B A C K T H E N
Well Smack of Beal’s Island
1894. The schooner Charlotte A. Beal, a “well smack” of Beal’s Island (officially she hailed from Machias), newly arrived at her home on Jonesport Reach. She was built at South Bristol by A & M (Albion and Menzries) Gamage, noted builders of smacks since 1854. Taking no chances with his new command, skipper Charles Henry Beal has set two anchors. The tide or wind has twisted the chains, which will make retrieving them a chore. A dory rides on a painter. A small lapstreak sloop, for inshore fishing, is moored astern.
Charles Henry Beal “owned in” the Beal along with John A. Beal, although probably a big Portland lobster dealer held the greater part of her. In 1895, she was joined by the Gamage-built E. McNickol, and both schooners “smacked” lobsters bought from eastern Maine and Nova Scotian fishermen to Portland. Both were handsome. The Beal is remembered as having been the “sleeker” of the two, while the slightly larger McNickol was slightly faster. The Beal, no slouch, once sailed from Beal’s to Boston, heavily laden, in forty-nine hours. She normally sailed with a crew of three, and her halyards are fitted with labor-saving jig tackles. The “halibut bend” of her springy “buggy whip” topmasts, created by rigging tension, helped to keep the foretopmast stay taut, the better for going to windward with the jib topsail set.
“Wet,” or “well,” smacks were fitted with an integral compartment flooded through numerous holes bored through the hull. (“Dry” smacks carried lobsters in barrels or crates.) Claws were not pegged. Smacks serving Portland dealers in the ‘80s cruised between Cape Porpoise and Grand Manan, usually making two-week trips and returning with up to 5,000 lobsters. In warm weather, when the oxygen content of the water was low, the losses among the over-crowded lobsters could be very high. When loaded with her perishable freight, a smack did not wish to be embayed with Portland far to windward—she must want to sail, and not on her ear. She must be handy in close quarters, despite her flooded gut. In a word, she must be “smart.”
In 1894, Portland was served by fifty-three smacks. The early ‘90s was a time of crisis in the fishery, yet during the first week of June 1893, twenty-one smacks landed 104,600 lobsters (not pounds of lobsters) at Portland. Smacking was a two-way trade, with the smacks returning Down East laden with supplies for the lobster catchers. In 1894, smacks were credited with $254,400 worth of purchases in Portland.
The early ‘90s saw the enactment of additional laws intended to preserve the collapsing lobster resource, while improved shipping facilities and the growing summer resort trade increased demand. The smackmen’s local knowledge placed them practically out of reach of the wardens, who accused them of flouting the laws through a variety of cute tricks and subterfuges. The trade in “raws” involved breaking off tails and claws of live undersized lobsters on the smacks, and packing them in ice. In 1891-92, 54,000 undersized lobsters were intercepted being shipped through Portland, an amount said to be but a small fraction of the total. New York was the chief market for illegal lobsters. Barrels of illegal lobsters were shipped under a mark rather than a name.
Whatever the questionable details of the business, the Charlotte A. Beal was a finely evolved craft, designed, assembled, and sailed with considerable skill. She was also a work of art, and no less. Like the ice sculptor, however, the shipbuilder worked with but a temporary medium, doomed by wreck and rot. The Charlotte A. Beal went missing on a winter passage, and is thought to have come to grief in the dangerous country of breaking ledges off Seal Island.
Not all smacks were intended for lobsters; in 1888, W.S. Trefethen, a Portland dealer, had an eel smack built.
Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 2, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860 - 1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine. 800-582-1899