Brigantine.
L/B/D:
83 × 22.5 × 11.5 dph (25.3 × 6.9m × 3.5m). Tons:
192 grt. Hull:
wood. Built:
Retire Becket, Salem, Mass.; 1816.
Captain George Crowninshield, Jr.'s, Cleopatra's Barge was the first seagoing yacht built in the United States. An intriguing blend of seaman and dandy, Crowninshield had acquired Jefferson for use as a yacht in 1801, and he sailed her as a privateer during the War of 1812. After the war, Crowninshield commissioned Retire Becket to build him a yacht from scratch. When the ship was launched, he gave her the extravagant name of Cleopatra's Barge, all but fulfilling the prediction of his brother Benjamin—then secretary of the navy—that he would choose "some foolish name that would be laughed at." Laugh they might; but when launched, the brigantine attracted thousands of visitors from far and wide, and Crowninshield wrote his brother at the end of December that an "average of over 900 [people] per day" had come to admire his ship.
Opulent and extravagant Cleopatra's Barge may have been—the hull was painted with a herringbone pattern to port and multicolored stripes to starboard—but she was nonetheless a swift sailer and smartly handled. Armed with some 300 letters of introduction, Crowninshield sailed for Europe on March 30, 1817, visiting sixteen ports in the Azores, Madeira, Gibraltar, North Africa, Spain, France, and Italy, before returning to Salem on October 3. Six weeks later, Crowninshield was dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one.
Cleopatra's Barge was sold and, stripped of her finer fittings, sailed as a packet between South Carolina and Boston. In 1821, the brigantine was bought by Bryant & Sturgis and sent out to Hawaii where Kamehameha II bought the ship. Renamed Haaheo o Hawaii ("Pride of Hawaii"), the vessel served as a sort of royal flagship until April 4, 1824, when she ran aground at Hanalei Bay, Kauai and became a total loss despite prodigious efforts to save her.
Crowninshield, Story of George Crowninshield's Yacht "Cleopatra's Barge." Walter Muir Whitehill, "George Crowninshield's Yacht Cleopatra's Barge."
