B A C K T H E N
Sloop Boat Classic
The Friendship-type sloop believed to be Dictator, built on Bremen Long Island in 1904 by Robert E. McLain, lying at the Stonington wharf of Boston lobster dealer Johnson & Young. Lobster cars—floating holding pens—lie awash in the foreground. The Dictator was owned by Steve Gray of York Island, hard by Isle au Haut. She has come to sell lobsters.
The Dictator was built (as shown here) without an engine and represented the final and finest form of the clipper-bowed Friendship sloop—some of the very last sloops had spoon bows. Non-Friendship builders called their boats “sloop boats” rather than “Friendship sloops.”
McLain’s sloops, in contrast to Wilbur Morse’s sloops built at Friendship, featured natural-growth hackmatack floor timbers. They also possessed unsurpassed style, which may reflect the influence of Captain George “Mel” McLain, a relative and a native of Bremen. A top Gloucester fishing captain, Mel McLain also was a leading “modeler” of handsome, big Gloucester fishing schooners. The similarities between the Dictator and some of Mel McLain’s schooners, and also the Gloucester “sloop boats,” are very strong. Significantly, for many years Friendship-area fishermen sailed their best sloops to Rockport and Gloucester in the winter to catch pollock.
The view affords a good sense of the great “power” or stability of the Dictator’s hull model, which permitted her to stand up while beating home against bitter winter nor’westers. The broad beam also provided a commodious, stable work place. Such a model created a large quartering “suction” wave, and required a stout spruce mast. A large sail plan was necessary for light air. The Dictator’s bridge-deck, between her cockpit and the cuddy, was a feature of the higher class of sloop and added strength. However, it would have retarded flooding in a bad knock-down but little, since the big cockpit drained right into the bilge.
Rub strakes aft protect the topsides from the bumping of traps. Although we cannot see her elliptical “schooner” stern to full advantage, its modeling is fully as artful as is that of her graceful clipper bow.
Although the sloops’ simple sternpost structure was readily bored for a propeller shaft, the coming of motors after the turn of the century dead-ended the species as a lobster boat. Many were sold to yachtsmen, who usually spoiled them as sailers by reducing the sail area.
Lobstermen installed engines in enlarged peapods, and began to build lobster-boat versions of pleasure launches, some attending Boston’s winter boat show for new ideas. The overnight adoption of engines by fishermen is a classic example of rapid, revolutionary technological change. Fisherman Gooden Grant of Isle au Haut recalled:
Willard Knox (made engines] in Rockland. Altogether I bought sixteen from him and he didn’t even send me one free. The Knox engine was a four horsepower make-and-break. You had to start it two or three hundred times a day. It was still better than rowing, although at times I didn’t think so. I damned near got my wrist broke spinning the big fly wheel. Lots of fellows got hurt. Still, the make-and-breaks were better than sail close in to shore. There’s not enough wind in the summer and sailing is work. You can’t get a sloop in close. I could load a pea pod with high wing boards twice a day.
Grant presumably meant Camden, not Rockland. Rice Brothers, East Boothbay shipbuilders, also manufactured engines of their own design.
The lapstrake peapod atop the lobster car may be the Dictator’s, and was probably built on Isle au Haut. The other peapod, with sailing rig and gear aboard, doubtless belongs to a local inshore lobster catcher.
The sloop Dictator still exists, although she might now just as well be called the Washington’s Axe, in honor of the sainted relic that has had six new handles and two new heads fitted since chopping down the cherry tree.
Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 1, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, 12 Starr St., Thomaston, Maine. 800-582-1899.