Kenchington

When I wrote the above note, I had carefully read Captain Collins' details of the gear on a dory prepared for the halibut fishery (meaning a 15ft dory, as represented in the Model Shipways kit). Searching further for missing information, I see that he specified the stern becket of a dory used in saltbanking for cod as made of "3 feet of 2-inch rope". What he termed the "painter" (but which presumably included the loop forming a becket) as made from "5 fathoms of 2-inch manilla rope". I don't doubt that the same applied to the slightly larger halibut dories (though missed out during editing of what seems to have been a time-constrained report). Given the date (published 1887), my expectation was that rope size was specified as circumference (as in the UK still, when given in Imperial units) but 2-inch circumference would mean 16mm diameter. That might be enough for a dory becket if made of Dacron but not in manilla. Thus, Collins must have meant 2-inch diameter (as in the US and Canada today), meaning 2.1mm at 1:24 scale -- which is very close to the size of the line supplied with my dory kit. For anyone interested in following up, I've quoted those dimensions from: G.B.Goode (ed.) "The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States", Section V, Volume 1. The accompanying illustrations were bound as a separate volume. The whole multi-volume work by Goode and his co-authors is still (after 140 years) by far the best, most comprehensive account of any nation's fisheries ever produced -- with details right down to, for example, the number of draft horses kept in Gloucester for hauling boxes of iced halibut to the railroad station! Indeed, that work has very rarely, if ever, been equalled for any single fishery anywhere. It is well worth consulting when modelling a North American fishing boat of the mid- to late-19th Century. And, courtesy of the generosity of the US government, it is available on line for free. Trevor

Thanks! I doubt that I will post a build log. (Better men than I, and at least one lady, have posted already.) But I hope to have something to show in the finished-models section, one day. Meanwhile, you posted above: "The last item to truly finish this kit is the beckets. I tried to install these, but the provided scale rope is just too large for the holes in the transom/sheer plank, and none of the drill bits for my pin vise drill are large enough to properly widen the hole. Maybe I'll try using the smallest bit from my power drill. On the other hand, some of the thread for rigging included with the Norwegian Sailing Pram kit seems like it may be a good size so I'm thinking I may see if there's any leftover after I'm finished with that kit that I could use." I've been looking at the photos that Frederick William Wallace took aboard Nova Scotian schooners in the years before 1914. Some show the beckets quite clearly and they were made of surprisingly thick rope. It's hard to scale off the images but it looks like six lengths laid side by side would be about as wide as the top of the dory's transom -- which is pretty much as thick as the stuff that ModelExpo provided with my kit. (Maybe they do know what they are doing?) So the correct response for an accurate scale model seems to be drilling out the holes, rather than finding thinner cordage. It will look weird and clunky but, if that's how it was done back in the day ... I could only guess at why such heavy stuff was used. Lifting a loaded dory, with the shroud tackles simply hooked to the beckets (no iron thimbles seized in, not even twine serving on the beckets) would have been a brutal way to treat the rope. Maybe men had learnt to compensate by using something thick enough to take the wear and tear. However, if ModelExpo have got the rope thickness right, they are completely wrong on the rigging of the beckets. Every image I can find (Captain Collins' drawings from the 1880s, as well as later photos) shows the stern becket with its knots on the outside of the transom and its loop in the dory (or emerging in the dory, but often tossed casually over the transom, out of the way). That makes sense, as a vertical lift would lead cleanly to the inboard face of the sloping transom, not outboard. I've been trying to discern what knots were used but I can't. My guess is a wall-and-crown on each end of the length of rope. To my shame, I've never managed to tie one of those in full-scale and I'm not going to try in 1:24! At that scale, fudging the end of the rope into a vague blob might give a better appearance than an overhand knot. As for the bow becket: All the illustrations I can find show the loop emerging forward of the boat, with any knots inboard. (The reverse of ModelExpo's instructions.) That becket was not only used for lifting but also had the painter attached. My guess (and the one photo I can find seems consistent, though the detail is hard to discern) is that the becket was a continuous loop, made with a short splice that lay against the inboard face of the stem -- thus effectively transferring towing forces from the painter to the main structure of the dory, not to the planks and thence to the nails holding those to the stem. If you want to include a painter, as well as beckets, some photos suggest an eye splice in one end of it, then the painter tag-hitched to the foremost point on the becket by passing the free end through its eye splice. However, other images suggest more of a gouty mess where the two ropes were joined, so a sheet bend with the short end frayed out and then glued into a lump might look very realistic, while saving a lot of heartache ! Trevor

