Nevis Sailing Lighter

Nevisan Sailing Lighters:
Small Vessels of Caribbean Inter-Island Transport

Preliminary Report
Update Summer 2007

Marco Meniketti
San Jose State University

For a documented 100 years and certainly longer, Afro-Nevisans carried on inter-island commerce and passenger service aboard specialized craft known as sailing lighters. Generally speaking, lighters are defined as craft used for off loading cargo from sailing ships for transshipment to shore, especially across shallows or where wharves are lacking.

Pictured at right: Lighter with passengers sailing from St Kitts to Nevis about 1900.. As these craft had limited decking, the passengers are likely riding on the cargo. Image courtesy NHCS.

General background
The island of Nevis in the Eastern Caribbean is home to a unique and unfortunately vanishing maritime tradition. Although Afro-Caribbean mariners have had a long and rich tradition of seafaring and independent maritime trade, this legacy has only been appreciated recently, principally in the works of Julius Scott (1986, 1991, 1996), W. Jeffery Bolster (1997), and most recently Jerry Hackett (1999a). This was the case in Nevis as well, Nevisan lighters performed duties far beyond that of basic lighter craft. Their original purpose may have been for hauling sugar, but they came to play a significant role in other areas of island commerce and social life. Small craft in Nevisan history
Early references to small craft on Nevis are scattered throughout the historic documents and nearly all are in reference to plantation operations. The fact that laws were enacted adding additional punishment to slaves who might steal a boat to escape bondage not only suggests that the practice was common and had become a problem for colonial authorities, but that at least some slaves were well acquainted with the workings of small craft. Similar laws were enacted on Montserrat and St Kitts.
Documents related to the capture and capitulation of Nevis by the French in 1782, also offer a glimpse into both the types of small craft on Nevis and the men working the vessels. In a letter to Governor De Fresne, dated 1782, Jno.Rn. Hubert writes “…If the boat which was brought down from Antigua will serve the purpose of the harbour master, I will endeavor to procure sailor negroes [sic] for her” (Watts 1929). This simple statement supports the contention that not only were slaves on Nevis capable sailors but, as Scott (1996:133) suggests, were a significant factor in island maritime activities. Citing newspapers of the day, such as the Kingston Daily Advertiser of 1791, and the St George’s Chronicle of 1790, Scott reveals the impact of deep-sea “sailor negroes” in resistance to slavery on Nevis, as he describes the mutiny of the crew aboard sloop Nancy, owned by a Nevis Merchant. The crew is described as comprised of a native of Nevis, a “sailor of the congo nation,” and two “Virginians.” It was supposed that the crew sailed off to remote areas of the Caribbean or to Virginia. Ruth Fisher’s (1942) important reference work on sources for Negro history in British archives contains the remarkable statement by Barbadian Governor Parry that so many Negro slaves were employed in trading vessels that English seamen were being put out of work, causing social problems in port cities of England.

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate how important ships were in the early history of the Caribbean, or that mariners often were a sizable portion of local populations. It was not uncommon for hundreds of ships to visit Nevis annually and that Caribbean islands were at hubs of international commerce. Official correspondence makes it clear that the mixing of sailors and free blacks or slaves was viewed by authorities with suspicion and by planters with apprehension. Additional historic documents of the 18th and 19th centuries make references to droghers making regular trips to the bays and inlets of the island. Kerchove (1961:245) defines a drogher as a seagoing sailing barge (specifically from Trinidad) used for local trading. These are described as reaching 60 feet in length and are open except for a forward deck. The rig consists of a single mast and a split lugsail. Allsop (1996) defines it as a West Indian coasting vessel. Droghers are also mentioned in the context of the sugar industry and occasionally as an appellation to the crew themselves. Image at right and below courtesy NHCS.

