Matthew Turner (captain)

Matthew Turner (born June 17, 1825 in Geneva (Ohio) , † February 10, 1909 in Oakland ) was an American captain, entrepreneur and shipbuilder. He built or had 230 wooden ships built in his name, 160 of them in Benicia on Humboldt Bay near San Francisco .

life and work

The barquentine Benicia , built in 1899, took only 35 days to travel from Newcastle, New South Wales to Kīhei on Maui , Hawaii

At the age of 23, Turner designed his first schooner , which was completed in his father's sawmill on Lake Erie . After 1850 he worked for several years as a schooner captain on the US west coast and in trade with the South Seas and Siberia. He acted u. a. with timber, fish, fruits, copra and vanilla. In 1868 he had the schooner brig Nautilus built in Eureka with a hull shape that he had optimized and designed for high speed, which, despite the doubts expressed by experts about the construction, made the trip to Tahiti in 20 days. A characteristic of Turner's designs was that he shifted the center of gravity of the ships further aft and made the ships narrow in front, but wider in the aft. This improved the speed and stability of the ships.

Turner has been building ships on its own since 1875. By 1883 he had built almost 60 ships, mostly for the South Sea trade and some for his own account. In Benicia on the San Francisco Bay he founded the shipyard in 1883, where he built another 160 seaworthy ships by 1905, mostly brigantines , barquentines and schooners. His schooner designs became legendary. Among them were some of the fastest racing yachts of the day, built for members of the San Francisco Yacht Club . Turner replaced while the gaff-rigged by the high rigging with large triangular sails without gaff (the so-called. Bermuda rig ). This made it easier to reef the sails in the sudden gusts that are not uncommon in the South Seas. He made the masts from one piece from the keel to the top.

It was not until he was 80 that Turner stopped his daily supervisory work at the shipyard for health reasons.

Ships

The four-masted schooner Ariel (1900-1917)

In 1884, the Brigantine Karluk with additional steam drive was built at Turner's shipyard , which initially served as a supply ship for fishing in the Aleutian Islands , then as a whaler and in 1913 as the flagship of the Arctic Expedition of the Royal Canadian Navy . It was crushed in ice in 1914.

Turner's elegant Brigantine Galilee , built in 1891 (and in the 1960s - although owned by the San Francisco Maritime Museum - sunk in the mud of the San Francisco Bay for lack of maintenance) made the journey from Tahiti to San Francisco in a record time of 22 (according to others Figures 19) days, the schooner Papeete (1891) made the trip in the opposite direction in 17 days. The Galilee served u. a. as a research vessel for geomagnetism.

The Hungarian Count Rudolf Festetics von Tolna traveled through the Pacific from 1893 to 1900 with the 76-ton yacht Le Tolna, built by Turner in 1893 .

Turner also built large four-masted brigantines, e.g. B. the Amaranth of 1901, and four-masted schooner, z. B. the Ariel from 1900 with over 1000 tons displacement.

26 schooners built by Turner sailed (at least temporarily) under the German flag, mainly for the trading houses Joh. César Godeffroy & Sohn , the Société commerciale de l'Océanie and the Jaluit company on the Marshall Islands .

In 2013 a brigantine with a displacement of 175 tons was built in Sausalito as a training ship for young people named Matthew Turner . It is the first wooden ship of this size to be built on San Francisco Bay in over 80 years.

literature

• Herbert Karting: Shipbuilder Matthew Turner: On the history of the most productive sailing shipyard on the American west coast and the German South Sea schooners built on it. (Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 32, supplement.) Wiefelstede 2009.

Web links

• Contemporary press reports on Turner's shipyard at www.maritimeheritage.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jennifer Niven: The Ice Master. London: Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-39123-2 .
2. ↑ http://www.scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.11Stradford.pdf
3. ↑ Jim Gibbs: West Coast Windjammers in Story and Pictures. Superior Publishing, Seattle, p. 42. ISBN 978-0-517-17060-1 .
4. ↑ See his report Chez les canibales: Huit ans des crozière dans l'océan Pacifique à bord du Yacht 'Le Tolna' [1]
5. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) 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.