Seafaring in Colonial Massachusetts

WILLIAM AVERY BAKER

Vessel Types of Colonial Massachusetts

Introduction

ABIGAIL, Arbella, and Mayflower are important names in the maritime history of Massachusetts, for they were the three ships that brought the early settlers to Salem, Boston, and Plymouth respectively. To these names we might add those of the vessels involved in unsuccessful efforts to establish earlier colonies. There was Concord with which Bartholomew Gosnold attempted a settlement on one of the Elizabeth Islands in 1602 and Gift of God and Mary & John that carried men and supplies for the Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607. We must remember here that what is now the State of Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820.

People growing up in Massachusetts hear and read so much about the first three ships that they are likely to assume that everything is known about them. Unfortunately the reverse is true. Of the hundreds of vessels that brought thousands of settlers to the English North American colonies during the seventeenth century the names of some are not known, the tonnages or dimensions of others are missing, and there are only two contemporary representations. These are plaster ceiling decorations in Hook House located near Tisbury, Wiltshire, England, depicting the 300-ton ship Ark and the fifty-ton pinnace Dove that landed the first settlers in Maryland in 1634.

Concerning one important American vessel a researcher noted that there was some confusion about her, not for lack of information but because of a superabundance of misinformation. We face a somewhat similar situation when investigating the vessels and small craft employed in colonial Massachusetts. There is no lack of information about what they were. Acts of governing bodies, court records, letters, diaries, and the like are full of references to ships, barks, snows, brigantines, ketches, pinnaces, sloops, and shallops, and these are not all. Little is known, however, of their forms, construction, and rigs, although a few shipbuilders’ notebooks and printed works help to fill the gaps.

To my way of thinking some of the available material has been interpreted wrongly, more often in light of twentieth-century experience than in the context of the period. Some readers of this paper who have questioned me about some types of vessels are aware of my somewhat rude reply, the double-barreled question “When and where?” “When” is particularly important in this study, for the colonial period of Massachusetts lasted close to 175 years.

One reason for the paucity of material about the vessels employed in colonial Massachusetts is that the mariners of the period knew what they were sailing and the merchants knew what vessels they owned. Neither mariners nor owners had any reason to set down details that were common knowledge. In the absence of written descriptions, the obvious next source to the unknowing is plans—if a vessel was built there must have been plans. Ship plans as known today, however, did not exist in the seventeenth century or indeed for the whole American colonial period, but I believe that simplified draughts, perhaps even done on a smooth board or two, were commonly drawn by the better shipwrights.1 The less skilled never progressed beyond a few basic rules learned during their apprenticeships. Draughts on paper or vellum were usually preserved only by an organization such as the British Admiralty and its counterpart in other countries. No such organization existed in colonial Massachusetts.

To date the earliest-known draught of a North American-built vessel, that for the sloop Mediator built in the Chesapeake region in 1741–1742, was drawn from measurements taken off her after she had been purchased by the Royal Navy. The earliest draught for an assumed North American-built vessel, also drawn from measurements, was made in 1736. We know, however, that a draught was sent out from England in 1638 to Arthur Gill for the building of a vessel on Richmond Island near Cape Elizabeth; later in the century there are references to other draughts, but apparently none of these have been preserved.

With useful photography still more than three-quarters of a century in the future when Massachusetts ended its colonial status, we are dependent on the work of artists for portraits of vessels and shore and harbor scenes. But the first-known portrait of a named Massachusetts vessel, the letter-of-marque ship Bethel, was not painted until about 1748. There are, however, a number of sketches and port views which if not always of Massachusetts are at least colonial. One point might be clarified here—in general, a boat can be carried on a vessel but not the reverse. The term “boat,” however, in combination with another word—Bermuda, Chebacco, pilot, etc.—often designated a sizable craft. While the plural “ships” was often used when referring to all the vessels in a fleet, “ship” usually meant a vessel of a definite type.

If an early seventeenth-century seaman could walk into this symposium he would likely be highly amused and greatly mystified by our attempts—my attempts—to describe the sailing vessels of his day. We, in turn, would be equally amused by his names for the sailing vessels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our present system of classifying vessels by rig alone is relatively modern, dating only from the 1850s. The northern European and Scandinavian seamen retained, much later than those of the New World, definitions of vessels that depended to a certain extent on hull characteristics. Thus we can find such seemingly contradictory classifications as a snow-rigged frigate, a brigantine-rigged cat, or a ship-rigged bark.

Early Seventeenth-Century Ships

At any period in history there was a particular type of vessel that was the favored “ship” of its day, the highest development at that time. Some specific names have been cog, hulk, carrack, and galleon, which came into being when trade conditions and fashion changed enough to warrant the development of a vessel different from the current “ship.” As new types developed, the older ones continued in service for a considerable period, hence at any given time there might have been several types of large vessels that a sailor would have called “ships.”

During our country’s annual Thanksgiving celebration near the end of November, we are beset by innumerable paintings, drawings, sketches, cutouts, models, and what have you, of varying quality, all purporting to represent the Pilgrims’ ship Mayflower. These usually exaggerate the obvious hull features of seventeenth-century ships: the beakhead and prominent forecastle forward, the low waist amidships, and a high poop aft. I hope I will be forgiven for including yet another version as Figure 1, a photograph of Mayflower II after her Atlantic crossing in 1957.

The rig of these assorted versions of Mayflower is usually three-masted with two square sails on both the fore- and mainmasts, a lateen sail on the mizzenmast, and a small square sail—the sprit-sail—under the bowsprit. By our current rig classification system, a vessel so rigged is not a ship, for a ship must have at least three masts with square sails on all. The rig described, however, was standard for small and medium sized ships of the early seventeenth century; it could also be found on vessels classed as barks and pinnaces.

The first two decades of the seventeenth century saw a gradual change on large ships from two lateen rigged mizzenmasts—the main mizzen and the bonaventure mizzen—to a single mizzenmast with a lateen sail and a small square topsail. Some small naval vessels had the mizzen topsail by about 1630, but it was not common on small English merchant ships until about 1650.

Vessels of the early seventeenth century had some definite shape characteristics that often were masked by the decorative features so apparent in old paintings and prints. The topsides were most noticeable as they tumbled home to high, narrow decks; one reason for this was to keep superstructure weights to a minimum, consistent with space requirements. Below water the vessels had the traditional cod’s head and mackerel’s tail, but their underbodies were far from the crude, chunky shapes so often seen in models.

Of great importance in the design of any vessel was the shape of the largest section, the midship bend, and its fore-and-aft location on the keel. The outline of the bend was developed in accordance with long standing practice using a compass and a straight edge. Its usual position was a bit forward of the midlength of the vessel. The point of greatest breadth was just above the load waterline, and it was raised toward the ends to give fine sections below for easy passage through the water and extra buoyancy above to improve seaworthiness in heavy weather. From four basic curved lines running from bow to stern, the shape of any bend or frame could be drawn with a compass and straight edge. This mechanical system failed at the ends of a vessel, and there the art of the shipwright took over. Some of the shape characteristics mentioned above were the odd bumps that occurred where arcs of differing radii came tangent.

Having mentioned the major external features of early seventeenth-century ships, we can turn to their interiors. Shipbuilders’ notebooks and evidence from paintings and prints show that all but the largest ships had two decks in the main hull which usually did not run continuously from bow to stern. They were stepped up or down as necessary to suit space requirements within the hull and to avoid cutting gunports through the main wales, the heavy external fore-and-aft strength members. Occasionally the wales were also stepped but it was not until about 1650 that shipbuilders began cutting them.

Ballast, cables, barrels of water and beer, and cargo were carried in the hold below the lower deck while the ’tween deck space was cluttered up with armament, some cargo, stores, passengers, and crew. In ordinary merchant ships, the galley was often in the forecastle along with more stores. Perhaps a few of the crew slept there in hammocks, but the forecastle was not yet the traditional crew’s berthing space; most of the crew was expected to find soft sleeping spots among the spare sails and coils of rope on the lower deck.

The first level of superstructure aft extended from the mainmast to the stern, about half the length of the ship, hence the name “half deck.” Under it at the very stern was the great cabin, the quarters of the commander of the ship who was responsible for the trading or combatant activities. Forward of this cabin’s bulkhead was another compartment, the steerage, where the helmsman stood at the whip-staff, which passed through a roller set in the deck and was attached to the forward end of the tiller. Often there were cupboard berths along the sides of the steerage. The forward steerage bulkhead had doors giving access from the upper deck, and usually there was a small hatch in the half deck over the helmsman through which he could see some of the sails by day and receive orders at all times from the officer conning the ship. The latter-day unsavory reputations of the “steerage” and “half deck” all began here.

The second level of superstructure aft, the quarterdeck, again was so-named for its length. It covered a small cabin for the master who was responsible for the actual sailing of the ship. The rank of sailing master was retained in armed vessels to the end of the sailing era, but in the ordinary small merchant ships one man handled the duties of commander and master.

Barks

A seventeenth-century three-masted vessel having two masts square rigged and only a lateen sail on the mizzenmast is classed by many persons today as a bark as this rig meets our nineteenth-century definition. To confuse matters, as bark has often been used in a poetic sense to mean almost any type of watercraft, the English long ago chose to use barque when referring to rig. In the early seventeenth century, however, a bark was defined as a small ship or a large boat, which leads to different hulls and rigs.

The first type of bark, a small ship, was just that, a square- or round-sterned vessel with the standard small ship rig. Another definition distinguished barks from ships by the fact that barks had only simple crosstrees instead of large platforms [tops] at the heads of their lower fore- and mainmasts. Some small barks probably had no superstructures while on others they were lesser in extent than on ships, perhaps no forecastle and only one level aft.

The second type of bark, the large boat, often double-ended, had a two-masted square rig. Her large mainsail, carried on a mast stepped nearly at mid-length, was deep and narrow, and her similarly shaped foresail was quite small, having only about one-quarter the area of the main; the foresail became larger with the passing of time. Such a craft is shown in Figure 2.

From colonial records, it is difficult to determine to which type of bark the recorder was referring, but the smaller sizes had the simpler rig. Barks ranged in size from about twelve to one hundred tons, but the largest mentioned by John Winthrop measured about fifty tons. William Bradford and Winthrop, particularly the latter, sometimes added to the problem by using “bark” in a general sense to indicate a lesser vessel when they were not quite sure what to call her. The first named vessel built in the Massachusetts Bay colony was usually called a bark, Winthrop’s Blessing of the Bay launched at Medford on 4 July 1631. On the same date 145 years later our Ship of State was launched, and our colonial history ended. Blessing was preceded, however, by a vessel built in the colony more than two years earlier, which in May 1629 was also called a bark. It is possible that she may have been the vessel sent off trading in October 1630 by Governor Winthrop, Deputy Governor Dudley, and Samuel Maverick, at which time she was referred to as a pinnace.

Blessing of the Bay measured about thirty tons; hence it is possible that she carried the two-masted square rig although she may have been near the upper limit for it. There are a few examples, however, of what might be called a simplified ship rig created by adding a small lateen mizzen to this two-masted square rig. Vessels so rigged often carried a small main-topsail set flying from the deck and sometimes a fore-topsail as well; the seamen of the Low Countries called them “boat-ships.” In 1672 we can find a ten- to twelve-ton craft described as a bark or decked shallop, and, for reasons that will be apparent later, there is no question but that she carried the two-masted square rig.

John Winthrop made a specific reference to the bark carrying Lion Gardiner that arrived at Boston on 28 November 1635. He called her a twenty-five-ton “Norsey” [North Sea] bark, from which we may infer that she had some features that distinguished her from ordinary small barks. This vessel, named Bachelor, may have looked something like the “boat-ship” shown in Figure 3.

Bartholomew Gosnold’s Concord of 1602, mentioned earlier, was called a bark. Her size is not known but she carried a complement of thirty-two; based on this I have estimated that she measured about fifty-five tons. Plans for a modern reconstruction of her as a small ship without tops are available from the Old Dartmouth Historical Society in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Pinnaces

By 1626 the Pilgrims at Plymouth had only open boats to use for fishing and their various trading enterprises along the coast of New England. “And finding they rane a great hazard to goe so long viages in a smale open boat, espetially ye winter season, they begane to think how they might get a small pinass,” wrote William Bradford, governor of the colony. The Pilgrims took one of their open boats, “sawed her in ye midle,” lengthened her five or six feet, built her up, laid a deck, and so converted her into a small vessel.

The pinnace category is probably the most confusing of all the early seventeenth-century vessel types. The term was applied at one time or another to practically everything from small open pulling boats to relatively large seagoing vessels that carried the standard ship rig. Some small pinnaces were transported on board larger vessels in a knocked-down form ready to be set up at the place of use.

The term “pinnace” came into the English language through the French pinasse from the Latin pinus meaning a pine tree or something constructed of pine. In this case, it meant a lightly built vessel in contrast to the usual heavy oak construction of large merchant and war vessels and in England and France it pointed further to a type derived from Scandinavia where pine trees were abundant. This would have been a vessel having lapped strakes of planking, a form of construction that today is usually called clinker-built. There is evidence that some late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century pinnaces were so built, but it is unreasonable to conclude that all pinnaces had clinker planking.

