Wooden Ships
Re-creating a Schooner of Yore on the Eastern Shore
By Andrew Reiner | Posted 10/20/1999
Prologue
I'd like to tell you that I signed up for a class in the Schooner Sultana Project's shipbuilding school because I love to work with my hands. I'd like to tell you that I am a zealous sailor, as were many in my class, and wanted to discover what was behind a growing resurgence in wooden-boat building.
But I'd be lying. I don't know the difference between fore and aft, and at the age of 35 I only recently acquired my first hammer, a gift from my girlfriend. The ribbon is still on it.
I signed up for this class, North America's only instruction in the traditional techniques for building an 18th-century schooner, because I couldn't help myself. I'm stuck in the 18th century. My personal aesthetic is so moldy that I consider Abigail Adams a great sex symbol (she was brilliant and looked fetching in a French-cut bodice) and laugh a lot harder at Ben Franklin's one-liners than those of Letterman or Leno. If I ever win the Pulitzer Prize and am asked how I'm planning to celebrate, I'll say, "I'm going to Williamsburg!"
This inability to make peace with the postindustrial age is what brings me on the first weekend of October to the school's home in Chestertown, Md., an Eastern Shore hamlet where people work hard at making the clock stand still. They pack the streets each year to celebrate a 225-year-old tea party. They get newspapers with their own names handwritten on them from Scotty's Shoe Store. As one of the school's instructors says, Chestertown is the perfect place to build a ship that "hasn't been seen in more than 200 years."
Friday
I leave my motel early and arrive at the Swain and McMullen Boatyard on Cannon Street. From the street I see the Sultana. They haven't finished putting up the hull frames, but even in this skeletal state of keel and ribs, the ship enraptures me with its sturdy, softly sloping curves, sensual as a Shaker chair, sublime as the bow of a woman's hips. If Wooden Boat magazine (and there is a Wooden Boat magazine) had a swimsuit issue, the Sultana would be the cover girl.
There are five others in my class, ranging in age from their mid-40s to late 60s: Steve Croker, a retired Air Force pilot recently relocated to Chestertown; Peter Sullivan, a commercial-real-estate broker from Cambridge, Mass.; Margie Elsberg, an ex-newspaper and TV-news editor and another transplant to the Shore; Rick Wirtz, a local psychologist, and his father, Pete, a Timonium resident who used to assemble Whirlwind boats, now collectors' items, back in the 1950s for long-defunct Cockeysville boatmaker Molded Products.
Everyone in my group has some obsession with boating or carpentry or both. Steve wants to build a cedar-strip canoe. Margie helped her son build a log cabin in Alaska and has taken a class on making spars (the poles used for ships' masts). When Peter Sullivan mentions that he learned of the Sultana Project in an arcane newsletter called Messing About in Boats, several in the group nod knowingly.
Our instructors, Richard Emory, a 29-year-old Baltimorean, and Joshua Herman, 26, who hails from New Jersey, want to make careers out of this avocation. As shipwrights, they completed two years of education and apprenticeship with licensed schools in Maine and Washington state that teach the plank-on-frame technique, the purest form of wooden-ship building. They have chosen to build boats from wood rather than the ubiquitous fiberglass because, as Rich says, "it's the difference between a classic, handmade car and a Yugo."
That sensibility is what stoked John Swain's quest to build a reproduction of a classic wooden schooner. The fire was sparked several years ago when Swain, who has been building and repairing wooden craft for 34 years, visited such a project in Holland: The entire town of Lelystad, residents young and old, were working together to build a reproduction of the Batavia, a Dutch East Indian Co. merchant ship that sank off the coast of Australia on its maiden voyage in 1628. The ship and the shipyard serve as the town's main tourist attraction. Swain was deeply affected by witnessing this communal effort and wanted to create a similar dynamic back home, according to Drew McMullen, his partner in the boatyard and the director of the Sultana project.
Swain, who built model boats as a child in Delaware (he says he used to create marinas in rain-swelled puddles), was aware of the Sultana's reputation as a popular model design. Not long after the Holland trip, he stumbled across a chapter about the Sultana in The Colonial Schooner: 1763-1775, Harold Hahn's seminal book on this type of ship. He also found accounts of the ship in volumes on maritime history. "That was one of the biggest reasons John chose the Sultana," McMullen says. "It was kicked around in so many maritime history books, and it's one of the few American boats from the Colonial period of which accurate drawings exist. . . . It's one of the quintessential early-American schooners." This past spring, the partners and Swain's wife, Melinda Bookwalter, went to England to track down Sultana artifacts. They brought back copies they made of drafts of the ship's design.
