A new book has been published by Salcombe Maritime Museum, looking at Salcombe’s history as a shipbuilding and ship-owning port.

Written by museum curator Roger Barrett, who also write The Salcombe Lifeboat Disaster, it is the first comprehensive account of Salcombe’s heyday as a shipbuilding port, famed for its clipper fruit schooners.

It tells the story of the town’s maritime community in the nineteenth century, describes their ships, their trades and the men who built, owned and sailed them.

Roger Barrett said: “The new book traces the rise of Salcombe from an obscure fishing village in the early 1800s, and describes how the port became famous throughout the maritime world for its beautiful clipper-like schooners, the ‘Salcombe fruiters’.

“Built for speed in the shipyards at Salcombe and Kingsbridge, these small, fine-lined vessels raced home to the fruit markets of London, Bristol, Liverpool and Hull with cargoes of highly perishable fruit from the Azores, the Mediterranean and the Bahamas.”

The book, which was launched on Friday, March 23, in Salcombe Maritime Museum, Market Street, contains more than 250 illustrations, including 32 colour reproductions of the paintings of locally-built sailing ships in the museum’s collection.

For family history researchers, there is a wealth of information about local mariners, shipbuilders and allied tradesmen.

‘Salcombe: Schooner port’ is priced at £19.99 and is available from Salter’s Bookshop, Salcombe, Harbour Bookshop, Kingsbridge, at the Salcombe Maritime Museum and can be purchased online by emailing [email protected] or from Amazon.

Book signings took place on Monday, March 26, between 11am and 12.30pm at Harbour Bookshop, Mill Street, Kingsbridge, and on Wednesday, March 28, between 10.30am to 1pm at Salcombe Library, Cliff House, Salcombe.