Sooloo

Type

Clipper

Period

19th Century

Nation

United States

Overview: Sooloo was a wooden, three-masted American merchant clipper built in Boston by John Taylor and sailed from 1861 to 1892 for the Salem firm of Silsbee and Pickman, which specialized in the Far East trade — the name itself is an older English spelling of "Sulu," the island group in the Philippines. Confusingly, an earlier and entirely separate clipper also named Sooloo (of Salem) was built in 1840 by Elias Jenks and Randall Hoyt and was lost off Sumatra in 1855; modelers researching this ship should take care not to conflate the two vessels sharing the name. Specifications: The 1861 Sooloo measured about 164.6 feet in length by 34.6 feet beam by 23 feet depth of hold, with a burthen of roughly 962.74 tons, and was rigged as a three-masted full-rigged wooden clipper. Service History: Sooloo entered service just as the Civil War was breaking out but avoided the fate of many Northern merchantmen preyed upon by Confederate commerce raiders. Her first voyage was to San Francisco, after which she became a regular trader to ports across Southeast Asia and the Far East, including Anjer, Singapore, Surabaya, Cebu, Iloilo, Manila, and Hong Kong, consistent with her owners' hemp trade with the Philippines. In 1887, while returning to Boston, she collided with the schooner Messenger and was essentially dismasted; underwriters wrote her off as a loss and she was sold on to a towing company for use as a barge, in which reduced role she ultimately sank in a storm in 1892. Notable Facts: A photograph of Sooloo taken on or about 4 October 1884 by the noted Boston marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins is documented in a four-part Rob Napier article published in the Nautical Research Journal in 1989 (catalogued as Stebbins image no. 819), which would be a valuable reference for anyone attempting a detailed scale build. No confirmed openly-licensed digital copy of that photograph, or of any other period image of this specific vessel, could be located during this research, so no image has been attached to this record.