In the index, true, but if you check the footnote that it references the instruction is really about ensuring, while clearing for action, that hammocks are stowed (so both getting them out of the way and putting them where they serve their protective function) and that they are stowed without every man in the watch below tripping over everyone else as each rushes around with his own gear. What I find most interesting (or maybe most amusing?) is that, as early as 1852, someone who sat at a desk in Washington presumed to tell USN Captains how to organize their ships for combat. Back then, and for a long time after, Captains RN ran their own ships according to their (sometimes bizarre) personal preferences, subject only to loose control by nearby Admirals and looser still by King's Regulations or Admiralty dictat. Apparently, the notion of centralized command was more developed in the USA. Still, I'd not be so sure that USN officers took the "Instructions" terribly seriously. As just one example, nothing in the document anticipated Winslow's ruse of using Kearsarge's anchor chains as impromptu armour when he cornered Alabama off Cherbourg in 1864! Either way, when considering what was actually done aboard Constitution in 1798, I'd not place a set of rules prepared in the 1850s ahead of a Midshipman's contemporary eye-witness account. Trevor

I'm about to start on my own dory and, as a preliminary step, I'm working my way through all the wonderful build logs for the kit that are on this site. (50 scribbled notes taken for transfer to the instruction book!) Before I begin work at 1:24, perhaps a note on full-size practice won't be too out of place here, as Galkar's log is so recent: In a "normal" lapstrake ("clinker" in the UK) hull, with curved sections, the strakes are bevelled amidships (besides where they approach the stem) to accommodate the curve while providing enough faying surface, between one strake and the next, for the clenches to pass and to give a watertight seal. The lands (the flat surfaces where the stakes project beyond the ones below) end up being narrower than the thickness of the planks used, with the narrowing depending on the curvature of the hull section and hence the amount of bevelling required. Bank dories are different. With their slab sides, no bevelling is needed to achieve however wide an overlap might be desired. However, the original purpose of the design was to produce stackable boats that could be stowed in the limited space on a schooner's deck. In that role, wide lands would get beaten around and likely jam inside the next dory in the stack. The solution is the "dory lap", in which both strakes are bevelled through most of their width, leaving almost no land at all. In his reconstruction drawing, Chapelle shows an almost flush joint but real dories do have lands -- narrow ones, and far narrower than plank-thickness, but they are there. In 1:24, they might not be visible at all. However, reproducing a dory lap at that scale would be beyond challenging. (Scratch building, I'd rather go for a single piece, substituting for the three strakes, then scribe to hint at the laps.) Still, to anyone familiar with the full-size prototype, meaning pretty much anyone here in Nova Scotia, the broad lands of the Model Shipways model look off. Nothing wrong with that: Models cannot truly be full-scale reality shrunken down. But if anyone wants to bevel their strakes and reduce the prominence of the lands a bit, I'd say go right ahead. Trevor

If this was only something O'Brien put in one of his books, I wouldn't give it ten seconds' consideration. As an artist weaving words, he did a great job of inserting technicalities to provide background colour ... except that he was so loose with the details that his works swiftly degenerate into being unreadable. However, the thread started with a quotation from the journal of Midshipman James Pity -- an eye witness who can be expected to have known what a "top" was. (I don't know whether he was quoted correctly but I assume so.) And I'd not suggest that anyone fitted hammock stanchions and nettings in a top. Those would be semi-permanent fixtures and, as such, would appear somewhere in contemporary models, artworks or the documentary record. My interpretation of the Midshipman's words (without seeing more of their context) is that this was an expedient used when clearing for action. Thus, the rolled, lashed hammocks would have been laid like sandbags around a foxhole (ashore, and a century or more later), though the men who fired from that cover would perhaps have called the arrangement a "barricado".

