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HOME > HISTORY INTRODUCTION > CHAPTER 1 > CHAPTER 2 > CHAPTER 3 > CHAPTER 4 > A NEW WAY > MARY BUTLER DAVIES
Chapter Two
The Hughes Brothers: 1924-1947
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By the 1940's the hub of the sail freight trade on the Eastern seaboard was 602 - 604 East Prat t Street, Vane Brothers Ship Chandlers.
"We are sailing men," Captain William Burke Vane told a Baltimore Sun reporter in 1937. "And we don’t take kindly to steam."
The schooners Vane Brothers owned and serviced had affinity for both their cargoes and their routes. Logwood and fertilizer, cordwood and coal needed to be moved along the east coast, from Canada to the Caribbean. With cargoes plentiful, a schooner might generate a decent living for its captain and annual returns for its investors ranging between five and twenty percent.
The G. A. Kohler
Just as he had underwritten Charles F. Hughes’s share in the John R. P. Moore, Captain William Burke Vane was regularly involved in schooner ownership. In 1929, along with partner R. B. White, Captain Vane bought the G. A. Kohler at a marshal's sale in Norfolk, Virginia, and brought it to Redman-Vane shipyard for repairs.
 Under Captain G. H. Hopkins, the Kohler would load coal at Hampton Roads, Virginia, destined for the Caribbean, where the coal would be used at fueling stations for steamships. She would then sail to a Haitian port to take on logwood, which was important for its extracts in the production of dye, for medicinal compounds, and for licorice candy. The Kohler loaded for the Baltimore dye maker, J. S. Young Company.
On one voyage, the Kohler found herself becalmed off Bimini in the Bahamas. The ship's cook died while they were stranded, and Captain Hopkins buried the man at sea. The next morning, Mrs. Hopkins rose, and looking overboard into the still, clear waters, she saw the cook's body, wrapped in its canvas shroud. With its feet anchored to the sandy bottom, the ghostly figure swayed with the current below. Mrs. Hopkins implored her husband to marshal all his powers in shifting the Kohler.
 Edna Hopkins was aboard the Kohler in August 1933 when the schooner left Baltimore, traveling 'light' —with no cargo—bound for Haiti and a return load of logwood. Shortly thereafter, the Kohler's crew found themselves off the Carolina banks under dark clouds in a rising sea and light winds. Caught between the Gulf Stream and the coast, Captain Hopkins attempted to maneuver the ship farther seaward, but the weather did not cooperate.
The winds now picked up, blowing easterly. The Kohler, in 90 feet of water, had met a terrific hurricane. While the winds howled, huge waves lifted the Kohler’s bow cleanly from the water, only to send it crashing back into the sea. The first anchor was lost. A second deployed, the crew could only wait as the wild weather pushed the ship progressively leeward toward the ever closer Carolina shore.
The crashing seas swung the Kohler's bow northward, pushing her onto the beach on Cape Hatteras. Thus cruelly anchored, the ocean unleashed its full fury, pounding the Kohler with waves that crashed across her broadside. Captain and Mrs. Hopkins and the crew of eight men took shelter in the forecastle head, stranded and uniquely vulnerable, as the hurricane spent its fury.
 In time, the Coast Guard vessel standing by rescued Captain Hopkins, his wife, and the Kohler's crew—remarkably with no injuries. Photographs taken once the skies had cleared show Captain and Mrs. Hopkins, the crew, and Coast Guard officers in dress uniform on the Kohler’s listing deck. Another photograph shows the schooner beached and lost, but oddly dignified, settled in her final resting place. Vane Brothers salvaged what fittings they could; later she was dismasted. As late as 1938 she remained intact on the beach. Finally, the speculator who had acquired her burned the wooden hulk to the sand to salvage her fittings for scrap. Lying in the shallows off Nag’s Head, Cape Hatteras, the outline of the hull can still be viewed from the air via the tour planes that fly the coast.
The Doris Hamlin
Meanwhile, in 1931, Captain William Burke Vane had bought the four-masted schooner Doris Hamlin. The depression was on and cargoes were scarce. She lay idle into the summer. Then in late June she began what was surely one of the strangest voyages ever undertaken by a Vane schooner.
"Expedition," read a classified ad in the Baltimore Sun on June 20, 1932. "Sailing Wednesday on Schooner Doris Hamlin for three months Caribbean cruise has few unexpected vacancies on share-expense basis. Also need doctor. Ship docked foot Woodall Street." The expedition was to be a farrago of missions: scientific research, historical exploration, treasure-hunting, stock-film shooting, and magazine-article writing being foremost among the stated aims. Conceived for a crew of fifty undergraduate students on their summer vacations, it was organized by L. R. Hubbard, a George Washington University student. Hubbard, better known as L. Ron Hubbard, would later go on to found the Church of Scientology.
After the crossing to Bermuda, eleven of the students jumped ship. The remaining forty-two students voted to continue the voyage, but by the end of the next leg, at Martinique, they had encountered another problem: the students were broke.
"Send funds to bring the vessel home," Captain Garfield wired Vane Brothers.
 With the advent of diesel engines, coal was no longer needed at shipping stations in the Caribbean. World War I had launched the synthetic dye and fabric revolution, drastically reducing the need for logwood, that other schooner staple. Then, with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the Hamlin won a last, remarkable reprieve. As had been the case with the outbreak of World War I, commercial shipping tonnage, which had been plentiful through the 1930s, again became dear. Unfortunately, that was not enough to save her. In January 1940, having been since sold by Vane Brothers, she left Hampton Roads loaded with a cargo of coal for Tenerife in the Canary Islands, never to be seen again. Presumably, the Doris Hamlin was sunk by a German submarine.
The Hughes Brothers take the helm
For Vane Brothers, as for the rest of the country, the outbreak of World War II ended a chapter and an era. Allen P. Vane died on Christmas Day, 1941. A few days later, twenty-one years after Claude V. Hughes wandered into Vane Brothers with his problem, Captain William Burke Vane sold out his remaining shares in Vane Brothers to the Hughes brothers, Claude and Charles Sr. "Why, at one time we had the accounts of 275 sailing ships," Captain Vane told an interviewer when he retired. "Now the total number of schooners that ply bay waters won’t run to fifty." His departure, though, was not fretful. "Ship chandlery, like every other business, has been affected by progress. And that means change."
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