The figurehead known as the “White Lady” originally adorned a three-masted square-rigger named the Imperial, built in Quincy in 1869. The ship was owned by Isaac Taylor, originally of Chatham; Isaac’s nephew, John Taylor III, commanded her during her first voyage from Boston to London to Singapore. John’s fifth son, Freddie Imperial Taylor, was born aboard ship in 1870. In 1872 she was listed in the Record of American and Foreign Shipping as engaged in the timber trade, the Taylors still owner and master through 1874. James Edwin Crosby of Brewster is listed as her master from 1875 until near the end of her career, working her in the California and China trade. During Crosby’s last voyage from Manila to Philadelphia in 1893 he contracted a cold and died the following year. He is buried in Brewster.
Captain J. Henry Sears of Brewster acquired ownership of the Imperial in 1875. According to local oral history, he added the figurehead in 1876. The shipping record lists New York, Liverpool, San Francisco, Antwerp, Shanghai, and Portland among her ports of call. She was eventually turned into a three-masted schooner-barge, and met her end in 1896, running aground on Barnegat Shoal in New Jersey. How Captain Sears managed to salvage the White Lady is unknown; what is known and well-documented in pictures is that he brought her back to Brewster and mounted her on the bluff near his summer cottage overlooking Cape Cod Bay. Captain Sears retired to Brewster in 1898 and died in 1912.
In 1969 the White Lady was restored and gifted to the Provincetown Museum by Barbara Hoyt Ecker, Captain Sears’s granddaughter. The figurehead was displayed at the Provincetown Museum until the 1980’s, when damage occurred that proved too costly to repair.
Specifications:
Height: 8’8”
Depth: 40”
Width: 22”
Weight: 600 lbs.
Collection #: 9993136
17 degree angle of ship mount
Copyright 2008 Sally Gunning.
Sources: Henry Sears Hoyt Jr. & Ann Hoyt Stone’s Looking Aft, 1997; Joseph A. Nickerson Jr. & Geraldine D. Nickerson’s Chatham Sea Captains in the Age of Sail, 2008; J. Henry Sears’s Brewster Shipmasters, 1906; the Record of American and Foreign Shipping; the American Lloyd’s Register of American and Foreign Shipping; Hoyt and Deborah Ecker.