The Schooner Sultana and Maritime British America, 1768–72

Walking along the riverfront in Chestertown, Maryland, a visitor would see the expected assortment of small yachts and power boats, but one vessel would stand out, in ochre and black with stout wooden masts sticking up: the Schooner Sultana, a careful reconstruction of a Boston-built original, launched in 1767. A small, ordinary working type, she was taken into the Royal Navy as an exigency, and used for customs enforcement on the Eastern Seaboard during the period of the Townshend Duties. Owned and operated since 2000 by the Sultana Education Foundation, the schooner offers the closest thing possible to the experience of a ubiquitous eighteenth-century working craft. Since the Royal Navy carefully documented her, we also have a full set of records for an ordinary vessel--something most rare for this period. Sultana, then, provides both scholars and the public an unusual entree into the working life of eighteenth-century British America.

I will discuss both the research that went into my microhistory monograph on Sultana's career, and what I have learned about the reconstruction's role in preserving and presenting the history of 18th-century British America to students and the public.