To secure a large sum of money due Robert Cary of London, Theophilus Pugh of Nansemond County mortgaged his lands, slaves, and vessels with all their boats. The vessels were listed as follows: ships, William and Betty, Prosperous Esther; sloops, Little Molly, Little Betty; schooners, Nansemond Frigate, Pugh. If the average planter had owned the equivalent of two ships, two sloops and two schooners, the total number of vessels in Virginia in the middle of the eighteenth century would have far exceeded any inventory reported.
The frame of a snow, which was to have been built by Thomas Rawlings, a ship-carpenter, for Mr. John Hood, merchant of Prince George County, was advertised for sale in 1745. The snow was to have been sixty feet keel; twenty-three feet, eight inches beam; ten feet hold; and four feet between decks. Also advertised for sale about the same time was a schooner, trimmed and well-fitted with sails and rigging to carry fifty hogsheads of tobacco. In March, 1746, the sloop Little Betty, burden fifty tons, was offered for sale with her sails, anchors, furniture, and tackle.
The advertisements of Virginia-built vessels in the 1750's, and in the 1760's, show a steady increase in the size of sloops and ships. The following are mentioned: a brig of eighty tons; several snows, one to carry 250 hogsheads of tobacco; and several schooners. Schooner rigged boats appeared in the colony early in the eighteenth century, and gradually increased in size and importance. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the schooner displaced the sloop as the principal coastwise vessel, and emerged during the Revolution as a distinctive American type. "The most spectacular event in the history of naval architecture in the eighteenth century was the emergence of the Chesapeake Bay clipper-schooner," says Arthur Pierce Middleton.
In April, 1767, John Hatley Norton came from London to be his father's agent with headquarters in Yorktown. He wrote home that his cousins, the Walker Brothers, had a shipyard at Hampton, and were building ships of new white oak, well calculated for the West Indies trade. A letter from John M. Jordon & Company, London, in 1770, reads in part as follows: "Mr. William Acrill desires you will make insurance of his brig, America, Captain William C. Latimer; in case of loss to receive four hundred pounds. She is chartered by a gentleman on the Rappahannock; and is now in Hampton Roads, and will sail tomorrow or next day; and in case she arrives safe, you are to receive her freight, and sell the vessel, provided you can get four hundred pounds for her."
Occasionally, we find an account of the use of a vessel of some kind or other for pleasure. In Fithian's Journal and Letters, the author writes in 1773, that his employer, Mr. Robert Carter of Nomini, prepared for a voyage in his schooner Harriot (named for his daughter), to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for oysters. The schooner was of forty tons burden, thirty-eight feet in length, fourteen feet beam, six feet in depth of hold, carried 1400 bushels of grain, and was valued at forty pounds sterling. Again from the Journal: "From Horn Point, we agreed to ride to one Mr. Camel's, who is Comptroller of the customs here. Before dinner, we borrowed the Comptroller's barge, which is an overgrown canoe, and diverted ourselves in the river which lies fronting his house."
Photograph by W. T. Radcliffe.
Susan Constant. Replica of the Ship that brought the first settlers to Jamestown, 1607
Photograph by W. T. Radcliffe.