THE SLOOPS OF THE HUDSON RIVER
A Historical and Design Survey

Foreword

These noble single-stickers were ubiquitous in the Hudson River. In 1832 there were apparently 1,200 of them in the 150-mile stretch between New York and Albany—a six-fold increase, incidentally, from the 200-odd noted just 20 years earlier. The sloops themselves nourished the trade and settlement that grew up along the banks of the Hudson, and after 1825 along the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes cities that were reached most economically by the Hudson-Erie waterway, and this exponentially growing traffic called for ever more, and bigger, sloops to be built.

But beyond the Hudson River—which really isn’t a river so much as it is a deep-water fjord reaching inland from the Atlantic—the sloops were only rarely to be found. Nothing like them was built outside the region until the type was revived, after it had become extinct, by the folk singer and conservationist Pete Seeger building the great sloop Clearwater. He had to go to the traditional shipyard of Harvey Gamage, in Maine, to get this beautiful and authentic (though somewhat modified) revenant constructed.

This extraordinary type evolved through three centuries of changing conditions, which Mr. Fontenoy traces with care. He rightly sees the ship as evolving in design to meet change, until a happy answer is reached, only to change again when new conditions of trade present fresh challenges. And he draws his conclusions about each stage of evolution from a full spectrum of sources, ranging from half models (no useful plans survive until the very last stage is reached) to travelers’ memoirs and above all the illustrations of the river and its traffics which engaged the attention of talented artists from the 1600s onward.

In a process of rediscovery that is fascinating to follow, the author gets measurements from known objects ashore, and transfers them to depicted shipping, checking and cross-checking his data continuously, and demolishing a good number of false assumptions along the way.

This broad-gauge approach to determining the characteristics of the type in history has the additional merit of bringing to life the culture that shaped the sloops and was nourished by them. An outstanding example is the French diarist Crèvecoeur delighting in taking passage aboard the stout 60-foot sloop Experiment—which in a wildly untypical escapade had the distinction of being the second ship to sail to China (for heaven’s sake!) under the flag of the newly independent United States. Her skipper, you see, had such remarkable tales to tell....

And readers will find Paul Fontenoy an entertaining and rewarding skipper to sail with too, in this voyage of rediscovery of a unique American vessel type.

PETER STANFORD, President,
National Maritime Historical Society

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