There are but few definitions and descriptions of pinnaces. In 1634 Captain Nathaniel Boteler wrote that there was “no difference between a ship and a pinnace but in bulk and burthen”; in other words, a pinnace was just a small ship. Dutch draughts of the mid-seventeenth century show “pinnasschips” having only one deck but with the normal forecastle and after superstructure of the larger ships. In 1686 a pinnace was described as:

…a small vessel with a square stern which is propelled by sails and oars and which has three masts. It is suitable for exploring and for landing troops.

Although these and similar definitions are not particularly helpful, it is obvious that a vessel of light construction with oars as well as sails would be useful as a tender to a large ship in addition to the duties mentioned. Records of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century voyages contain many references to ships and their accompanying pinnaces; in some cases the pinnace was a sizable vessel. A small vessel intended to sail in company with a larger ship had to have a form and rig that would enable her, under normal circumstances, to keep up with the ship; in unfavorable circumstances pinnaces sometimes were towed. There is evidence that in relation to length, pinnaces were narrower than normal ships, but the shapes of the sections of both were about the same.

While “pinnace” derived initially from constructional features it came to indicate a use or service; almost any vessel could have been designated the “pinnace” to accompany a larger one. Vessels called pinnaces often voyaged alone, and in such cases the type name must be considered as applying to a lightly built square-sterned vessel suitable for the duties mentioned. Pinnaces ranged in size from about fifteen to 200 tons and in rig from a simple sprit mainsail with a staysail forward to the full ship rig.

The first vessel built in New England was called a pinnace, the thirty-ton Virginia. She was constructed during the winter of 1607–1608 under the direction of one Digby of London in the Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec. The plan of St. George’s Fort in the Spanish Archives has a sketch of a small vessel, Figure 4, that is thought to represent Virginia—a square-sterned, single-deck craft with one mast carrying a sprit mainsail and a staysail tacked to the stem head.

Because the pinnace Dove mentioned earlier came from Maryland to Boston late in August 1634 with corn to trade for fish and other commodities we can include her portrait as Figure 5A.2 This is rather confusing, but the artist was probably trying to show the rig depicted in Figure 5B, which was common in northern Europe. Although the fore staysail would have been hidden and blanketed by the deep, narrow mainsail the artist has shown it full of wind.

The smallest of the three vessels that carried the first settlers to Virginia in 1607 was the twenty-ton pinnace Discovery. In view of her size, it is likely that she had the two-masted square rig of our boat-type bark. In fact, considering that almost any vessel might have served as a pinnace, Discovery under other circumstances might have been called a bark.

A good example of a ship-rigged pinnace is shown in Figure 6, Black Pynnes, which carried the body of Sir Philip Sidney from Holland to England in 1586. Many of her features are hidden by the waist cloths and boarding nettings, but it is obvious that she has a short forecastle and a short poop. We do not know her dimensions, but her hull length may have been about seventy feet. For the next half century marine paintings, primarily of fleet actions, show many small vessels of this type, but they would have been rare in the Massachusetts Bay colony.

As the seventeenth century progressed we find in American colonial records an increasing use of other type names for small vessels employed for the same purposes as pinnaces were early in the century. Samuel Pepys probably was responsible for the elimination of the pinnace, for at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 he listed all the vessels in the Royal Navy, and pinnaces were not set down as a separate type. The fighting ships were grouped into six “rates” depending on size and armament; buried in the list of “6th rates” was the old pinnace Henrietta of 1626, the only one labeled as a pinnace. Other small vessels occasionally called pinnaces may have been listed in some of the thirteen other categories that Pepys established.

Ketches

The ketch, in one of the many variants of the word, can be traced back to at least 1481. William Bradford mentioned ketches but once in his journal, and they do not appear in John Winthrop’s history until 1640. By the end of the seventeenth century, the ketch was New England’s primary offshore fishing vessel and was also employed for trading voyages that ranged from Newfoundland to the north, Barbados to the south, and overseas to Madeira, the Azores, and England.

Bradford’s reference to ketches concerned the ship carpenter who crossed the Atlantic to work at Plymouth. Before he died of the fever in the summer of 1624 he had, among other things, hewn the timbers for two ketches or “catches,” to use Bradford’s spelling. Why the decision was to build two ketches—instructions from Robert Cushman, the colony’s agent in England—instead of two barks or pinnaces is an intriguing problem.

As a type name, ketch applied to yachts, a special type of naval vessel, traders, and fishermen, but it has come down to us primarily as a rig usually described as a ship without a foremast. Evidence from a model, pictorial material, and a masting rule, however, show that ketches of the first half of the seventeenth century were quite unlike the “ship-without-a-foremast” concept. They were rigged, in fact, about the same as the vessel shown in Figure 5b; later versions carried a jib instead of the square sail under the bowsprit. For part of our definition, then, we must look to the hull.

From a mass of evidence we can draw some conclusions about the hulls of ketches. First, ketches were flush-decked vessels and very seaworthy. Second, ketches were relatively small, ranging in size from about ten to seventy tons with the smaller tonnages up to about thirty predominating. Third, ketches were relatively beamy, stoutly built, double-enders. Fourth, ketches were handy vessels. A modern reconstruction of a forty-ton trading ketch of about 1670 that has all of these qualities is shown in Figure 7.

Shallops

Shallops were ubiquitous in early Massachusetts maritime history. Before starting the construction of the pinnace Virginia, the Popham colonists built one shallop and later may have turned out two more. The shallop in which the Pilgrims explored the shores of Cape Cod Bay was carried in some sort of cut-down form in Mayflower; while at Provincetown the Pilgrims cut timber for another. The 1624 ship carpenter completed two shallops in the short time he worked at Plymouth. Six shipwrights came to Boston in Arbella and her consorts under orders to build at least three shallops that were to be sent out fishing as soon as completed. John Winthrop in Arbella noted on 11 June 1630 the presence of five or six shallops under sail off the Isles of Shoals, and his History of New England contains fifty-two other references to shallops.

Slup, schlup, sloep, chaloupe, and chalupa [Swedish, German, Dutch, French, and Spanish] indicate the widespread use of the type in Europe. The Basque shallop from the Bay of Biscay was particularly esteemed among seamen; it probably was the ancestor of the New Bedford whaleboat. Generally speaking, the shallop was an open, strongly built, double-ended work boat propelled by both oars and sails that was employed for inshore fishing and limited coastwise trading.

A modern reconstruction of the shallop carried on Mayflower is shown at anchor in the foreground of Figure 1; she is about thirty-three feet long with a beam of about nine feet. She is arranged for four oars on each side and her sailing rig consists of a staysail forward and a sprit main. Many shallops, however, had the two-masted square rig described earlier, for this was the basic rig of the Basque shallop.

There is not room in this paper to do more than mention a few of the minor types of watercraft employed in the early days of Massachusetts and some of the occasional visitors. “Canows,” adopted from the native Americans, were widely used along shore and even carried as tenders on small vessels. These were, of course, the heavy type carved from logs. “Boats” are impossible to define other than being undecked and propelled mainly by oars. Large naval vessels, and probably the large merchant ships as well, usually had three boats whose type name depended on size, shape, and construction—the long boat, usually towed astern; pinnace; and skiff. Occasionally there was a smaller fourth boat, the jolly-watt, about which we know nothing. Lighters were common and probably were what we would call scows, square-ended, shallow draft craft suitable for transporting heavy, bulky cargoes in protected waters and propelled by both oars and sails.

In 1643, John Winthrop mentioned a galliot which was primarily a two-masted Dutch type. To the English, a galliot was a ketch, but to the Dutch an English ketch was not a galliot. A Dutch hoy visited Boston in 1648; hoys were flat-bottomed vessels carrying single-masted, fore-and-aft rigs. Although the Dutch word “sloep” was one of the ancestors of “shallop” it defined for the Dutch an open boat, yet to Winthrop, who had shallops and open boats in his colony, a Dutch sloop was something different. As the ones mentioned came from New York they probably were decked, and they too very likely had a single-masted, fore-and-aft rig.

1. Mayflower II with her shallop after her Atlantic crossing in 1957. (Text p. 6)

2. Two-masted bark (left) of the mid-seventeenth century. (Text p. 8)

3. “Boat-ship” of the seventeenth century, from a view of Amsterdam. (Text p. 9)

4. The 30-ton pinnace Virginia of Sagadahoc, built in 1607–1608. Watercolor by John F. Leavitt. (Text p. 11)

5A. Pinnace similar to Dove, 1633, which landed the first settlers in Maryland in 1634. After a plaster ceiling decoration in Hook House, Wiltshire, England. (Text p. 11)

5B. Another pinnace similar to Dove. After Waghenaer. (Text p. 12)

6. Ship-rigged pinnace Black Pynnes, circa 1586. After Lant. (Text p. 12)

7. Modern reconstruction of the 40-ton trading ketch Adventure of about 1670. (Text p. 13)

8. Section of the White Hills Map of New England, 1677, showing local craft of the period. (Text p. 15)

9. The ship William and John, circa 1670. (Text p. 15)

10. Detail of anchored shallops fishing off the Isles of Shoals, circa 1680. (Text p. 16)

11. Detail of shallops under sail, circa 1680. (Text p. 16)

12. Modern reconstruction of a medium-sized sloop, circa 1680. (Text p. 18)

13. Detail of an oil overmantel painting, Richmond County, Virginia, circa 1715, showing a brigantine of the period. (Text p. 19)

14. Detail of John Bonner’s Map of Boston, 1722, with local shipping. (Text p. 20)

15. Left-hand section of “A South East View of y^e Great Town of Boston in New England in America,” by William Burgis, 1743. (Text p. 20)

16. Middle section of “A South East View of y^e Great Town of Boston in New England in America,” by William Burgis, 1743. (Text p. 20)

17. Right-hand section of “A South East View of y^e Great Town of Boston in New England in America,” by William Burgis, 1743. (Text p. 20)

18. Sloop anchored off Boston Light, mezzotint by William Burgis, 1729. (Text p. 23)

19. Letter of marque ship Bethel, 1748. (Text p. 24)

20. Shipping sketches by Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead. (Text p. 24)

21. Shipping sketches by Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead. (Text p. 24)

22. Shipping sketches by Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead. (Text p. 26)

23. Shipping sketches by Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead. (Text p. 26)

24. Shipping sketches by Ashley Bowen (1728–1813) of Marblehead. (Text p. 26)

25. Salem schooner Baltick, 1765. (Text p. 26)

26. Shipping off Cape Poge and Gay Head, from The Atlantic Neptune. (Text p. 27)

27. Shipping off Sandy Point, Nomansland, and Sankaty Head, from The Atlantic Neptune. (Text p. 27)

28. Shipping off Boston Harbor, from The Atlantic Neptune. (Text p. 28)

29. Shipping off Boston Harbor, from The Atlantic Neptune. (Text p. 28)

30. Shipping off Boston Harbor, from The Atlantic Neptune. (Text p. 29)

Late Seventeenth Century

Having considered the major types of vessels and boats employed in early seventeenth-century Massachusetts—the ship, bark, pinnace, ketch, and shallop—we can now move on and see how they changed. For the first evidence of change, let us consider Figure 8 taken from what is said to be the first map ever cut in America. This woodcut is thought to be the work of Boston printer John Foster, and it was used to illustrate the Reverend William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, published by Foster in 1677. The map is unusual to modern eyes, for the viewer is looking west from a meridian drawn just east of Cape Cod.

Shown properly sailing in Massachusetts Bay with a northwest wind are two ships, a bark, a ketch, and a small vessel or large boat that has one mast with a staysail and sprit mainsail. The two ships, both heading a bit west of south with the wind on their starboard quarters, show considerable reduction in their superstructures compared with Mayflower. Both have square topsails over their lateen mizzens, but neither shows a spritsail under the bowsprit although these sails were still standard. The southernmost ship has fore- and main-topgallant sails which by this time were standard on medium-sized ships.

Better details of a late seventeenth-century ship are shown in Figure 9, a portrait of “The William and John—William Stevens [?] Commander” of about 1670 from a watercolor in the British Museum. Her armament is typical—a few guns on the quarterdeck, a fully armed upper deck, but only four guns on each side on the lower deck and these are abaft the mainmast. This left the ’tween deck space forward of the mainmast available for cargo. The single lower deck port amidships was for handling ballast. Note that by this time the first level of superstructure aft had been shortened and its name changed from the half to the quarter deck.

William and John carried topgallants on both fore- and mainmasts, and her spritsail forward is drawing well. At the outer end of her bowsprit is that peculiar seventeenth-century fitting, the sprit-sail-topsail whose rigging must have been the boatswain’s despair. This ship also carries four of the staysails that became common during the 1650s—the main, mizzen, fore-topmast, and main-topmast staysails. They were not set on the actual stays but on auxiliary stays secured beneath them.

Just east of Hull on the Foster map and heading northeast is a large ketch. She is similar to that shown in Figure 7 but she carries two additional sails, a main-topgallant and a mizzen-topsail. A bit further north, about midway between Cape Ann and the Isles of Shoals, and also sailing northeast, is a two-masted square-rigger, very likely a late bark. Although her foresail is larger in relation to her main than on our earlier bark, the proportions between fore and main are maintained by the addition of a main-topsail.

The single-masted craft is in near shore just off Hampton; it is difficult to know what to call her, for by rig alone she cannot be identified. First, she might be a shallop, but in relation to the other vessels she seems too large. Second, she might be a ketch, a possibility that might shock some modern sailors. In the 1680s, however, some ketches measured as small as ten tons. Such a vessel would have been only about thirty feet long on deck, hardly suitable for even a simplified version of the rig shown in Figure 7. Third, she might be a sloop as this type was fairly common in New England waters by 1677. Finally, she might fall into a general category found in many records, that of “great boat.”

