Snow Squall
Mainers lived within a quasi-feudal civic order whose coherence rested upon the economic tides of shipbuilding and maritime trade. Captain W. J. Lewis Parker captured this social ecology when he observed that vessels were “built and officered by local men, managed by a leading citizen, and owned by the builder, the captain, the sailmaker, the doctor, and a score of other substantial townspeople.” Yet by the mid-nineteenth century this tightknit town structure unique to early New England began to loosen. Money centers like Boston and New York now held greater sway over the region’s economic life. Simultaneously, the Industrial Revolution opened new avenues for employment, rendering “going before the mast” less compelling to Maine’s rural youth. Shipboard wages, depressed by owners’ evasion of US cabotage laws, further eroded the viability of this vocation.
Within this shifting landscape, the Snow Squall emerged as one of approximately ninety Maine-built clipper ships. Snow Squall was built by two rogue brothers in a fly-by-night shipyard in Portland in 1851. She was small in scale at 151 feet in length, required a relatively compact crew of 20, and was rated at 742 tons register though her slightly beamier ratio enabled her to carry as much as 800 tons of cargo. Shortly after her launch, she was delivered to New York and acquired by what became her lifetime owner for less than $40,000. The brothers built only 4 vessels after which one brother moved to Boston to run his clothing business and the other brother, disappeared.
During her career, the Snow Squall circulated through trade routes touching Europe, Asia, and South America. A representative itinerary might proceed from New York City to Richmond, Virginia then onward to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and finally to New Orleans, Louisiana. (In the years preceding the Civil War, Richmond exported large quantities of flour to Brazil, where it was exchanged for coffee, at the time making Richmond the nation’s leading coffee port.)
Although the typical wooden vessel would survive a decade, the Snow Squall sailed for thirteen years, accumulating a series of notable episodes -- including an escape from the Confederate raider Tuscaloosa. Her career hove to in the Falkland Islands, where she met the same peril that had claimed the General Grant: a becalmed vessel, near shore, suddenly finds itself swept into a mortal hazard. This was the anticlimactic fate that befell the Snow Squall in 1864.