Coming late to this discussion, I'll offer a few generalities. First, what was done when preparing a ship for action and what artists showed (or even textbooks described) could be very different things. Faced with the reality of combat, men did (and do) what they must to achieve their ends. Second, attitudes change through time. The concept that causes lead to effects, which underlies so much of the thought of our own era, was not exactly a product of the Enlightenment but was much enhanced through that transformation. The consequences of that shift in thinking can be seen well enough in warship design: The elegant, sweeping rails and carved hances of 17th Century ships were replaced, circa 1800, by blocky, built-up bulwarks that effectively protected the gun crews on quarterdeck and fo'c'sle. Soon after, lovely but fragile sterns were replaced by Seppings' far more robust (but ugly) round sterns. In short: By the 1790s, men were thinking of what we would now regard as practicalities -- like providing protection for sharpshooters stationed in the tops. Then there was technological change: A battalion of Foot, armed with muskets, could do much harm to a line of enemy by volley firing (if they did not miss entirely, which too many did). But one musketeer firing at a single individual was almost certain to miss, unless at the closest range. By the 1790s, however, slower-firing but far more accurate rifles were available and it was possible to pick off individuals at a distance. (Think Nelson at Trafalgar.) That gave value to stationing sharpshooters in the tops but also made them vulnerable to counter-fire. Whether a rifleman or the gunnery officer of a Dreadnought, nothing disturbs a man's careful aim so much as being on the receiving end of someone else's projectiles, so there was good reason to provide protection for your own sharpshooters, sufficient that they could remain calm and confident. USN officers would have been well aware of that: Who, in their time, could forget Bunker Hill, where the doomed Redcoats had advanced over their own dead but been repeatedly beaten back by a bunch of civilian marksmen, firing from cover? Put all that together and, if a Midshipman who was there reported that hammocks were sent aloft to the tops, I would take him at his word. I see no reason to doubt that that was done, at least at that one time and on that one ship. Trevor

Sadly, no. My years down-under were half a lifetime ago. Now, I'm half a world away.

Ah! The d'Entrecastaux Channel ... Beat up the length of that in "Eye of the Wind", nearly 40 years ago now, and learnt that short-tacking a square rigger (even a very small square rigger) is hard work for a fo'c's'le hand! Happy memories of Adventure Bay, on the outer side of Bruny Island too. A couple of times, we lay in the lee of King Island, waiting for a break in the weather, then down the west coast of Tasmania (fishing for data) and nipped around South East Cape just ahead of the next storm. Around the Cape and into Adventure Bay, where Cook had lain two centuries before, seeking the same shelter we did. But he had come across the Indian Ocean in a sailing vessel. We had only rounded Tasmania in a big steel research trawler, with its diesel thundering under our feet! Trevor

Thanks for the invitation! I had heard of the Guild and maybe I'll stop by for one of your meetings, though I avoid the city as much as I can. Trevor

Thank you, gentlemen, for your welcomes! It's really great to find such a supportive community.

I signed up for MSW a few years ago, hoping to look and learn, but other commitments got in the way. Truth to tell, I don't think I have had the patience for ship modelling through the last half-century, but age has its effects and I'm slowing down now. I've also had more success than I expected with woodwork projects during a refit of my small (but full-scale) boat. So I've decided to embark on the Model Shipways trio: dory, pram and sloop. I'll see how far I get. By way of introduction: I'm a marine biologist by education, a fisheries scientist by occupation and a sailor by inclination. However, I have published a few research papers in nautical archaeology and maritime history. (I see that one of my earlier contributions was chewed over some years back, here on MSW.) My interest is in ships (and smaller water craft), with models being one way to approach their prototypes, rather than an end in themselves. Looking forward to leaning from everyone on MSW, as my attempt at a miniature dory proceeds ... Trevor