tana. At just over 95 feet and 75 tons, the Sultana was small for a warship, but she seemed sturdy and seaworthy-well suited, the Royal surveyors thought, for enforcing import and export duties.
Sailed to England for refitting in the summer of 1768, the Sultana returned to the northern New England coast that fall and found a very angry Boston waiting for her.
Bostoners were becoming increasingly hostile, storming custom commissioners' offices, burning the officials in effigy, and burning the officials' homes for real. It became so bad that Britain ordered troops to occupy the city, and an imposing Royal fleet was sent to the harbor as a menacing reminder of the king's might. Sultana went there, too, the smallest vessel in the Navy.
A series of enforcement runs followed, as the Sultana prowled the Atlantic for American merchants trying to avoid payment of royal taxes.
The busiest stretch of her career came in the Sultana's Chesapeake Bay posting. There her crew enforced taxes in ports on both Chesapeake shores, including the busy docks of Chestertown. Those merchants paying levies on their tea-the tax that would lead to Chestertown's own Tea Party years later-probably handed a good sum of money over to the Sultana.
Still, McMullen maintains that Sultana was no enemy of Chestertown. "We WERE the British," he says. "It goes along well with this area, which was very loyalist."
Sultana smacked against her biggest dose of colonial resistance in 1771, when she captured a deserter from her crew in a smaller vessel off Newport, Rhode Island. The escapee was seized and hauled back aboard Sultana, infuriating the colonists. A mob gathered, but Sultana loaded her swivel deck guns, and the mob stayed at bay.
By 1772, the diminutive Sultana could no longer muster enough of a fight against American vessels who felt little fear from the Union Jack flying atop her spar. She was returned to England, then sold out of the Royal Navy. She ended her career hauling cargo among the British Isles.
Drew McMullen, left, and John Swain have lived part of their lives in the 18th century while recreating the colonial Sultana.
Some 225 years later, the Sultana is poised for a resurrection.
Before construction could begin for the 20th-century Sultana, the crew needed about 10,000 board feet of lumber. McMullen and Swain had settled on osage orange for the hull, just about the most stubborn wood in all of North America.
Osage Orange was discovered by Lewis and Clark in their journey west, then sent home to serve as Nature's version of barbed wire, so ornery were the thickets and tangled boughs that formed among a clump of osage. The wood is so hard it will bend metal, and so twisted there's hardly any such thing as a long straight plank of osage.
All of which makes osage pretty useless from a furniture or building standpoint, but pretty useful for someone trying to assemble a curved, tough hull for a boat.
Timber experts were skeptical McMullen and Swain could find enough osage for the Sultana, but area farmers were happy to have some of the nettlesome trees hauled off their property.
Harvesting the osage offered the first glimpse of the volunteer effort McMullen and Swain hope will fuel the Sultana's construction. To chop down the trees, about 10 people showed up with their own chainsaws. Only one of the guys was getting paid for it.
"I've never built any boats, but I'm interested in boats," explained Stig Torstenson, a retired mechanical engineer from Pennsylvania now living in the Great Oaks community near Chestertown. He's holding some metal siding while an intern from the local high school trims it. The siding will help protect the shed built on the Sultana shipyard-the group's first project, before moving on to the actual ship.
"But I can swing a hammer and use a saw," Torstenson continued, "so I can be of some help."
Torstenson is one of a few volunteers who show up everyday to the dusty Sultana yard, hammering boards, pouring concrete, hauling away scraps. Free labor for a sometimes back-breaking project.
At this writing, the crew has built the shed. They hope to start the hull by the end of October.
"Everybody's really into it," he said. "That's the most amazing thing . . . I'm hoping that interest will build once there's a ship.
"Right now it's just a rumor of a ship."
McMullen is standing in front of the Compleat Bookseller
store in Chestertown, where a scale model of the Sultana is berthed in the front window. The model makes clear that the colonial plans scattered across McMullen's desk don't do the Sultana justice, at least to a layman.
The spars are huge, towering three feet above the squat, bulky hull of the model. Spidery threads form the intricate rigging of this Sultana in miniature, with nets climbing the side halyards. Iron swivel canons the size of cocktail swords stand guard aft.
It is a striking vessel, one McMullen really hadn't seen before the model arrived eight weeks before. A visitor remarks that the model must be a boon for fund-raising, allowing prospective donors to actually see McMullen and Swain's vision.
"It helped us frankly," McMullen responds. He pauses.
"It's hard to visualize a boat like this." w
