Sultana

Type

Schooner

Period

18th Century

Nation

United States

Overview: Sultana was a small merchant schooner built in Boston in 1767 by shipwright Benjamin Hallowell, purchased into the Royal Navy in 1768 to serve as a customs/revenue cutter enforcing the Townshend Acts along the American colonial coast. She is exceptionally well documented for a vessel of her size and era, with surviving Admiralty draughts, logbooks, muster books, and correspondence, making her a favorite subject for modelers seeking documented accuracy. Specifications: Admiralty records give her at roughly 52 tons burthen, about 50 ft 6 in on deck (38 ft 5 1/8 in keel), 16 ft beam, and 8 ft 4 in depth of hold, with a complement of 25. Her armament was unusually light for a naval vessel: eight half-pounder swivel guns rather than carriage guns, reflecting her role as a fast customs patrol boat rather than a combatant. The Royal Museums Greenwich holds both a contemporary Admiralty plan taken off her lines in 1768 and a modern builder's-style full-hull model at 1:48 scale, both useful references for hull form and rigging. Service History: The Royal Navy purchased her for £292 9s 0d from Sir Thomas Hesketh on 18 March 1768, one of six Marblehead-built schooners bought for revenue service. She patrolled the American coast from 1768 through 1772, ranging from Nova Scotia and Boston down through the Chesapeake, Delaware, and Narragansett Bays enforcing customs duties and searching vessels for smuggled goods, before being retired and sold in 1773 as colonial unrest escalated toward the Revolution. Notable Facts: With an overall deck length of only about 53 feet, the twin-masted Sultana is often cited as the smallest schooner ever to serve in the Royal Navy. A full-scale replica, built from the traced 1768 Admiralty survey drawings (via Howard I. Chapelle's lines), was launched in Chestertown, Maryland in 2001 and today sails the Chesapeake Bay as a floating classroom; it differs from the original in having a diesel auxiliary engine, a lead ballast keel, Coast Guard-compliant modifications, and only four guns instead of eight. The same Chapelle lines also loosely inspired another modern vessel, the junk-rigged schooner Larinda.