The 5-Masted Schooner EDNA HOYT

The 5-Masted Schooner EDNA HOYT

The 5-masted schooner EDNA HOYT tied up at Pier 11 on the East River, New York City. Immediately behind the HOYT is 120 Wall Street, a skyscraper in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, completed in 1930. The building is 399 ft. tall, has 34 floors, and is located on the easternmost portion of Wall Street, and also borders Pine Street and South Street. When she was launched in Thomaston in 1920, no one knew the EDNA HOYT would be the Atlantic’s last five-masted commercial schooner. As crowds gathered to see off the majestic ship — 284 feet long and more than 1,500 tons — no one knew she’d end her seagoing days as a lowly coal barge, stripped of her dignity, relieved of her refinement. As she slipped the bounds of Thomaston’s Dunn & Elliot shipyard, no one knew that the age of the schooner, so entwined with the state of the Edna Hoyt’s birth and berth, was slipping into history, marking the end of a remarkable burst of coastal construction and maritime grandeur.Schooners were generally faster and more maneuverable than square-rigged boats and required a smaller crew. Designed to maximize cargo space and travel without ballast, schooners could be profitable transporting a payload in one direction only, and in the 18th and 19th centuries, they became the backbone of coastal trade in the Americas, the equivalent of today’s long-haul trucks or freight trains.Maine’s schooner fleet carried lumber down the Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot rivers to the West Indies, then returned with the molasses that was a staple of meals in the lumber camps. The ships traveled to hubs like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Hampton Roads and brought to Maine the coal that became the 19th century’s vital energy source.While three- and four-masted schooners were most common in coastal trade, five-masted schooners arguably represent the pinnacle of the era’s wooden shipbuilding, vessels of uncommon beauty and unusual efficiency. 52 five-masters were built in Maine between 1888 and 1920. The first was the GOVERNOR AMES, 245 feet long, built by a crew of 150 in Waldoboro and launched in the Medomak River. On its first voyage, the ship lost its 115-foot foremast in high wind and ran aground, raising questions about the seaworthiness of what, at the time, was the largest cargo vessel ever built. The EDNA HOYT would be some 40 feet longer still.The HOYT was the last of three five-masters built in Thomaston, named for the wife of one of its investors and built at a cost of $280,000, just as the period of schooner prosperity was nearing its end. The American schooner fleet had made a fortune carrying cargo to South America and Africa during World War I, but after the war, there were too many ships ferrying too little cargo at too slow a speed. The result was a shipping depression that deepened in the early 1920s. The HOYT lost money in its early years because, as her last owner, Captain Harold G. Foss, once said, “She cost altogether too much.’’She was one of the last five-masted schooners in the world. The vessel suffered extensive damage in a 1937 gale and ended her days as a floating coal barge.