The Memoirs of Charles H. Cramp

by Augustus C. Buell

In 1750-51 two ships were built in West’s new yard, which exceeded in size any merchant vessels previously constructed in America. One of them was of three hundred and twenty and the other of four hundred tons burthen. They were sent to England with cargoes of colonial produce, and on arrival at London were both bought by the East India Company and placed in the regular East India and China fleet. They were as large as any merchant vessels built in England up to that time, and of superior model and construction. One of them—the larger of the two—remained on the list of the East India Company more than thirty years; and in 1751 had for one of her passengers to India, Warren Hastings, who was going out to Madras as a young clerk in the Civil Service, to become the first Governor-General of British India, and founder of the British Empire in Asia.

During this period, the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a new scheme of ship-building commended itself to the enterprise and ingenuity of Philadelphia shipwrights. This was the construction of what they called “raft-ships.”

The local supply of ship-timber in the forests of England, particularly of frames, knees, keels, and the larger spars, had begun to decline to the danger-point by 1750. The size of ships, both for commerce and for war, was constantly increasing. This increase incessantly involved the use of longer and heavier timbers for frames, larger knees and futtocks, and thicker planking. Meantime the forests of England became smaller and smaller. The great old trees had been cut down and sawed or hewn up, and the younger stems had not found time to grow in their stead.

Indeed, before 1750, England had begun to import ship-timber from the Baltic; but it was mostly deal boards used for cabin-work, ceilings, sheathings, etc. Now she began to look to her American Colonies for the heavier materials. It was difficult to load and stow this kind of timber through the hatchways of the ships then available. The ingenuity of Philadelphia shipwrights met this obstacle by building the timbers themselves into the form of ships, and they were then navigated across the Atlantic to be broken up on arrival in British ports. These “raft-ships” were built with bluff bows and square sterns, their sides being several feet thick. To make them water-tight, they were sheathed with two thicknesses of boards which “broke joints,” and were caulked. The largest of these, called the “Baron Renfrew,” measured the equivalent of five thousand tons in a regular merchant ship. She got safely across the ocean, but went ashore on Portland Bill in a fog and broke up. Most of her timber, however, was picked up by English and French vessels which cruised for weeks in search of it. Among the mast-timber she carried was one white pine tree ninety-one feet long by four feet eight inches diameter at the butt inside the bark. This tree was used for the mainmast of the “Royal George,” a three-decker then building at Chatham (1774). It was doubtless still in the ill-fated ship when she heeled over and went down at Portsmouth in 1782. The “Baron Renfrew” was the last of the “raft-ships.” The oncoming Revolution stopped all kinds of commerce for eight years, and though after the peace ship-timber was again exported to England, it went as hold or deck cargo in regular vessels.

Summing up the colonial period, it may be said that, while the records were imperfectly kept and some lost, enough is extant to show that between 1684 and 1744 one hundred and eighty-eight square-rigged ships and over seven hundred brigs and schooners, besides immense numbers of boats, river-sloops, fishing-yawls, etc., were built at Philadelphia. Her only rival in the Colonies during that period was Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but Philadelphia held the ascendency over all in the size and total tonnage of her ships.

That the Colonies should have developed the ship-building industry from their earliest existence was natural and necessary. If you take a modern map of the United States and draw from Maine to Georgia a heavy black line averaging one hundred miles back from the general trend of the sea-coast, you will have in close approximation the geography of colonial settlement at its maximum. In this belt, this “narrow fringe of civilization,” were concentrated for more than a century all the energies of English-speaking pioneers, rapidly increasing in numbers and incessantly augmenting the products of enterprise and industry which, from surplus over home consumption, had to seek markets over sea.

In those early days the population kept within easy reach of the coast or of the arms of the sea and estuaries which abound from the Savannah on the south to the Penobscot on the north. The back country, forming the eastern or Atlantic slope of the Appalachian chain, was little more than a hunting and trapping ground or a field for primitive trade and barter with the Indians. As for the vast “hinterland,” west of the Alleghenies, it was, up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the final struggle between England and France for supremacy on this continent began, an unbroken wilderness, inhabited only by hostile savages, and unknown to any white men except the Jesuit priests and the cunning traders of French Canada.

For all these reasons, the gaze of the English-speaking colonists from the earliest settlements to the beginning of the conquest of Canada was always bent toward the sea, and all their enterprise and energy were directed to the commerce of the ocean. Under such conditions, the development of skill in ship-building was inevitable; and with that necessity was also bred a scientific alertness in marine architecture itself which, as soon as political independence freed its scope, became supreme throughout the civilized world.

The outbreak of the Revolution of course, for the time being, put an end to merchant ship-building in all American ports. But in Philadelphia the paralysis was only temporary, and the energies heretofore directed toward construction of ships for the uses of peace were soon turned to the conversion of available merchantmen into vessels of war or privateers, and the building of new frigates ordered by Congress. The first American squadron, that of the ill-starred Commodore Esek Hopkins, was composed entirely of merchant vessels taken up in the harbor and converted into men-of-war in the shipyards of Philadelphia during the autumn of 1775.

It was in the selection and conversion of these four merchantmen into cruisers that Paul Jones, founder of the American navy, first gave to the United States his energies and his talents. Thus Philadelphia was the birthplace of a new sea-power, and her shipyards have ever since been the foremost contributors to its growth, until even now, though only a century and a quarter old, it has achieved imperial rank.