The Roanoke was to Shenandoah (1890, 3401 BRT) and Susquehanna (1891, 2745 BRT), the third wooden four-masted barque, the & from the shipping company Arthur Sewall Co. at the Kennebec in the shipyard town of Bath , Maine , United States , for their own account was built and launched on 1892. After the six-masted schooner Wyoming (3,730 GRT) and the four-masted klipperbark Great Republic (4,555 BRT) by Donald McKay , she was the third longest and third largest wooden ship ever built in an American shipyard. She was a smooth-decker with a large deckhouse behind the foremast, another around the mizzenmast with captain's quarters and officers' mess, and a wheelhouse at the stern. Its four masts are called fore, main, mizzen and mizzen mast (English: fore, main, mizzen and jigger or spanker mast). Her rig had undivided slab sails over divided topsails , plus royal sails and sky sails on the three frame masts. Its wooden hull was reinforced with steel girders and initially appeared light with a dark water pass, later black. The gross tonnage was 3,539 GRT, but with a draft of 8.2 meters (27 ft ) it was able to fill an additional 2,000 tons, or 5,340 GRT, with cargo due to its enormous depth of 8.8 meters (29 ft) [1]. Your ship's dimensions were: length Lüa : 114.5 meters (375½ ft), Lpp: 94.8 meters (311 ft), width 14.9 meters (49 ft), draft 8.2 meters (27 ft) and 8.8 Meters (29 ft) room depth. Their lower yards were 29 meters (95 ft) long, their foremast tip was 54.9 meters (180 ft) above deck. The white oak keel ( Quercus alba ) lay in two 40.6 cm (16 inch ) rows, hers Kiel courses . were 20.3 cm (8 inches) thick, and her deck above the lower hold 35.6 cm (14 inches) its construction used 295 cubic meters (= 1,250,000 Plankenfuß (= 1 square foot x 1 inch)) Jeffrey- Pine , 396.4 cubic meters (14,000 cubic feet) white oak, 98,000 wooden nails and 550 knees (angles in shipbuilding) made from East American larch . The sometimes mentioned sail area of 15,000 square yards (yd 2 ) corresponding to 12,541.91 square meters (m²) is incorrect.
Last trip and loss
On June 24, 1904, the Roanoke left New York Harbor on her last voyage under the command of Captain Jabez A. Amesbury . In August 1904 it collided with the British steamer Llangibby off the Brazilian coast below the equator and reached Rio de Janeiro on August 19 , where it had to be repaired for 106 days. On December 3, she sailed for Sydney , where she arrived after 82 days on February 23, 1905. After the cargo was unloaded for Australia , the Roanoke reached the roadstead of Nouméa , New Caledonia , to load chrome ore . On the night of August 10th to 11th, 1905, a fire broke out on board the Roanoke, which had already loaded over 3,000 tons of ore. The crews of the shipping company sister, the wooden four-masted barque Susquehanna and the full ship Arabia tried in vain with the men of the Roanoke to extinguish the fire, but the ship burned down to the waterline.
Basil Lubbock: The Down Easters - American Deep-water Sailing Ships 1869–1929 . Brown, Son & Ferguson, Ltd., Nautical Publishers. Glasgow 1929, 1930 and 1953 (reprint).
William Hutchinson Rowe: The Maritime History of Maine: Three Centuries of Shipbuilding & Seafaring ( The maritime history of Maine: Three centuries of shipbuilding and maritime ); WW Norton, New York 1948, p. 333.
