Kenchington

The transcontinental railroad was responsible for drawing the USA away from the sea. More exactly, opening the interior, with all of its opportunities for investment, was the draw, the railroad only the most prominent symbol. Sure, the War of Northern Aggression hastened the end but it would have come anyway. Shipping is inherently international and the British, paying less to their workers and hence with lower labour costs, could carry cargo to and from the USA more cheaply. Meanwhile, ships are their own advertisements, as they move from port to port. British shipyards, already more technically advanced as they had to cope without access to abundant timber, learnt from the Yankee clippers and produced more efficient (though slower) ships. Most of us who build models care about ships as artifacts but merchant ships are, first and foremost, commercial investments. They were and are mostly about profit margins and returns to capital -- for all that the people most closely involved got excited about speed or size, while the tea trade became the greatest sailing race there has ever been or is ever likely to be. Trevor

That is interesting. I think it is pointing but maybe grafting (and please don't ask me to define the difference!). Ashley illustrated multiple alternatives as his #3550 to #3565, with others scattered about on nearby pages of his tome. But why go to the extra trouble n the eye of a stay, instead of just serving? Did it produce a thicker cover for the rope within? Was it more stable, if part was worn away, where long lengths of service can come loose? Or maybe the ship's bo's'un was just showing off his skills and the pride in his ship! Trevor

I won't say that is wrong but I find it surprising -- where tarring of cordage is concerned. @wefalck: Can you point to your source for the use of coal tar in ship rigging, before the era of museum ships? There's scope for some confusion here. When laying up new rope in a ropewalk, both hemp and manila fibres were always tarred with pine tar -- the Stockholm (actually made more broadly in Sweden and probably elsewhere around the Baltic) product being preferred. So far as I am aware, that has never ceased, though few ropewalks produce hemp or manila material now. (Whether other fibres were tarred is more than I can say. I'll guess that cotton wasn't and isn't, but I don't know about coir. Modern synthetics are not.) That tarring of fibres when rope was/is made was/is standard. However, it would be unusual to apply extra tar to the outside of running rigging, once it was in place on board, aside from on servings covering eyes at ends and so forth. Surface tar along the length of running lines would gum up blocks, coat the crew in tar and generally create a mess. So we have standing rigging dark because of repeated application of tar to its surfaces, running rigging a lighter brown because its only tar is internal. Trevor

Joggling -- usually, though Smyth didn't include that term (or only with an unrelated meaning) and nor did Paasch, so I don't know whether it was in use before the 20th Century.

That one, I think I can answer: No, there were no deck lights in sailing ships. There is usually enough light, even on a moonless night, for men to work the rig and usually no call for anything more detailed (maintenance tasks or whatever) until daylight. When it was (and is) truly dark, seamen were expected to work by feel, knowing which line was belayed on which pin. As to lights for other ships to see and follow: My guess is that a rather ordinary lantern would be hoisted in the rigging, probably using a spare flag halliard or the like. That's how anchor lights were shown in more recent times. In the 1940s, it was claimed that U-Boat lookouts could find a convoy if one smoker could not resist the need to strike a match when on deck at night. (I don't know the truth of it but that was claimed at the time.) So a lantern with even a single candle could likely be seen from a distance, given reasonable weather. Trevor

Note also, in the posted images, that much (not all) of the rigging is in left-laid cord of some kind, whereas almost all rope is right-laid. That departure from full-size practice (I won't call it an "error") stands out like a sore thumb once you have the eye for it. Sure, any sailing-ship model is (today) a work of art rather than a miniature version of some full-size prototype. But, for myself, I don't see the artistry in misrepresenting the cordage. Trevor

Yes, if "common" means many ships had some lengths wormed but not parcelled and served. No, if you mean was much of the rigging done that way. It was one treatment among several alternatives and had specialized purposes at particular times. Trevor

