Whaleboat

The early history of whaleboats includes a c. 1335 image of Basque whalers working from a double-ended boat of this type.

There is little information on the actual boats used in the 1600s, but with a whaleship of that time carrying half a dozen or more whaleboats, they are likely to have been specialised types.

Boats became more optimised for sailing, with slightly more beam and less slack bilges in the section (to give greater stability); by the 1850s centreboards were common.

Monomoy surfboats, a lifeboat directly descended from whaleboats, are used for recreational and competitive rowing in the San Francisco Bay Area and coastal Massachusetts.

Colonel Benjamin Church is credited with pioneering their use for amphibious operations against Abenaki and Mi'kmaq tribes in what is today Maine and Acadia.

Others in the Northeastern borderlands followed suit and they were used throughout the imperial conflicts of the early 18th century, and extensively used by both British and colonial troops during the French and Indian War.

Units that made extensive use of whaleboats were the 7th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment at the siege of Louisburg in 1745, often referred to as "the whaleboat regiment", and Gorham's Rangers, formed in 1744, initially a company of Indians mainly from Cape Cod, many of whom were employed as whalers, and which later evolved into a British Army ranger company in the 1750s and 1760s.

[3] John Bradstreet's Bateaux and Transport service,[4] a corps of armed boatmen tasked with moving supplies on inland waterways during the French and Indian War also used whaleboats extensively.

During the American Revolutionary War, there were many whaleboat raids, including one with 230 men led by Return J. Meigs Sr. to sack Sag Harbor on Long Island in 1777.

[citation needed] The whaleboat was originally a lapstrake design, clearly in the Northern European building tradition that created the longship and the yole.