During the second half of the seventeenth century, shallops and ketches were respectively the major inshore and offshore fishing vessels employed by Massachusetts fishermen. The shallops are nicely portrayed on a map of New England of about 1680. In Figure 10 a fleet of four rides at anchor with masts down in the waters between Cape Ann and the Isles of Shoals. Three shallops carrying the two-masted square rig, Figure 11, are heading in toward the original Winter Harbor at the mouth of the Saco River. The shallops in these two fleets have the same basic characteristics as the fishing boats shown on seventeenth-century maps of Cornwall. We should not be surprised at this, for men from Cornwall and Devon were the first English fishermen off the Maine coast in the sixteenth century. Fishermen from Cornwall and the Channel Islands settled Marblehead in the seventeenth century.

From court records and other sources, it is apparent that these fishing shallops were substantial craft. They were sheathed inside, were partly decked, and had a cuddy forward that contained a fireplace. A crew of four was standard for fishing—the master, the midshipman, the foreshipman, and a fourth man who remained on shore to cure the fish and cook the meals. The three who manned the shallop fished with handlines from “rooms,” short open compartments extending from side to side of the craft bounded fore and aft by transverse bulkheads. The fish holds between the rooms were decked over and sometimes portable covers were provided for the rooms.

Unfortunately, I have not found any identifiable pictorial representations of late seventeenth-century Massachusetts fishing ketches. Trading ketches probably retained the square rig right through the colonial years, but the type lost its popularity and few were built in the latter part of the period. In 1677 there is evidence for a square rig on a Massachusetts fishing ketch, but in his L’ Architecture Navale published in France in the same year Le Sieur Dassie noted that a “quesche”—his approximation of the English word—had a fore-and-aft rig, and he invented the word “tronc” for the square-rigged version.

As is well known to marine researchers, the Massachusetts Archives contain licenses, passes, and registers of vessels that sailed from Boston between 1686 and 1715. These vessels were engaged primarily on “foreign” voyages, i.e., to any port outside Massachusetts, hence a vessel bound to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was registered but one heading for Pemaquid was not. Fishing vessels were not registered. These records tell us what types were being used, their tonnage, and the shape of their sterns. There were ships, barks, ketches, and an occasional shallop along with three new types—pinks, sloops, and brigantines.

Ships normally had square sterns: hence, for a simple definition, a pink was a ship with a round stern; there were, however, vessels of other rigs that had pink sterns. Sloops were not so simple. With his six “ratings” and other classifications of vessels of the Royal Navy, Samuel Pepys thoroughly confused the sloop story. After the Restoration of Charles II, the Royal Navy had a number of square-sterned, open boats that had the two-masted square rig; these were considered expendable, were commanded by a petty officer, and were called shallops. Decked vessels so rigged were carried on the official list, were commanded by a junior officer, and were called sloops. Under some conditions such a sloop would set a short-gaff fore-and-aft sail on its tall ensign staff, hence at a quick glance would look like a bark. Further to confuse matters, we cannot overlook Thomas Riley Blanckley’s famous definition in 1732:

Sloop—Are Sail’d & Masted as Mens fancys leads them sometimes with One Mast, with Two, and with Three, with Burmudoes, Shoulder of Mutton, Square Lug & Smack Sails, they are in Figure either Square or Round Stern’d.

During the years covered by the records in the Massachusetts Archives there are about 960 entries for sloops; there is some minor duplication as vessels had to be reregistered when any of their owners changed. In size, these sloops ranged from four to eighty tons with the greatest number measuring between fifteen and forty tons. The majority had square sterns. A few listed as “open” would have been employed in the coastal firewood trade which was important to Boston. For a time Harvard College owned its own firewood vessels which plied between Down East ports and a landing on the Charles. Trading sloops of the late seventeenth century probably had what we recognize as a sloop rig—a short-gaff, fore-and-aft mainsail, a staysail, and a jib; the larger sloops also carried one or more square sails. Figure 12 is a modern reconstruction of a medium-sized sloop circa 1680.

The original name of the third of the new types—brigandine—clearly indicates its derivation, a craft used by brigands or pirates, hence something light and fast propelled by oars and sails. As the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century brigantines owned in Massachusetts ranged in size from eight to one hundred tons, all cannot have been built and rigged in the same fashion. It is almost easier to say what brigantines were not than to describe them.

We know that one form of brigantine was alive and well in 1732, therefore Blanckley was thinking of an earlier craft when he wrote: “Not now used, but were built light for Rowing or Sailing & had 2 Masts & square Sails.” A few years earlier, John Harris of London simply put into English Guillet’s French definition of 1686:

Brigantine—is a small light vessel which can both row and sail well, and is either for fighting or giving chase: It hath about 12 or 15 benches for the Rowers, one man to a bench; all hands aboard are soldiers and each one hath his musket lying ready under his oar.

Neither of these definitions bears any resemblance to that in the Oxford Universal Dictionary which states that as early as 1695 a brigantine was recognized as a two-masted vessel with a square-rigged foremast and a fore-and-aft rigged mainmast. To avoid problems that cannot be solved at this time let us accept this statement and note that such a rig is shown in an American painting of about 1715, Figure 13.

The story of the supposed invention of the schooner in Gloucester about 1713 need not be repeated here, for the schooner rig—a two-masted fore-and-aft rig with the second mast as tall as or taller than the first and at least one triangular headsail—existed before that date. It is sufficient to say that “schooner” as a type of vessel began appearing in Boston and Gloucester records in 1716 and by 1720 schooners had practically replaced ketches in the New England fishing fleet. We cannot assume that there was a wholesale scrapping of ketches and the building of replacement schooners or even that major re-rigging occurred. It is more than likely that a newly fashionable type name was adopted for as many somewhat similar vessels as possible along with a few small changes. This then means that by the end of the seventeenth century the smaller fishing ketches had fore-and-aft rigs; there is other evidence to support this argument. As ketches were basically double-ended this also means that the type later called a pinky existed in New England waters for about 200 years.

We can turn now to pictorial evidence for examples of what was sailing in Massachusetts waters in the 1720s. Let us look first at John Bonner’s 1722 map of Boston, which in its first state, Figure 14, showed eleven well-defined vessels with the masts of two more visible behind a wharf. Moored along the south side of Long Wharf are a ship, a sloop, and a brigantine as defined by the Oxford Universal Dictionary. Out in the harbor are three ships under sail, another ship at anchor with her sails furled, a brigantine with only her fore course set, and two sloops.

The eleventh vessel is probably a “two-mast boat” so-called because that description was sufficient and no one could think of a better name. References to two-mast boats appear in various records and newspaper advertisements right through the War for Independence. One variation of the type, an import used for fishing, was the Bermudas boat. She carried two raked masts with loose-footed, jib-headed sails, the ancestors of what we call the marconi rig but which the British have always called Bermudian. Actually it was a Dutch rig that can be traced back to the 1620s in the Netherlands.

The second state of Bonner’s map shows three additional craft on the Charles River. One is a sloop, the second is a schooner, while the third—an open boat being moved by two sweeps—is probably the “Ferry to Charles-Town.”

“A South East View of y^e Great Town of Boston in New England in America,” drawn by William Burgis, engraved by I. Harris, and published by William Price, is thought to show the town and its harbor as they appeared in 1722. The print was dedicated to Governor Samuel Shute of Massachusetts and probably was first issued in 1723. We can assume but can never be sure that the boats and vessels shown actually sailed in Massachusetts waters; two of them, a ship and a brigantine, appear again in the George Heap view of Philadelphia published in 1754. For convenience, we shall consider this “View” of Boston in three sections, Figures 15, 16, and 17.

In the foregrounds of these sections are a number of ship-rigged and sloop-rigged vessels of the Royal Navy. Although the full details of some of the former cannot be distinguished they are probably small ships of the line, frigates, and sloops of war. So much has been written by others about such vessels that we need only note here a further reduction in the heights of superstructures from those of William and John. The spritsail topmast at the end of the bowsprit has disappeared but just barely, for 1720 is considered about the last date of its use although some would say 1725 or even 1730.

Starting with the left-hand third of the Burgis view, Figure 15, we find a number of small vessels, some perhaps packets from Braintree, Hingham, and even the landings on the North River. Six are what we would call sloops, single-masted fore-and-aft rigged craft with one or two triangular headsails. None have topmasts or yards and while all the short-gaff mainsails are loose-footed, two of the sloops do not have booms. Two small craft near shore in the left background carry single spritsails and there is one boat with a single square sail.

Outward bound near the right-hand edge of Figure 15 is one of the relatively new schooners; some of her details are confused showing that the artist may not have been fully familiar with the type. This schooner has but three sails, a staysail forward set on a bowsprit and short-gaff fore and mail sails. Both the fore and the main are loose-footed and only the mainsail has a boom.

The center section of the Burgis print, Figure 16, which includes Long Wharf and nearly all of Clark’s Wharf to the north, is cluttered with vessels. Moored along the south side of Long Wharf, starting from the outer end, are a ship; a brigantine; a snow, which was a two-masted square-rigger with a full complement of square sails on both masts; a ship with her topmasts housed; what may be a square-rigged ketch, and three sloops. Without a large-scale print at hand it would be too confusing to continue this enumeration around the waterfront; hence we will limit this discussion to a few specific vessels.

In this center section there is only one well-defined schooner. While all of her hull but the transom are hidden by a warehouse on a small wharf, over the end of Long Wharf, her short-gaff fore- and mainsails tower above the surrounding buildings. She must have been a fairly large vessel.

Against one of our earlier arguments, no vessel in the entire view can be described as a fore-and-aft rigged ketch, but there are several square-rigged ketches in addition to the one noted on the south side of Long Wharf. One is moored to the south side of Clark’s Wharf, and a second is almost hidden against the shore just under the beacon on the hill (whence the now familiar name). A third square-rigged ketch rides at anchor with two sails set just below the outer end of Clark’s Wharf and is just barely seen at the left-hand edge of Figure 17. Two more ketches may be moored to the beginning of the T on the north side of Long Wharf.

There are several of the 1695-type brigantines in Figure 16, the most apparent being the two near the inshore end of Clark’s Wharf and a small one under sail just north of Long Wharf and directly over the brigantine moored to its south side. This little brigantine seems too small for her rig.

Outward bound near the left-hand edge of this section is what may have been among the last of the old square-rigged shallops and there may be another close in to the middle of Long Wharf. The size of the square foresail has increased considerably since the early seventeenth century.

The vessel at anchor just off the port quarter of the first shallop is a bit of a mystery, for she seems to have yards down near her deck. She is quite likely an example of the older brigantine rig that had a deep narrow square sail on each mast with small square topsails.

The general anchoring ground in the Boston harbor of 1722 seems to have been to the north of Long Wharf, for here in Figure 17 we find a large number of vessels riding at anchor. Some of these, however, are rather poorly drawn without proper attention to scale as though intended to fill space. There are a number of ships, some fully rigged, perhaps just arrived from or about to sail on a voyage, while others with topmasts struck are awaiting employment. We might note here the use of the term “galley” in conjunction with a vessel’s name such as Essex Galley or Sarah Galley which was common practice in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It did not mean that the vessel was propelled by oars but simply that her hull was shaped more for speed rather than cargo capacity. The practice of combining name and type continued in popular usage, if not always official records, into the nineteenth century when we find expressions such as Brandywine Frigate and the record that has confused steamboat researchers, North River Steamboat, Robert Fulton’s first successful craft.

In the foreground of Figure 17 is a fine example of a pink-sterned brigantine, while above her and slightly to the right is another more sketchily drawn. Near the center of this section another schooner rides at anchor. Her topmasts, which may be for pennants only, are stepped abaft the heads of her lower masts; this practice was common on sloops of that day. Off this schooner’s bow, however, is another mystery, a single-masted vessel that carries a deep, narrow square sail as well as a short-gaff mainsail, a combination having no English name that is occasionally seen in Dutch marine views.

Against the shore just south of the prominent North Battery are two craft carrying single spritsails. They are at the Winnisimet Ferry landing whence travelers crossed the harbor to Chelsea and the highway to Lynn and Salem. In a later state of this print the spritsail-rigged boat off the North Battery is marked “Chelsey Ferry Boat.”

All along the shore, from the northernmost tip of the peninsula to the very left-hand edge of the view among the string of dwellings that mark the single roadway across the neck, are evidences of one of Boston’s major industries, shipbuilding. There are hulls in several stages of construction from an assembly of keel, floor timbers, and sternpost to what may be completed hulls ready for launching.

In 1729, William Burgis drew his well-known view of the Boston lighthouse, Figure 18, and included a fine portrait of a sloop at anchor. H. I. Chapelle thought that she resembled sloops of the Ferrett class built in England for the Royal Navy about 1711. Hazard of this class was wrecked and lost off Cohasset, Massachusetts, on 12 November 1714. Although Burgis’s sloop was a naval vessel she is worth looking at closely, for the larger merchant sloops were quite similar.

The sloop has one deck with relatively high bulwarks that are pierced with seven ports on a side. A quarterbadge shows that she has a “great cabin” aft under a quarterdeck. Her loose-footed mainsail is of the short-gaff type with a long boom. For headsails she has a staysail (or foresail) and a jib; in light weather she may have set a flying jib on the topmast stay. The sloop’s standing yard is shown fitted with foot-ropes, but her lower square sail may have been hoisted to the yard for setting, not furled upon the yard and let fall in the usual way. A light square topsail yard would have been set flying on her topmast which is stepped abaft the head of the lower mast. The gaff topsail was not employed widely until the middle of the eighteenth century.

