Lady Washington (ship, 1780)
The Lady Washington was built as a merchant ship in Massachusetts around 1780 . The sloop was named after Martha Washington, but often appears only as Washington in contemporary documents. In 1787 the ship was acquired by the investor group Bullfinch, Barrell & Company and from September 1787 accompanied the Columbia under Captain Robert Gray under Captain John Kendrick on her voyage around the world from Boston to the North American west coast. The two ships got lost in a storm and the Lady Washington reached Oregon a week before Columbia . She was thus the first US ship on the west coast. The ships traded fur and fur with the indigenous people of the coast of the Pacific Northwest and then sailed on to Guangzhou , China . There the commanders exchanged vehicles and Lady Washington stayed in the Pacific . She reached the island of Kii-Ōshima in 1791 together with the Grace , where she made the first contact between the United States and Japan , while the Columbia on a western course reached Boston again in August 1790.
Apparently John Kendrick sold Lady Washington to himself without ever paying the money to the shipowners. Around 1790 she was moved to a brig . What happened to her after Kendrick's accidental death in 1794 is not documented.
The only illustration of the ship is a watercolor . It shows a simple New England Sloop with a topsail and a non-typical for these vehicles Galion . Reconstructed mass give a displacement of 90 tn.l. , a length between the perpendiculars of 58 feet (= 17.68 m) and an overall length of 74 feet (= 22.56 m).
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ ヘ メ ッ ト 市 . (No longer available online.) Kushimoto City, archived from the original on April 2, 2015 ; Retrieved March 18, 2015 (Japanese). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ John F. Millar: American ships of the colonial and revolutionary periods (1607 - 1789), WW Norton & Company Inc., New York 1978, ISBN 0-393-03222-1
