Wanderer (Schooner)

In the history of American sailing ships, there are few vessels that can compare with the disreputable story of the schooner Wanderer. In her career, from 1857 to 1871, Wanderer was stranded, involved in two collisions at sea, stolen not once but twice, condemned as a slaver, a pirate ship and a gunboat. The tale of this yacht is both disturbing and illuminates a dark side of American history.

Wanderer was built as a private yacht for Colonel John Johnson, a sugar plantation owner in Louisiana and also a member of the New York Yacht Club. The keel was laid in Setauket, Long Island, in 1857. No expense was spared — the vessel reputedly cost $25,000, comparable to about one million dollars today. Her design was radical in that she was very modern with a fine long entry at the bow and a cutaway stern. Wanderer was a 114-foot LOA, 232-ton topsail schooner. While on a cruise to New Orleans, Johnson stopped in South Carolina and sold Wanderer to a southern businessman Charles Lamar, who represented a group whose only interest was to bring slaves to Georgia’s Hilton Head, San Simeon, and Jekyll Islands.

In 1858 Wanderer was brought to Port Jefferson, New York for the addition of extra water tanks to hold up to 15,000 gallons of water. The local officials were suspicious that a vessel of this type should be outfitted with so many water tanks. Unfortunately, however, Wanderer was allowed to sail.

Carrie sailed Wanderer to the mouth of the Congo River where there was an active slave market. While the ship was in Africa, pens and shelves were built in the hold for at least 500 people. The passage back took six weeks, with many dying — records indicate that the average death toll of slaves on board ship was 12% ...

Wanderer was the next to last documented ship to bring an illegal cargo of people from Africa to the United States, landing at Jekyll Island, Georgia on November 28, 1858. It was the last to carry a large cargo, arriving with some 400 people. Clotilda, which transported 110 people from Dahomey in 1860, is the last known ship to bring enslaved people from Africa to the US.

Originally built in New York as a pleasure schooner, The Wanderer was purchased by Southern businessman Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar and an investment group, and used in a conspiracy to import kidnapped people illegally. The Atlantic slave trade had been prohibited under US law since 1808. An estimated 409 enslaved people survived the voyage from the Kingdom of Kongo to Georgia. Reports of the smuggling outraged the North. The federal government prosecuted Lamar and other investors, the captain and crew in 1860, but failed to win a conviction.

During the American Civil War, Union forces confiscated the ship and used it for various military roles. It was decommissioned in 1865, converted to merchant use, and lost off Cuba in 1871.

In November 2008, the Jekyll Island Museum unveiled an exhibit dedicated to the enslaved Africans on Wanderer. That month also marked the unveiling of a memorial sculpture on southern Jekyll Island dedicated to the enslaved people who were landed there.