In Figure 19, we have the first-known painting of a named Massachusetts vessel, the letter-of-marque ship Bethel which was owned by the Quincy family. Probably typical of the better ships of her day, she was armed with fourteen guns and carried a crew of thirty-eight men. In 1748, when Yankee bluff was added to these, she captured a Spanish treasure ship worth close to £100,000 that had twenty-four guns and a crew of 110.

The painting is typical of the period showing Bethel in two positions. With what are the equivalents of the old half and quarter decks, her superstructure aft seems higher than we might expect, but some of this is due to the open rails on the first level. While the spritsail-topmast is gone from the end of the bowsprit, the sail is still there with its yard slung under an extension of the bowsprit, a new spar called the jibboom. Topgallant sails are carried on all three masts. The mizzenmast still has its lateen yard—some examples can be found as late as the War for Independence—but the part of the sail forward of the mast has been cut off.

We come now to the unique colored sketches in the journals of Ashley Bowen, mariner, rigger, &c, of Marblehead. Were he not a professional rigger we might find it difficult to accept some of his details. Small in the originals, these sketches cannot stand much enlargement, and they lose some of their qualities when reproduced in black and white. They are, however, convincing portraits of the vessels that sailed in Massachusetts waters from about 1740 to the end of the colonial period.

Because so many of Ashley Bowen’s sketches are near duplicates, only those of particular interest will be mentioned. Three of the panels of Figure 20 show the sloops that were so prominent in colonial trading, only one of which carries standing square sail yards; Bowen identified the latter as the “bitcy…of S^t a Crewes” [Betsy of St. Croix]. These panels also show two small schooners rigged to carry four sails only—mainsail, foresail, staysail, and jib.

The two right-hand panels of Figure 21 show better than many words of description the basic features of the two-masted square-riggers of the eighteenth century, the brigantine above and the snow below. Although the 1695-type brigantine was not featured in any of Bowen’s sketches, there is enough scattered evidence to show that it did not disappear completely between Burgis’s 1722 view of Boston and 1775. After the war vessels so rigged were called hermaphrodite brigs.

As the eighteenth century passed, light square sails were added on the main-topmast of the 1695 type of brigantine. The lowest yard never carried a sail, and all yards on the mainmast were shorter than the corresponding ones on the fore. A brigantine could immediately be identified by her long lower mainmast and large fore-and-aft mainsail. It is easy to understand why customs service clerks and others abbreviated brigantine to “briga.” and eventually to brig.

A snow’s lower mainmast was only a little longer than her foremast, all yards on the mainmast were equal to or longer than the corresponding ones on the fore, and she set a course on her main yard. To eliminate any problems between the main course and the mast hoops of her fore-and-aft spanker, the latter was set on a separate light mast stepped a couple of feet abaft the mainmast. Bowen’s snows have standing gaffs for their spankers while the mainsails of his brigantines were lowered for furling. What is now called the true brig rig appeared about 1770. The brig had the mast and yard proportions of the snow and carried a main course but set her spanker directly on the main lower mast in the manner of the brigantine.

In the upper left-hand panel of Figure 21 we have a typical small ship of the mid-eighteenth century. Obviously smaller than Bethel she carries courses, topsails, and topgallants on her fore and main masts but a square topsail only on her mizzen. While she carries a lateen yard, the sail does not extend forward of the mast. Forward we can spot a spritsail yard and a jib furled on the jibboom.

The lower left panel shows two schooners, Swallow and Duke of Cumberland, rigged in a manner not mentioned in textbooks, and the sketches would be dismissed as artistic aberrations were Bowen not a professional rigger. These vessels can be called topsail schooners but, unlike the usual rig which has yards on the foremast, their yards are on the mainmasts only. Once the possibility of such a rig is admitted, examples come to light in many locations, even a Norwegian maritime museum. Dated 1749, this sketch of Swallow may be the earliest representation of a Salem vessel.

Figure 22 shows a snow in the upper left and a schooner with yards on both masts in the upper right. The ship in the lower left, dated 1755 and 1756, has an early example of a standing gaff instead of a lateen yard on her mizzenmast. The 1756 schooner in the lower right has no yards but seems to have gaff topsails on both masts, a rather early example of such sails.

The two ships in the lower panels of Figure 23, Atlantick and Patty respectively which were sailing in 1756, are quite similar to the earlier Bethel. They show how she might have appeared had she been given bulwarks on her half deck. The schooner in the upper left seems to be a small vessel with only a staysail forward. The schooner Rambler of Marblehead, upper right, is worthy of notice for two reasons. One is her standing fore gaff which means that her foresail is furled by brailing to the gaff and mast. The second is, that unlike Bowen’s usual practice as shown on Swallow to the left, the mainsail is furled with the gaff right down on the boom. This may indicate that Rambler’s main was secured by a lacing line or other means to the boom, rather unusual in 1766 as the practice did not become common until the 1840s.

The small craft in the left panel of Figure 24 is much like the Bermudas boat of over a century earlier and quite similar to Dutch boats of the 1620s. Her foresail is loose-footed, but the main has a boom. The build-up aft may just be bulwarks or there may be a small cuddy. The right panel portrays the sloop Eagle with nearly all her sails set. They include the flying jib, jib, course, topsail, topmast studding sail, topgallant sail, mainsail, ringtail, and a “save-all” under the boom. Because it would be blanketed by the course, Eagle’s foresail [staysail] is not set.

Until Ashley Bowen’s sketches were studied fully, the portrait of the schooner Baltick, Figure 25, was considered the earliest painting of a Salem vessel. Built at Newbury in 1763, Baltick is shown coming out of St. Eustatia on 16 November 1765 carrying the normal topsail schooner rig of the period with yards on her foremast only. Because of the location of her foremast, the staysail is very small; both it and her jib are furled, for they would have been blanketed by the course. It was fairly common on schooners of the period to carry dual mainstays and when on one tack for a long period to set up the weather stay to a ringbolt in the waterway abreast the fore rigging. Baltick is carrying a main-staysail on such a stay. The extension on the main boom shows that she could carry a ringtail and she probably had a main gaff topsail as well.

Unlike Bowen’s small sketches, the portrait of Baltick is large enough to show many rigging details. The bobstay is attached to the bowsprit about halfway out to its cap, and the bowsprit shrouds are worked into a netting for protection of the crew and to keep the jib from dropping into the water when being furled. The course has one row of reef points, but its area can quickly be reduced to about one-half by removing the laced-on bonnet. Both fore- and mainsails have provisions for three reefs, the uppermost on the main being a so-called “balance” reef.

The final examples of vessels of our colonial period come from the charts and views that comprise The Atlantic Neptune, published by Joseph F. A. DesBarres for the use of the Royal Navy. The first chart of the series appeared in 1774, and the entire collection came out in 1780. This work is said to be “the most splendid collection of charts, plans, and views ever published.” The several recognition views included are considered among the best contemporary pictures of many of the places shown. These views are enlivened with numerous sketches of various types of vessels, many under sail and all of the types that might have been seen in the locations depicted. Although details are lacking the sketches are convincing.

Figure 26 is a combination of views of Cape Poge and Gay Head, Martha’s Vineyard. To the left in the upper view of Cape Poge is a small schooner on the starboard tack. In the center, broad off the wind, is a larger schooner with a square topsail on her mainmast only and to her port a small schooner close hauled on the starboard tack. The middle view of Gay Head includes a small schooner heading away on the port tack with a double topsail schooner and an ordinary schooner heading toward us on the starboard tack. The bottom view shows a small sloop in near Gay Head and a ship heading offshore under easy sail—jib, fore course, and three topsails.

A second combination, Figure 27, depicts vessels off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. In the upper view showing Sandy Point [now Great Point], Nantucket, we find a small schooner, a brigantine, and a sloop, all sailing from left to right. The middle view, off Nomansland, shows a schooner in the distance and another brigantine. Off Sankaty Head in the bottom view, we see to the right a small schooner running before the wind with her fore- and mainsails set wing-and-wing; she seems to have gaff topsails on both masts. Astern of her, heading toward us on the starboard tack, is a large two-mast boat. By this time, such craft were commonly called Chebacco boats, after the building place of large numbers, the Chebacco parish of Ipswich which is now the town of Essex, Massachusetts. Continuing to the left, to part of the previous lower view of Gay Head, we find, as seen from off her port quarter, a brigantine running and a small schooner coming toward us on the port tack.

Our final vessels are from A View of Boston which we will consider in three sections. Figure 28, the right third, shows an open two-mast boat proceeding under oars close in to the shore of Governor’s Island which, as we know, has been cut down and included in Logan Airport. She carries furled spritsails on her two masts. In the 1770s such a craft could have served for short coastwise passages, for fishing, as a pilot boat, and even for doing some of the sounding and surveying for the charts in The Atlantic Neptune. Just above this craft and in near Noddle’s Island, now East Boston, are two larger two-mast or Chebacco boats standing out under sail on the starboard tack; they are probably fishermen. Heading up the main channel between Noddle’s Island and the north end of Boston are a brigantine and yet another schooner with a square topsail on her mainmast only.

The center portion of the Boston view, Figure 29, shows in the background a ship riding at anchor with all sails furled; she carries a lateen yard on her mizzenmast. Off her bow a schooner is heading down the harbor on the starboard tack. Just below her is a small open boat running up the harbor under a single spritsail. The large ship is under three topsails only, the fore course and the two topgallants having been clewed up and left hanging in their gear. Some of the crew are on the main-topgallant yard about to furl the sail. Unlike the ship at anchor, this one has a standing gaff on her mizzenmast.

In the left-hand section, Figure 30, we find the ship repeated and, to her port, two sloops, an ordinary schooner, and a double topsail schooner are outward bound on the starboard tack. In the background, just above the ship’s port quarter is Beacon Hill on the far side of which this paper was read at a Colonial Society symposium on 21 November 1975.

1 A board, about six feet long and twenty-four inches wide, bearing a scribed plan of a small vessel, perhaps a coasting sloop, was found in Warren, Rhode Island, in the spring of 1977. From details of the design practices depicted the writer would date the plan at least pre-1750.

2 Since the writing of this paper in 1975 further study of the plaster ceiling decorations in Hook House, mentioned earlier, has tended to discount their value as representations of the Ark and Dove.

1 Charles Browne, “Memorandum concerning Abraham Browne, of Boston,” New England Historical & Genealogical Register, ii. (1848), 45–46.

2 James A. Spaulding’s query in New England Historical & Genealogical Register, xlv. (1891), 166.

3 David Hannay, “Barbary Pirates,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (London, 1910), in. 383–384

4 Abraham Browne, “Journal,” 1–3.

5 Browne, “Journal,” 5–7.

6 A small, light coasting or fishing vessel.

7 Browne, “Journal,” 19.

8 Browne, “Journal,” 20–24.

9 Browne, “Journal,” 27–28. Richmond’s Island lies off the southern shore of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, about half a mile distant from the mainland. It was at the time a commercial center and fishing station.

1 Browne, “Journal,” 29.

2 The following account of this voyage and Browne’s captivity is in his “Journal,” 38–58.

3 Corunna, Spain.

4 Sale, a seaport town of Morocco opposite Rabat.

5 Algiers. Spanish, “Argel.”

6 An ensign or flag.

7 Portuguese.

8 Browne, “Journal,” 89–90.

1 “The accounts of this interview given, on the one hand, by Smart and Southack and, on the other, by St. Ovide are irreconcilable,” writes John Stewart McLennan in Louisbourg from Its Foundation to Its Fall (1918).

1 For maps of Boston and Boston Harbor, see:

Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, [Report to the Society on Boston maps before the Revolution, with a letter from G. G. Smith], Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vu. (Boston, The Society, 1863), 35–40; and Shurtleff’s A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 3rd ed. (Boston, Common Council, 1891).
John Appleton, “Early Charts of the Harbor of Boston,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vm. (1864), 475–477.
Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, 4 vols. (Boston, J. R. Osgood, 1881), ii. 491–533 (Provincial); in. i–vii (Revolutionary).
Engineering Department, Boston. “List of Maps of Boston published between 1614 and 1822, copies of which are to be found in the possession of the City of Boston.” Annual Report of the City Engineer, Appendix II, 1 February 1903 (Boston, 1903), 248 pp.
P. L. Phillips, “A Descriptive List of Maps and Views of Boston in the Library of Congress,” [Washington, D. C], 1922, 275 pp. (a typed list, found in several libraries).
John R. Reps, “Boston by Bostonians: The Printed Plans and Views of the Colonial City by its Artists, Cartographers, Engravers, and Publishers,” Boston Prints and Printmakers 1670–1775 (Boston, The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1973), 3–56.

2 A facsimile of the Cellere manuscript (Morgan Library MS., MA766) with an accompanying transcription and translation, is in Lawrence C. Wroth, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano 1524–1528 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970), 97–143. This is the best biography of Verrazzano, with full documentation and reproduction of pertinent maps.

