Schooner Sultana
On March 8, 1768 His Majesty’s Royal Navy purchased what would prove to be the smallest schooner ever to see active service in the British Royal Navy. At just 52 64/92 tons burthen (52-feet on deck), the schooner Sultana was the unlikeliest of warships. Built by American shipwrights at Benjamin Hallowell’s South Boston shipyard, Sultana had been conceived as a costal merchant schooner. Destined for a life of hard work in relative obscurity, Sultana’s fate changed forever when the British Parliament enacted the notorious Townsend Acts or “Tea Taxes” just as Sultana was being framed up in the Hallowell Yard in the summer of 1767. Along with a handful of other small American-built schooners, Sultana would be bought by the Royal Navy and see almost five years of active duty patrolling for American smugglers from Halifax, Nova Scotia to the Chesapeake Bay. The taxes that Sultana and her sister-ships enforced enraged American colonists as nothing had before and these vessels played an important and often overlooked role in sparking the conflict that would become the American Revolution.
Two hundred and thirty years later a handful of people from the small but proud town of Chestertown, Maryland got it into their heads to build a full-scale replica of Sultana. Though more than two centuries has passed since the Revolution, the story of British taxation was one familiar to every resident of this well preserved colonial port. Each May more than 15,000 people assemble on the banks of the Chester River to reenact the day in 1772 when the residents of Chestertown, following the example set by Boston a few months earlier, boarded a ship lying at anchor in their harbor, dumping its cargo of tea overboard in protest of British taxes (www.chestertownteaparty.com) . What better way to celebrate this legacy than to build a replica of one of the vessels that had harassed Chestertown’s revolutionary-era sea captains so long ago. The fact that Sultana had flown the British flag during the war for independence was not a deterrent for the people of Chestertown, but rather an attraction. While staunchly proud to be Americans, Chestertown retains an unusual affinity for the British heritage that was central to its founding as one of Maryland’s seven original ports in 1706.
The new Sultana was built under the direction of Master Shipwright, John E. Swain, the man who had first had the idea to build her. Assisted by a small team of professional shipwrights, Swain laid the keel for Sultana in 1998 and launched her almost three years later in the spring of 2001. In every sense of the word, Sultana’s construction was a community undertaking. The cost of building the small schooner was paid for by countless donations from local residents, more than three-thousand school children visited the shipyard in Chestertown to assist with Sultana’s construction and volunteers traveling from as far away as Ohio and New York contributed over 150,000 man-hours in labor.
In the decade since Sultana’s launch, the schooner has sailed as the “Schoolship of the Chesapeake,” boarding 60,000 students from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC for under-sail educational programs that encourage students to value the history and environment of the Chesapeake Bay. Sailing with a crew of professional educators, Sultana regularly visits ports throughout the Chesapeake including; Baltimore, Annapolis, St. Michaels, Oxford, Cambridge, Solomons, Washington and Norfolk. In addition to working with school aged students Sultana also works with hundreds of public school teachers, helping them develop creative ways to help bring history to life in their own classroom. In 2004 and 2007 Sultana’s educational accomplishments were recognized by the National Maritime Heritage Society with the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Maritime Education. Sultana Projects was also the recipient of “Tall Ship’s America” 2009 Sea Education Program of the Year Award. To learn more about Sultana visit: www.schoonersultana.org.
Where is the Sultana now?
May 6th.