This seems appropriate as the term droguer applies to laborers who carry heavy packs. In contrast, a lighter is traditionally a flat bottomed vessel used for transporting cargo between a sea-going vessel and the shore. Lighters and barges were once classed together, the distinction “more in the manner used than in form or equipment” (Kerchove 1961). Occasionally the term “lighter” refers to short haul harbor operations. That Nevisan lighters may share common elements with droghers is not surprising. Both were used in the sugar trade, as close shore craft, and for local inter-island trade. A depiction of the Basseterre landscape on St Kitts found in Cokes’s 1811 History of the West Indies illustrates the variety of vessels to be found in the waters off St Kitts and Nevis. Among these are small sailing vessels hauling hogsheads out to ships. Merrill (1958:123) mentions the lighter in his classic geography of Nevis and St Kitts, but his analysis of the craft as awkward and slow is as misleading as it is unjustified. While these vessels are indeed not very trim as he states, they are designed for working the shallows and under full sail can be quite swift.

Of greater value to understanding the history of the lighters is found in Merrill’s comments that the vessels were still employed in carrying foodstuffs and other commodities from ocean-going ships that anchored a mile off-shore, and the photo of lighters he published. The dimensions he provides for a typical lighter, fifty feet in length; keel 31 feet; beam 16 feet, stern breadth 10 feet, and depth of 7 feet fit well within the pattern established from the Shipping Registry on St Kitts. Types of woods used in construction are also discussed. Comprehensive data is included in Hackett’s work, and need not be elaborated here.

Nevisan lighters were tradition built vessels--constructed without plans, from a mental template of the builder.. Boatwrights followed sea-tested traditions learned as apprentices, and adhered to a set of general principles guiding their design and production. Using templates and experience, boatwrights built lighters of three approximate scales. Vessels ranged from 42 feet in length, with an average beam of 14 feet in smaller vessels, to 56 feet in length, with beams as great as 20 feet. The length to beam ratio ranged from 2.5:1 to 3:1. Nevisan lighters were lightly decked for and aft, with an open hold. They were sloop rigged and capable of handling a good deal of canvas, which was locally sewn for the boats. With transom stern, a removable tiller rigged with a rope and pulley system controlled the rudder.
Lighters were built at two principle boatyards on Nevis, at Newcastle at the northern extreme of the island, and at Gallows Bay in Charlestown. All framing timbers, knees, aprons, deadwood, as well as keel and keelson were naturally grown and selected for their specific shapes. Planks, mast, and boom were imported. To obtain timbers, according to Hackett (1999a), boat-builders in Nevis relied on specialists referred to as “mountaineers.” Pictured at left: view of the bow. Note wide beam and hard chine.

Given a set of templates for floors, futtocks, breasthook, and other framing elements, these men would then climb up Mt. Nevis in search of the required timber--no easy task on the overgrown, nearly vertical and slippery rainforested slopes. Felled trees would be roughly shaped and the timbers hauled down the mountain by donkey to the boat yards. Although built in accordance to tradition, the Registry of Shipping, archived on St Kitts, which began listing lighters in 1900, reveals considerable variation. While it is true that templates dictated the shape of the vessel, the availability of specific trees and limb shapes also influenced dimensions and final configuration of the lighter. Templates could not be easily changed without upsetting the entire framing design. To some degree this accounts for the variability found in the different vessels.
The boats were built entirely using hand tools; awl, auger, various saws, adze, hand ax, bit and brace, caulking irons, and hammers. Tool marks are in evidence on both the Pioneer and Sakara, especially on frames and futtocks, where adze marks are testimony to the work that went in to shaping the timbers. Each vessel was built according to financial resources and needs of the client. The shallow draft allowed some of the vessels to work in close to shore, while the broad open hold permitted a great deal of cargo to be carried. Pictured at left: view of transom stern, rudder not in place.

