Sloops of the Hudson River

For more than 200 years, sloop-rigged sailing craft carried the bulk of the commerce on the Hudson River, helping to make New York America's premier seaport. Historian and model-maker Fontenoy looks at the origins of Hudson River sloops among seventeenth-century Dutch vessels, then traces the changes through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that resulted in the classic Hudson River sloop of the 1830s-50s.