen and merchants—were square-rigged only on the fore mast, the main mast being rigged with a spanker and a gaff-topsail. Staysails were often set between the fore and main masts, there being no gaff-rigged sail on the fore mast.

– Erik Ronnberg

References:

1. Howard I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1960), 64–68.

2. Alfred Mansfield Brooks, Gloucester Recollected: A Familiar History (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1974), 62–74. A candid and witty view of Gloucester’s Surinam Trade, which employed brigs and barks.

3. R[ichard] H[enry] Dana, Jr., The Seaman's Friend (Boston: Thomas Groom & Co., 1841. 13th ed., 1873), 100 and Plate 4 and captions; and M.H. Parry, et al., Aak to Zumbra: A Dictionary of the World's Watercraft (Newport News, VA: The Mariners’ Museum, 2000), 95.

4. Parry, 95, see Definition 1.

Schooners in Lane’s time were, with few exceptions, two-masted vessels carrying a fore-and-aft rig having one or two jibs, a fore staysail, gaff-rigged fore- and main sails, and often fore- and main topsails. One variant was the topsail schooner, which set a square topsail on the fore topmast. The hulls of both types were basically similar, their rigs having been chosen for sailing close to the wind. This was an advantage in the coastal trade, where entering confined ports required sailing into the wind and frequent tacking. The square topsail proved useful on longer coastwise voyages, the topsail providing a steadier motion in offshore swells, reducing wear and tear on canvas from the slatting of the fore-and-aft sails. (1)

Schooners of the types portrayed by Lane varied in size from 70 to 100 feet on deck. Their weight was never determined, and the term “tonnage” was a figure derived from a formula which assigned an approximation of hull volume for purposes of imposing duties (port taxes) on cargoes and other official levies. (2)

Crews of smaller schooners numbered three or four men. Larger schooners might carry four to six if a lengthy voyage was planned. The relative simplicity of the rig made sail handling much easier than on a square-rigged vessel. Schooner captains often owned shares in their vessels, but most schooners were majority-owned by land-based firms or by individuals who had the time and business connections to manage the tasks of acquiring and distributing the goods to be carried. (3)

Many schooners were informally “classified” by the nature of their work or the cargoes they carried, the terminology coined by their owners, agents, and crews—even sometimes by casual bystanders. In Lane’s lifetime, the following terms were commonly used for the schooner types he portrayed:

Coasting schooners: This is the most general term, applied to any merchant schooner carrying cargo from one coastal port to another along the United States coast (see Bar Island and Mt. Desert Mountains from Somes Settlement, 1850 (inv. 401), right foreground). (4)

Packet schooners: Like packet sloops, these vessels carried passengers and various higher-value goods to and from specific ports on regular schedules. They were generally better-maintained and finished than schooners carrying bulk cargoes (see The Old Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, 1850s (inv. 30), center; and Gloucester Inner Harbor, 1850 (inv. 240), stern view). (5)

Lumber schooners: Built for the most common specialized trade of Lane’s time, they were fitted with bow ports for loading lumber in their holds (see View of Southwest Harbor, Maine: Entrance to Somes Sound, 1852 (inv. 260)) and carried large deck loads as well (Stage Rocks and the Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor, 1857 (inv. 8), right). Lumber schooners intended for long coastal trips were often rigged with square topsails on their fore masts (see Becalmed Off Halfway Rock, 1860 (inv. 344), left; Maverick House, 1835 (not published); and Lumber Schooner in a Gale, 1863 (inv. 552)). (6)

Schooners in other specialized trades. Some coasting schooners built for carrying varied cargoes would be used for, or converted to, special trades. This was true in the stone trade where stone schooners (like stone sloops) would be adapted for carrying stone from quarries to a coastal destination. A Lane depiction of a stone schooner is yet to be found. Marsh hay was a priority cargo for gundalows operating around salt marshes, and it is likely that some coasting schooners made a specialty of transporting this necessity for horses to urban ports which relied heavily on horses for transportation needs. Lane depicted at least two examples of hay schooners (see Gloucester Harbor, 1850s (inv. 391), left; and Coasting Schooner off Boon Island, c.1850 (inv. 564)), their decks neatly piled high with bales of hay, well secured with rope and tarpaulins.