3 This reproduction is from a full-scale photograph of the original in E. L. Stevenson, Maps Illustrating Early Discovery and Exploration in America 1502–1530 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1903), No. 12. Another smaller unsigned world chart in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, has been identified as by Gerolamo, with the suggested date of 1528, with additions of about 1540: Marcel Destombes, “Nautical Charts attributed to Verrazzano (1525–1528),” Imago Mundi, XX. (1954), 57–66. Maggiolo’s world chart of 1527, formerly in the Ambrosiana Library, Milan, with information not on the Gerolamo charts, was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War (reprod. in Stevenson, op. cit., No. 10). A fourth manuscript map, presumably lost, was still extant as late as 1582, according to Hakluyt in his Divers Voyages, ii. 2, 287: “Master John Verazzanus, which hath been thrise on that coast, in an olde excellent mappe which he gave to King Henrie the eight, and is yet in the custodie of master Locke.”

An early and very popular printed map that showed Verrazzano’s discoveries was a quaint woodcut of the western hemisphere by Sebastian Münster, “Insulae Novae,” that first appeared in Münster’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Basle, 1540) and later in Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), published in some twenty-eight Latin, German, French, and Italian editions throughout the rest of the century. This woodcut in effect shows three connected continents: “Francisca” above Verrazzano’s false gulf, connected by a narrow peninsula with “Terra florida” and several Central American countries; below these is South America, “Insula Atlantica quam uocant Brasilii & Americam,” separated by “Fretum Magnaliani” from yet another antarctic land mass.

4 The best attempts to identify some of the Verrazzano names are in W. F. Ganong, Crucial Maps in the Early Cartography and Place-Nomenclature of the Atlantic Coast of Canada, ed. T. E. Layng (Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1964), 104–194; L. C. Wroth, Verrazzano, 88–90; and Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of North America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970), 308–311.

5 Wroth, Verrazzano, 141.

6 These and other maps showing Verrazzano’s Sea are examined in Wroth, Verrazzano, 178–212.

7 The pertinent documents by these three are printed in Henry Harrisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historical Investigation (London and Paris, 1892), 229–243.

8 L. A. Vigneras, “The Voyage of Esteban Gómez from Florida to the Baccalaos,” Terrae Incognitae, ii. (1970), 28.

9 Woodbury Lowery, The Spanish Settlements within the Present Limits of the United States, 1513–1561 (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 161.

1 This large vellum planisphere (82 × 102 cm.) was given to Count Baldassare Castiglioni, papal legate to Spain and personal friend of Charles V, and is still in the possession of the Castiglioni family in Mantua. It was examined by the present writer in 1958. Although unsigned, it is clearly the work of Diego Ribero; the date is given twice: “1525” in the astrolabe in the lower right-hand corner (as in the signed Ribero charts, Vatican 1529 and Weimar 1529), and in the legend near New England, “Land, discovered by Estebam Gómez in this year of 1525 by order of his majesty.”

2 L. A. Vigneras, “The Cartographer Diogo Ribeiro,” Imago Mundi, xvi. (1962), 76–83.

3 On some of the later maps Cabo de Arenas was transferred to apply to the northern tip of Cape Cod, although the early charts give Cabo de Santiago as the northern point. Around the middle of the sixteenth century some charts show Cape Cod not as a thin straight finger pointing northeast but as a simple straight-line jutting to the east with no Cape Cod Bay and with the coast continuing directly southward from its point, somewhat like a “7.” Examples are Pierre Desceliers 1550 (reprod., W. P. Cumming, R. A. Skelton, and D. B. Quinn, The Discovery of North America (London, Elek, 1971); John Dee (from The Simon Fernandez map) 1580 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., 195); Levasseur 1601 (Service Hydrog., Paris, Arch. 5).

4 Alonso de Chaves, Quatripartitu[m]en cosmographia pratica, with tables made for the year 1539; the original manuscript is in the Real Academia, Madrid. See Appendix B. Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (New York, Bonanza Books, 1949), 141–144, has a good summary of the origin, functioning, and laws governing the Casa de Contratación, the pilot majors, and the official charts (padron real and padron general).

5 Reprod. (detail) from Alonso de Chaves, Islario General, ed. by Franz R. V. Wieser (Innsbruck, Wagner, 1908), pl. 4.

6 Reprod. (detail) from Cartas de Indias (Madrid, Ministerio de Fomento, 1877), Facsimile R. The original is in the Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid. Commentary on the map is in W. P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1962), 114; photographic reproduction of the entire map from the original from South America to Nova Scotia is in Cumming, Discovery, pl. 193, p. 172. The Cartas de Indias facsimile has small errors of transcription that are corrected in the list in Appendix B.

7 Examples are Rotz 1542 (reprod., Cumming, Discovery of North America, pi. 116); anonymous maps in Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, circa 1540 (reprod., ibid., pis. 54, 152); Pierre Desceliers 1550 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., pi. 139); Guillaume Le Testu 1550 (reprod., Cumming, ibid., pis. 99, 141, 147, 163); Diogo Homem 1558 (Cumming, ibid., pi. 140). Wilma George, Animals and Maps (London, Seeker & Warburg, 1969), examines with many reproductions the portrayal by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartographers of animals as typical of different regions.

8 Ganong, Crucial Maps, 180–187; Bernard G. Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1961). Reprod. of Lopo Homem 1554, I. P. N. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York, R. H. Dodd, 1915–1928), ii. pl. 11; Diogo Homem 1558, Cumming, Discovery, pl. 140, 126–127.

9 Reproduced from Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (Paris, 1613), Harvard College Library copy. The maps and drawings of Champlain, including the Library of Congress map of 1607, the original drawings in the John Carter Brown Library, and those in published works, with useful notes, are in The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. by H. P. Biggar and others (Toronto, Champlain Society, 1922–1936), in eight volumes including an accompanying portfolio. W. F. Ganong edited, with translations, the first book of Les Voyages (1613) and the first two books of Les Voyages (1632), in this series (Vols. II and III), with useful notes.

1 Samuel Eliot Morison, Samuel de Champlain, Father of New France (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 36.

2 The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. H. P. Biggar (Toronto, 1922–1936), (Les Voyages, ed. W. F. Ganong, Book I), ii. 346.

3 Reproduced from Champlain, “Description de costs…de la nouvelle france,” 1607, from manuscript original in the Library of Congress.

4 Numerous editions are reproduced in Tony Campbell, Netv Light on the Jansson-Visscher Maps of New England (London, Map Collectors’ Circle No. 24, 1965).

5 Reprod., I. P. N. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan-Island, 6 vols. (New York, 1915–1928), 11. pl. 21A and 49; Gabriel Archer’s account of Gosnold’s 1602 voyage in Samuel Purchas, Hakluyt Posthumous or Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), xviii. 304–305; for Pring 1603, ibid., xviii. 324. For identifications of the harbor, Henry S. Burrage, ed., Early English and French Voyages, chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534–1608 (New York, 1906), 346–347; D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York, 1974), 426–427, argues convincingly for Provincetown.

6 Alexander Brown, Genesis of the United States (Boston, 1890), 455–460. Reprod. of Velasco map: Cumming, Discovery, 266–267; also Stokes, op. cit., ii, frontispiece and 51, 135.

7 Burrage, ed., Early English and French Voyages, 335 (Gosnold); 358 (Waymouth).

Mr. Philip L. Barbour, who is preparing a new edition of the Arber-Bradley Works and Travels of Captain John Smith, has found a German map derived from Waymouth’s chart.

8 Henry O. Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony. Gorges Society, iv. (Portland, Me., 1892), with the text of the manuscript in the Lambeth Palace Library, giving the relation of the voyage under George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert and a reproduction of the Simancas plan. Cf. also reprod. in Cumming, Discovery, pl. 313, and p. 257.

9 John Smith, Travels and Works, ed. by Edward Arber, revised by A. G. Bradley (New York, B. Franklin, 1910), i. 188, 190.

1 Ibid., ii. 704; I. 190.

2 Ibid., i. 170. Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, i. 52, gives a list of changes that distinguish ten issues of the plate, usually with only minor changes and additions. See also Joseph Sabin and others, Bibliotheca Americana, 29 vols. (New York, Bibliographical Society of America, 1868–1936), xx. 230–231, where nine issues are distinguished; the first issue of 1616 has forty-eight names along the coast to which forty-two names are added by the ninth issue of 1635. For comments on the map, see Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964), 308–310, 326–327.

3 Smith, Travels and Works, ed. Arber and Bradley, i. 123; II. 699–700.

4 Reproduction of the De Laet and Dudley are in Stokes op. cit., ii. pis. 31, 35, 37, with bibliographical references; for Sanson reprod. see Blathviayt Atlas, ed. J. D. Black (Providence, R. i., 1970), i. map 6.

5 Reproduced in Cumming, Discovery of North America, 291, and elsewhere. Justin Winsor suggests that Wood’s map is based on the same survey as that in the Henry Fitzgilbert Waters-Governor John Winthrop manuscript map (British Museum, Add. MS. 5415. G. 3) of about the same time and which Winsor reproduces with explanatory notes (America, iii. 380–383). The Waters-Winthrop map includes the coast only from Boston Bay to Merrimac River but is more detailed for the land area around the bay than Woods.

6 Original in the State Archives, The Hague. It is an anonymous undated manuscript map, extending from just below the entrance to Chesapeake Bay north to Penobscot River on the coast and to the Saguenay River in Canada. It was presented to the States-General of the Dutch Republic 11 October 1614 by Gerrit Witsen and his associates in the New Netherlands colonizing venture to show the discoveries made by their three ships between 40° and 45° N.L. It was most probably copied from an original by Block, who sailed in 1614 through Hellegat (East River and Long Island Sound) along the south coast in his ship Onrust, the first ship built on Manhattan Island: cf. Stokes, ii. 67, 136–137, pl. 23. The most accurate and best reproduction of this so-called “Figurative Map of Adriaen Block” is a full-sized chomolithograph executed at the Hague about 1854 by E. Spanier, lithographer to the King.

An unsigned, undated seventeenth-century coastal outline of New England in The Hague Algemeen Rijksarchief, Versameling Kaarten No. 517 (photocopy in the Library of Congress) is interesting because it is a draughtsman’s sketch on a cross-lined sheet that shows the shore line in considerable detail, with offshore islands but with no names. It is unlike the published Dutch Jansson-Visscher charts in the smallness of Buzzards Bay and the shape of Cape Cod as well as in the intricacy of coastal delineation.

7 Stokes, ii. 137–138, pls. 25, 27; the excellent commentaries on early cartography are by F. C. Wieder, author of Monumenta Cartographica.

8 Stokes, ii. 80–82, 138; no example is known of the 1621 chart, but a later state with the imprint of Jac. Robin, otherwise apparently unchanged, is reproduced as plate 28.

9 Stokes, ii. 86, 143, pl. 31, from de Laet’s Beschryvlnghe van West-Indien (Leyden, Elzevir, 1630).

1 Stokes, ii. 88, 144–145, pl. 31; first found in the English edition of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (Amsterdam, [1636]).

2 Stokes, ii. 88, 143–144, pl. 32.

3 Stokes, i. pls. 7, 7a, 7b, 7A. The best cartobibliographical study is Tony Campbell, New Light on the Jansson-Visscher Maps of New England (London, Map Collectors Circle No. 24, 1965), with twenty-four plates illustrating various editions. Additional information on the Jansson-Visscher series is scattered through the volumes of Cornelis Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici: Bibliography of Terrestrial, Maritime and Celestial Atlases and Pilot Books, Published in the Netherlands Up to 1880. 5 vols. (Amsterdam, 1967–1971).

4 “A New Mapp of the north part of America from Hudson Straights.…Including Newfoundland…New England…& Carolena…by John Thornton.” (1673) Reprod. and notes in Jeannette D. Black, The Blathwayt Atlas (Providence, R. I., Brown University Press, 1970), No. 5, and the Blathwayt Atlas: Volume II: Commentary (Providence, 1975), 48–55.

“A New Map of the English Plantations in America…By Robert Morden…and William Berry” (1673). Reprod. and notes, Blathwayt Atlas, No. 3, ii. 43–45.

“A Mapp of Virginia…& New England by John Thornton…and by Robert Greene” [1678–1679]. Reprod. and notes, Black, Blathwayt Atlas, No. 10, II: ii. 75–81.

“A Map of y^e English Empire…by R. Daniel…R. Morden…W. Berry” (1679). Reprod., Stokes, Iconography, ii. 158, pl. 51. Comment, Cumming Southeast, 157; for 1685 edition with changed imprint, ibid., 163.

“A Chart of the Sea coasts of New England…and Carolina. From C. Cod to C. Hatteras” and “A Chart of the West Indies from Cape Cod to the River Oronoque, By John Seller. Hydrographer to the King,” in Seller’s Atlas Maritimus (London, 1675): see Cumming, Southeast, pl. 38, 153–154.

5 David Woodward, “The Foster Woodcut Controversy: A Further Examination of the Evidence,” Imago Mundi, xxi. (1967), 52–61.

6 Seller’s “A Mapp of New England” was advertised for sale in the London Gazette, no. 1085 (10–13 April 1676); see Black, Commentary, 80, n. 14. See Stokes, Iconography, ii. pi. 52, p. 157: “A Mapp of New England by John Seller,” with the dedication to Robert Thomson, in his Atlas Maritimus.

Since Seller’s map is earlier than Foster’s woodcut, since it has many differences from it in detail and coastal configuration, and since it has settlements apparently relating to King Philip’s War not on the Stoughton-Bulkeley map (deriving from the Reed map of 1665), Seller must have had other sources not yet identified in addition to some version or copy of the Reed map. He was gathering information for his English Pilot and other publications, presumably including New England correspondents. In this connection it is interesting that the second edition of his “Mapp” is dedicated to Robert Thomson, a London merchant involved in the New England Company: see Black, Commentary, 84–85.

