Bath-built Vessels We Should All Know: The Rappahannock I
Courtesy of Maine Maritime Museum, PC-3. This is a photograph of a painting (whereabouts unknown) showing the vessel in close to its original appearance. Another painting of the Rappahannock, in the Museum’s collections, can be seen here.
Note: This is the first in a planned series about Bath-built vessels by Nathan R. Lipfert, Curator Emeritus of the Maine Maritime Museum and current Board President of the Bath Historical Society.
Claim to Fame: When launched, the Rappahannock was the largest merchant ship in the world, and the largest merchantman that had yet been built (see stats below) in the United States.
Rappahannock was originally painted with simulated gunports, in the style of the time. Amos L. Allen, of Bath, designed the ship to be a cotton freighter, bluff-bowed and kettle-bottomed so that as many cotton bales as possible could be packed into her hold. Like many cotton ships, her hull was designed to be a rule-beater, cheating the tonnage rules of the time which had been written for eighteenth-century vessels. As a result, Rappahannock’s owners paid port fees on less than 75% of the ship’s actual tonnage capacity. (U.S. tonnage formulas were not changed until 1865.)
This monster ship was operated mostly as a cotton freighter between New Orleans and Liverpool, depending on the labor of enslaved persons to grow and harvest the cotton, bale the cotton, and “screw” the cotton tightly in the hold of the ship. Rappahannock was large enough to affect the economy of the trade, and reputedly freight rates would fall when it was known she was coming up the Mississippi to load at New Orleans. If that was true, she made up for it by carrying more cotton. Her first cargo was a record 3,856 bales; in 1844 she made another haul of 4,317 bales. Summers Rappahannock tended to run as a New York – Liverpool packet, bringing in as many as 600 European immigrants in the space between the ship’s main deck and lower deck.
The ship’s figurehead was a full-length figure of a native American, carved by Freeman H. Morse of Bath. It can be dimly seen in the above photograph of a painting of the vessel. The present whereabouts of the painting, which must have existed in a local family (both captains were from Phippsburg), is not known. Rappahannock was sold in England in December 1859.
Launched: June 23, 1841
Designer: Amos L. Allen of Bath, age 30
Master Builder: Stephen Larrabee of Bath
Shipyard: Clark & Sewall, Bath
Rig: Full-rigged ship
Tonnage: 1,133
Length: 179.5 feet
Breadth: 37 feet
Depth of hold: 18.5 feet
Owners: Freeman Clark, Clark & Sewall, & Sprague Robinson & Co.
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