A photograph of a watercolor by Louis Roux. The photo notes that the painting is owned by Amos Nichols. The bark Herbert Black was built in 1873 in Searsport by Marlboro Packard and stranded in Preston, England in 1919.
In 1895, Defender was built at the Herreshoff Company in Bristol, Rhode Island and successfully defended the America's Cup, with a crew from Deer Isle, Maine. Defender was radical, having a bronze bottom and aluminum topsides, creating a floating battery, which dissolved aluminum. She was dismantled in 1901, but was functional long enough to challenge the new Columbia in 1899 to become the Cup defender.
The Nabraska (sic) Nebraska was one of hundreds of packets (ships operating on schedule) sailing the Atlantic before the Civil War. She was built in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1845, for New York owners, and sailed to Liverpool that year and to Marseilles in 1847. She made at least one trip to China (1850), and like many packets, she switched to the southern cotton trade and was lost off Texas in 1857.
The British prided themselves on winning single-ship fights against the French. In June 1798, the 38-gun British frigate HMS Seahorse, under the command of Captain Edward J. Foote, captured the French frigate Le Sensible off the coast of Sicily. The battle, much of which took place at close quarters, lasted less than 15 minutes.
George Wasson, from a Brooksville family of shipbuilders and seafarers, painted and wrote about coastal Maine and the Penobscot Bay in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th. The Museum owns his last boat,Wave Crest, built in Brewer in 1916. This painting's donor's father, Percival Cushman, worked on Wave Crest with Wasson and cruised with him. When Wasson died Cushman inherited the boat and sailed out of Sorrento until boat was given to Frank Hatch who gave it to the Museum.
The John Carver was a bark built at the Carver yard in 1841, well before Waldo Pierce was born. Until 1870 she was Searsport owned then sold to New Bedford as a whaler. This painting does give the artist's impression of what the Searsport shore looked like, and shows the cords of wood in the foreground needed to heat houses in winter.
The Augusta E. Herrick was built in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1877 for William P. Herrick, a highly successful Swans Island, Maine, mackerel fisherman. Modeled and built by Daniel Poland, Herrick wanted a yacht-like vessel. He also wanted a fast vessel, and he got one that was fast both reaching and running. The bow was relatively long and fine. She was the only centerboard schooner built for the Banks fisheries; Herrick wanted the centerboard in order to be able to work in and out of some shallow Maine ports. Herrick sailed her until he sold her to Boston in 1891.
One of seven 3-masted schooners built by Bath's Goss & Sawyer yard in 1873. This one was for a Taunton, Massachusetts captain, J.M. Phillips, who sailed with a few breaks until 1886. After his death about 1898, his wife continued to own the vessel. These 3-masted schooners were the most common schooners in the coasting trades.
Senator Weber was built in Boston in 1853 as the ship Wellfleet. She sailed for Enoch Train’s Boston Liverpool Line of packets in 1854, then transferred to the Regular Line, sailing in the Boston-New Orleans cotton packet trade. The Civil War idled ships like the Wellfleet, and she was sold to Hamburg, Germany in 1863. There she was renamed Senator Weber and flew the flag of Hamburg. This painting was done when she was still the Wellfleet. It descended in the family of the American captain, Henry S.
The Endymion was a 40-gun British frigate of 1277 tons and 159 feet in length. She had a crew of 320 men when launched on the Thames in 1797. The President was a 44-gun American frigate built in New York City in 1800. This vessel fired the first shot of the war (of 1812) during a skirmish with the British frigate Belvidera on the evening of June 23, 1812.