Historical anti-fouling colors

[Christopher V]

I am about to paint the waterline on a generic Baltimore-clipper type privateer. I was wondering weather it would be historically accurate to paint the waterline green because I have seen some reproduction ships with green paint instead of red, but most of the models of the ship I am making don't even paint one- it is just left black. The time period marked with the kit is 1847 although I suspect that is is more in line with 1812 to 1820. I will probably paint it red rather than black, but was curious about the historical usage of paint and other anti-fouling colors. Thanks a lot!

 

Christopher

[wefalck]

I think anti-fouling paints in the modern sense began to be developed from the 1820s on. By the early 1860s such paints have been available in many different colours, although the most common one seems to have been iron-oxide red.

 

Before the 1820s and well thereafter ships bottoms where either covered in concoctions of lineseed oil and lime with all sorts of additives, such as ground glass, or in pitch or tar. The former would appear in a sort of off-white, while the latter would be a brownish black. The latter was only used in areas outside the risk zone for a terredo navalis attack.

 

What you seem to describe is the boot-topping stripe, which is an altogether different story. It doesn't seem to have come into general use before the second half of the 19th century. it is a kind of fashion element and its use varied greatly across the different regions of the world. It seems also to be associated with the used of 'proper' paints, meaning that it not normally seems to have been used together the white concoction or tarred bottoms.

[Christopher V]

Thanks for the info- I asked mainly because of this picture of the Lynx out of water during construction which shows a completely green bottom and was wondering if this was a top coat or some kind of underlying modern protective paint. 

 

[Dr PR]

Smaller ships, and especially merchant ships, operating in cooler seas and fresh water usually used something like tar and sulfur on the bottoms. Ships operating in warmer waters used tallow and lime or white lead. Naval vessels often had much more expensive coppered bottoms.

 

Howard Chapelle (The Search For Speed Under Sail, W. W. Norton & Company, New York & London, second printing 1983, pp207-208) says copper plating was introduced by the British in 1761 and it worked well to prevent fouling and attack by wood boring toredo worms. In 1783 they extended it to all Royal Navy ships. However, the high cost of copper plating caused it to be adopted slowly by British merchant vessels.

 

Some American Navy ships had coppered bottoms. It wasn't until the 1790s that copper plating came into use on American merchant vessels, and then only on larger ships. As late as 1822 the  lime-and-tallow "white bottom" was still being used extensively in the United States. Because clean bottoms improved speed, many fast sailing American schooners were copper-bottomed after 1795.

 

Privateers were privately built, and often cheaply.  The idea was to use a cheaply built ship to bring in prize money during a relatively short period of hostilities. The privateer was somewhat expendable. It was just a matter of profit. And some privateers brought in many times their cost of construction and operation.

 

Unless you know for certain what type of bottom the ship you are modeling had, at the period you are modelling, you can go either way.

 

Modern reproductions like the Lynx use modern anti-fouling paints instead of expensive copper plating. Also, the Coast Guard has regulations about what you can put on the bottom of hulls to reduce pollution.

[wefalck]

iron-oxide red and green are perhaps the most popular colours for anti-fouling paints because they resemble the colour of coppering under different circumstances. But this is only an assumption.

 

A captain from Bremerhaven (Germany) invented in about 1862 an anti-fouling paint, that used shellac and lineseed oil as a binder, iron-oxide (red ochre) as pigmentmt, and arsenic and/or mercury as active ingredients. He received patents all over the world and the paint became very popular due its efficacy. It was manufactured in many countries under license and many other manufacturers tried to copy it. Its trivial name was 'patent paint' and also 'red-hand paint', as obviously you ended up with red hands when applying it. Shellac is expensive and was later replaced with other fast drying binders. The fast drying property was one of the selling points, as it could be applied onto a careened vessel between tides and it reduced docking times. The textboock of 1870 on iron shipbuilding by Steinhaus list various other colour options for this paint.

 

In the 20th century mercury and arsenic were replaced by tributyltin (TBT)  compounds. These are banned now also, as they are endocrine disrupting substances - leading e.g. to reproductive disorders and birth defects in snails and other sea animals.