7 Cf. Cumming, British Maps, fig. 18, p. 31.

8 Black, Commentary, Map 8, pp. 63–72.

9 Black, Commentary, 67, 69–71.

1 Mr. Boulind generously allowed the writer to read the typescript of his “William Hack and The Description of New England,” to be published by The Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He makes a detailed study of many names found on the Hack map and analyzes the differences in four charts that include New England in Hack’s atlas, A Description of the Coasts, Islands & C^a. in the North Sea of America, in the British Museum (K. Mar. VII. 3). None of these is as detailed as the Hack map in the Plymouth Society; No. 3 is the closest to it.

2 John Seller, Praxis Nautica (London, 1669), Postscript, quoted in full in Coolie Verner, A Carto-bibliographical Study of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book (Charlottesville, Va., University Press of Virginia, 1960), 5–6.

3 Samuel Pepys, The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys, ed. Edwin Chappell, Publications of the Navy Record Society, Vol. 73 (Greenwich, England, 1935), 107.

4 The English Pilot: The Fourth Book; London, 1680, ed. Coolie Verner (Amsterdam, Theatrum Orbis, 1967), xix–xx.

The following is a list of charts of the New England coast with the dates of their first and last inclusions in various editions of The English Pilot:

1. A New Chart of the Sea Coast of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England, New Jersey, Virginia…(1689–1706).
2. Part of New England, New York, East New Jersey, and Long Island…(1689–1706).
3. Part of New England…(1689–1706).
4. Boston Harbour in New England (1689–1698).
5. A Large Draught of New England New York and Long Island…Inset: Boston Harbour (1706–1737).
6. Chart of the Sea Coast of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland (1713–1794).
7. New Survey of the Harbour of Boston in New England…(1721–1732).
8. Harbour of Casco Bay…Captain Cyprian Southicke…1720…Em. Bowen (1721–1774).
9. Correct Map of the Coast of New England…1731 (1737–1760).
10. New and Correct Chart of the Sea Coast of New England from Cape Cod to Casco Bay…Henry Barnsley (1767–1773).
11. A Map of the Coast of New England from Staten Island to the Island of Breton as it was actually surveyed by Capt. Cyprian Southack…Insets: Town of Boston in New England [top left];[Atlantic Ocean, north of equator] [top right] (1775–1794).

5 “Part of New England” extends from Penobscot to eastern Long Island. The Fourth Book of 1689 has two other charts showing the sea coast from Newfoundland to Virginia and from southern New England to the Bahama Islands; on a smaller scale, they give less detail.

British Museum Add. MS. 5414.22 is a rough line drawing of the coast from Plymouth and Cape Cod to include southern Maine, with settlements on the rivers (circa 1680). Two manuscript maps of the New England coast in the Public Record Office have some similarity in coastal delineation to the 1689 chart: P.R.O., CO. 700. New England. 2, showing rivers and numbered references to a list with 130 references; and P.R.O., CO. 700. New England. 1, similar to the preceding with some details to the interior. In the British Museum are a number of undated maps of the New England coast that have not been identified as influencing printed charts: K. Top. 120.23 (Kennebec River; for Gov. Winslow by Indicott); Add. MS. 5414.21 (circa 1670); Add. MS. 5415, g. 2 (by Hack: circa 1680); Add. MS. 13970a (circa 1680); K. Mar. vii.9 (circa 1700). The dates, given in the B. M. Catalogue, iii. (1843), 536–540, are unreliable.

6 “Harbour of Casco Bay…by Capt. Cyprian Southicke…1720…Em. Bowen” was retained for over seventy years, until 1794.

7 P.R.O., CO. 700. Maine 3.

8 Clara E. LeGear, “The New England Coasting Pilot of Cyprian Southack,” Imago Mundi, XI. (1954), 137–144, with a list of Southack’s charts.

9 Bellamy’s wreck and Southack’s expedition have been recounted from original records in J. Franklin Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (New York, Macmillan, 1923), 290–311.

1 Pp. 43–65

2 [Braddock Mead] Explanation for the Neiv Map of Nova Scotia and Cape Britain (London, T. Jefferys, 1755), 5; William Douglass, Summary…of the British Settlements in North America, 2 vols. (Boston, Rogers and Fowler, 1749–1752), i. 362.

3 Cumming, British Maps, 40–45.

4 Public Record Office, CO. 700. Nova Scotia, 4.

5 Cumming, British Maps, pp. 10, 86, pl. 7; Arthur H. Robinson, “Nathaniel Blackmore’s Plaine Chart of Nova Scotia: Isobaths in the Open Sea?” Imago Mundi, xxviii. (1976), 137–141. Professor Robinson saw a photocopy of Blackmore’s chart in 1970, when the present writer was discussing Moll’s use of another map by Blackmore of Nova Scotia in his “Dominions” and later maps. Professor Robinson first noted the significance of Blackmore’s contour lines and has made a careful and judicious analysis of the problems involved. For the controversy between Mitchell and John Green [Mead] over Blackmore and his maps, including Mitchell’s attack on Blackmore in the second edition (ca. 1757) of his map of North America, see E. and D. S. Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell, Chapel Hill, 1974, pp. 208–209, which gives an account of the controversy and its background.

6 Arthur H. Robinson, “The Genealogy of the Isopleth,” Surveying and Mapping, xxxii. (1972), 332, 337.

7 “A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on y^e Continent of North America,” in H. Moll, The World Described (London, 1709–1720), No. 8. See Cumming, Southeast, 43–44, 181–183.

8 A Map of the British Empire in A merica with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent Thereto, by Henry Popple, with introductory notes by William P. Cumming and Helen Wallis (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1972).

9 Cumming, British Maps, 34, 90–91. Copies of the rare Douglass map are in the Library of Congress, British Museum, and Harvard College Library. The Douglass map was not engraved until after his death by order of his executors (circa 1753). Many copies of Douglass’s Summary have a copy inserted of Huske’s “A New and Accurate Map of North America…1755” in the 1760 edition of the work.

1 “A Map of the most Inhabited part of New England…by Thos. Jefferys, 1755,” North America at the Time of the Revolution: A Collection of Eighteenth Century Maps, Part II, with introductory notes by Louis De Vorsey, Jr. (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1974), ii, sheets J1 to J4; Cumming, British Maps, 34, 91; Erik Akorn, “Geographical and Place names, Taken from A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxxxix. (1953), 275–287. The differences in the numerous states of the Jefferys map are noted in Stevens and Tree, “Comparative Cartography,” Map Collectors Circle, xxxix. (1967), 326–327.

Mead (alias John Green) does not acknowledge Douglass in the list of authorities used for the map, but the “List of Maps” prefixed to Thomas Jefferys’s A General Topography of North America…(London, 1768), states that the Douglass map is the basis for the “Map of the Most Inhabited Part of New England.”

2 Charles Morris’s “Draught of the Northern English Colonies…” dedicated to William Shirley (British Museum, K. Top. 118. 52) is a careful, finely executed manuscript map on vellum dated Boston, 16 August 1749. Morris, born in Boston in 1711, had already been surveying the coast for several years; he was appointed surveyor general of Nova Scotia 25 September 1749: see Don W. Thompson, Men and Meridians (Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1966), i. 117–118.

3 Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell: The Man Who Made the Maf (Chapel Hill, U.N.C. Press, 1974), 175–213, has the best analysis of the sources and influence of Mitchell’s map. A full-scale facsimile, with notes, is Louis De Vorsey, North America at the Time of the Revolution Part II (Lympne Castle, Kent, Harry Margary, 1974), pis. M1–8. The different editions of the map are given by Richard W. Stephenson in W. W. Ristow, A la Carte: Selected Papers on Maps and Atlases (Washington, Library of Congress, 1972), 109–113.

Neither the Berkeleys nor Mitchell himself in his notes engraved on the map give specific information about the sources used for New England, although Mitchell (Sheet 7, col. 3) makes detailed criticism of the latitudes on the maps of Moll, Blackmore, and others and cites the observations of those whom he follows.

4 An annotated list of the American maps in the Bernard Collection is given in Cumming, British Maps, Appendix A, 28–30, 75–78. In 1959 the writer looked over these maps; ten years later, 1969, Dr. Helen Wallis of the British Museum and the writer visited Nether Winchendon, examined the collection, and took photographs.

Other manuscript maps and charts of Maine made for Sir Francis are in the Public Record Office: Maps and Plans, Vol. II (America), ed. P. A. Penfold (London, 1974), CO. 700. Maine no. 18 (“Rout from Fort Pownall…to Quebec 1764”), and probably CO. 700. Maine no. 16 (“Six Townships on the East side of the River Penobscot…1763”); C.O. 700. Maine no. 18 (“seven Townships…on the East side of Mount Desert River…1764”); C.O. 700. Maine no. 19 (“Bay and River of Penobscot” [1764]).

5 Cumming, British Maps, 30.

6 “A Map of the Middle British Colonies in North America…by M^r Lewis Evans …with the Addition of New England…By T. Pownall…London…1776”; off the Maine coast is the legend “**The coast included within these marks is copied from Governor Bernards Surveys, including M^ọ Desart I^ḍ &c.” See reproduction and notes in ed. Lois Mulkearn A Topographical Description…By T. Pownall (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949).

7 A major legal factor in the rival claims of the Kennebeck Company proprietors and their opponents was whether the Kennebec River extended to the sea or whether it ended at Merrymeeting Bay and from there was the Sagadahoc River and therefore not included in the original Plymouth Council patent. At least part of the lower river below Merrymeeting Bay and the coastal bay into which it flowed was known to the English as the Sagadahoc from the time of Popham’s short-lived Sagadahoc Colony settlement in 1607. Sagadahoc is derived from the Indian sanktai -i -wi, to finish, and -onk, a locative, meaning a finishing place: where a river ceases to be a river, the mouth of a river: cf. Edward Ballard, Geographical Names on the Coast of Maine (Washington, Coast Survey Report, 1868). Fannie Hardy Eckstrom, Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (Orono, Maine, Maine University Press, 1941), 129, 172, lists ten different spellings of Sagadahoc, with early references to its Indian meaning.

The French used the name “Quinibequy” for the entire river from the time of Champlain (1604) and his maps (Cumming, Discovery, 273, 274). J. N. Bellin’s map in P. F. X. de Charlevoix, Histoire et Description Generate de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1744), ii. facing 237, gives the entrance as “Baye de Kinibequi.” Both John Green, Explanation for the New Map of Nova Scotia and Cape Britain (London, 1753), 6, and Thomas Johnston in his “Plan of Kennebeck and Sagadahock Rivers…1754” refer to Bellin’s map. Johnston, attempting to limit the name to the Androscoggin River, that branch which also flows into Merrymeeting Bay as well as the Kennebec, notes along the river “Sagadahock or Amorescoggin River, so called by Mr. Pople [Popple’s “A Map of the British Empire in America…1733”], Sagadahock R. so Called by Monsr. Bellin and also by most or all the Ancient Plans.” In 1757, however, Bellin, probably confused by Green’s maps which he used, has both “Sagadahoc” and “Kinibeke” flow into the “Baye de Sagadahock” in his “Carte de la Nouvelle Angleterre…1757” that appeared in his Histoire Générale Des Voiages (Paris, 1746–1761), xiv. (1757).

The ruling of the Privy Council did not come until 1771 and then was inconclusive (Kershaw, Kennebeck Proprietors, 190); they ordered the case returned for a new trial to the Massachusetts Superior Court. It was not until after the Revolution that the Proprietors equivocally won their case; they were granted other land to compensate for that which they claimed.

Gordon E. Kershaw, The Kennebeck Proprietors 1740–1775 (Portland, Me., Maine Historical Society, 1975), 175–200.

Gordon E. Kershaw, “Settling the District Called Frankfort,” Maine Historical Society Newsletter, x (February 1971), 73–83, with a reproduction of Johnston’s “Plan of Kennebeck & Sagadahock…1755.”

8 L. C. Wroth, “The Thomas Johnston Maps of the Kennebec Purchase,” In Tribute to Fred Anthoensen, Master Printer (Portland, Me., 1952), 161, 163, with reproductions of Johnston maps.

James C. Wheat and Christian F. Brun, Maps and Charts Published in America Before 1800 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969), 34.

Sinclair Hitchings, “Thomas Johnston,” Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–1775 (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1973), 83–132, with reproductions of Johnston’s “A True Coppy…1753” and “Kennebeck and Sagadahock…1754.”

9 Willis Chipman, The Life and Times of Major Samuel Holland, Surveyor General, 1764–1801 in Papers and Records, Ontario Historical Society, xxi. (1924), 21.

1 Louis De Vorsey, ed., De Brahm’s Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 33; De Vorsey’s Introduction is the best life of De Brahm.

2 Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians (Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1966), 100.

3 Chipman, Holland, 11–15; Thomson, Men and Meridians, 108.

4 P.R.O., C.O. 700. Maine 20.

5 Louis De Vorsey, “Hydrography: A Note on the Equipage of Eighteenth-Century Survey Vessels,” The Mariner’s Mirror, lviii. (1972), 173–177.