When I first came to Nova Scotia, near a half-century ago, there was an old joke still getting passed around. It was said that, if a bluenose (a Nova Scotian) was ever to rig a bathtub, he'd make it a schooner. Mainers weren't (and aren't) so very different from us. Back in 1994, I got to watch the local boats return to a harbour in El Salvador, after a day of fishing. The smallest of them all, hardly more than a canoe, had her name in large letters down her side: "Bismarck". Some humour is timeless! Trevor

One thing to understand is that, although the men in corporate boardrooms of ship-owning companies may only care about utility, those who work on the water are motivated by the same suite of urges that drive the yachting fraternity-- even though most would hate to admit it. Of course, it is essential on the commercial side to bring in more than the outgoings (whereas the reverse is true of the recreational side) but there's the same pride in the boat, the same wish to display the superiority of the boat to outside observers, the same desire for comfort in so far as that can be afforded and so on. Hence, I suspect that the prominent gammon knee that forms the "clipper" stem profile of a Friendship sloop was always primarily decorative. That aside, the forward rake of the Friendship's stem (in contrast to the plum stem of smaller boats on Muscongus Bay) went with a lot of flare well forward. That will have helped the bow rise to waves, hence suiting a sloop to winter lobstering, in worse weather and further from shore than the summer fishery. (There are boat types that have the flare without the rake but it's not an easy shape to plank.) However, there's fashion and appearance there too. A man who could only afford a sloop for lobstering still wanted a boat that looked like the great Gloucester schooners -- much as a man who drives a Ford would prefer one that looks like a BMW or a Jaguar. That's the way we human males are 😎 The choice between lapstrake and carvel is a whole lot murkier. All else being equal, lapstrake is probably lighter, so easier to haul ashore in places where that is advantageous. However, fitting watertight bulkheads is much easier in a carvel hull, while the strength of a lapstrake hull is more badly affected by cutting holes in the planks. So a desire to have a live well would encourage the choice of carvel. But my guess is that there were two alternatives, each complete to itself. They needed different types and sizes of lumber, with different costs, different skills in the boatyard, different labour demands (lots of hours needed to clench all the nails in a big lapstrake hull), different maintenance (no need for a man to re-caulk his lapstrake boat) and so on. The optimum balance amongst all those encouraged carvel for larger hulls, lapstrake for smaller, with the critical size decreasing through time -- partly as relative costs changed, partly as fashions and expectations shifted. The Muscongus Bay sloops of the later 19th Century seem to have lain near the break-point for their time and place, so that personal preference could push the choice one way or the other. If that's complicated, what do we make of the boat types that had part-lapstrake, part-carvel construction? The English even had some early steam tugs with that duality. Weird! Trevor

OK: I stand corrected! Not what I would have expected, but I clearly need to re-read Chapelle before posting. Was it he or one of the US Fish Commission authors who said something about the cuddy being heated in winter -- not for the comfort of the fishermen but to keep the lobsters from freezing? I'd not want to share my living space with the catch but if that was the only way to earn a living in the fishery, men had to do what they had to do. Trevor

I have been mulling over this point through recent days. The real world is variable, with layers upon layers of variations. But the human brain does love to group and classify. Indeed, academic disciplines need classifications to get order out of a chaos of data and find the underlying truths. So we have Linneaus' system for classifying plants and animals, Lyell's arrangements for sorting the ages of rocks and so forth. Historians of ships and boats have to do the same. Sometimes, there is real order -- as in a frigate built to the standard design for a certain class. Friendship sloops weren't as uniform as that but they could be recognized and, to some extent, distinguished from the other sloop designs used elsewhere along the New England coasts. However, other times, the chaos overwhelms the order and academics end up imposing a terminological order on a chaotic reality. It rather looks like the Muscongus Bay centreboarders were a case in point. Chapelle wasn't wrong to group them together and stick a label on them but they weren't uniform. There's lots of interesting questions here: Why do recognizable "types" of boats often arise? And why do they sometimes not? As technological evolution can be so rapid, how should we classify the products of an on-going evolutionary development? When does one "type" become another? (Palaeontologists have the same problem, if the fossil record is rich, and have to invoke "chronospecies", distinguished from one another by breaks at largely-arbitrary points in time.) Then there's what labels we apply to whatever groups we recognize. Nautical historians have tended to use contemporary terminology, which isn't always helpful. There have been many utterly different types of vessel, through some four centuries, all labelled "frigate" -- which doesn't aid clarity. "Battlecruiser" didn't get used for so long but was applied to multiple, very different types within a half-century or so. Then we could spend hours listing the various meanings of "sloop" and "smack". It ain't simple! Trevor

