Kenchington

I'll echo Mark's approval of your bringing the Duchess back to life, for those lucky enough to see your restoration. What a remarkable ship she was! The second SCUBA dive I ever made was on her bones, in Starehole Bay, and I went back a few times after. It's hard to admit but that was closer to the date of her loss than from my visit to her until today. How a lifetime can slip away ... Trevor

I tend to agree on the "theoretical value" explanation. I have never heard of ships-of-the-line being rowed and it is hard to see how they could have been, with the decks encumbered by their guns. Conversely, it would not be out of character for an author of a technical treatise to want to fill a table with numbers, even irrelevant numbers. Perhaps there is another explanation, however: Using contemporary British terminology (and Steele was writing of British practices): When a ship was laid up In Ordinary, her guns were returned to the Ordnance Board's gunwharf. I think it was also normal to send them ashore whenever a ship was docked, so that the weight did not strain the hull, and docking was frequent in the era before coppering. I wonder whether the dockyards kept some very long sweeps on hand, to facilitate movement of ships under their care. The sweeps could have been taken out to a ship that had been stripped of her armament (perhaps with her rig stripped to a gantline too), the looms passed in through lower-deck gunports and men set to rowing. That would have given better control, when moving a bare hull to align with the entrance of a drydock, than a collection of boats filling the role later given to harbour tugs. I have never heard mention of such a practice, but the technical details of dockyard work got less attention from contemporary authors than did the operations of ships in commission and hence under the command of gentlemanly officers.

Fascinating! I knew of Steele's work on masting etc. but not his treatment of oars. I wonder whether anyone actually tried moving a First Rate with 52ft sweeps -- and where they might have been stowed when not in use! Trevor

I'm still working on ModelExpo's Lowell dory, so I'm some way from thinking about the Muscongus Bay sloop. However, for what it's worth: My (full-size) boat is not much shorter than a lobster sloop, though a good deal lighter. I have her rigged in clunky 19th-Century style, rather than anything sleek and yacht-like, yet the parrel beads on the jaws of her gunter spar are only about an inch in diameter -- call it 1mm at scale. Go for the smallest you can find or, like the instructions say, go without. Trevor

Thanks Andy! I was aboard Provident again in Portsmouth in 2002, when she looked much as she had when I crossed to Brittany and back with her, in 1976. Still as much yacht as trawling smack, though a lesson in working sail nevertheless, for anyone willing to look beyond the surface. In '02 she had just finished a Tall Ships "race", while I had sailed from Bremerhaven, via Rostock, on Kruzenshtern. So a purely chance meeting. Trevor

I don't know the answer but maybe some speculation would help ... What purpose would there be in putting copper between the keel and false keel? No fouling could grow there. If the specialist coppering crew was sent to the ship while her keel still rested on the building ways, maybe there was no point in knocking away blocks to get access to the underside of the keel, only to put those blocks back to support the ship, then knock them away again to fit the false keel. However, if the false keel was bare wood and there was nothing between it and the keel, the worms could bore through the false keel and into the keel. Thus, some protective layer was needed, the contracts suggesting lead, heavy paper (maybe tarred?) or tar and hair (presumably horse hair), applied as the false keel was put on. So why not use copper at that stage? Expense? A need to call a specialist crew back? Or was someone still worried about the electrolytic problems between copper sheathing and iron bolts that had been such a problem with the first coppered ships? I doubt that coppering the false keel would stop it from being torn away if the ship ran aground. Maybe there would be a ragged mess of loose plates, rather than a clean removal of the false keel and its staples. Then again, I'm not sure that the purpose of the false keel was to be torn away. (There must be a very fine line between taking the ground on sand, without harm, and a hard grounding that broke timbers. Only when in the narrow margin between would the ship escape with nothing worse than a lost false keel.) Rather, I would suggest that the false keel's purpose was to take the wear and tear of routine dockings. Maybe there didn't seem much point in applying copper if it would only be torn away at the next docking. Trevor