6 G. N. D. Evans, “Hydrography: A Note on Eighteenth-Century Methods,” The Mariner’s Mirror, lii. (1960), 247–250. G. N. D. Evans, Uncommon Obdurate: The Several Public Careers of J. F. W. DesBarres (Salem, Peabody Museum, 1969), 13–14.

7 Evans, Uncommon Obdurate, and Thomson, Men and Meridians, 93ff., are somewhat complementary in their biographies.

8 There is no complete list of the works that DesBarres supervised and published, but several libraries have published their holdings in map catalogues. Some of the productions of DesBarres’ workshop, chiefly profiles that may have been discarded, are known only by a unique copy in some collection. The most extensive list so far is the typewritten list by Henry Stevens, “Catalogue of the Henry Stevens Collection of The Atlantic Neptune, with revisions to 1937 (London),” a careful carto-bibliography of the charts, profiles, and views that he owned and of other states that he had observed. His collection has been acquired by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Other large collections are in the British Museum; the Hydrographic Department of the Navy at Taunton, Somerset; the New York Public Library; and the Library of Congress. The collection of sets and separate sheets in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress (totaling some 2,300 items) is at present being collated by Dr. John R. Sellars and Miss Patricia Molen van Ee in a Library of Congress Bicentennial project. At the time of writing, the finest private collection is owned by Mr. Augustus P. Loring of Prides Crossing, Massachusetts; from it were chosen the full-scale reproductions in the four-portfolio reproductions of The Atlantic Neptune published by the Barre Publishing Company, Barre, Mass., 1966–1969.

The library at Taunton holds a number of the original drafts of the New England coast sent by Holland and his assistants to London; these deserve special study not yet made, to examine their relation to the finished plates produced in London by DesBarres. See A Summary of Selected Manuscript Documents of Historical Importance Preserved in the Archives of the Department of Hydrography: Department Professional Paper No. 13. London: Admiralty, 1950, pp. 5, 19 ff. In 1820 the Admiralty purchased the original copper plates used for The Atlantic Neptune from DesBarres, later selling 84 of the 241 purchased. In 1946–1947 the Admiralty presented to the Canadian government 30 of the original plates and to the United States of America 34 plates; these have later been distributed to appropriate local archives and libraries. At Taunton are also four sets of The Atlantic Neptune, one from George III with his coat of arms.

9 The profiles in The Atlantic Neptune are usually depicted as they are seen about thirty feet above water from an off-shore vessel. Some plates have been erased and new profiles from a different angle engraved, indicating the continuous sketching done as the surveying vessel was making soundings.

The writer is indebted to Mr. Loring for his analysis of changes in profiles and views on different states of the same chart, illustrated by examples from his collection and photographs of the same views, taken two hundred years later, from the same locations.

1 The writer is indebted to Mrs. William P. Cumming who has done the research with him and read the MS. at all stages, and to Miss Jeannette Black for suggestions and corrections that have added to the usefulness of this essay.

1 “Diary of Samuel Sewall,” 4 April 1706, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 5th Series, vi. 157.

2 Colonel Robert Quary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 10 January 1708, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, xxiii. No. 1273.

3 Declaration of Denis & Bernard Godet of Annapolis Royal, 1 September 1714, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG7, 52, 53; B. Pothier, “Joseph de Monbeton de Brouillon, dit Saint-Ovide,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, III, (Toronto, 1974), 454

4 Governor Francis Nicholson of Nova Scotia to Governor Joseph Dudley of Massachusetts, Boston, 25 December 1714, Public Archives of Nova Scotia, MG7, 49.

5 De la Forest (? to the Minister of Marine), 12 September 1717, Archives des Colonies (France), Series CiiB, ii. f.274.

6 Cyprian Southack to Lieutenant Governor John Doucett of Nova Scotia, Boston, 9 January 1718, Public Record Office (London), Colonial Office 217/2, ff.188, 189.

7 Memorial to Governor Shute, the Council and General Court of Massachusetts by Oliver Noyes et. al., Boston, June 1718, P.R.O. C.O. 217/2, f.283.

8 Massachusetts Council Minutes, 15 March 1721, P.R.O., C.O. 5/794, 123.

9 Massachusetts House of Representatives to Governor Shute, November 1720, P.R.O., C.O. 6/794, f.85.

1 Giles Hall to Mrs. Hannah Pickering, Boston, 11 September 1723, Pickering & Derby Papers, 10, Essex Institute (Salem, Mass.).

2 Peirce to Dolebra, Portsmouth, 10 September 1728, Peirce Letter Book, Baker Library (Harvard University).

3 Peirce to Peter Faneuil, Portsmouth, 9, 30 November 1733, Peirce Letter Book.

4 T. Barrow, Trade & Empire, The British Customs Service in Colonial America 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 169.

5 Memorial of the King to Saint-Ovide and Mezy, Paris, 12 May 1722, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xiv. f.235.

6 Complaint enclosed in a letter from the ministry of the Marine to Saint-Ovide, 17 May 1728, ibid., x. ff.24, 25, 29.

7 Maurepas to Saint-Ovide and Mezy, 18 June 1728, Archives Nationales (France), Series B, lii. f.582v.

8 Officers of the Admiralty, Louisbourg, 5 December 1730, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xi. ff.111–113.

9 Mezy to the Minister of the Marine, Louisbourg, 3 February 1732, list of New England ships sold at Louisbourg in 1732, ibid., XIII. ff.7, 100.

1 Boston Gazette, 17 September 1733.

2 New England Weekly Journal, 8 January 1733.

3 Boston Gazette, 16 August 1731.

4 Ibid.

5 E. Pearse to William Pepperrell, London, 6 December 1721, Pepperrell MS., Book 2, New England Historical and Genealogical Society (Boston).

6 Orders and Bills of Lading, July 1721, Pepperrell Papers, Box 212, 1718–1721, Maine Historical Society (Portland); William Pepperrell to Captain John More, Piscataqua, 25 July 1721, Pepperrell Papers, Collection 35, No. 12, p. 5, Maine Historical Society.

7 William Pepperrell, Sr. to Captain Thomas Richards, 8 August 1726, ibid.

8 “Acct. of Mes. H. Grangent with Wm. Pepperrell & B. Clark,” 13 November 1729, ibid.

9 H. Grangent to William Pepperrell, Martinique, 11 January 1731, ibid.

1 Invoices nos. 119, 120, 121, 1, 10 September and 17 November 1729, P. Faneuil Ledger, 1730–1732, 3, Baker Library.

2 J. Peirce to P. Faneuil, Portsmouth, 9, 30 November 1733, Peirce Letter Book.

3 Governor Richard Philipps to John Henshaw et al., Public Record Office, C.O. 217/6, f.150.

4 Faneuil to Thomas Kilby, Boston, 20 June 1737, Faneuil Letter Book, Baker Library.

5 Account of Trade for 1736, Archives Nationales, Series CiiB, xviii. f.170.

6 Faneuil to Kilby, Boston, 19 April 1737, Faneuil Letter Book.

7 Bigot to the Minister, Louisbourg, 18 June 1742, Archives des Colonies, Series CiiB, xxiv. ff.87–89.

8 Archives Departementales, Charente-Maritime (La Rochelle), Series B, Cours et Jurisdictions (Amirauté de Louisbourg à La Rochelle), registre B272, ff.510–515, 555–560.

1 The introductory essay in Alexander Starbuck’s History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Washington, 1878) remains the most useful account of the colonial fishery.

2 James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, England, 1972), Appendix IV, Table 2, pp. 211–216.

3 Three quarters of a century earlier, French whalemen at Spitzbergen attempted unsuccessfully to operate tryworks at sea. See Friedrich Martens, “Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland” (1671), in A Collection of Documents on Spitzbergen and Greenland, ed. Adam White (London, 1855), p. 130. The American practice may have begun in the 1740s, but logbook or other contemporary references to tryworks on board have not been found before the 1750s.

4 But see a puzzling advertisement in the Boston Nevus-Letter, 30 March 1748, offering “Sperma Ceti Candles, exceeding all others for Beauty, Sweetness of Scent when extinguished…[and] emitting a soft, easy expanding light.” As no evidence for the manufacture of spermaceti candles in the American colonies before 1750 has been found, the vendor, James Clement, possibly imported his wares. Yet no foreign source nor sperm whale fishery outside the colonies is known.

5 Although documentary material on outfitting costs and crew sizes for colonial whaling vessels is fragmentary, three useful sources are (1) Aaron Lopez Ships’ Book: 1767–1772, vol. 559, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society, (2) Ledger B (1769) of William Rotch, Sr., and (3) Journal B (1771), also of Rotch, in the Old Dartmouth Historical Society.

6 Except for a well-known one-paragraph description of whale hunting by Penobscot Indians in A True Relation of the Most Prosperous Voyage made this Present Yeare 1605, by Captain George Waymouth, there is no other documentary or archaeological evidence to sustain the assertion of an independent whaling tradition by native Americans. Without such confirmation, the Waymouth account should be treated with care.

7 For variations in available whaleboats of the period, see the letter from Jacob Rodriguez Rivera to Henry White, 19 June 1767: “I have agreeable to your request been with a Whaleboat Builder to git one built as you direct, but your directions not being explicit enough he is fearful to begin it till I hears from you.…The Common Whaleboats here row with 5 oars, they are 20 foot keel & 27 foot from stem to stern & about 5 foot 4 in. broad. If you incline to have it either longer or broader it shall be done. He wants to know if she is to be (as she is to steer with a Rudder) Square Stern or in the form of a Common Whaleboat.” Aaron Lopez Letter Book, 1767, vol. 81, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society.

8 For a detailed description of colonial whaling practices, see Adams’ notes and minutes for the case, in The Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, II (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 68–97. Useful information may also be found in Douglass C. Fonda, Jr., Eighteenth Century Nantucket Whaling, As compiled from the Original Logs and Journals of the Nantucket Alheneum and the Nantucket Whaling Museum (Nantucket, 1969).

9 Among the earliest accounts of fastening to a whale with a whaleboat in colonial America is Felix Christian Sporri’s description of a capture off Narragansett Bay in 1662. Originally published in his Americanische Reiss-beschreiburg Nach den Caribes Insseln, Und Neu-Engelland (Zurich, 1677), a translation is available in Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton and Liberty of Conscience: Society in Rhode Island, 1636–1600 (Providence, 1974), Appendix V, pp. 144–145.

1 See Logbook of the Sloop Dighton, 1769, in Old Dartmouth Historical Society, and Fonda, Eighteenth Century Nantucket Whaling, p. 10.

2 For brief summaries of the conditions of the Massachusetts fishery before the Revolution, see the “Replies to Queries: Massachusetts,” submitted to Thomas Jefferson in 1784, and Jefferson’s “Memoranda Concerning the American, British and French Fisheries” (1788), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., vii. (Princeton, 1953), 339–343, xiv. (Princeton, 1958), 226–234.

3 Henry Cruger, Jr., to Aaron Lopez, Bristol, 28 July 1766, in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 1726–1774, ed. Worthington C. Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 7th series, ix. (Boston, 1914), 165. See also Cruger’s letters to Lopez, 9 April 1766, and 6 April 1768, Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 152–153, 236, and the blunter remarks of William Stead, London, to Lopez, 10 February 1764, Aaron Lopez Papers, Box 651, Newport Historical Society: “As to the 44 casks of white oyl my cooper tells me they most of them stunk.”

4 Henry Lloyd to Aaron Lopez, Boston, 10 May 1756, in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 68.

5 Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, iii. (Boston, 1878), 546–547. See also Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1750–1751, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston, 1952), pp. 115, 135, 165, and Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, pp. 149–150. The date of the petition is misstated by Starbuck and others as 1750. The confusion is probably due to the fact that the period from 1 January to 24 March 1751, was considered part of 1750 under the Julian Calendar still in effect in Great Britain and the colonies.

6 Invoice, Benjamin Crabb to Obadiah Brown, Providence, 21 August 1751, and “Schem for a Contract with Obadiah Brown” in Miscellaneous Papers, Obadiah Brown, 1742–1757, Box B-814, Rhode Island Historical Society.

7 The assertion that Brown was disappointed with Crabb’s ability was made by Obed Macy in his History of Nantucket, published in 1835, p. 69. See also James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years (Providence, 1968), pp. 9, 89

8 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 1752–1753, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston, 1954), p. 78.

9 Journals of the House of Representatives, 1752–1753, pp. 132, 147, 153.

1 Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, ii. (Cambridge, 1962), p. 46. See also George Francis Dow, Whale Ships and Whaling (Salem, 1925), pp. 36–38.

2 A Pennsylvania candleworks is known to have been in operation in the 1750s, perhaps as early as November 1751, when Benjamin Franklin referred in a letter to “a new kind of Candles very convenient to read by,” which were made at Marcus Hook in Chester County. From the description, they seem almost certain to have been spermaceti rather than tallow candles: “You will find that they afford a clear white Light; may be held in the Hand, even in hot Weather, without softning; that their Drops do not make Grease Spots like those from common Candles; that they last much longer, and need little or no Snuffing.” Letter, Franklin to Susanna Wright, Philadelphia, 21 November 1751 in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, iv. (New Haven, 1961), 211.

3 The largest single collection of Lopez papers is in the Newport Historical Society. For biographical details, see Stanley F. Chyet, Lopez of Newport: Colonial American Merchant Prince (Detroit, 1970). On the Jewish merchants of Newport, see Jacob Rader Marcus, Early A merican Jewry: The Jews of New York, New England and Canada, i. (Philadelphia, 1951) and S. Broches, Jews in New England, Six Monographs: Jewish Merchants in Colonial Rhode Island (New York, 1942).

