Vol. 65, No. 4 winter 2020 362


2. Quarterdeck view of the model named Hannah by Walter C. Leavitt in the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Photograph by the author. Publication courtesy of the Addison Gallery.


Since the turn of the twentieth century when


interest in the armed schooner Hannah began to blossom, literally hundreds of paintings, sketches, engravings, and models have been concocted to show ‘how she looked.’ Imaginary Hannahs have graced the pages of untold numbers of books and magazines, they decorate home and offi ce bookshelves and walls, and representations of her by better-known artists have sold for exorbitant fi gures on the auction block. In one form or another, she has been seen to sail across paper place mats in restaurants, add interest to the cover


3. Rebecca - Marblehead, coarse-scale model c. 1850, maker unknown. Photograph by the author. Publication courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum.


of a telephone directory, highlight a philatelic fi rst-day cover, enliven many a year’s calendar print, appear daily as a linecut in a newspaper, and crop up in the most unlikely contexts. T e number of models must be astronomical. Yet, as with the illustrations, no two are exactly alike. Every representation, to the last one, is nothing more than a guess—educated or otherwise— as to what she really looked like, because NO CONTEMPORARY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PORTRAIT OR PLAN OF HANNAH HAS EVER BEEN FOUND OR HAS EVER BEEN KNOWN TO EXIST. (Capitalized in the original.)


(Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, In Troubled Waters: T e Elusive Schooner Hannah. Salem: Peabody Museum, 1970, pp.45-46)


Philip Chadwick Foster Smith deserves all the credit we can give for fi rst shaping the proper course for our understanding of the “elusive schooner Hannah” while his collaborator Russell W. Knight provided the always important funding to get the story into circulation. Regrettably, it


took us fi ſt y years to


4. A circa 1865 model of “a Marblehead schooner” probably fi ctitiously named Friendship. Photograph by the author. Publication courtesy of the Abbot Library, Marblehead, Massachusetts.


appreciate the signifi cance of their eff orts and to apply their fi ndings to encourage a new interpretation of Hannah.


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