Ringold Brothers Skipjack

Maryland Historical Society

Ships and boats are differentiated by size, but more by the number of masts and, concomitantly, the nature of their rigging. Put simply, a ship with classic ship's rigging would sport three masts and square sails on the fore and main masts, ranging from 1 to 3 tiers on each, and lateen sails on the rear or mizzen mast, with additional sails in front ("afore") and sometimes behind ("aft" or "abaft") of the masts. Ships are built in professional shipyards and involve skilled specialists as well as laborers. Boats are smaller and while still requiring skill and talent can be constructed in "backyard" or "shade tree" boatyards by fewer craftsmen.

Colonial Times
Despite the abundant resources available for the construction of watercraft in Maryland, a fact that did not go unnoticed from the outset of settlement, and despite hopes that it would prove a significant supplier of vessels for both the Royal Navy and commercial shipping, shipbuilding was slow to develop in the seventeenth century. The earliest vessels were prefabricated in England and assembled in the colony, and craftsmen were employed mostly in repairing and replacing European vessels and building boats adequate to local needs. The reason was tobacco. Growing the "sot-weed" was so incredibly lucrative that almost no other occupations or skills were practiced beyond what was absolutely necessary, much to the chagrin of the colony's sponsors, who feared that lack of attention to producing food crops and developing other crafts could cause the settlement to fail. The demand for tobacco was such in Europe that merchants sent their own vessels to purchase and transport the tobacco, removing any incentive for the colonists to develop this industry. It is not surprising then that ship and boat building began in earnest first on the Eastern Shore where the soils were not conducive to tobacco planting and because there was a greater reliance on aquatic foods, nor to learn that it also went into decline there first through the depletion of the necessary forest resources.

Agricultural diversification was finally imposed by a series of external factors in the latter part of the seventeenth century and through much of the eighteenth. These included wars abroad, a severe tobacco depression followed by cyclical recovery and recession. In addition, Britain began enforcing legislation restricting trade as well as passed laws providing perquisites to induce shipbuilding, such as reduced taxes and tariffs on merchandise, including liquor, transported in Maryland-built vessels, and the exemption of shipyard workers from public duties such as road repair. As slaves replaced indentured servants on more impoverished plantations and smaller tobacco farms failed, shipbuilding became an alternative occupation on the western shore.

Although growth was somewhat step-wise and incremental, there was a general increase in shipbuilding and in the average sizes of the ships built in the years leading up to the American Revolution. In 1776 Maryland vessels represented 8.8 percent of total American shipping recorded in Lloyd's Registry; the highest to that point. By the end of the eighteenth century, Kent and Talbot Counties produced five vessels for every three built in the rest of the state.

American Revolution and the War of 1812
At the outset of the Revolution, the Continental Congress created the American Navy with the authorization of 13 frigates. Two, the Virginia and the Constellation, were built in Baltimore. The State Navy was formed when the General Assembly ordered seven galleys in June 1776 and another two plus eight barges in 1781. The city of Baltimore undertook to build another galley, and the Eastern Shore built many smaller vessels, called barges but not in the modern sense; they were usually double-ended craft powered by sail and oars, like smaller versions of the galleys. All but the frigates were intended for defense of the Chesapeake and were not ocean-going vessels.

Shipyards around the Chesapeake produced variations of two general types of vessels: large ships and brigs that carried large cargoes and smaller, lighter sloops and schooners in which some cargo space was sacrificed for a narrower, faster vessel. These schooners were also called brigantines because of the character of their rigging. Brigantines carried traditional square sails forward and fore and aft rigging toward the stern of the vessel. This is called an "hermaphrodite" rig and offers the speed of the massive wind-catching square sails as well as the maneuverability and agility of the fore and aft sails. Their masts have a distinctive rearward rake making them look speedy even without sails. These vessels were first called Baltimore schooners and were favored, notoriously, by both privateers and slavers. They evolved quickly into the famous Baltimore clippers of the nineteenth century.

During the tensions leading to the War of 1812, Baltimore shipyards produced large frigates (e.g. the 44-gun Java), gunboats, sloops-of-war and galleys. Some navy vessels were also built at St. Michael's on the Eastern Shore but nowhere to the scale that took place in Baltimore.

