A scow is a smaller type of barge. Some scows are rigged as sailing scows. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scows carried cargo in coastal waters and inland waterways, having an advantage for navigating shallow water or small harbours. Scows were in common use in the American Great Lakes and other parts of the U.S., Canada, southern England, and New Zealand. In modern times their main recreational purpose is for racing, but the hull type is widely used in the construction industry and as garbage scows for aquatic transport of refuse.
Scows The name "scow" derives from the Dutch . Old Saxon has a similar word which means to push from the shore, clearly related to punting. A second theory suggests that schouw comes from schol or schouw, meaning "shallow," referring to the vessel’s usefulness in shallow waters due to its flat bottom. A third theory also connects the word to the act of pushing, proposing that the schouw could be pushed over reed beds and low dikes, allowing access to shallow peat lakes. The Dutch word schouw is also associated with ferryboats; 40 different places in the Netherlands include schouw in their name are or were locations of a ferry crossing.
The basic scow was developed as a flat-bottomed barge ( a large punt) capable of navigating shallow rivers and sitting comfortably on the bottom when the tide was out. By 1848 scows were being rigged for sailing using leeboards or sliding keels. They were also used as dumb barges towed by steamers. Dumb scows were used for a variety of purposes: garbage (see The Adventures of Tugboat Annie), dredging (see Niagara Scow) as well as general estuarine cargos.
Sailing scows
Sailing scows have significant advantages over traditional deep-keel sailing vessels that were common at the time the sailing scow was popular. Keelboats, while stable and capable in open water, were incapable of sailing into shallow bays and rivers, which meant that to ship cargo on a keelboat required a suitable harbour and docking facilities, or else the cargo had to be loaded and unloaded with smaller boats. Flat-bottomed scows, on the other hand, could navigate shallow waters, and could even be beached for loading and unloading. This made them useful for moving cargo from inland regions unreachable by keelboat to deeper waters where keelboats could reach. The cost of this shallow water advantage was the loss of the seaworthiness of flat-bottomed scow boats in open water and bad weather.
The squared-off shape and simple lines of a scow make it a popular choice for simple home-built boats made from plywood. Phil Bolger and Jim Michalak, for example, have designed a number of small sailing scows, and the PD Racer and the John Spencer designed Firebug are growing classes of home-built sailing scow. Generally these designs are created to minimize waste when using standard 4-foot by 8-foot sheets of plywood.
The scow hull is also the basis for the shantyboat or, on the Chesapeake, the ark, a cabin houseboat once common on American rivers. The ark was used as portable housing by Chesapeake watermen, who followed, for example, shad runs seasonally.
The Thames sailing barge and the Norfolk wherry are two British equivalents to the scow schooner. The Thames sailing barges, while used for similar tasks, used significantly different hull shapes and rigging.
The term scow is used in and around the west Solent for a traditional class of sailing dinghy. Various towns and villages claim their own variants (Lymington, Keyhaven, Yarmouth, West Wight, Bembridge, Chichester), they are all around in length and share a lug sail, pivoting centre board, small foredeck and a square transom with a transom-hung rudder.
Dutch GWS-schouw In the Netherlands, the GWS-schouw is a traditional flat-bottomed sailing boat derived from small working craft once used on the Frisian peat lakes. The class is still actively raced and maintained by the Vereniging Grouwster Watersport (GWS) in Grou, Friesland. The boats are about 5 m long with approximately 11 m² of sail area (main and jib combined) and are rigged with a characteristic spritsail (spriettuig). GWS-schouwen are built of riveted steel and represent one of the few surviving national “schouw” classes that preserve the traditional design and sailing culture of Friesland.
Scow schooners An American design that reached its zenith of size on the American Great Lakes, and was also used widely in New Zealand, the schooner-rigged scow was used for coastal and inland transport, from colonial days to the early 1900s.Jay C. Martin, "Scows, and Barges, or Other Vessels of Box Model" International Journal of Maritime History 30 (February 2018). Scow schooners had a broad, shallow hull, and used centreboards, bilgeboards or leeboards rather than a deep keel. The broad hull gave them stability, and the retractable foils allowed them to move even heavy loads of cargo in waters far too shallow for keelboats to enter. The squared-off bow and stern accommodated a large cargo. The smallest sailing scows were sloop-rigged (making them technically a scow sloop), but were otherwise similar in design. The scow sloop eventually evolved into the inland lake scow, a type of fast racing boat.
Sailing scows were popular in the American South for economic reasons, because the pine planks found there were difficult to bend, and because inlets along the Gulf Coast and Florida were often shallow.
A comparative study of the commercial sailing scows of the Great Lakes to those in New Zealand showed that both types reached their zenith in popularity during the frontier or early commercial eras when improved roads and ports were still developing.Jay C. Martin, “Scows, and Barges, or Other Vessels of Box Model”: Comparative Capital Investment in and the Sailing Scows on the Great Lakes of North America and in New Zealand,” International Journal of Maritime History, 30, No. 1 (February 2018): 89-105.
