You may have seen him ambling up Union Street from the Vineyard Haven wharves between voyages. He is short and spare, his face handsome and whiskered, his long, blond hair bound up in a ponytail secured by leather ties. He wears white shirts with billowing sleeves, a vest with a gold watch strung from button to pocket, and – with the occasional exception of a pair of blue jeans – turn-of-the-twentieth-century trousers he makes himself. “Some things are hard to buy anymore,” says Dominic Zachorne. In dress and carriage Zachorne, who has just turned thirty-three, looks like a nineteenth-century buccaneer, and he works from time to time as a relief captain of the Alabama and first mate of the Shenandoah, the two great passenger-carrying schooners sailing under the flags of the Douglas family and the Black Dog Tall Ships Company of Vineyard Haven.

“I enjoy history,” Zachorne says, his accent sharp in the old New England waterfront way. “I surround myself with it, and that might give me the air of living in that time period. I think that what you see, possibly, is my enjoyment of history.”

With his father George, Dominic Zachorne is a traditional wooden-boatbuilder. The family shop is a cluttered building in Wickford, Rhode Island, on the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Father and son build and restore smaller yachts. But at the moment what Zachorne is thinking about and working on most intensively is a two-masted schooner named Alice S. Wentworth. In the middle years of the last century, the Wentworth and her master, Captain Zebulon Tilton of Chilmark, were, together, the most famous sailing vessel and skipper working on the whole Atlantic coastline. The Wentworth, hailing from Vineyard Haven, would go down in history as the last freight vessel under sail on the East Coast.

“Look down the companionway,” he says, directing the beam of a flashlight through a hatch of the Wentworth. “Do you see the coal stove?” Nothing burns inside the cast-iron black Shipmate No. 45, for the stove is no larger than a matchbox, the companionway no wider than the width of a finger, and the schooner, seventy-three feet long when she sailed out of Vineyard Haven, measures just thirty-one inches from stem to stern as it stands on Zachorne’s worktable. It couldn’t be truer to the real Wentworth if Zachorne had set out to build an exact replica from her original plans. He’s building the model from scratch for Bruce Ferguson, a Rhode Island sailor and businessman. When complete, the tabletop Wentworth will cost $15,000.

“Every piece built into the original vessel is in this model,” he says. “The frames are built up with futtocks. The keel, keelson, mast step are all individual pieces. The coamings are notched into the deck beams. The windlass is built of individual pieces that I’ve machined on the lathe.”

He fiddles around with brass bits the size of lighter flints and gestures toward his machine tools. “The frames are all there; the individual pieces of the stern are built exactly the way you build a full-size boat. And all the rigging works. The turnbuckles rotate; the blocks have sheaves in them. I make my own three-strand rope because I can’t buy it. It is the entire boat, down to the interior.”

The Wentworth, built as the Lizzie A. Tolles in South Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1863, was purchased by Captain Zeb in 1921. For twenty-one years, Zeb and the Wentworth – known as one of the fastest and prettiest coasters on the seaboard – carried bricks, cordwood, lumber, coal, ice, and oysters up and down the New England coastline. Zeb, cross-eyed, voluble, promiscuous, and astonishingly strong, made the papers and radio programs whenever and wherever he sailed into a port. Zeb and the Wentworth were so much a part of the Vineyard Haven waterfront story that when the vessel was auctioned for nonpayment of debt in 1939, a group of Islanders bought the schooner and kept Tilton at work until he was laid up by surgery in 1942. Captain Tilton died in 1952 at the age of eighty-five, and the Wentworth, which went into the passenger trade after leaving Martha’s Vineyard, was destroyed in a gale in Boston in 1974 at the age of 111. (Zeb: a Celebrated Schooner Captain of Martha’s Vineyard, a book by Polly Burroughs about Tilton and the Wentworth, was recently republished in paperback by Globe Pequot Press.)

For all the work Zachorne invests in research, and for all the care he devotes to the most minute aspects of construction, the wood in her hull – apple, pear, cherry, bass, box, cedar, and black locust – amounts to little more than a bucket’s worth of kindling. Spools of quilting thread, tensioned on a ropewalk, are twisted into gossamer rigging. Brass fittings are fashioned from plates the size of chocolate bars.

“People say the way I build models is crazy,” says Zachorne. “Bruce isn’t going to be able to lift the house off to see the coal stove, but he will be able to take his flashlight and look down and see it. That’s neat.”

Zachorne early on embraced the trade of his father George and late mother Norma Jean (known as Mike), beginning with plastic models they gave him when he was a child. He used wood to fill in the parts the company forgot to include in the kits, and ever since, between gigs working with Bob Douglas aboard Shenandoah and Alabama, and restoring Herreshoff 121/2s with his dad, Zachorne has built model boats.

He has built or repaired 200 vessels-in-miniature. “I maintain models from across the globe and across the centuries,” he says. “I get to see what modelers of another time used for material.

I take notes on the details of their construction, and I learn to weed out the ones that aren’t quite right or accurate.

“Every once in a while these babies come close to going out the window,” he says. “I had to put one model aside for two months. I couldn’t grasp the patience to work on it. Sometimes I just have to be in the right mood. Some models are fussy. Working with my dad and Bob Douglas gives me relief. Throwing spars around the deck which weigh maybe a half a ton, as opposed to those that are six inches long, is a great way to relieve stress.”

One way to make this builder of boats, clothes, and fastidiously accurate models feel stress is to call him an artist. “I’m not an artist by definition,” he protests. “I looked it up one time. I have done artwork – pen and ink drawings on sea chests. But no doing, I’m not an artist.”