Morning Departure, Clippership DAVID CROCKETT Leaving the East River, New York, New York

oil, 24” x 36,” 28" x 40" framed

SOLD

One of the most successful of the clippers was the DAVID CROCKETT, built in 1853 by Greenman and Company at Stonington, Connecticut. A three-skysail-yarder of 1,679 tons, she was first owned by handy and Everitt of New York and sailed as a packet between New York and Liverpool. After the business crash of 1857 she was sold to Lawrence Giles and Company of New York and put into the Cape Horn trade. The DAVID CROCKETT made many voyages to San Francisco. Her forty-eight passages around Cape Horn are believed to have been the record for any sailing ship. Twelve of her runs in thirty years of New York to San Francisco trading averaged 109 days, 14 hours. The best of these passages, in 1872, was completed in 102 days.

One of the DAVID CROCKETT’s most colorful commanders was Captain John A. Burgess of Massachusetts, a hard-driving master who ran a taut ship. In 1874 after having commanded the clipper for some years. The Crockett outlived most of her fellow clippers and was still ship-rigged in 1889. The following year she was converted into a schooner barge, and her long career ended when she was wrecked in the winter of 1899.

The DAVID CROCKETT carried as a figurehead a statue of colorful congressman and hero of the Alamo in honor of whom she was named. Showing him in frontiersman’s garb and gripping a long rifle, the figurehead hangs today at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, almost on the site where the DAVID CROCKETT was built. John Stobart’s painting shows her towing down New York’s East River, outward bound on one of her later voyages. This painting was originally was featured in Stobart’s one-man show at Kennedy Galleries in 1968.

(pictured on page 123 of John Stobart’s book “STOBART: The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage, published in 1985.)