R. M. Munroe built double-ended sharpies in Florida, and one of these was used to carry mail between Biscayne Bay and Palm Beach. Although Munroe's double-enders were certainly related to the New Haven sharpie, they were markedly modified and almost all were yachts.
A schooner-rigged, double-ended sharpie was used in the vicinity of San Juan Island, Washington, in the 1880's, but since the heels of the stem and stern posts were immersed it is very doubtful that this sharpie was related in any way to the New Haven boats.
The story of the New Haven sharpie presents an interesting case in the history of the development of small commercial boats in America. As has been shown, the New Haven sharpie took only about 40 years to reach a very efficient stage of development as a fishing sailboat. It was economical to build, well suited to its work, a fast sailer, and attractive in appearance.
When sailing vessels ceased to be used by the fishing industry, the sharpie was almost forgotten, but some slight evidence of its influence on construction remains. For instance, transverse tie rods are used in the large Chesapeake Bay "skipjacks," and Chesapeake motorboats still have round, vertically staved sterns, as do the "Hatteras boats" used on the Carolina Sounds. But the sharpie hull form has now almost completely disappeared in both areas, except in a few surviving flat-bottomed sailing skiffs.
Recently the flat-bottomed hull has come into use in small, outboard-powered commercial fishing skiffs, but, unfortunately, these boats usually are modeled after the primitive flatiron skiff and are short in length.
The New Haven sharpie proved that a long, narrow hull is most efficient
in a flat-bottomed boat, but no utilization has yet been made of its
design as the basis for the design of a modern fishing launch.
[1]Forest and Stream, January 23, 1879, vol. 11, no. 25, p. 504.
[2]Forest and Stream, January 30, 1879, vol. 11, no. 26, p. 500.
[3]Henry Hall, Special Agent, 10th U.S. Census, Report on the Shipbuilding Industry of the United States, Washington, 1880-1885, pp. 29-32.
[4]Howard I. Chapelle, American Small Sailing Craft, New York, 1951, pp. 100-133, figs. 38-48.
[5]C. P. Kunhardt, Small Yachts: Their Design and Construction, Exemplified by the Ruling Types of Modern Practice, New York, 1886 (rev. ed., 1891, pp. 287-298).
[6]Hall, op. cit.(footnote 3), pp. 30, 32.
[7]Kunhardt, op. cit.(footnote 5), pp. 225, 295.
[8]Full-scale examples of sharpies may be seen at the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia, and at the Mystic Marine Museum, Mystic, Connecticut.
[9] The foremast of the garvey was the taller and carried the larger
sail. At one time garveys had leeboards, but by 1850 they commonly had
centerboards and either a skeg aft with a rudder outboard or an
iron-stocked rudder, with the stock passing through the stern overhang
just foreward of the raking transom. The garvey was commonly 24 to 26
feet long with a beam on deck of 6 feet 4 inches to 6 feet 6 inches and
a bottom of 5 feet to 5 feet 3 inches.
[10] In building shoal draft sailing vessels, this practice was usually possible and often proved helpful. In the National Watercraft Collection at the United States National Museum there is a rigged model of a Piscataqua gundalow that was built for testing under sail before construction of the full-scale vessel.
[11] A primitive craft made of three wide planks, one of which formed the entire bottom.
Printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained.