Ships & Passenger Lists

MERCURY (1)
The MERCURY was a 3-masted, square-rigged ship, built by Westervelt & Mackey, New York, for Boyd & Hincken's Havre Second Line of pacekts between New York and Havre, and launched on 3 September 1851. 1,350/1,156 tons (old/new measurement); 193.6 x 38.10 x 22.2 feet (length x beam x depth of hold); 2 decks, draught 21 feet. She was the largest vessel in the Havre Second Line, and the fastest (she is often considered a "medium clipper"): in the 18 years (1851-1869) in which she sailed in the line, her westbound passages, from Havre to New York, averaged 33 days, her fastest passage being 23 days, her longest being 49 days [Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Square-riggers on Schedule; The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), pp. 286-287, 299; William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail (Center Lovell, Maine: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, [1945]55]), II.1176, 1190, 1198, 1199, 1201, 1202, 1206, 1226, 1271, 1292, 1301, 1304; V.2780, 2781, 2799, 2816; Carl C. Cutler, Queens of the Western Ocean; The Story of America's Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, c1961), p. 321]. I have no information on the MERCURY's history after 1869, or on her ultimate fate. However, it may be able to trace this history in the annual volumes of one or more of the following: 1. American Lloyd's Registry of American and Foreign Shipping (from 1858; begun in 1857 as the New York Marine Register), a "classification" society like Lloyd's and the Bureau Veritas. 2. American Shipmasters' Association (later American Bureau of Shipping), Record of American and Foreign Shipping (from 1867), also a "classification" society. 3. Merchant Vessels of the United States (from 1867), published originally by the Treasury Department, then, in turn, by the Bureau of Navigation, the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation, and the Bureau of Customs. The best collection of these registers is held by the Mariners' Museum, 100 Museum Drive, Newport News, VA 23606-3798. [Posted to the Emigration-Ships Mailing List by Michael Palmer - 12 December 1997]