The Single-masted Fishery

From the protected coves to either side of Halibut Point fishermen operated sailing craft to increase their range, speed, and capacity in making a living.

The single mast with sails fore and aft distinguishes the sloop rig. The simplest arrangement is a mainsail and jib. The reach for greater capacity, requiring greater hull length and sail area, necessitates additional crew to hoist the sails up taller masts. At a certain sized hull the sloop rig becomes unwieldy and gives way to splitting the sail plan between two masts, in the schooner rig.

The years between 1880 and 1907, when auxiliary engines began to be utilized, saw the rise and fall of larger-hulled sloop boats in the Cape Ann fishing fleet. These single-masted clippers were typically constructed with deck lengths of forty to sixty feet. 

Only in the highly specialized business of freighting stone from Cape Ann quarries did the commercial sloop rig survive into the early decades of the twentieth century. The large single mast was ideally suited as a derrick post for working the heavy loading boom. The flagship of the Cape Ann Granite Company, the sloop Albert Baldwin, measured 86 feet at the waterline. Its main mast towered 90 feet, extended by a top mast of 43 feet. The huge mainsail, over 1,100 square yards, was the largest ever made in the lofts of Gloucester or Boston. It required a crew of four or five men to handle it.

Lanes Cove, late nineteenth century
Old Lanesville Collection, Lanesville Community Center

Mast and sail to harness wind power were added to water craft of all sizes and purposes. In the foreground of the Lanes Cove photo above, a man holds a portable rig to set in his dory when conditions and intentions dictate. He is easily able to manage operations by himself, for a low investment but limited capability.
 
Moored out in the Cove are a 'sloop boat' and two small fishing schooners. Behind them on the pier the tripod masts of a granite derrick complicate the picture of diverse spar configurations. The term 'sloop boat' on Cape Ann came to be applied to vessels of this type smaller in size than standard fishing schooners. A similar term was applied to small schooners, ie, 'schooner boats,' which would be appropriate to the ones pictured here. The addition of 'boat' to the name of the rig indicated diminutive size.

Pigeon Cove Harbor, early twentieth century
Charles Cleaves photo, Sandy Bay Historical Society



 During this period the small craft of the inshore fishing fleet at the north end of Cape Ann had to compete for wharf space with the robust vessels of the granite industry, which had capitalized the harbor developments, generated greater commercial value, and paid  the bulk of the wharfage fees. 

Pigeon Cove Harbor detail

In these photographs, dories and low-draft sloop-rigged boats up to about twenty-five feet in length are tethered along the margins of the harbor.



Fishing boats, Pigeon Cove c. 1907
Postcard courtesy of Bob Ambrogi

Fish houses line the shoulders of the Cove. The still modest facilities of the Cape Ann Tool Company are off to the left.

Market boats at Boston's T Wharf, 1913
Henry D. Fisher photo

In this photograph the sloop-boat Lillian, fishing with trawl lines or gill nets on ledges off Cape Ann with a crew of four, has offloaded 700 pounds of cod at Boston on April 25, 1913.

Gloucester sloop-boat Laura Enos
Launched 1901, 50' at deck
Model by Erik Ronnberg

Deeper water ports such as Gloucester harbor supported the larger sloop boats that became popular in the late nineteenth century, with the trim hull lines of a contemporary schooner at a much lower cost. The Laura Enos was the pride of a prospering immigrant from the Azores, engaged in various inshore fisheries. In the course of a day trip he could come around Halibut Point into the Ipswich Bay. Ultimately he might aspire to ownership of a full-sized schooner to reach the offshore banks.

Laura Enos model detail

Growing up in Gloucester, Erik Ronnberg watched his father make a model of a sloop-boat. "It was imprinted on me," he says. "A great-looking boat. That beauty is driven by, if not derived from, the fact that they have to go through the wind and the water with speed and safety. Their good looks follow along from that."

Sources

Howard I. Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships, 1935; and American Sailing Craft, 1936.

Down on T Wharf, The Boston Fisheries as Seen Through the Photographs of Henry D. Fisher, by Andrew W. German, Mystic Seaport Museum, 1982.

Erik Ronnberg, Maritime Curator at the Cape Ann Museum.

"One Survivor of the Famous Fleet Cape Ann Stone Sloops,"  an article by Captain Charlton Smith from an unidentified 1924 Boston newspaper in the files of the Annisquam Historical Society.

 

"Rockport's Old Salts Still Tell Thrilling Yarns of Stone Sloops" Boston Sunday Post April 8, 1945.