GASPÉ TRADER

The GASPÉ TRADER is a sail-powered schooner scale model that became popular in the 1950s, owing to the skills of famous scale model artist Eugène Leclerc of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. He made this scale model himself in 1955.

This type of schooner with a fore-and-aft sail on each mast was commissioned at the turn of the 20th century, in a fruitless effort to compete with steam-powered ships for bulky transport.

This scale model is not necessarily a replica of the GASPÉ TRADER ship built by H.A. Ellis in Barachois, in 1918, but represents a type of schooner. “The GASPÉ TRADER ships were not named as such by Eugène Leclerc. Those ships were the sail-powered schooners that supplied the St. Lawrence River shorelines; a range of those ships, from the three-masted to the seven-masted schooners, were called GASPÉ TRADERS by the ancestors and old captains. In time, everything that qualified as a schooner in the old sailors’ language could be a GASPÉ TRADER.” [Translation] Honoré Leclerc, scale model artist, son of Eugène Leclerc, July 16, 1983