B A C K   T H E N

Coppered At Knightville

The full-rigged ship St. John Smith in dry dock at Knightville, Cape Elizabeth (now South Portland), May 1874. Newly built at Kennebunkport, the Smith has been towed to Portland to be “copper” sheathed. The local press customarily described every new vessel as being the most wonderful nautical advancement since the ark:
She is a handsome specimen of marine architecture and was looked upon with admiration by the large number that had gathered on the wharves as she proceeded up the harbor. No expense has been spared to render her perfect in every respect. Every modern improvement has been applied, and she is the pride of her owners, who embrace several of our prominent citizens ....

The ship is of 2,220 tons burthen—the largest ever built in this State. Her length is 237 feet; she is 42-1/2 feet breadth of beam, and 30 feet depth of hold. She rates at French Veritas A1 for eleven years. She hails from this port. After she has been coppered she will sail for New York to load for San Francisco. From thence she will sail in Sutton & Co.’s line for Harvre with a cargo of wheat. –The [Portland] Daily Argus, May 5, 1874.

The owners included Mr. Smith, who had paid for the compliment and could afford it. In 1874 the fleet managed by Captain Jacob S. Winslow, to which the Smith belonged, numbered eighty-five vessels, mostly schooners and barks.1 The ship’s builders were Titcomb & Thompson. Nathaniel Lord Thompson, despite financial depression, built in 1873 and ‘74, either singly or with Joseph Titcomb, one barkentine, seven three-masted schooners, and four fullrigged ships.2 The Smith was eclipsed in October by Thompson’s four-masted bark Ocean King (called a “ship”), the second such American vessel). In 1875, Thompson suffered a severe financial reversal.3 All told, Captain Thompson was “instrumental” in the construction of over one hundred vessels!”

A biography by Thompson’s daughter omits any mention of the St. John Smith (the custom-house certificate was signed by her master carpenter, a common practice.) This oversight likely reflected the fact that the ship was branded “of weak construction,” and, in 1881, underwent major repairs, a most unusual occurrence for a Cape Horner. In 1882 she went missing. Most of her brief career had been spent in the San Francisco, New York, Liverpool circuit. The ship J. B. Brown, also built in l874 by Thompson, survived nearly thirty years of very hard service; the Ocean King had a troubled life, but was well built. Fred Perry, of Rockland, watched the Smith depart on her final voyage.

Early the following Sunday morning I went over to Birkenhead to say good-bye to Captain Johnny Fitz [of Portland] and wish him good luck on his first voyage as master .... As the ship glided out into the channel and swung her bow down the river under the strain of the tightening hawser, Captain Johnny stood on the quarter-deck waiving his hand in a parting salute.

Completed in 1869, the dock complex consisted of two basins, one large enough for the British steamships serving the Grand Trunk. Devised by Captain James Simpson, a New Yorker, it was built of planks and timbers and constructed on top of 5,450 piles. The hollow gate, lower right, containing ballast and ballast chambers, fitted into slots. Water entered he dock through openings in the gate, and the gate was then pumped out, floated, and warped away. After a vessel had entered, the gate was warped back and sunk in place. Steam pumps emptied the chamber in two hours’ time. In 1883, the dock caught a large school of fat herring. The dock closed in 1890; the basin may yet be seen.

Whatever she may have lacked, the St. John Smith bore a handsome “elliptical” stern with wonderful carving, likely the work of Portland’s Littlefield Brothers. Typical for ships of her day, she was deep but not particularly lofty, and both aspects are accentuated by the camera. The slight convex “swell,” or “tumblehome,” of her topsides is a remnant of the old cotton-shipping era, when both tonnage measurement rules and the light weight of cotton cargoes resulted in hulls built beamier at the waterline than at deck level.

In 1874, twenty-one full-rigged ships, fifty-one barks, seven barkentines, sixty-one brigs, 135 schooners, thirty-seven sloops—including big stone sloops—twenty-seven steamers, and eighty-one vessels under twenty tons had “Portland” lettered on their stern. Many, however, belonged to other Casco Bay towns that fell within the Portland customs district. A commandment made about 1870 (later rescinded) to afix “Portland” to all district vessels’ sterns greatly annoyed the proud ship owners of Yarmouth, Freeport, Harpswell, and Brunswick. Master George Skolfield added, underneath “Portland,” “Made in Brunswick.”

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