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CRADLE OF SHIPS by Garnett L. Eskew

CRADLE OF SHIPS

By

Pub Date: Sept. 27th, 1958
Publisher: Putnam

For 350 years ships have been built and launched at Bath, Maine; this book tells the story of these craft and the men who built them from Virginia, a trading vessel built by the founder of the colony, George Popham, to the 1957 missile guided Naval frigate Dewey. Shipbuilding in bath really began in 1792 when an Englishman, Jonathan Hyde, settled there and added shipbuilding to his numerous other activities; in the 19th century his nephew Thomas Hyde established the great Bath Iron Works, shipbuilders for the U.S. Navy, which has sent down its ways destroyers and torpedo-boats, transports, cargo-vessels, tugs, the ill, fated iron ram of the Civil War, Katahdin, and-in spite of the smallness of the harbor -- one dreadnought, Georgia. Of non-war vessels the Bath Iron Works has produced travelers and ferry-boats, yachts and fishing-boats, defenders of the America's Cup (but not the first America) and Pierpont Morgan's magnificent Carsait Somewhat overwritten for its content but carefully documented and with an appendix listing details of all ships built by the Bath Iron Works, the book must of necessity have a limited appeal: to shipbuilders, yachtsmen, residents of Maine and students of American nautical history. Not for landlubbers.