I would doubt that, on a New England fishing boat. "Stern sheets" is terminology for the kinds of boats used to transport officers or other up-market passengers. But I'd not call any of the seats "benches". That's landsman's terminology. For myself, I'd call them all "cockpit seats", though that may be just me carrying over a yachtsman's term. If there's a "cabinet" aboard, it would be in the cuddy. In the cockpit, you're talking "lockers" or specifically "cockpit lockers", with the locker lids serving as cockpit seats. On my own boat, the lockers right aft are the "lazarette" but, once again, that's not terminology I would expect to be understood on a New England fishing boat. I'd certainly expect that the frames would be visible. That is, I would not expect such a boat to have any ceiling. Doesn't Chapelle say something about the earlier Muscongus Bay boats being open, even though we choose to model later ones with cockpit soles rather than light floorboards? Trevor

Good to hear that, @SaltyScot! I'm in the same status as you: Alive, kicking but not building models. Amongst other tasks, I'm touching up the paint on the house. But when I went to scrape the living-room window, the paint came off and revealed ... nothing. Nothing but a big hole, where ants had eaten everything away. So now I have to get a new window installed, complete with rebuilding the house structure around it. What a joy! Trevor

Nothing bigger than a basket of fish to pass down or up through that hatchway but lots of water on deck to keep out of the fish hold! Trevor

Thank you for doing this translation and presentation, @Waldemar! You have taken on a major effort but it will be very, very valuable -- to me, at least. Trevor

I would say, in general, no. They were usually permanently fastened in place and anyway were thought to be essential to the function of the vessel. That seems odd to a modern mind but our notions of cause-and-effect date from the Enlightenment. It took a long while for practical seamen, shipwrights and so forth to see that light, so well into the 18th Century men supposed that the carvings were as vital to the power of a warship as her guns were. (Considering that scaring the other guy into submission was half the point, the idea wasn't entirely wrong anyway.) For Nonsuch, fighting wasn't the objective but the grandeur of the Company was. The carvings were a projection of that. Trevor

Interesting that the Cunarders had less internal subdivision than the White Star ships. That would indeed have made them more vulnerable, though there is also a question of low-temperature brittleness of Titanic's plating, which may not have been true of Lusitania's. The big unknown will always be the human element: The liner companies were tied into free advertising, through media interest in the big ships, which sometimes focused on irrelevancies. (How many railway tracks could be laid, side-by-side, through each ship's funnels was an especially bizarre one.) Thus, Titanic's officers were under some extra pressure to set a fast time to New York on her maiden voyage, which the newspapers would cover. Lusitania could have afforded to slow down while passing the ice field. Whether she would have done, when Cunard competed on speed (versus White Star's luxury), is unknowable.

Just for fun, here's the gear in use: Note the reef tackle (beneath the feet of the men on the yard) hauled from the deck and easing the strain on those aloft. The stuns'l boom has been topped up to give some clearance but the skilled man, at the yardarm, has it under his arm. His feet are braced on the Flemish horse as he hauls (though the earring is not shown accurately). The other men are supposed to take hold of reef points and pull to windward to ease the load on the man passing the weather earring. Later, they will let the wind do the work of stretching the sail toward the lee earring, before gathering up the canvas and tying the reef points. I have only participated in this task the once and that only in a training exercise, not when a reef needed to be tucked in. (In the old insult of greenhorns, I was strictly a "bunt reefer and yardarm furler", the skilled work being needed in furling the bunt but passing the earring when reefing!) If anyone cares, that was on the topsail yard of Rose, during a sail from Halifax to Lunenburg before she went off to Hollywood to play at being Surprise. Trevor