– Erik Ronnberg

References:

1. Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1935), 258. While three-masted schooners were in use in Lane’s time, none have appeared in his surviving work; and Charles S. Morgan, “New England Coasting Schooners”, The American Neptune 23, no. 1 (DATE): 5–9, from an article which deals mostly with later and larger schooner types.

2. John Lyman, “Register Tonnage and its Measurement”, The American Neptune V, nos. 3–4 (DATE). American tonnage laws in force in Lane’s lifetime are discussed in no. 3, pp. 226–27 and no. 4, p. 322.

3. Ship Registers of the District of Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1789–1875 (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1944). Vessels whose shipping or fishing voyages included visits to foreign ports were required to register with the Federal Customs agent at their home port. While the vessel’s trade or work was unrecorded, their owners and master were listed, in addition to registry dimensions and place where built. Records kept by the National Archives can be consulted for information on specific voyages and ports visited.

4. Howard I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1960), 40, 42–43.

5. Ibid., 42–43, 73.

6. Ibid., 74–76.

"Engine-powered vessel" is a collective term used by nautical historians to include all vessel types using engine power of any type for propulsion, whether assisted by sails, oars, or other motive power. In Lane's time, steam reciprocating engines fueled by wood or coal were the only practical source of this power for ships using paddle-wheels or screw propellers to convert heat energy into motion.

For most of the nineteenth century, steamships had sails for auxiliary power; indeed the earliest examples relied principally on sails, using engine power in calm weather to shorten the voyage time or keep to a schedule. As engines became more efficient, powerful, and reliable, sail plans were reduced, to be used only to steady a vessel's motion in a seaway (for the sake of seasick passengers), or to maintain headway if the engine broke down. Only harbor craft, ferry boats, and coastwise passenger steamers relied solely on engine power.

Among Lane's depictions of steamships, the auxiliary steam packet Auxiliary Steam Packet Ship Massachusetts (inv. 442) is a good example of primary reliance on sails, while the steam demi-bark The "Britannia" Entering Boston Harbor, 1848 (inv. 49) and the Cunard Liner "Britannia", 1842 (inv. 259) have relegated sails to secondary (or simply emergency) motive power.

– Erik Ronnberg

A marine railway is a service facility for hauling ships out of the water to repair and clean the hulls. They are not used for shipbuilding, although some of the work done on them may call for the services of skilled ship carpenters.

Every marine railway in Gloucester had the following basic features:

1. The hauling ways – a straight, gently-inclined slope to convey a ship from deep water to dry ground.

2. Iron rails in pairs – two pairs of rails on the rail beams and two corresponding pairs on the underside of the hauling cradle.

3. A hauling cradle which carries and supports the ship.

4. Two racks of rollers which travel on the rails as the cradle travels over them. The principle is that of roller bearings.

5. A hauling chain and machinery to pull the cradle up the ways. Prior to steam-powered hauling winches, capstans with reduction gears, turned by horses, were used. This may have been the case with the first of the two railways built by Parker Burnham & Bros.

The lengths of the Burnham hauling ways were approximately 250 feet (first railway) to 350 feet (second railway) with an average rise of one foot in fifteen feet. Ideally, the slope should be perfectly straight, but the Gloucester ways usually had some unwanted “crown” which made hauling more difficult. While the railways in Rocky Neck were built on a jutting rise of land, the railways at Duncan’s point were built in hollows, as those locations offered the straightest inclines.

As a foundation for the rails, pairs of heavy spiles (wood pilings), set twelve feet apart, were driven every twelve feet down to bedrock. They were capped with cross-timbers which resembled railroad ties, but were much heavier. Over the cross-timbers, a pair of bed timbers was laid the length of the ways. Cross-timbers were fastened to the spiles with long iron spikes. The bed timbers were spiked down to the cross timbers in the same fashion.

Pairs of iron rails were spiked down to the bed timbers, with great care taken that they were spaced uniformly and that no spikes protruded to interfere with the rollers. The rails were plain iron bar stock, two inches by three inches in cross-section, and bored to take the spikes. Locomotive rails were not used. 

