The Slavers : 229 



Mr. Howard I. Chappelle, in his History of American Sailing 

 Ships shows that at least some of the Baltimore Clippers were built 

 as slave ships and he believes that the conditions of the trade had an 

 influence on their design. At Page 156 he provides the plans of such 

 a vessel. 



As we have already noted, the Baltimore vessels came into use at 

 the time when efforts were being made to enforce decrees and laws 

 against the slave trade. Thus, there was a premium on sail-carrying 

 capacity and speed to avoid capture. There was also a premium on 

 being able to work to windward on a chase and this accounted for 

 the use of the fore-and-aft elements in the sail plan and particularly 

 for the preference for the schooner rig. 



Here a word of explanation is needed for the modern reader. Our 

 present-day schooners carry the fore-and-aft principle even to the 

 topsails; that is to say, their topsails are set between the topmast and 

 the gaff. Thus they lie in the same plain as the mainsail and the fore- 

 sail and are managed as a unit in tacking or in jibbing. 



The term "schooner" as it was used in the years, say, 1815 to i860, 

 designated a ship that we should call today a topsail schooner. That 

 is to say, on both the main- and the foremast it carried yards on 

 which a varying number of topsails were set. They were managed as 

 square sails. This was desirable or even necessary because the vessels 

 were usually operating in the trades with winds coming from some 

 quarter abaft the beam, a condition under which square sails are 

 relatively most effective. 



The West African slave ports were mostly small and this, as well 

 as the need to escape detection, made a small vessel desirable. The 

 water-line length of these vessels was not much in excess of 100 feet. 

 Many of the ports were also at the mouths of rivers where shoals and 

 sand bars are frequent so that the shallow draft of the Baltimore 

 vessels was also an advantage. 



Some of the risks of the trade were inherent in the character of 

 the Atlantic Ocean between the African coast and the western con- 

 tinents. Everything considered, the passage should have been an easy 

 one. Sailing from any of the ports north of the equator, the vessel, 

 once it left the African shore, could usually maneuver its way into 

 the favorable influences of the northeast trades and the North Equa- 

 torial Current. 



Most of the slavers, particularly in the later days of the trade, 

 though rather small vessels, usually made fast and satisfactory pas- 

 sages. KinJ{ajou, a schooner with a seventy -foot water line in which 