As sugar mills on Nevis ceased operating in the early years of the past century, Lighters carried bundled sugar cane from Nevis to St Kitts for processing, but also carried general merchandise, raw materials, livestock, and passengers on market day. With the end of sugar production in the 1950s, Lighters and their captains relied entirely on general cargo. Deep water craft brought supplies into St. Kitts and lighters sailed a consignment of goods over to Nevis, which lacked a deep water port until 1998.
It was not unusual for lighters to sail as far south as Barbados or north to the British Virgin Islands. While on the beach at gallows bay measuring the remains of Sakara, an old timer gleefully informed me of sailing a lighter and beating a steamer to Barbados that had left Nevis at the same time back in the 1950s. Several people who had been ferried to St Kitts aboard the Pioneer informed me that it was a swift sailer, often beating the government operated ferry--making the run between Charlestown and Basseterre in St Kitts, a distance of eleven nautical miles, in under an hour. Only four working vessels were reported in 1974 (Pyles 1975). In 1990 the remaining two lighters, the Pioneer and the Sakara, were hauled out onto the beach at Gallows Bay. Sakara lost its transom between 1998 and 2000, but Pioneer is relatively intact, and has been removed to the grounds of the Horatio Nelson Museum, in Charlestown, by concerned members of the Nevis Historical and Conservation Society. I first saw the lighters in 1997 and suggested to the NHCS they be fully documented. The only previous documentation of a lighter being a brief account of the Victoria in Pyles’(1975:159) book Clean Sweet Wind. Victoria is long gone and cannot be examined.
Both the Sakara and the Pioneer were built by master boatwrights Liburd and Huggins, both of whom are still alive and available to consult. Retired Coast Guard Captain, Jerry Hackett, along with the NHCS intends to restore the to sailing condition as a symbol of Nevisan maritime heritage and has recently interviewed each of these men for his forthcoming book, Of Lighters and Lightermen, currently in manuscript form. However, the condition of the vessel gives reason to believe this may not be a realistic goal. I therefore undertook the recording of the vessel during the summer of 2000 while on Nevis conducting a separate archaeological survey.

The Pioneer
Built in 1958 for the for S.L. Horsford Company and sold in the1980s to TDC, a major construction and hardware firm on the island, Pioneer was a worked hard (Hackett 1999) and the wear is obvious. Because the vessel is beginning to sag and seams are separating, measurements taken have been corrected and lines faired to reflect original dimensions. The keel length is 31 feet, 5 1/2 inches with an overall length of 42 feet, 6inches.( Compare this to Merrill’s dimensions above). Pioneer is likely the smallest lighter built according to the Registry of Shipping. The deadrise in the bow extends 11feet

½ inch and 3 feet, 6inches at the stern. The keel is rabbited to take the garboard strake at a sharp angle. Each plank is scarfed to adjacent planks like an interlocking puzzle below the waterline and simply butted to one another above the waterline. Care seems to have been made to make the most of timber resources. The hull flattens rapidly and the sharp angle at the turn of the bilge gives these vessels a very hard chine.Okum, still present, was pressed between planks and seams pitched. The light decking for and aft offered no shelter.
These vessels were built quick and dirty. According to Merrill (1956:123) many vessels were built in four months. Under the decks the grown timbers used in framing still retain tree bark since there was no need for it to be removed. Shaping of floors and futtocks was in the areas of contact with other timbers only. Limber holes run stem to stern but are not forward of the fourth frame. Several repairs are in evidence indicating a hard life for Pioneer and efforts to keep the vessel working show great ingenuity as well as expediency.

Lighters carried a small jib and mainsail with a “leg of mutton” rig which facilitated handling by fewer hands than a standard rig. Hackett (1999) cites E.P. Morris for the British origin of the rig and points out that this arrangement was certainly in Bermuda by as early as 1671. Hackett is most likely correct in this assessment. Such a rig is found in many historic illustrations. Chappelle (1951:30, 239) illustrates a similar hull shape for a Moses Boat used around 1800 for lightering hogsheads of molasses, as well as the similar rig of a Bermuda sloop. The mast exceeded the overall length of the vessel, as did the boom. Fortunately, both mast and boom were still on the beach at Gallows Bay allowing direct measurement. Much of the hardware remains though in a deteriorated state. Pictured at right: Stern viewed from starboard side. Rudder not in place.

Comparisons

The mast step is a separate timber scarfed diagonally directly to the keelson, and braced by short sister keelsons.
The keelson does not extend the entire length of the vessel, stopping short at frame 2 forward and frame 17 in the stern, and is only 17 feet 9 inches overall. In the Pioneer the keelson measured 6 inches sided and 5 inches moulded. For comparison, the 4-foot longer Sakara’s keelson measured 5 ½ inches sided by 8 inches moulded.