Riding on each pair of rails was a rack made of fourteen oak frames, each sixteen feet long and fitted with eighteen cast iron rollers. For a railway 350 feet long,a 224-foot rack (fourteen frame units long, totaling 28 frames and 504 rollers) was needed to allow a 100-foot cradle to travel from the low end of the way to the upper end. Although cumbersome, rollers were durable and the racks were easy to repair.

The cradle was a wooden frame with iron rails on its underside which corresponded to those on the rail bed timbers. Its dual purpose was to raise the ship by traversing the racks and to support the hull safely while the repair crews were working on it.

The base of the cradle consisted of two “fore-and-afters” with the rails on their bottom sides. Over them were heavy cross-pieces of alternating 14-foot and 24-foot lengths, spaced every five feet. On the centers of the cross-pieces were the keel blocks – short lengths of hardwood which supported the hull along the keel. On the outboard ends of three long cross-pieces were adjustable bilge blocks which moved laterally on wooden tracks. They supported the hull at its bilges so it could not tip over.

Each vessel to be hauled had a different shape to its keel and bilges, so for each hauling the keel blocks and bilge blocks were specially built up so the hull would rest on all of them, distributing its weight as evenly as possible. Hull bottom plans or tables of bottom dimensions were kept on file in the railway office for future reference.

Hauling a Ship 

To get a ship on a cradle, the cradle had to be hauled out to the lower end of the hauling ways so the hull could be positioned over it. The cradle, being made of wood, had to be ballasted so it would not float off the rails. Stone blocks were the usual ballast in that period. All keel and bilge blocks were securely nailed to the cradle frame or to the sliding bases of the bilge blocks.

The vessel was carefully positioned and centered over the submerged cradle, then both were hauled in together, the cradle rising until the keel rested firmly on it. The bilge blocks were then hauled inboard (toward the keel), using ropes, until they rested firmly under the bilges. The cradle could then be hauled out with the vessel safely on it.

Hauling a ship was not without risks, and if the hull was not correctly centered over the cradle, or of the keel- or bilge blocks were not properly in place, there was danger of accidents or damage. In the worst case, a ship could “fall down” on the cradle, or sometimes off it, causing great damage to the vessel, the rails and cradle, and adjoining wharves. Then there was the expense of pulling the vessel off the ways so it could be hauled again.

Hauling the cradle was done with chain, which was taken around a type of iron capstan called a “wildcat”, turned by reduction gears connected to the power source. In its earliest years, the Burnham railway probably used horses, harnessed to a second capstan which turned the wildcat. This soon gave way to steam power, as evidenced in Lane’s 1857 painting of the Burnham railway and his 1859 lithograph of Gloucester Harbor. The inhaul chain was made of long, heavy links shackled to an iron towing bar at the “bow end” of the cradle. A smaller outhaul chain, shackled to the cradle’s “stern end”, ran out to an iron capstan at the deep end of the railway and back to the hauling machinery, where it was connected to the inhaul chain. A wooden trough was laid over the cross timbers to reduce chafing from the chains as they traveled over them.

Since the early 1850s, steam engines powered the marine railways in Gloucester, and were not replaced by gasoline or diesel engines until the 1920s or ‘30s. A machinery building at the head of the larger of Burnham’s railways in Three Master on the Gloucester Railways, 1857 (inv. 29) is obscured by the ship on the cradle, but the conspicuous smokestack leaves no doubt about the presence of steam power.

The ground level of the machinery building was occupied by a steam boiler, an engine, and reduction gears linked to the capstan. An attached workshop was equipped with a power saw, lathe, and hand tools for most types of vessel repair work and engine maintenance. On one side of the foundation would be a roofed coal bin, while on another side would be a wooden steam box for the steam-bending of replacement planking for vessels under repair.

Over the machinery level was a floor used for offices and repair records. The roof was fitted with a skylight aligned exactly with the center line of the hauling way. An observer from this level could tell very accurately if a vessel being hauled was positioned over the cradle’s center line.

