In 1869, American George Peabody died in his adopted country: Britain. Here his body is being loaded on the HMS Monarch, Britain's newest warship, for the trip back to the United States for burial. Peabody’s London to Portsmouth funeral train is in the background.
It is unlikely that Snow, born in 1857, saw this scene in Searsport in 1918, after the days of Searsport shipbuilding were well in the past, although buildings may well have still been in place. By then some yards were active in towns like Belfast, Camden and Rockland but the days of building coasting schooners were gone.
Here the artist shows the schooner partially planked. Smoke comes from a building that could have housed a steam powered saw. Men work at a crane in the foreground which is piled with the usual raw timber that was the stock of the yard.
Busy port scenes were a favorite subject for James Buttersworth. Here, he portrays a classic New York harbor view. On shore, to the left, is Castle Garden (immigration headquarters before Ellis Island) and Fort Williams on Governor's Island from which a salute is being fired. In the midst of a yacht race, a ship of the line is being towed into the harbor. A racing sloop with a prominent owner’s flag, probably belonging to Buttersworth’s paying or potential customer, dominates the foreground. Signed, lower right.
William Parr, who later became partners with Robert Bagott, owned these vessels, including the center ship and the brigs Betsy to the left and Phoenix on the right. The world was a dangerous place in 1809, when French and Spanish privateers and naval vessels roamed, ready to snap up unprepared merchant ships. Indeed, Betsy had been taken from the French.
Percy Sanborn shows two three-masted schooners, one headed up Penobscot bay, the other down on a breezy day. In the foreground two fishermen hand line from a dory while Blue Hill shows up in the background.
Capt. Phineas Alexander Griffin of Searsport wrote on this chart of the North Pacific a note identifying the spot where his daughter Anita was born. Captain Griffin's ship was the 1869 Belfast launched and owned Leonora, which was sold to Italy about 1885. The museum has another copy of this chart, published two years later, on which Capt. Griffin again made a mark showing where his daughter was born.
Here is a view of the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. as shown in 1873 on a British Admiralty chart. The chart includes engravings of views of entering the harbor, showing the famous mountain called Sugarloaf.
Landing a boat at Sunda Strait, photographed by Joanna Colcord aboard the ship State of Maine in 1900. Sunda Strait is the passage between Java and Sumatra, and it is the gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
British ship Bangalore, Captain Ray D. Congdon, 1893. The ship is loading at Tide Water Oil Works, Bayonne, with 65,000 cases of "case oil" for Calcutta. Case oil is kerosene, shipped in wooden "cases," a frame that held two 5-gallon tins of oil.
She was an iron ship built in England in 1886 and sold to the Maine Navigation Company in 1899 whereupon she was put under US registry and continued in the case oil trade.
From 1900 to 1908, the Bangalore was commanded by Captain Phineas Banning Blanchard of Searsport.