Keelson and partners at the mast step of the Sakara.

Mast step of the Pioneer. The partners are notched to fit over the futtocks and bolted.

The beam of Sakara was listed a foot wider than Pioneer (Hackett 1999a) and I found this to still be true even though the transom stern is missing and the vessel has been allowed to sag outward. The data in the Registry of Shipping has been rounded. Pioneer’s beam is stated as 15 feet but direct measurement yields the figure of 14 feet 6 inches. Room and space of floors and futtocks range between 19 inches and 22 inches. Framing timbers ranged between 4 ½ inches to 5 ½ inches sided and moulded, only occasionally spiked to one another. At the turn of the bilge one floor butted a futtock consistently forward of a half floor cut to the angle of the chine sided with it.

Social Memory of Lighters
With such impressive names as Vagabond, Valiant, Princess, and Victoria, to name only a few, the lighters were a significant feature of the Nevisan seascape and are an significant facet of Nevisan popular culture. The annual cultural festival Culturama features a Calypso King competition that demands contestants compose songs and orations. The winner of the competition a few years ago created a song about “the mystery ship” Sakara, relating the story of how the vessel and crew disappeared during hurricane Hugo, but eventually returned. This story was related to me by a passenger on a mini-bus after learning that I was interested in the vessels. In fact, the song conflates a real episode with the wrong storm. Sakara vanished during hurricane David in 1979 en-route to Nevis from St. Kitts. The captain had to outrun the storm and fetched up in St. Croix, dismasted (Island Administration brochure 1996). The return of Sakara to Nevis some weeks later caused a sensation. Lighters were once fundamental to the cultural landscape of Nevis and linger in popular memory.
As this is only a preliminary report I have only highlighted some of the interesting elements of construction, and only lightly touched on the history and importance of the lighters to Nevisan culture. The Pioneer is the last of its type and will soon gone. If efforts of the NHCS are successful however, the sailing lighter of Nevis will again be visible on the waterfront and will not fade from memory.

Left: Stern interior decking

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Most recently the Pioneer has completely deteriorated to the point where slavage would be impossible. Hull planks have fallen away and several timbers have been discarded. In fact, only the keel and stem post remain. The only record of the vessel are the lines taken during the 2000 season. These are being faired and corrected to permit a replica to be constructed. It is, however, sad that none of the lighter remains. The same can be said of the Sakara on the beach at Gallows Bay.

References:
Alsopp, Richard
1996 Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage ( Oxford university Press, Oxford).

Bolster,W. Jeffery
1997 Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard University Press, Cambridge).

Chapelle, Howard
1951 American Small Sailing Craft (Norton and Company, New York)
pp 29-30, 233-239.

Fisher, Ruth Ann
1942 “Manuscript Materials Bearing on the Negro in British Archives” Journal of Negro History 27: 83-93.

Hackett, Kieran J.
1999 Of Lighters and Lightermen, in manuscript. Contact Nevis Historical and Conservation Society. Charlestown, Nevis.

1999a “The Sailing Lighters of St. Kitts and Nevis,” Nevis Historical and Conservation Society Newsletter, Number 53 (Charlestown, Nevis).

2003 Of Nevis lighters and Lightermen (The Writers Collective, Cranston, Rhode Island)

Island Administration brochure
1996 Port of Charlestown Reopening (MG 2.36 in Nevis archives)

Kerchove, Rene de
1961 International Maritime Dictionary (Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York).

Pyles, Douglas
1981 Clean Sweet Wind (Easy Reach Press, Preston, Maryland) pp154-164.

Scott, Julius
1986 The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution. Unpublished dissertation. Duke University.

1991 “Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network: The Case of Newport Bowers,” in Jack Tar in History, Colin Howell and Richard Twomeny, eds. (Acadiensis Press, Fredericton) pp 37-52.

1996 “Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, Robert Pacquette and Stanley Engerman, eds. (University Press of Florida, Gainesville) pp 128-146.

Watts, Arthur
1929 Nevis and St Kitts 1872-1784 (Unpublished Documents) (Les Presses Universitaires de France, Paris). In the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.