Wartime designation: CGR-812
Type: Gaff-rigged schooner
LOA: 137′ 0″ / 42.00m – LOD: 112’0″ / 34.00m – LWL: 90’0″ / 27.00m – Beam: 20′ 7″ / 6.27m – Draft: 13′ 0″ / 4.00m – Displacement: – Sail Area: 5,600 sq ft / 520 m2 – Original Owner: Harold Hathaway of Taunton, Massachusetts – Original Name: Roseway – Year Launched: 24 November 1925 – Designed by: John F. James – Built by: John F. James & Son – Hull Material: Wood – In service: May 1942 – Out of service: November 1945 – National Register Number: 97001278
Historical:
Roseway was designed as a fishing yacht by John James and built in 1925 in his family’s shipyard in Essex, Massachusetts. Father and son worked side by side on Roseway, carrying on a long New England history of wooden shipbuilding. She was commissioned by Harold Hathaway of Taunton, Massachusetts, and was named after an acquaintance of Hathaway’s “who always got her way.”
n 1941, Roseway was purchased by the Boston Pilot’s Association to serve as a pilot boat for Boston Harbor, as a replacement for the pilot-boat Northern Light, No. 3
WWII service
In the spring of 1942, Roseway was fitted with a .50-caliber machine gun and assigned to the First Naval District (New England). All lighted navigational aids along the coast were turned off during the war, and it was up to the Pilots and Roseway to guide ships through the minefields and anti-submarine netting protecting the harbor. At the end of the war, the Coast Guard presented a bronze plaque to the pilots in honor of Roseway‘s exemplary wartime service.
Post War Years:
Roseway continued to serve as a pilot vessel until the early 1970s, at which point she and San Francisco’s Zodiac were the only pilot schooners still in service in the United States. She was then sold and converted into a passenger vessel for the tourist trade. Roseway changed hands several times in the ensuing decades, operating primarily out of Camden, Maine and the US Virgin Islands.
In 1997, Roseway appeared in a 1977 television remake of Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” featuring Karl Malden. And she is now believed to be one of only six Essex-built Grand Banks fishing schooners left in existence. Roseway was listed as a National Historic Landmark. Roseway, at that time, retained between eighty and ninety percent of her original hull fabric and was badly in need of repairs. She remained docked in Rockland, Maine until she was repossessed by the First National Bank of Damariscotta, which in 2002 donated the vessel to the newly founded World Ocean School.
Following two years of restoration in Boothbay Harbor, Roseway again set sail in 2005. She currently serves as the platform for the World Ocean School, which offers various educational programs in St. Croix and the northeastern United States.
Roseway appeared in a 1977 television remake of Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” featuring Karl Malden. And she is now believed to be one of only six Essex-built Grand Banks fishing schooners left in existence.
Provenance (The Wall of Remembrance – The Owners, Notable Guest, and Reunion Information):
Owner: (1925-1941) – Harold Hathaway of Taunton, Massachusetts
Owner: (1941–1942) – Boston Pilots
Owner: (1942–1945) – Coast Guard Reserve
Owner: (1945–1972) – Boston Pilots
Owner: (1972–1974) – A Boston syndicate
Owner: (1974–1987) – Jim Sharp, Orvil Young
Owner: (2002–present) – World Ocean School