Isaac C. Smith

In 1849, Smith opened a shipyard in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he built a wide variety of vessels, from small sloops to steamboats to large, full-rigged ships.

[5] Smith began his career at an early age, working aboard market sloops on the Hudson River.

Over the next six years, Smith would build a wide variety of vessels at this yard, from sloops to steamboats to large, full-rigged ships.

[19] In 1854–55 however, a deepening nationwide shipbuilding slump persuaded the Smiths to leave the business,[20] the yard's last known ship, "a beautiful clipper schooner"[21] named Colonel John McRae[c] being launched in March 1855.

[4] In his retirement, he became an enthusiastic yachtsman, taking excursions of up to a week in length with his friends aboard his small ten-ton yacht Cornelia to destinations in and around New York Harbor, New Jersey and Long Island Sound.

[6] In the last year of his life, he began to have attacks of paralysis, until eventually, "convinced the end was approaching",[9] he joined the household of his son J. Malcolm in White Plains, where he died two months later on March 15, 1877, at the age of 79.

[29][e] On another voyage, from Portsmouth, England to Calcutta, India, in 1855, Hurricane set a record of 82 1/4 days from The Needles to the mouth of the Hooghly River that remained unbeaten for many years.

[c] The largest of these was the 800-ton freight steamboat Atlas, built in 1852, which had the unusual design feature of external iron strapping for strengthening of her exceptionally broad-beamed hull.

On one such excursion in August 1871, Ocean Wave's defective boiler exploded, sinking the steamer and killing over 70 passengers and crew.

As scant record of these latter vessels has been found,[10] probably they were mostly small watercraft of little individual historic interest such as Hudson River sloops.