Customer Reviews

American Small Sailing Craft: Their Design, Development and Construction

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This is the classic book about classic boats. I bought it because of my interest in one particular boat and ended up reading it cover to cover. The author put together a large part of the Smithsonian's collection of boat plans and definitely knew his stuff. This is a great book if you are interested in a particular type of historic boat. It is also worth reading just to compare the relative merits of different designs. The lines and offsets given for the many of boats are enough to build from.

Howard Chapelle lived and wrote at a time when the fleets of working small sailing craft rapidly vanished. His life's work was to preserve a lowly, humble part of American maritime heritage, and his efforts are without peer.

In American Small Sailing Craft, Chapelle shows us a number of the plain work-a-day craft of the watermen of old. Although people of those times took little notice of such common, plain, ordinary vessels, we modern readers are left to marvel at their seaworthiness, sturdiness, simplicity--in short, their consummate practicality.

Any maritime heritage enthusiast will love this classic book.

For anyone interested in small American sailing craft this is the definite volume. As a small boat builder and model builder there is no more comprehensive source of information.

Each section on the boat type is both too short and long enough. I wanted more text on dories, and Whitehalls, my favorite boats but there was enough about Bermuda fishing boats and Jersey Shore boats to pique my interest to go google them and see if I could find a modern version to look at. If you are considering buying or building a 19th century style boat this is a great guide to what you are getting. It's original purpose and design guidelines. It is not a how to build a boat unless you already know what you are doing and can read micro drawings of lines. To a master boat builder this book would be enough to a garage shop guy, only a taste.

I bought it to research Jersey Shore boats and ended up reading it all. A boat nuts bible.

Howard I. Chapelle's American Small Sailing Craft, published in 1951, remains one of the most influential books ever written about historic small American workboat types. You may think that's a narrow field, something like being the tallest building in Manhattan, Kansas, but the book helped inspire the wooden boat movement. It includes lines, offsets, construction drawings -- everything you need to build these historic types. Chapelle, a naval architect, made a career of documenting these types just as they were disappearing. Sometimes he'd have a boat still sailing to work from, sometimes he'd have to measure a hulk and reconstruct it based on his research.

The book helped inspire people to build replicas of these workboat types. Chapelle gave the history of those types and argued that they had evolved over time for use in the conditions prevailing where they were used, and that they were the most practical way to economically get on the water. He became the curator of the Division of Transportation of the National Museum of History and Technology. Today, if you don't want to work from the small plans in American Small Sailing Craft, you can order plans from the Smithsonian, and get them for a lot less than most commercially available plans.

I've owned an 18-foot sharpie skiff built from that book, and regularly sail a 35-foot New Haven sharpie at the Center for Wooden Boats for our Cast Off program, which gives people a taste of sailing on traditional craft with free sails every Sunday. These boats aren't as fast as a modern yacht, but they are roomy, practical and fun to sail. I've seen dozens of boats built from the book, and sailed on more than a few. I've concluded that he was right about the pleasure and practicality of these boats. I've also restored a couple of racing dinghies and owned a racing keelboat, and I can tell you he was certainly right about he cost. When I bought a competitive Snipe mast, I found that a new one would cost me about $1,200 (I went with a used one.) My 18-foot sharpie had a mast that was basically a small tree with the branches lopped off and the bark removed. The tree must have been about the size of those used as a municipal Christmas tree in small towns. I've always wondered if the fellow who built that mast actually had to pay for it, or just waited for the right tree to show up after Christmas.

Of course, part of the reason people build wooden boats has nothing to do with cost. A wooden boat is in some ways the ultimate wood project, having no square corners and providing the ultimate test of craftsmanship when you see how it handles the sea.

Workboats tend to have large cockpits and to be designed to carry big loads. This makes them delightful for piling a big crowd of friends into and banging around the bay for a day. Modern dinghies tend to be built around the need for speed, with too little rocker to carry large loads. A boat designed to plane, when too heavily laden, sinks the transom in the water and becomes a pig.

The wooden boat movement got started in the US. I recently read Iain Oughtred: A Life in Wooden Boats, and was surprised to learn how late the movement was in getting started outside the US. No one had done as much as Chapelle did in documenting the workboats of other nations. Those books that were available didn't include offsets, so you couldn't loft a boat from them. Oughtred has partially filled that gap for British types, most notably double-enders based on the Scottish Yole. But at the point where the wooden boat movement in the US had matured to the point where it had its own magazine, Oughtred was having a difficult time establishing himself in Britain. WoodenBoat magazine, searching for signs of a wooden boat movement in England, 'discovered' Oughtred, and by publicizing his work helped give the British enthusiasts a push.

But I have to wonder where all this would be without American Small Sailing Craft.

I would suggest it for anyone intending to build a boat, or anyone interested in the history of boats in any way means or form.

Great book. In my view this is the best of the various great books by Chapelle because of the great variety of different types of small craft documented.

A well written text that explores american working sail in the smaller alongshore models. These are the sizes most likely to be built by small boatyards and amateurs. What surprised me was the variety in both model and rig after 1800. If you want to know what has been found to work in various conditions, I don't know how you can beat this one.