4 For specifications and equipment of various candleworks, see (1) “Account of Cost Spermaceti Works,” in Obadiah Brown, Misc. Papers, 1742–1757, Box B-814, Rhode Island Historical Society, (2) Letter, J. Palmer & Co. to Nicholas Brown & Co., 26 August 1763, in Brown Papers, P-U5, John Carter Brown Library, (3) “Spermaceti Agreement” in Commerce of Rhode Island, t. 137–139, and (4) William Rotch, Jr., Account Book, “Spermaceti Candle Mfg. Accounts, 1772–1776,” in New Bedford Free Public Library.

5 The most complete description of the process of refining head matter and spermaceti is in Charles H. Stevenson, “Aquatic Products in Arts and Industries: Fish Oils, Fats, and Waxes,” U. S. Fish Commission Report for 1902 (Washington, 1903), pp. 200–201, 244–247.

6 An impression of Hurd’s label for Rome is in the collection of the John Carter Brown Library. The label for Palmer & Co. is reproduced in Dow, Whale Ships and. Whaling, p. 37.

7 Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade and the Economic Development of Colonial North America, Appendix 6, pp. 211–126.

8 The story of Hancock’s participation in the whale-oil trade is told in detail by W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, 1945). See also N. S. B. Gras and Henrietta M. Larson, Casebook in American Business History (New York, 1939), pp. 66–69.

9 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 168–174.

1 Letter, Henry Cruger to Aaron Lopez, Bristol, England, 6 December 1769 in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 300.

2 The problems of smuggling head matter under the guise of common oil are vividly described in two “remarkably saucy” letters from Joseph Rotch & Sons to (1) Rivera & Co., Napth. & Isaac Hart, Thos. Robinson and Aaron Lopez, 31 July 1764, and (2) Robert Jenkins, 16 August 1764, both in Brown Papers, John Carter Brown Library.

3 On the Browns’ whaling ventures, see Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years, pp. 87–88. For Lopez, see his Ships’ Book, vol. 559, Lopez Papers, Newport Historical Society.

4 On the strategic position of the producers, see the series of letters from the Boston merchant, Henry Lloyd, to Aaron Lopez in 1755–1756, in Letters of Boston Merchants, 1. Baker Library, Harvard University. On the dominant position of the Rotch firm, see Lloyd’s letter to Lopez of 7 June 1756, in the Newport Historical Society, and the letter of another Boston merchant, John Rowe, to the London dealers, Booth and Lane, in Letter Book of John Rowe, 1759–1762, also in Baker Library. Pertinent material may also be found in Chapter iii of a doctoral dissertation, “The House of Rotch: Massachusetts Whaling Merchants, 1734–1828,” by Joseph L. McDevitt, Jr. (American University, 1978).

5 This and subsequent agreements of the “Spermaceti Trust” are best described in Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: The Colonial Years, pp. 94–103.

6 The text of the agreement is printed in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 88–92.

7 Letter, Collins & Rivera, Naph. Hart & Co., Aaron Lopez to R. Cranch & Co., Newport, 29 July 1762; letter, R. Cranch & Co. to Nicholas Brown & Co., 16 and 23 August 1762; Brown Papers, John Carter Brown Library, L & A 59–92 Sp. C. The letter to Cranch is printed in Marcus, Early American Jewry., i. 132–133.

8 The agreement is printed in Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 97–100.

9 Commerce of Rhode Island, i. 288–289.

1 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 226–227.

2 Letter, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 17 August 1764, as quoted in Gras and Larson, Casebook in American Business History, p. 67.

3 Letters, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 5, 18 April 1765, in Gras and Larson, Casebook, pp. 67–68.

4 Letters, Hancock to Barnard & Co., Boston, 17 April, 8 November 1766, in Gras and Larson, Casebook, pp. 67–68.

5 Baxter, The House of Hancock, pp. 243–250.

6 Ellis, History of New Bedford and Vicinity, 1602–1892, pp. 58–59.

7 Tax Valuation List, Dartmouth, 1771, Old Dartmouth Historical Society. The property taxed to Joseph Rotch & Sons exceeded in value the combined total of the next six propertied residents of New Bedford. See also John M. Bullard, The Rotches (New Bedford, 1947), pp. 14–15.

8 Nicholas Brown & Co. to Jacob Rodriguez Rivera & rest of Spermaceti Manufacturers at Newport, Providence, 21 January 1768, Brown Papers, P-R5, John Carter Brown Library.

9 William Rotch Account Book, “Spermaceti Candle Mfg. Accounts, 1772–1776,” New Bedford Free Public Library.

1 Letter, Jacob Rodriguez Rivera to Nicholas Brown & Co., Newport, 7 February, 16, 26 September 1769, and letter, William Rotch to the Manufacturers of Head Matter at Newport and Providence, 24 January 1774, both in Brown Papers, P-U5, John Carter Brown Library.

1 The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1878), iii. 1062.

2 The first Province Galley, a snow, served from 1694 to 1704 when she was sold. The second, built in 1705, ended her days as a merchant vessel eleven years later. Prince of Orange was a snow-rigged galley, lost in 1745. The ship Massachusetts-Frigate, the largest of the Province vessels until construction of King George, served for about nine years before being sold out for a West Indiaman. The activities of these, and other, smaller Province vessels are described in Howard M. Chapin’s companion volumes Privateer Ships and Sailors, The First Century of American Colonial Privateering, 7625–7725 (Toulon, 1926) and Privateering in King George’s War, 1730–1748 (Providence, 1928).

3 The Acts and Resolves…of the Massachusetts Bay, iii. 1062.

4 Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts (Boston, 1960), xxxiii. pt. 2, 434.

5 Reproduced in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxiv. (1928), 199.

6 Journals of the House of Representatives…, xxxiii. pt. 2, 33.

7 The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, No. 108, 25 April 1757.

8 Reproduced in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, lxiv. (1928), 200.

9 The Boston Gazette, and Country Journal, No. 127, 5 September 1757.

1 See Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, Caftain Samuel Tucker (1747–1833), Continental Navy (Salem, 1976).

2 See the “Journal of the Voyage of his Excell’y Thos. Pownall, Esq., Capn General and Governor in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts Bay, to Penobscot, and of his Proceedings in Establishing Possession of his Majesty’s Rights there in Behalf of the Said Province,” photostatic copy at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

3 Ibid.

4 The Boston Weekly News-Letter, No. 3017 (numbering out of sequence), 5 July 1759.

5 Ibid., No. 2940, 6 November 1760.

6 See The Boston News-Letter and New England Chronicle, No. 3043, 21 October 1762; No. 3083, 20 January 1763; and at the Public Record Office, London: Captain’s log of H.M.S. Northumberland, Adm. 51/3925; Captain’s log of H.M.S. Gosport, Adm. 51/406; Captain’s log of H.M.S. Syren, Adm. 51/966; and Admirals’ Correspondence (Colville), Adm. 1/482

1 Neil R. Stout, “Goals and Enforcement of British Colonial Policy, 1763–1775,” The American Neptune, xxvii. (1967), 211–220.

2 The memo of the Treasury was based on reports from the London Commissioners of Customs, 21 July and 16 September 1763, Treasury 1/426, Public Record Office; Order in Council, 4 October 1763, W. L. Grant and James Munro, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (6 vols., 1908–1912), iv. 569–572.

3 Instructions of Lord Colville, 15 October 1763, Admiralty 1/482, P.R.O. In direct quotations capitalizations and spellings have frequently been modernized.

4 3 Geo. iii c. 22, no. iv, Statutes at Large, xxv. 345–351.

5 Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, iv. 560–562. There is a printed copy in Adm. 1/3866, P.R.O.

6 This enumeration is taken from the 1771 Boston table of fees in T. 64/45, P.R.O. The other American ports are also listed there.

7 Captain John Brown to Customs Collector, 10 December 1763, Captain Brown to Admiral Colville, 12 December 1763, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 John Temple to Commander of H.M.S. Hawke, Boston, 19 December 1769, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Commissioners of Customs to John Temple, Custom House, London, 19 January 1765, T. 1/441; also Adm. 1/4286, P.R.O.

1 Ibid.

2 The theoretical ramifications of the case especially for smugglers are in Herbert A. Johnson and David Syrett, “Some Nice Sharp Quillets of the Customs Law: The New York Affair, 1763–1767,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, xxv. (1968), 432–451. As the case was not decided until 1767 I am not sure what influence this decision had on the practice of smuggling.

3 E.g., Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 19 May 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

4 Cf., e.g., Colville to [Archibald] Cleveland, Halifax, 10 April 1761, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.; Gambier to Philip Stephens, Boston, 6 November 1770, Adm. 1/483, P.R.O.

5 A Table of Dimensions etc., Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

6 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 19 May 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

7 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 18 June 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 26 July 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Thomas Hill to Colville, Newport, [30 June 1764], Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

1 New York Post Boy and Gazette, Supplement, 26 July 1764; see 2 August 1764.

2 Thomas Hill to Colville, Newport [circa 12 July 1764], Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.; Captain Smith [of Squirrel] to Colville, Rhode Island, 12 July 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

3 General Reports of Attorney and Solicitor General, 22 December 1765, Huntington MSS. HM 220, Huntington Library.

4 Thomas Lougharne to Colville, Halifax, 11 August 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

5 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 24 August 1764, 9 September 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

6 Colville to Philip Stephens, [Halifax], 24 August 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

7 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 September, 13 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

9 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 9 September, 13 November 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

1 An Account of the Disposition of H.M. Ships…14 December 1764, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

2 An Account of the Disposition of H.M. Ships…10 July and 7 November 1765, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

3 Colville to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 7 June, 31 July 1766, Adm. 1/482, P.R.O.

4 Samuel Hood to Philip Stephens, Halifax, 28 July, 24 October 1767, 28 March, 23 October, 11 July 1768, Adm. 1/483, P.R.O.; Massachusetts Gazette, 10 November 1768.

5 L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel, eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965), ii. 173–210, especially, 180.

6 An Account of Warrants…of Incidental Expenses, 7 September 1767 to 10 November 1769, T. 1/461, P.R.O. These figures do not agree with those in the Legal Papers of John Adams (see footnote 5 above); nor with the accusation of John Temple that the cost was £1,500. John Temple to “My Lord Duke,” Boston, 25 October 1769, T. 1/469, P.R.O.

7 Reid had fought in the last war as a midshipman and mate. Colville had promised him a post in North America but was unable to obtain one. He had commanded the packet between Halifax and Boston. He was recommended to the command of Liberty by Colonel Dalrymple. Memo of William Reid, 29 January 1771, T. 1/482, P.R.O.

8 Deposition of William Reid, Newport, 21 July 1769, T. 1/471, P.R.O. See all the documents in this bundle connected with Liberty, especially Deposition of Joseph Adams, 21 July 1769; Deposition of Joseph Packwood, 21 July 1769; William Reid to Governor Joseph Wanton, Newport, Wednesday [19 July 1769], 11:00 P.M.; Charles Dudley and John Nicoll to Governor Wanton, Custom House, Rhode Island, 12 July 1769; Governor Wanton to Charles Dudley and John Nicoll, July 1769, etc.

The man who may have started the whole business, Barnabas Wilson, a tidesman in New London, was roughly handled by the mob on 25 July 1769. John Miller and Thomas Moffatt to Commissioners of Customs, New London, 27 July 1769, T. 1/471, P.R.O. The Commissioners gave Wilson £2.5 for his trouble. An Account of Warrants, T. 1/461, P.R.O.

9 See, e.g., Commissioners of Customs to the Treasury, 25 January 1771, T. 1/483; 11 February 1773, T. 1/501, P.R.O.

1 Memo of William Reid, 29 January 1771, T. 1/482, P.R.O.

2 Advices from Amsterdam, copies to Commissioners of Customs, the Lords of Admiralty, Collector at New York, 7, 15 October 1770, T. 1/480; Andrew Elliot and Lambert Moore to Treasury, 7, 16 January 1771, T. 1/482; Commissioners of Customs to Treasury, Boston, 25 January 1771, T. 1/483; James Gambier to Philip Stephens, Boston, 16 November 1770, 21 January 1771, Adm. 1/483; John Swift to Commissioner of Customs, Philadelphia, 5 February 1771 [Cf. Custom House Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, xi. 1346]; John Swift to Treasury, Philadelphia, 30 April 1771, T. 1/485; John Swift to Commissioners of Customs, Philadelphia, 5 February 1771, T. 1/482; Richard Reeve to John Robinson, Boston, 1 March 1771, T. 1/482; Case, ibid.; John Swift to Andrew Allen, n.d., T. 1/485, P.R.O.

3 Commissioners of Customs to Treasury, Custom House, London, 21 July 1763, T. 1/426; An Account of Receipts, Payments…from 8 September 1767 to 5 January 1777, T. 1/461, P.R.O. Another set of figures in this bundle of documents for 1769 gives gross revenue as £42,787, payments as £5,106, net £37, 681; another set in T. 1/486 and another in T. 1/504 gives £40,024; £18,242; £21,181. See also Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, iv. 569–572.

4 An Account of the Duties…from the 10th of October 1766 to the 10th of October 1767, T. 1/452; An Account of Receipts, Payments…from 8 September 1767 to 5 January 1777, T. 1/461, P.R.O.