Beauty of Schooners

The sails of ships in the southern Caribbean Style. Jambalaya was built in Carriacou, a historic center of the Caribbean, the boat building trade, using technqiues that are rapidly being lost to modernization. The keel is made of greenheart, a wood so dense it sank. Wood for the faraming had to be cut in the bush in Grenada - a laborious and exhausting process, because the wood had to be good form to take the boat. The process, which included local restrictions such as cutting wood when the moon is in decline, took three years and the 65-foot schooner was finally launched in 2003.

The Freedom Schooner Amistad, with its low, and extremely elegant hull tilted masts, was launched in 2000 at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, and is owned by Amistad America Inc., a nonprofit organization based in New Haven, Connecticut, whose mission is to educate the public about the history of slavery, discrimination and civil rights. The ship is a recreation of the early 19th century Baltimore clipper La Amistad, an American built, Spanish registered craft which became a powerful symbol of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Schooners were used to transport goods in many different environments, to travel to the coastal ocean and running on major waterways. They were very popular in North America, and at their peak during the late 19th century over 2000 schooners carried cargo back and forth across the Great Lakes region. Three-masted “terns” were a favorite platform of the Maritime provinces of Canada. The schooner barge, using a platform on a flat-bottomed schooner, foam-ended barge hull, have been very popular in North America for inland and coastal.  Three of the most famous racing yachts, America, Atlantic and the Bluenose were schooners Essex, Massachusetts was the most significant shipbuilding center for schooners.By the 1850s, over 50 vessels a year were being launched from 15 shipyards and Essex became recognized worldwide as North America’s center for fishing schooner construction. In total, Essex launched over 4,000 schooners, most headed for the Gloucester, Massachusetts in the huge fishing industry.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911, the first schooner ship’s protector of Baumeister was Andrew Robinson and in 1713, Gloucester, Massachusetts. The legend says that the name of the schooner was the result of a spectator exclaimed: “Oh, how they Scoon,” a Scottish word that Scoon skip or skim over the water. Robinson replied, “A schooner let her be.” According to Walter William Skeat, the schooner term comes from the word Scoon, while the sch spelling comes from the subsequent adoption of the spelling in Dutch and German. So that’s how the word “Schooner”.