SCHOONER THOMAS W. LAWSON

1902

The schooner Thomas W. Lawson, a steel hulled, seven masted, built byFore River Ship & Engine Company, Quincy, Massachusetts, launched on July 10, 1902, coasting $250,000. for the Pacific Ocean trade, but was used primarily to haul coal and oil on the east coast.

The captain of the schooner Lawson was Captain John G. Crowley, of

the Coastwise Transportation Company of Boston.

She was a pure sailing vessel, no auxiliary engine, was 475 feet long

overall, with a 395 foot deck, her 7 mast were 193 foot high, all equal,

which carried 25 sails, 7 'gaff' sails, 7 gaff topsail, 6 topmast staysails,

5 jib sails, fore staysails, jib, flying jib, jib topsail, balloon jib, 43.000

square feet of canvas. She was not a good sailng ship, her submerged

hull and was too large for the too small sail area and she never did carry

her intended cargo of 11,000 long ton capacity. Her top speed was knots.

The schooner Lawson size and design was a unsuccessful bid to keep

pure sailing vessels competitive with the oncoming steamship trade.

The ships steel hull had high bulwarks and double cellular bottom four

foot deep, using 1000 tons of water ballast, and registered for 5218

gross register tons.

The 7 masted schooner made use of 18 crew members, to include the

captain and the engineer. There were two continuous decks, poop and

forecastle decks, a large superstructure on the poop deck where the

captains cabin with fine furnishing and leather seats, officers mess and

rooms, a card room and rudder house. There were two deck houses on

the main deck, around mast #5 and behind mast #6. There were 6

hatches with access to the holds between the mast. Her “stockless”

anchors, two of them, weighed five tons each.

The emen associated with her criticized the sluggish maneuver and\

dubbed her 'the bathtub. She had problems in ports BECAUSE of her

displacement. The Lawson tended to yaw and needed strong winds to

be held on course.

In 1903 Captain Crowley had the topmast, gaff boom and all wooden spars

removed , withdrew from the coal trade, then chartered her out as a sea

going barge and carried cargoes of case oil.

1906 she was retrofitted for sail at Newport News for used as a bulk oil

carrier with a 60,000 barrel capacity for Sun Oil Company, the first

pure sailing tanker, with cargoes of bulk oil from Teaxas to the

eastern seaports.

The ship Thomas W. Lawson, wrecked in 1907 while under charter to

Standard Oil , set sail 19 November from Marcus Hook to London

with her cargo of 58.000 barrels light paraffin oil under a new captain,

Captain George Washington Dow and six new crew members, who were

not “able Seamen” and did not speak english. On November 20 she

cleared Cape Henlopen and set course for England in fair weather.

The weather turned poor the next day and the ship was not “seen” for

20 days which were extremely stormy and she had lost most of her sails,

all but one life boat, the breach of #6 hatch , her pumps, when she

reached the Celtic Sea NW of Scilly. December 13 entering the English

Channel the captain mistakenly passed inside Bishop Rock Lighthouse,

anchored between Nundeeps shallosws and Gunners Rocks NW Annet

to ride out a gale. While there Captin Dow refused efforts of lifeboat

crews from St. Agnes and St. Marys to abandon ship. He did accept

the pilot from Trinity House, Billy Cook Hicks, off the St. Agnes lifeboat

who came aboard a 5 pm Friday the 13^th. Early morning the storm

increased, the Lawson lost both port and starboard anchors, was smashed

against Shag Rock after being grounded on underwater rocks, the seven

mast, with crew, were lost to sea. The ship broke apart at mast #6 and

slid off into deeper waters. Captain Dow, the engineer Rowe, were the

only survivors.

William Lawson, born in 1857, a self made millionaire at

age 21, his fortune of $60 million, was a stock broker, a big risk

taker, superstitious, and had what was then the largest sailing ship afloat

the seven mast schooner.

Lawson, no stranger to grandiosity, had a large private estate near

Boston, Dreamworld, which had a 172 foot high flag pole.

Lawson lost $150,000 on the ship he financed which shortly lived.

There is a memorial seat, in the St. Agnes Churchyard, the nearest

inhabitable island to the wreck, located in 1969, the home of Billy

Cook Hicks, the pilot, faces the unmarked graves of the Thomas W. Lawson's crew.

Abstract: November 4, 2018, Harrison H., from WIKIPEDIA and the

June 2016 issue of Hemmings Motor News.