A Mast for Every Day in the Week

We finally got to see the enormous metal sculpture of the schooner Wyoming on the campus of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. Maine. The life-sized sculpture outlines the six-masted ship launched at this spot on the Kennebec River in 1909. At over 400 feet from tip to tip, the schooner was the largest wooden ship ever built, we’re told. The towering skeletal “evocation” (showing six masts plus bow and stern) is now the largest public work of art in New England.

That visit reminded me of a photo in the Portsmouth Athenaeum archive of another over-the-top schooner named Thomas W. Lawson. Launched in 1902 this was the largest metal schooner in history. With one mast for every day of the week, it was the the only seven-master ever built. Named for a Boston millionaire, she was designed to carry coal and oil along the East Coast.

There are two pictures of the Thomas W. Lawson in the collection, but  no indication as to whether this monster steel-hulled sailing ship ever tackled the turbulent tides of Portsmouth Harbor.  There are, however, many photos of an unidentified five-masted schooner docked at Portsmouth in the early 20th century.  

Big was not necessarily better for the last of the commercial schooners. The Wyoming foundered in a storm in 1924 and sank off the coast of Cape Cod with the loss of all 14 crewmen.  The Thomas W. Lawson was only in its fifth year when it was destroyed in a storm while at anchor off the tip of Cornwall, England  in 1907. Only two of her 18 crewmen survived. Her cargo of 58,000 barrels of light paraffin oil was lost, creating what has been called the first large marine oil spill. Sometimes more is less.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson