THE HISTORIC AMERICAN MERCHANT MARINE 



SURVEY 



By Frank A. Taylor 



Curator, Division of Engineering, United States National Museum 



[With 11 plates] 



The progressive development of watercraft can be discussed intel- 

 ligently only with accurate knowledge of the actual designs of hun- 

 dreds of specialized types of craft. The lack of such knowledge has 

 resulted in unsatisfactory generalizations about the designs of many 

 vessels which have figured prominently in our history and over- 

 emphasis upon relatively unimportant but better described types. 

 It is true that several authorities in the past have made compilations 

 of designs of watercraft and in more recent times many plans of im- 

 portant individual vessels have appeared in textbooks and professional 

 publications. But these are scant records of a large and involved 

 development and they have been used almost to exhaustion by stu- 

 dents and writers. Most of the inferences in regard to the develop- 

 ment of watercraft have been drawn rightly or wrongly from these 

 too meager sources. 



Plans of early naval vessels are preserved in the archives of national 

 admiralty offices and are reasonably available, but there are no com- 

 parable collections of plans of merchant vessels. In the United 

 States about a half-dozen museums, libraries, and universities and an 

 equal number of collectors and students have worth while collec- 

 tions. The bulk of these, however, relates to large merchant vessels 

 of the period of 1840 to 1885 which were built at well-established yards 

 where the models and plans from which they were built were fortu- 

 nately preserved. Though much of the missing information has been 

 irrecoverably lost, there is in existence a large quantity of invaluable 

 evidence which requires to be sought out and preserved. It was to 

 secure as much as possible of the passing evidence now available and 

 to put it into form for preservation and distribution that the Historic 

 American Merchant Marine Survey was created. 



The scheme of the Survey as conceived by its originator and director, 

 Eric J. Steinlein, was to establish a project of the Works Progress 

 Administration to employ unemployed professional people and 

 mechanics from the ship and boat building industries to make marine 

 architectural drawings, photographs, and written reports describing 

 old vessels. The records produced were to be preserved and made 



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