Erik Ronnberg

Reference: This information was compiled in 1991 from interviews by the author with the late Joseph Santapaola of Gloucester, who was employed by, and later managed, the marine railways in Gloucester over sixty years, starting early in the 20^th century. The data was used for a reconstruction of the marine railways in the diorama exhibited at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, now on exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum. The resulting diorama agrees closely in detail with photographs of the actual facilities dating from the 1880s, as well as many details in Lane’s painting of 1857 (Three Master on the Gloucester Railways, 1857 (inv. 29)). 

To judge from Lane's depictions of Gloucester Harbor, It would seem that the harbor was devoid of shipbuilding activity, with only one painting The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester (Harbor Scene), 1848 (inv. 58) showing a vessel under construction. While the historical record shows far more shipbuilding activity in nearby Essex, Gloucester did have significant shipbuilding in the years 1800 to 1865, amounting to 93 registered vessels and an unknown number of enrolled vessels. The registered vessels included 82 schooners, four (full-rigged) ships, one bark, four brigs, and two sloops. The numbers of enrolled vessels is unknown, but they were likely to be smaller craft with sloop and schooner rigs, and built in significant numbers. (1)

Official records were compiled by the U.S. Customs Service for all merchant and fishing vessels, registry being applied to vessels trading or fishing in foreign waters and ports. "Enrolment" (as spelled on customs documents) was applied to vessels fishing or trading only in U.S. territorial waters. Registry documents were filed with the Register of the Treasury in Washington, DC, as well as with the local customs offices. Enrollment documents were filed only with local customs offices and were subject to loss due to fires or careless storage, leaving many voids in the record of American coastal fishing and shipping. (2)

Shipbuilding was a time-consuming process, needing a sizeable space for lofting, millwork, storage of shipbuiding timbers and lumber, not to mention the building- and launching ways. Prime waterfront space was not a necessity. As long as the launching incline is straight, and the water is deep enough to float the vessel at high tide, the building site can utilize unwanted shoreline, as it did in Gloucester's Vincent Cove for many years. The likelihood that Gloucester shipyards were in out-of-the-way places around the Inner Harbor is probably why Lane (and his clientele) paid so little attention to them.

The vessel in Lane's painting is probably a very small schooner—more likely to be enrolled than registered. Building vessels on a wharf was common in Gloucester, even into the twentieth century, but launching was difficult for larger vessels. The example in Lane's painting will probably measure (not weigh) about twenty tons - a small vessel which should be easy to launch this way. Needless to say, the launching would take place at high tide, when the drop from wharf to water was minimal.

– Erik Ronnberg

References:                                                                                            

1. Ship Registers of the District of Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1789-1875 (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1944)

2. Forrest R. Holdcamper, "Registers, Enrollments and Licenses in the National Archives", The American Neptune 1, no. 3, 275–83.

It was usual practice to prime all ship’s ironwork with red lead, which has a dark brownish red color. This was usually all that was done for anchors, but other ironwork, like chain plates. hawse pipe liners, chocks, cleats, and the iron on deck machinery was given a finish color, such as black, white, and sometimes bright red or other color. Ironwork in spars was also red-leaded, then painted to match the spar color—white, black, or brown if oiled or varnished bright. Lane’s work pre-dates galvanized hardware.

Sarony & Major was a lithography shop in New York at 117 Fulton St. According to Sally Pierce and Catharina Slautterback in Boston Lithography, a number of the artists who worked for Boston firms also worked for Sarony & Major in New York.

Albert Conant was an artist, printer, publisher, and art teacher. From 1835 to 1850 he drew New England town views that were printed by J.H. Bufford, E.W.Bouvé, and John W.A. Scott was well as by Lane & Scott. He was possibly the same A. Conant whose views of Kansas towns were lithographed by Middleton, Strowbridge & Co. of Cincinnati from 1857 to 1859. He was born in Pomfret, Vermont, on 6 July 1821 and died in Boston on 22 February 1883. 

This information has been summarized from Boston Lithography 1825–1880 by Sally Pierce and Catharina Slautterback.