SINCLAIR, WILLIAM (1819-1885)

SINCLAIR, WILLIAM, ship carpenter and master builder; b. Scotland, c1819; m. 1st, 1840, Mary Clouston, of Nelson parish, and 2nd, 1864, Mrs Janet McLean; d. Chatham, 14 Mar 1885.

William Sinclair arrived on the Miramichi around 1835. He was located on Beaubear's Island in the early 1840s and was probably employed in Joseph Russell's shipbuilding yard. In 1846 he was in Saint John, separate from his family. In 1851 he and his family were sharing a home with the James Henderson family in Chatham. Shortly afterwards, he formed a business partnership with Henderson, and Thomas Phillips of Douglastown, to build ships at the former Cunard yard in Chatham. The firm of Phillips, Henderson & Sinclair launched the ship Grand Trianon in 1854 and the barque Summer Cloud in 1855, and then assigned. Later Sinclair was the master builder, with Henderson, of at least three vessels for Gilmour, Rankin & Co.: the ship Annie Laurie (1867), which was the first of the "ABC" ships, so-called, the ship Cycla (1858), and the schooner Doria (1859).

After sixteen years of marriage Sinclair's first wife, Mary Clouston, died in 1856. He was not enumerated on the Miramichi in the census of 1861, but he was back on the river later that year. Between 1861 and 1865 he was the named builder of eight ships for William Muirhead & Co. at Chatham, two of which he constructed jointly with other master builders. The ship Sailor Prince, the first of the Muirhead ships, was "iron kneed, copper-fastened, beautifully modelled, and neatly finished." The ship Glen Cora, the last of the group to which his name is attached, had "as fine an appearance on the water as any vessel that ever floated on the Miramichi."

Another Miramichi vessel credited to Sinclair is the Paradigm, a schooner built for Adam D. Shirreff Jr in 1867. He could have been the William Sinclair who built ships in Saint John in 1868-69. He was, in any event, the master builder of the barque Jennie Armstrong, which was launched from the yard of Adam Tait at Shediac in 1869. He was back on the Miramichi in 1871 and was involved a few years later with James Desmond and other shipwrights in the Miramichi Ship Building Co. This firm went bankrupt while building the large barque Molilamo.

Between 1875 and 1877 Sinclair constructed fourteen smaller boats for government use at lighthouses in the region. In 1877 he built a boat for the Magdalen Island cod fishery. In 1879 he had responsibility for the wood work of a steam tug built at the Miramichi Foundry. He was still classed as a shipbuilder in 1881.

The Miramichi Advance observed that Sinclair possessed "intelligence of a superior order," was given to "a quaintness of speech," and was always "humorous and genial." He and his first wife, Mary Clouston, were the parents of at least nine children, not all of whom survived to adulthood. Their eldest son, William Sinclair Jr, was a shipwright with Gilmour, Rankin & Co. at Bathurst in 1861. There were also children born of the second marriage.