Back to Sail

The age of sail came back to the Caribbean last week as the U.S., with RFC cash, set out to build a thousand new wooden schooners in the little shipyards of the West Indies, Venezuela, Colombia and Central America. First contract for six 300-to 500-ton schooners has been let to a shipyard in the Dominican Republic. The second will go to Cuba.

Already old two-and three-masters are being rerigged and recaulked; fishing and lumber schooners are bidding for commercial cargoes (and getting them); and importers all along the Caribbean are beginning to specify "Dispatch via sail" when steamers are not available. This means slower and more uncertain voyages, higher insurance, and cargo rates that are all the traffic will bear; but in many cases it may be the only means of getting badly needed supplies.

Northbound, the sailing vessels will nibble away at the 4,000,000 tons of sugar awaiting shipment in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the 330,000 tons of Colombian and Central American coffee normally imported each year by the U.S. At transfer terminals in the Lesser Antilles they may even pick up cargoes brought by convoy from Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, cutting the convoy voyage by as much as half.

The new schooners will be built of wood, so they will not compete with Liberty ships for steel plate. They will be built with local labor whose skills have been handed down from generation to generation, and they will be manned with Caribbean crews. Almost the only demand they will make on U.S. production will be for auxiliary diesel engines. These are already being assembled at New Orleans.

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