very acti\-c. Large vessels were rigged as ships or 

 briganlincs, in the Enghsh manner, of course. 



The timber employed in colonial ship and boat 

 Ixiilding offered many prol)Iems to the early builders, 

 for while there ivas apparently suitable timber avail- 

 able, some of it was then unfamiliar to English 

 builders. Gradually the colonial builders found 

 woods that were useful to their purposes. In the 

 northern colonies native oak, cedar, white pine, 

 spruce, elm, maple, and juniper (or hackmatack) were 

 commonly employed. In New England spruce top 

 timbers were used in the framing of many ships to save 

 topside weight; sometimes hackmatack or cedar was 

 used for this purpose. In the Chesapeake Bay region 

 frames were made of mulberry, cedar, laurel, or oak; 

 planking was oak or southern pine. On the Chesa- 

 peake and northward to southern New England 

 chestnut was used also for framing and for general 

 structural purposes; farther south cypress and li\-e 

 oak were employed; there, too, long-leaf yellow pine, 

 e\-entually to become one of the most important 

 American shipbuilding timbers, was found %-ery 

 suitable for both planking and structure. Due to 

 lack of capital, the colonial ship and boat builders 

 were usually unable to maintain a stock of well 

 seasoned timber and this led to many colonial-built 

 \-esscls ha\-ing a rather short life, as the green timber 

 often employed rotted very rapidly, particularly if 

 the vessel were sent south to the West Indies in the 

 first few years of her life. 



The tools employed by the colonial builders were 

 the common hand tools of the period — the axe, 

 hatchet, hand saw (rip and crosscut), a pit saw for 

 shaping frames and getting out plank, hand planes, 

 adze, maul, hammer, chi.sels, scrapers, and scpiares, 

 and measuring devices. Water-powered sawmills of 

 the jigsaw type were established in the northern 

 colonies at an early date, but the location of most 

 shipyards and boatbuilding areas prevented the use 

 of sawmills until other forms of power were available. 

 In fact, steam-powered sawmills were not commonly 

 used in shipyards until after 1840. 



The 18th century saw a great increase in American 

 ship and boat building. Increasing wealth and 

 trade created demands for additional types of small 

 boat such as the wherry, whaleboat, barge, cutter, 

 yawl boat, moses boat, longb(jat (or launch as it %vas 

 later known), dory, periagua, and cutter. Of these, 

 the moses boat and dory may ha\'e been of American 

 design. The moses boat was a square-stcrned rowing 

 boat having marked rocker in the keel and great 



sheer, used originally in the West Indian trade as a 

 ship's lighter to handle casks. These boats were also 

 used in the Maryland and Virginia tobacco trade. 

 The dory was a flat-bottomed skiff, as it is today, and 

 may have developed from the flat-bottomed skiff or 

 plank canoe of the colonial lumbermen, that later 

 became known as drive boats, or bateaux. The other 

 types were of European origin and most of them were 

 ships' boats. 



The name periagua, it is thought, was of West 

 Indian origin and was originally applied to a large 

 dugout canoe with the sides raised by plank and fitted 

 to sail. Later the name became applied to a form of 

 shallop having the foremast raked forward and the 

 mainmast raked aft; these were often craft of some 

 size and were usually decked wholly or in part. In 

 this century the name shallop became less popular 

 and the type, often called a 2-mast boat, gradually 

 cle\-eloped into the famed Chebacco boat of New 

 England and into large 2-masted, decked, river trad- 

 ers, the last survival of which was probably to be found 

 in the St. John River woodboats in New Brimswick, 

 Canada. Vessels of this class were in use on the 

 Hudson River at least as late as 1845. 



.Ships built by colonial builders increased in size 

 and na\-al shipbuilding began; the first Royal Navy 

 ship built in the colonies was the 4th Rate Falkland, 

 built by contract at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 

 in 1690. This ship was followed by three or four 

 others and by numerous sloops, brigs, snows, and 

 schooners intended for service in America, either on 

 the Lakes or on the coast. Merchant ships were all 

 of English types, apparently. 



In the early years of the 18th century the construc- 

 tion of fast sailing v^essels became profitable. This 

 ^vas largely due to profitable but illegal trades open 

 to colonial traders in the ^Vest Indies, as well as to the 

 unstable international conditions that made the seas 

 unsafe for slow-sailing vessels. The American "gal- 

 lies," first built late in the 17th century, remained 

 popular; and small, swift sloops, schooners and brigan- 

 tincs were also constructed. On the Chesapeake, in 

 particular, the construction of small, fast vessels 

 became common. The type chosen \vas the old West 

 Indian sloop, or Jamaica sloop which, by this time, 

 had been transplanted to Bermuda and was now 

 connnonly called the Bermuda sloop. 



This was a keel sloop of some size, up to 65 feet in 

 length, having a straight, rising floor, well rounded 

 bilge, and rather upright topside, giving it a rather 

 "heart-shaped" midsection in extreme cases. The 



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