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Figure 19. — Sharpie yacht Pelican built in 1885 for Florida waters. She was a 

 successful shoal-draft sailing cruiser. (Photo courtesy Wirth Munroe.) 



sharpies and sharpie schooners were used to carry fish 

 to market, but they had only very faint resemblance 

 to the original New Haven boat. 



The sharpie also appeared in the Great Lakes area, 

 but here its development seems to have been entirely 

 independent of the New Haven type. It is possible 

 that the Great Lakes sharpie devolved from the 

 common flatiron skiff". 



The sharpie yacht was introduced on Lake Cham- 

 plain in the late 1870's by Rev. W. H. H. Murray, 

 who wrote for Forest and Stream under the pen name 

 of "Adirondack Murray." The hull of the Champlain 

 sharpie retained most of the characteristics of the New 

 Haven hull, but the Champlain boats were fitted with 

 a wide variety of rigs, some highly experimental. A 

 few commercial sharpies were built at Burlington, 

 Vermont, for hauling produce on the lake, but most 

 of the sharpies built there were yachts. 



Double-Ended Sharpies 



The use of the principles of flatiron skiff design in 

 sharp-stern, or "double-ended," boats has been com- 

 mon. On the Chesapeake Bay a number of small, 

 double-ended sailing skiffs, usually fitted with a cen- 

 terboard and a single leg-of-mutton sail, were in use 

 in the 1880's. It is doubtful, however, that these skifTs 

 had any real relationship to the New Haven sharpie. 

 They may have developed from the "three-plank" 

 canoe ^^ used on the Bay in colonial times. 



The "cabin skiff," a double-ended, half-decked, 

 trunk-cabin boat with a long head and a cuddy 

 forward, was also in use on the Bay in the 1880's. 

 This boat, which was rigged like a bugeye, had a 

 bottom of planks that were over 3 inches thick, 



" A primitive craft made of three wide planks, one of which 

 formed the entire bottom. 



152 



BULLETIN 228: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 



