Product Code Database
Scottish Maid was designed to take advantage of a deficiency in Britain's tonnage laws of 1836 so that her officially measured tonnage, and hence tax payable, was low compared with her load carrying capacity. As her designers anticipated, her shape of hull produced a fast vessel and to optimise this her bow (pointed front) was given an innovative shape to cut through the water cleanly – a profile that turned out to be particularly successful. The extreme clipper ships later in the 19th century had substantially larger hulls though they were somewhat similar in shape.
The word "clipper" was first used for sailing vessels in the United States and argument arose in the 20th century about whether Scottish Maid's underlying design had been copied from America, and whether she should properly have been called a clipper at all. It now seems agreed that "clipper" is best regarded as simply a name for a fast Merchant ship sailing vessel and the particular design was arrived at independently on the two sides of the Atlantic.
Much of Scottish Maid's career was transporting passengers and goods between Aberdeen and London. She was lost in a storm off the Farne Islands in 1888; the crew escaped by lifeboat.
Anxious that such a radical design would not be approved by the purchasers, Halls shipyard built the new vessel starting from the stern and then constructed a temporary "skeleton" bow at the front to gain Aberdeen Line's approval. Once completed and launched, the Scottish Maid exceeded expectations.
| Original model in sail |
| Half-hull model |
Scottish Maid was designed and built after Alexander Hall had handed over the firm he had founded to his sons, James and William. She was a two-masted gaff-rigged schooner with a topsail and her carvel hull included a single deck and boasted a female figurehead. She carried a clinker-built longboat and jolly boat.
In America some vessels, particularly the Baltimore clippers, had been called clippers for some time – Scottish Maid and her sister vessels also started to become known under this name which became associated with their particular shape of hull. Scottish Maid's "clipper bow", later also to be called the "Aberdeen bow", was designed to make the vessel fast and maneuverable. Scale models were tested in a water tank. A pointed bow was selected for the hull with the stem sharply Raked stem forward (at some 50° from vertical) and the sternpost and masts raked aft. Then a mock-up was fitted to a conventional hull to demonstrate to the owners the intended design. Not only was the bow raked forward but the planking of the hull went over the stem, right to the front of the bow so the vessel cut the water cleanly. The bowsprit was kept low to leave room for larger . The bow-lines were straight although below the waterline they were slightly hollow.
The vessel proved to be very fast, travelling between Aberdeen and London () in 49 hours at an average speed of about 9 knots and competing well against steam driven so in 1842 Hall's built three sister ships of the same design.
In February 1854 Scottish Maid carried emigrant passengers to Australia who wrote to the press praising the attention and kindness given to them by the captain.
In 1853 the collectors of excise brought a case against the ship's master, Arthur Sinclair, who had only declared one gallon of whisky but over three gallons were found on board. The case was dismissed after Sinclair said that he knew nothing of the extra spirit. In 1862 one of the crew fell overboard and was drowned while the vessel was in tow down the River Tyne at Jarrow. When in passage from Stettin to Newcastle in 1867 she met drift ice and was forced ashore at Kronborg. She was helped off and towed in to Elsinore.
In 1884 the vessel was underway to Sunderland when she got caught in a severe storm that sank several other vessels. Scottish Maid was blown past her destination but was able to anchor in Bridlington Bay from where she was towed in to Bridlington. She made her own way back to Sunderland but from there had to be towed back to Aberdeen for major repairs because her and rigging had been destroyed.
On 26 August 1888, when carrying a cargo of 200 tons of stone from Aberdeen to Newcastle, Scottish Maid struck the Knivestone reef, a mostly submerged reef one kilometre farther offshore than Longstone Rock in the Farne Islands, the site of Longstone Lighthouse and the famous 1838 Grace Darling rescue. After the crew had tried for nearly seven hours to pump out the incoming seawater they had to abandon ship as Scottish Maid sank and was totally wrecked. The six crew were able to reach shore safely near Seahouses using their lifeboat.
The broad, short shape of the hulls of these vessels was required by a 1784 anti-smuggling law that required that the length of a vessel (excluding ) should be no more than 3.5 times longer than its beam. In 1836 the law was changed to make it possible to have narrower ships so vessels intended to be fast could take advantage of this.
Aberdeen's first transoceanic tea clippers, built in 1846, did not show a particular turn of speed because the "Aberdeen bow" was less well suited to larger . Nonetheless, for smaller vessels the Aberdeen bow became well known in shipbuilding circles and the ships became called "clippers" Hall's clipper ship Stornoway, built in 1850, soon became known as a "China clipper". The Aberdeen-built Thermopylae of 1868 was to compete with Cutty Sark (1869) but 1869 was the year of the last clipper, Caliph, to be built in Aberdeen because the opening of the Suez Canal made them obsolescent.
Provoked by Cable's jingoism article, John Lyman responded in 1944 with "The Scottish Maid as 'the World's First Clipper saying that the motivation for the Scottish vessel's hull profile was to avoid tax, not to increase speed, and that many similarly sized vessels of that era in both Europe and America had a similar shape of hull. The later larger clippers, now sometimes called , for structural reasons could not have a highly raked stem and these vessels were first built in the United States.
R. C. Anderson responded in 1945 with "Hollow Bows and 'First Clippers citing a well-made professional model in a Swedish museum of an English three-decker of 1665–1670 with a bow below the waterline more hollow than Rainbow. In 1946 William Salisbury wrote in "Hollow Water-Lines and Early Clippers" that Scottish Maid was simply one of the earlier clippers and much more research was needed in Britain to decide what interaction there was (if any) between American and British designs. J.Henderson reported he had inspected an original model at Hall's shipyard of a vessel with a greater stem rake than the Scottish Maid and its bow-lines were straight, not concave or convex.
In 1948 Howard Chapelle wrote of the claims in Boyd Cable's article "It is my opinion that these claims are wholly untenable and are to be accounted for only because Mr Cable did not know of the extensive American literature relating to the subject of clippers". Chapelle wrote that "clipper" had simply become a name for a fast sailing ship and that any discussion was useless unless it was with reference to a particular type of vessel. In 1973 MacGregor agreed with this opinion and wrote that, by any reasonable definition of clipper, Scottish Maid was not the first in Britain and doubted whether it was even the first in Aberdeen.
|
|
