It wasn’t too long ago—about a century—that some cargo ships still relied on the power of sail to move from port to port. Among them, one ship in particular commanded attention.
The Thomas W. Lawson, named for a copper baron in Boston, was the only seven-masted, steel-hulled schooner ever built. Launched in 1902, she was conceived for the Pacific trade, though she often hauled coal and oil along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
She was contracted in June 1901 to the Fore River Ship and Engine Company in Quincy, Massachusetts. There, naval architect Bowdoin B. Crowninshield designed what would become the largest schooner and largest pure sailing vessel ever built.
Unfortunately for Crowninshield, his design was flawed, and the Thomas W. Lawson was unable to live up to her projected profits. She was forced to carry a reduced capacity of goods so that her working draft would not run aground in shallow ports.
She was hard to miss on the water. At 475 feet long, she had seven 193-foot masts and 25 sails. On board were two continuous decks (a poop and forecastle), the captain’s room, an officers’ mess and rooms, a card room, and a rudder house separate from the living quarters.
In November 1907, the Thomas W. Lawson set out on a trans-Atlantic voyage to London carrying 58,000 barrels of light paraffin oil. Once inside the English Channel, she anchored between the Nundeeps shallows and Gunner’s Rock on December 13 to wait out an impending storm. In the night, the storm took a turn for the worse, and both of her anchor chains snapped. The schooner was thrown against Shag Rock, losing all seven masts and 16 of the 18 men on board.
Her bow now lies in 56 feet of water off the northeast side of Shag Rock and can be visited by scuba divers.