Andy, I've only started monitoring MSW in the last few weeks, so just come across your incredible model. Words fail me, so I'll only second all that has been said of your work throughout this log. A lifetime ago, "Provident" was my first love (I was 13 and at sailing school in Salcombe!) and Brixham trawling smacks have never been far from my heart since. They were (and are) very special vessels, so it is great to see some being brought back to life, both full-size and to scale. In a different corner of my labours, I have being working up the global history of trawling – as a vehicle for explaining to the academic world that fisheries are about far more than just fish, rather than a straightforward history. (That's just one of my unfinished book manuscripts, as the people who pay me will keep piling on demands for other research work, knocking back more interesting stuff.) Amongst the rest, I have got a long way towards understanding how and why trawling grew from Brixham, some 250 years ago. If you or the people working on the full-size "Vigilance" want a summary version of the early part of that tale, just let me know. Trevor

You have run up against a pet peeve of mine, Haiko. I can't answer your question but maybe some context will help: Warships built in the 1790s, Constitution as much as any other, were on an evolutionary stream that affected shipwrights' thinking, even though the men of the time were unaware of what had gone before (let alone what was to follow). It is not an easy trend to follow, because marine artists were concerned with what could be seen from outboard, not what seagulls saw while looking down, but there are bits and pieces of evidence. The very few deck plans from the 16th Century (all Iberian, so far as I know) show ships as being open from bow to stern, with beams spanning from side to side but planking only along the outer thirds or (more likely) outer two-fifths. The middle strip had mast partners etc. where needed and was likely covered by gratings most of the time (with tarpaulins over the gratings in wet weather) but nothing permanent. Fast forward to the early precursors of the Navy Board models, dating from the 1650s, and you can see that same notion of an open strip, covered by gratings wherever it was not occupied by mast or capstan partners, with select gratings set aside to provide for hatchways, ladder ways etc. By the 1670s, parts of that central strip were being planked, particularly on the forecastle and quarterdeck. The lower deck of two- and three-decked ships may have remained with nothing more than gratings, as it was protected from the weather. When Sutherland composed the first (almost) clear explanation of English ship structure, soon after 1700, he wrote of "long coaming carlings" running the length of the ship, either side of that open strip. They were heavy timbers, providing important strength in resisting hogging -- much as Marcus has mentioned from Humphrey's words. Yet, in Sutherland's day, the long carlings were also coamings, standing higher than the deck planking on either side, preventing any water on the deck from pouring through the gratings and down into the ship. Raised obstacles running the length of the deck must have been a confounded nuisance, especially when guns needed to be moved about. So, by the later 18th Century, the more detailed plans that were being prepared show the same idea of long, structural elements but ones set down into the deck beams, giving the deck an even upper surface. The space between was still something different from what was on either side. The side portions were planked in oak, with ledges and carlings beneath, to take the wear and tear of the guns. The centre section might have pine planking, though much of it still had hatchways, mast partners etc. That arrangement can still be seen in Victory. As the decades rolled on, shipwrights seem to have finally left the old idea of an open central strip with side decks and, by the mid-19th Century, decks were what we expect them to be today: Continuous areas of weathertight planking, with breaks for hatchways etc. But, when Constitution was built, the notion that the central strip was different was still there. How that concept was realized in the structure of a particular ship needs either evidence for that one vessel or close study of the progress of evolutionary change. Times, places, purposes of the ship in question, individual shipwrights' preferences ... all will have affected what was done at any one point in the steadily changing trends. One final thought though: When building a model, it is usually convenient to plank the deck and then cut the hatchways after. In full-size construction, however, the framework beneath the planking was necessarily constructed first. So the shipwrights knew where the hatchway would be, when they laid the planks around it, even though the coamings might not be added until later. A short run between, say, a main hatchway and the mainmast partners, would be planked as a short run, not matched to the shifted butts of the long lengths of planking to either side. Hope this helps you figure out the answer to your question! Trevor

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

It depends on the type of stern. If the lapped planks end on a transom, there is little need to increase the bevel, as the outer edge of the transom can be joggled to receive the full thickness of each plank. However, on a double-ended hull, with the hood ends of the planks in a rabbet on the stern post, the lands (the exposed lower edges of the planks) must be fined away until they disappear at the rabbet -- just as the forward hood ends must at the stem rabbet. Of course, many lapstrake hulls have the lowest strakes run to the post and only higher ones meeting a transom, while prams have transoms both fore and aft. Then there have been more particular practices in some times and places: Dory laps, for example, or the Norse practice of carving stem and post with "wings" that looked like planking fining away to nothing but avoided the inevitable weakness. Best to study the prototype of whatever hull you are modelling, if you can.

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