I went looking for images of windlasses similar to my previous guess and found a couple that had been sold in recent years but were still posted on he sale websites -- both once-lovely bronze yacht fittings, as those are the ones that have survived:

My best guess is that the two projections pointing aft (in profile: level with the axis of the windlass; in plan: aligned with toothed gears immediately inboard of the warping drums) ended in sockets into which the crew could insert wooden levers (modern versions of the old handspikes). Then it would be a matter of lifting the lever as pawls (built into those same projecting parts) rattled across the teeth of the gear, before pulling aft and down to turn the drums. With two men working the levers out of sync with each other, a fairly steady pull could have been maintained. That would suffice for a small vessel, particularly one not operated much in heavy weather and never needing to anchor in deep water. John Harland's 2015 paper on capstans and windlasses (in Mariner's Mirror vol. 101, pp. 38-62) has an illustration of something of the sort as its Fig 26, taken from a patent filed by Charles Perley of New York (date not stated but probably 1850s to mid-1860s, as that was when Perley filed other windlass patents). Trevor

My trouble is that the type of windlass isn't obvious from the drawing -- probably because (as the recorder noted) "Windlass removed by present owner". Before removal, it's just possible that the windlass was an old-style handspike one and equally possible that it was driven by belt or chain from some sort of engine or motor. More likely, it was one of the many patent designs but whether of pump-brake type or something else isn't obvious. As drawn, it had only the two warping drums (one each end) and perhaps that was enough for a skipjack. But maybe there was something more substantial to take the anchor warp. Trevor

True of the period after the Seven Years War, for certain, but I'm not so sure of the 1730s -- not so much of whether the French had little need to "keep the seas" as to whether the English did need to then. There may have been both push (French forests getting depleted of knee timber, especially as much of their soil and climate was unsuitable for high-quality oak) and pull (a strategic emphasis on speed rather than endurance), plus a greater influence of innovative savants, versus English reliance on practical shipwrights. Whatever the historical factors, Chris is right to model French-built warships of the 18th Century without lodging knees -- unless they are presented as following a major repair in an English dockyard. Trevor

That makes sense: Flemish horses would likely be useful when reefing, as the man hauling out the weather earring would have something to push his feet against. Most times on squareriggers, topsails were the only ones routinely reefed -- and that ended when split-topsails came into use instead (though I suspect that was after Flying Cloud). Trevor

3 feet below the yard would suit a tall man but be too low for me. You need to put your belly on top of the yard, while your feet are securely braced against the footrope and your arms reaching down to work with the sail. And if the shipmate working beside you is a big, heavy guy, his weight will pull any slack towards you, lowering the rope. Then again, I have worked aloft on a vessel that seemed to have been rigged for teenagers. If I stood up straight, the yard was at mid-thigh, which did not encourage a sensation of stability! Trevor

Ollivier's 1737 espionage report (David Roberts' translation published 1992, p. 51) is explicit that the French dockyards of his day only put hanging knees at the ends of the deck beams. He wrote that the substitute for lodging knees at that time was heavy waterways (rather than clamps or the later solution: beam shelves) that were scored to fit down over the ends of the beams. He saw the French method as cheaper (not needing the many knees), better resisting hogging (with the continuous, longitudinal timbers) and providing for better caulking, where the English had a difficult seam between waterway and spirketing. He did not mention weight, though he did refer to the amount of timber, which comes to the same thing. I rather wonder whether the French approach, for all its benefits, did not leave their ships more vulnerable to wracking stresses, which were destructive of all wooden hulls until Seppings brought in his diagonal reinforcements around 1810. That would be one of the multiple reasons why the English found that French prizes tended to not last as long as their own ships. Ollivier did mention that the English arrangement, with lodging knees, had been used by the French 50 years before, though he did not date the change in practice. Trevor