The best source I know of regarding American pilot schooners is Vol. I of the 2-volume set
Pilots, edited by Tom Cunliffe and published by Wooden Boat Publications. It's pretty expensive (though I suspect used copies are floating around by now), but a beautiful, authoritative piece of work. It contains hundreds of photos, paintings, and drawings.
I assume the
Phantom plans sumpter250 is using are the same ones that came with the resin-hull kit I bought a couple of years ago. They were drawn back in (I think) the early 1960s by George M. Campbell - one of the best in the business. Mr. Campbell was a marine architect, draftsman, and modeler of vast experience; he knew what he was talking about. (He was, among many other things, the naval architect in charge of the restoration of the clipper ship
Cutty Sark.) When it comes to such things as rigging fittings, I think we can trust him completely.
Remember that the
Phantom was a small, latter-day sailing schooner. Most of her standing rigging probably was made of wire. By her day the old methods of setting up hemp rigging were on the way out. The structures at the heads of the lower masts are iron clamps, rather than the hefty wood trestletrees and crosstrees that supported the shrouds in earlier eras. The photos in Mr. Cunliffe's book make it pretty clear that Mr. Campbell got it right: the shrouds of such vessels were secured to iron bands with shackles.
I wasn't quite as impressed with the supplementary instruction sheet, which shows some ideas for making the rigging fittings out of wire. Those ideas probably would work all right, and they made sense in the early sixties, but there are better ways to do such things nowadays. The railroad department of a good hobby shop, for instance, can provide beautiful miniature turnbuckles in brass or plastic.
One major item is missing from Mr. Campbell's drawings of the
Phantom. A pilot schooner couldn't function without some sort of small boat, which carried the pilots between the schooner and the big ships they were piloting. Mr. Cunliffe's book contains a good drawing of the sort of "pilot canoe" (actually a broad-beamed, square-sterned rowboat) that was used on board Boston pilot schooners, but little if anything about New York ones. (Apparently each port had its distinctive boat types.) I can't claimed to have dug into the primary sources myself, but on the basis of that book I got the impression that not much is known about New York "pilot canoes." That, I suspect, is why the plans of the
Phantom don't show one.
The book does explain in some detail how the system worked on board the Boston-based schooners. The canoe sat upside down on a pair of simple wood chocks amidships. It was light enough that two strong-backed apprentices could pick it up, flip it over, and lower it over the side by hand. (The photos don't seem to show any hoisting gear for the purpose.) The apprentices would then have the job of rowing the canoe, with the pilot himself sitting majestically in the stern sheets, over to the incoming or outgoing ship - and the young men had to row him back when the piloting job was finished. I suspect the "canoe" would be towed behind the schooner much of the time.
I liked the resin-hulled MS kit. There were some problems with the hull casting, but none of them was too hard to fix. Some photos of the finished product are on the Drydock Models site: http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/album195 . One of these days I'm going to tackle the problem of building a canoe for it.
Hope this helps a little. Good luck.