Catalog entry

Commentary

Lying six miles off the Maine coast, five miles north of the Maine-New Hampshire border, Boon Island is a large exposed rock in the middle of a busy shipping lane. For vessels in the coasting trades, it has been a menace to navigation; also for naval vessels entering and leaving Portsmouth, as well as fishing craft, cargo carriers, and passenger vessels operating between Canadian and major U.S. ports. This was also true in the Colonial Period, and the earliest (1689) chart depicting New England with any accuracy clearly shows Boon Island and its surrounding ledges in their proper location relative to the mainland. (1)

In Lane’s painting, we are looking eastward as a morning sun begins to break through a passing storm. Wallowing in heavy seas, with fore- and main sails reefed and jib and fore topsail furled, a coasting schooner is bound south, probably to Boston. Her deck and hold are loaded with bales of hay, the former covered with a tarpaulin to keep the cargo dry (a standard practice when transporting hay any distance). The types of hay shipped from Maine were farm hay and several types of marsh hay, each with its specific qualities and uses. Cape Ann and surrounding Essex County (Massachusetts) were blessed with enough hay for their own needs, but Boston and its thousands of horses needed all the hay Maine was willing to provide. This situation endured until electric and motor vehicles replaced horse-drawn wagons and streetcars. ( 2)

The coasting schooner depicted is more precisely a “topsail schooner” by rig – setting a square topsail on the fore topmast. On a long voyage when a vessel is sailing with the wind coming from astern, the square topsail is very helpful to reduce rolling in heavy swells. In this instance, the wind is coming off the port (left) side, and in such force that the reefed lower sails are sufficient to keep the schooner’s motion steady.

Despite frequent losses of vessels and lives, Boon Island’s first lighthouse was not built until 1799 and lit the following year. Poorly constructed of wood, it was destroyed in a gale in 1804. Replaced by a stone structure that same year, it was decided in 1811 that a second rebuilding was necessary, and this replacement lasted until 1831. The third replacement was removed in 1852 and the present stone structure was built to a height of 133 feet, using carefully-fitted granite blocks of massive proportions. While the 1852 tower remains, the auxiliary buildings around it have all been demolished by storms and rebuilt numerous times. (3)

Erik Ronnberg

References:

1. Alex Krieger and David Cobb, Mapping Boston (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1979), p. 98, Plate 13: John Thornton, “Part of New England” in The English Pilot (1689).

2. W. H. Bunting, A Day’s Work, Part 1 (Gardiner , ME: Tilbury House, Publishers, 1997), pp. 128, 130, 132.

3. Kenneth E. Kochel, America’s Atlantic Coast Lighthouses (Clearwater, FL: Betken Publications, 1994), pp. 370, 371.