Alexander McDougall and the Whaleback Ships

Alexander McDougall was a Scottish-born ship captain who looked at the Great Lakes and decided that everything being built to sail them was wrong. In eighteen eighty-one, he began sketching a new kind of vessel, one designed to ride through heavy seas rather than fight them. The hull would be rounded on the bottom and curved on the sides.

The deck would be nearly flat, barely above the waterline, with small round turrets for hatches instead of the boxy superstructure of a conventional freighter. The bow would taper to a blunt spoon shape. Sailors who saw the first one launched called it a pig boat.

McDougall called it a whaleback. He built his first whaleback in eighteen eighty-eight and went on to construct dozens of them in the yards along the harbor. They were weird-looking ships, low and rounded like submarines trying to surface, and they moved through rough water in a way that convinced no one who wasn't used to them.

Waves broke over the deck and slid off. The rounded hull twisted and flexed under load instead of cracking. On paper, the design was sound.

In practice, the ships were wet, hard to load, and difficult to repair. The whaleback had a short commercial life. By the early twentieth century, the standard design of Great Lakes bulk freighters, the long, flat-decked, boxy ships still used today, had proven itself superior for practical purposes.

The whalebacks were gradually sold off, repurposed, or scrapped. Only one survives as a museum ship: the S.S.

Meteor, docked today at Superior, Wisconsin, just across the bay from Duluth. McDougall's experiment mattered not because it succeeded in the long run but because it demonstrated the creative possibilities of industrial design on the Great Lakes. Duluth was a city where men like McDougall could build strange and ambitious things, find investors who wanted to be part of the future of iron and grain, and launch their experiments on the greatest body of fresh water in the world.