Henry Eckford

Henry Eckford

Henry Eckford (born March 12, 1775 in Kilwinning , Scotland ; died November 12, 1832 in Constantinople ) was a Scottish-American shipbuilder who was particularly famous for his warships built for the US Navy in the British-American War 1812-15 .

Life

Eckford left his native Scotland at the age of sixteen and first emigrated to Canada . There he learned the shipbuilding trade at his uncle John Black's shipyard in Québec . In 1796 he moved to the United States and in 1799 founded his own shipyard in New York City .

Eckford gained a good reputation with the construction of merchant ships and was recruited for his expertise by Isaac Chauncey for the services of the US Navy when the Anglo-American War approached . In 1812 he was commissioned to develop the hamlet of Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario into a naval base and to set up a fleet for this large inland lake. By 1814 Eckford converted several merchant ships for military purposes in Sackets Harbor and built 8 new and ever larger warships under difficult logistical circumstances, including the frigates USS Superior and USS Madison and the corvette USS General Pike. The last construction projects, in particular the ship of the line USS New Orleans designed for a displacement of 3,000 tons , were not completed after the peace treaty of 1815.

At the end of the war he became chief designer of the American Navy at the Brooklyn Navy Yard . His biggest project there was the construction of the frigate USS Ohio , the prototype for all 74-gun ships of the Navy later built . Eckford resigned from his post a week after they were launched in June 1820. In the following years he was a fixture in the upper classes of New York and not only did shipbuilding business, but also tried his hand in banking and insurance and was an active member of the Democratic Party and an influential figure at Tammany Hall . At this time he also built his most popular civilian ship, the steamship Robert Fulton , which in 1822 was the first steamship to make an ocean voyage from New York to Havana. He also built small ships for the American Navy and Coast Guard, but also for the fleets of young South American nations such as Chile, Peru and Colombia.

In 1825 he lost a large part of his fortune in insurance speculation, was accused of fraud in several trials and only narrowly escaped a final conviction.

In 1831 Eckford set sail with his 1,000-ton frigate United States across the Atlantic, hoping to offer his services to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire , whose fleet had been defeated in the Battle of Navarino in 1827. After the ship's arrival, Sultan Mahmud II is said to have initially believed that it was a gift from the American government; when he learned that it was Eckford's private ship, he immediately bought it from Eckford. The United States from then on served as Mesir-i-Farah in the Ottoman fleet. Eckford was also entrusted with the construction of a new ship of the line, the Mahmoudieh, but died in 1832. A description of Eckford's time in Turkey can be found in the Sketches of Turkey in 1831 and 1832 by an American of his son-in-law James Ellsworth De Kay , who raised him had accompanied his journey.

literature

• Andrew CA Jampoler: Who Was Henry Eckford? In: Naval History 21: 6, December 2007, pp. 38-45.
• Phyllis D. Wheelock: Henry Eckford. In: The American Neptune 7: 3, 1947, pp. 177-95.