Nineteenth Century
By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most Eastern Shore shipbuilding resources were depleted past recovery and only local fishing and oystering watercraft continued to be constructed. These are the vernacular vessels that have become iconic of the Chesapeake and which underwent an evolutionary development of their own. Anywhere but the Chesapeake, a log canoe is understood to mean a prehistoric or Native American dugout; a canoe made from a hollowed log. While this is the basis for a Chesapeake log canoe, it rapidly came to be widened through the addition of other hollowed out logs to make 3-log, 5-log, and larger, canoes, which then had their sides built up with the addition of planks, and a keel and mast added to form regionally indigenous boats. A Brogan is a partially decked, multiple-log canoe, and is an intermediately between the single log canoe and the Bugeye.

The latter are larger, more complex vessels with either a schooner or sloop rig and with holds and accommodations for the crew. Bugeyes are a post-Civil War development associated with the legalization of the oyster dredge that required a more powerful boat to handle them.

The Pungy was either schooner or sloop-rigged, had a keel but was generally shallow drafted and restricted to the waters of the bay. It was traditionally painted green with pink trim; there are no known surviving examples of this watercraft. Skiffs, Skipjacks and Sharpies share a common heritage, and generally have centerboards instead of keels, that they can raise to operate in shoal water. Skiffs are small, heavy workboats, usually rowed but sometimes equipped to sail. They are diverse in forms, some being double-ended, flat-bottomed or v-hulled while others have square sterns; some have small cabins while others are only partially decked. They are generally used for crabbing and oyster tonging.

A Skipjack, also called a Bateau or a Deadrise, has one raked mast, a centerboard and is built plank on frame; less costly in materials and labor, and quicker and easier to build. Skipjacks generally carry a small wooden boat across the stern that holds a motor in order to push the vessel on days when oystering was not permitted under sail; a legal loophole. Sharpies are long flat-bottomed, sharp-ended craft of more than 20 feet of skiff design and can carry one or two masts. Rigs vary and include cat, sloop, and schooner. Although they are found in the bay, they are believed to have originated in Connecticut in the 1870s.

The only really large watercraft being constructed on the Eastern Shore late in the nineteenth century were ram schooners. With few exceptions, these vessels were built either at Sharptown, Maryland, on the Nanticoke River or Bethel, Delaware on Broad Creek, a tributary of the Nanticoke, and only after 1880. They carried three masts, and few were built to carry topsails. Rams have flat bottoms and straight sides and were exceptionally narrow (length:breadth was 5:1), built to negotiate the locks of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The only extant ram is the Victory Chimes ex. Edwin and Maude.

Despite successful experiments with steam engine-powered watercraft from the late eighteenth century, and its proliferation during the Civil War, steam did not surpass sail in tonnage until the 1880s and not in vessel production until the twentieth century. The sloop-of-war Constellation in Baltimore, constructed in 1854, was the last all sail-powered ship built by the U.S. Navy. The paddlewheelers that plied the bay were sidewheelers, unlike the sternwheel-propelled vessels of interior rivers, and mostly built in Baltimore. Commercial steamboat service began in the bay in 1813 and the last steamboat ran in 1963. Baltimore was a major steamboat hub for both passenger travel and shipping of raw materials to its industries and manufactured goods and merchandise from the city.

Twentieth Century
By World War II, the age of sail was well and truly over. Because of the additional specialized, and costly, equipment required as well as an entire suite of new skilled labor, only a few shipyards were capable of expanding to address the age of steam, then diesel, engines and most faded away repairing the diminishing numbers of sailing ships or turned to maintaining the fishing and oystering fleets. The surviving large shipyards were concentrated in Baltimore with its corporate support structures including railheads and large labor base. However as vessels continued to increase in size and cost and with the increasing popularity and decreasing expense of air travel, as well as the expansion of railways and road networks, especially Eisenhower's Interstate highway system, other means of transporting materials and people faster and more inexpensively outstripped the capabilities of the Maryland shipyards. Confined by their urban locations they could not physically expand, and constrained by the prohibitive costs, most succumbed in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Entering the twenty-first century, there are fewer than a half-dozen large shipyards constructing vessels in the U.S. and none are in Maryland; the nearest being the U.S. Navy's yard at Norfolk, Virginia. The few ship-related facilities still in Baltimore are directed toward repair and maintenance.

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Brewington, Michael V. Chesapeake Bay: A Pictorial Maritime History. Centreville, Md.: Cornell-Maritime Press, 1953.

Ford, Ben. "Wooden Shipbuilding in Maryland Prior to the Mid-Nineteenth Century." The American Neptune. , 62 (2002): 69-90.

Goldenberg, Joseph A. Shipbuilding in Colonial America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976.

Holly, David. Chesapeake Steamboats: Vanished Fleet. Centreville, Md.: Tidewater Publishers, 1994.

Middleton, Arthur Pierce.Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era. Repr.; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.