Louisa Lee is a two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner. She's "bald-headed," which means she carries no topsails. Her headsails are a jib and a staysail. Her masts are raked, her transom is angled, and she has a steep spoon and a clipper bow. At the tip of her bowsprit (actually the jib boom), not visible in this streamlined silhouette, is a pulpit--a small iron cage to steady a harpooner. (The pulpit was also known as the widowmaker, for the frequency with which fishermen were swept from it into heavy seas.) An ornate taffrail embraces her quarterdeck; forward of the midships cabins on each side is a lifeline run through brass stanchions. The top of the anchor windlass can be seen on the foredeck. Also not visible in this silhouette are the anchors, the seine boat--stowed on deck, since she's under way--the small dory suspended from davits on the port side, and the wheel and wheel housing.

Louisa Lee is 72 feet on deck, 112 feet overall, with an 11-foot draft and a 22-foot beam. She can accommodate 20 passengers and 6 crew. Her hull is bone white. There is no name or homeport painted along her sheer or on her transom, but the banner streaming from her mainmast says LOUISA LEE in silver lettering on white.

She was rebuilt from the keel up by Jonathan Carleton and Henry Gordon at the Carleton Shipyard in Rockport, Maine. Work started in late 1971 and proceeded as funding allowed. Through connections with inland loggers, Gordon and Carleton were able to obtain coveted white pine for her masts. Gordon's family ran a marine-salvage operation, and many of her parts and fittings came from retrieved wrecks--most notably her keel, salvaged miraculously intact from the wreck of Norumbega, a nineteenth-century Rockport lime coaster briefly renamed Scapegrace. She came down the ways at last in 1976, to great local fanfare, but she disappeared during her shakedown cruise, apparently lost in a freak squall from which only Henry Gordon escaped alive.