New Zealand trading scows The American scow design was copied and modified in New Zealand by early immigrant settlers to Auckland in the 1870s. In 1873, a sea captain named George Spencer,George Spencer who had once lived and worked on the American Great Lakes and had gained a first-hand knowledge of the practical working capabilities of the sailing barges that plied their trade on the lakes, recognised the potential use of similar craft in the protected waters of the Hauraki Gulf, Auckland. He commissioned a local shipbuilder, Septimus Meiklejohn, Septimus Meiklejohn to construct a small flat-bottomed sailing barge named the Lake Erie.Lake Erie An account of the launching of this vessel appeared in 1873 in the Auckland newspaper, The Daily Southern Cross,"The Daily Southern Cross", 26 April 1873. which gave its readers a good idea of the distinctive construction and advantages over other vessels.
The Lake Erie was 60 feet 6 inches in length, seventeen feet 3 inches in breadth and had a draught of three feet 4 inches. It was fitted with lee boards (a type of keel slotted onto the sides of the vessel), but these were highly impracticable in rough weather on the New Zealand coast. Later scows were constructed with the much safer slab-sided centre board, which crews raised and lowered as required. This one small craft spawned a fleet of sailing scows that became associated with the gum trade and the flax and kauri industries of northern New Zealand.
Scows came in all manner of shape and sizes and all manner of sailing rigs, but the "true" sailing scow displayed no fine lines or fancy rigging. They were designed for hard work and heavy haulage and they did their job remarkably well. They took cattle north from the stockyards of Auckland and returned with a cargo of kauri logs, sacks of kauri gum, shingle, firewood, flax or sand. With their flat bottoms they could be sailed or poled much further up the many tributaries and rivers where the bushmen and bullock teams had the freshly sawn kauri logs amassed, thereby saving a great deal of time and energy on the part of the bushmen. Flat-bottomed scows were also capable of grounding on a beach for loading and unloading. Over the side went duckboards, wheelbarrows, and banjo shovels. The crew then filled the vessel with sand, racing against the turn of the tide. When the tide did turn, they loaded the equipment back on board and put off to sea. Occasionally an inexperienced skipper overloaded the scow. Then, as the water rose against the outside of the hull (diminishing the amount of safe "free board"), the crew had to shovel rapidly to reduce the contents in the hold to a safe level.
Logs when hauled were always carried above deck, secured by heavy chain, the space between decks being left empty to give added buoyancy. The logs were taken to Auckland and unloaded into floating "booms" to await breaking down in the sawmills of the Kauri Timber CompanyKauri Timber Company and other such mills that operated right on the edge of Auckland Harbour.
The golden age of scows and schooners lasted from the 1890s to the end of the First World War, when schooners were superseded by steamers and scows were gradually replaced with tugs.
The Subritzky family of Northland operated the scows Jane Gifford and Owhiti as the last fleet of working scows, operating between the Port of Auckland and the Island communities of the Hauraki Gulf. Subritzky The Jane Gifford was gifted to the Waiuku Historical SocietyWaiuku Historical Society by Captain Bert Subritzky and his wife Moana in 1985, where it was re-masted and re-rigged to its original splendour. The Owhiti was sold to Captain Dave Skyme and fully restored to its 1924 sea worthiness, and it subsequently starred in the 1983 movie Savage Islands (starring Tommy Lee Jones and amongst others Kiwi icon and singer Prince Tui Teka as King Ponapa). Unfortunately the Owhiti was not maintained for a period of time, during which teredo shipworms destroyed much of her structure. She remains in a deteriorating condition at Opua. Her rig may see use in another scow when restored.
The main differences from American scows were sharper bows and favouring the ketch rig instead of the schooner rig, although a great many schooner- and topsail schooner-rigged vessels were built. Some 130 scows were built in the north of New Zealand between 1873 and 1925; they ranged from 45 to 130 ft (14–40 m). New Zealand trading scows travelled all around New Zealand as well as to Australia and to the west coast of America although the majority were based in the Hauraki Gulf of New Zealand.New Zealand trading scows
Notable sailing scows The scow schooner Alma of San Francisco, built in 1891, restored in the 1960s, and designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1988, was one of the last scow schooners in operation. She is a small example, 59 feet in length, 22.6 feet in beam, with a draft of 4 feet and a loaded displacement of 41 tons.
Elsie was the last scow sloop operated on the Chesapeake Bay. Although sailing scows were once numerous around the Bay, they are poorly documented.
The Ted Ashby is a ketch-rigged scow built in 1993 and based at the New Zealand National Maritime Museum in Auckland, it regularly sails the Auckland harbour as a tourist attraction. It was named after an old-time New Zealand seafarer and scowman, Ted Ashby, who had the foresight to document much of the history of these coastal work horses in his book Phantom Fleet - The Scows and Scowmen of Auckland, which was published by A. H. & A. W. Reed, Wellington, in 1976.