"I liked the Sultana because it was well-documented," Swain says. "It was one of the few 18th-century schooners with its original draft, logs, and musterbook [an inventory of crew and provisions]. Also, it was well known as a small, uncomplicated boat that was more gussied up than other schooners its size." This meant it would require a small crew to operate it.
Swain could have chosen a more marketable ship to reproduce--one with more direct ties to the Chesapeake and local history, such as the Geddes, the brigantine (a two-masted sailing vessel) from which Chestertownians threw a cargo of tea in 1774, a protest re-enacted annually in the town. But Swain is a purist; he wanted to re-create a ship precisely, to the exact lines and measurements, and that would be impossible to do with early-American ships such as the Geddes. He found a sympathetic sponsor in Chester River Crafts & Arts (CRCA), a local nonprofit that had been busy offering artsy-craftsy workshops to visitors as a way of boosting the local economy. CRCA was impressed with the Sultana project's potential as a fund-raising and community-binding tool, executive director Michael Thielke says. The workshops were put on hold, and CRCA took on the $1.3 million reconstruction effort.
Our first duty as shipbuilders is to take a tour of the unfinished schooner. We learn it will be 97 feet long and will weigh approximately 45 tons when completed. (The scheduled launch date is March 2001.) Although the ship is being hailed as an authentic reproduction of an 18th-century schooner, it will feature a 220-horsepower motor, electricity, and a head. "We don't want a bunch of people swinging from one of those seats off the bow to go to the bathroom like they would have in the 1700s," Josh jokes.
Once the Sultana hits the water, McMullen estimates, it will host thousands of students a year, from third grade up to college. While they will emphasize shipboard environmental studies (as do the Baltimore-based Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Living Classrooms Foundation), the Sultana crew will also focus on something that isn't being taught by anyone under sail: the region's and country's colonial history. It will make a particularly fit floating schoolhouse.
The original Sultana was built in Boston in 1767 and bought by the British Royal Navy (RN) the following year. Although it was the smallest schooner in the fleet, the ship was described in a letter by members of the RN's governing board as "well adapted for the Service of Cruizing against the Smugglers." The Sultana was outfitted with four months' worth of every major provision save beer--"of which she is to have as much as she can conveniently stow," according to an edict from the Lords of the Admiralty--and turned over to Lt. John Inglis.
Inglis was to enforce the unpopular Townsend Acts, which placed heavy taxes on colonists for such commonly imported goods as tea and tobacco. He spent his five years with the Sultana inspecting cargo ships for smuggled goods. This was akin to playing sheriff in the Old West with a pop gun. With a crew of only 25 and a mere eight half-pound swivel guns, the undersized Sultana didn't make a terribly threatening enforcer. Smugglers from the brig Carolina, angry at the confiscation of their ship, opened fire on the Sultana. On another occasion, one crew member wrote, citizens in Newport, R.I. "threatened to board us, cut us off [the anchor], and burn the Schooner." (The angry mob was quelled, but that same year angry Newporters burned to the water another of the king's revenue cruisers.)
The new Sultana, its builders envision, will be able to tap this rich historical vein to bring to life not just the Chesapeake region's past but the nation's. McMullen envisions schoolkids briefly living the lives of 18th-century British sailors: making hardtack biscuits in a brick oven, using a rope to calculate the ship's speed, hearing the Articles of War a captain would read to the crew whenever the boat faced possible wartime service. "This is the kind of education that hopefully will crack that part of their brains so they'll be more open to learning history back in the classroom," he says.
There are, however, no rapt schoolchildren on hand to watch us make trunnels. These start out as rectangular pieces of wood about a foot or more long; we turn them into rounded pins that resemble a cross between a night stick and small chair leg. It was a quick way of watching a nondescript piece of wood suddenly metamorphose. Steve, Peter, and I learn two things while making trunnels: 1) While many of the technologies being used to build the ship are historically accurate (caulking irons and mallets, slicks, adzes), some are modern--we used power tools as well as the unplugged sort. 2) The trunnels are going to hold together the futtocks. The futtocks are the parts of a wooden hull's frame, or rib; our weekend assignment is to make two frames.
I learn one more thing in this exercise: I no longer need to wear goggles in order to be heard when woodworking. I had so believed since junior high, when my wood-shop teacher, Mr. Hugus, would invariably scream, "I can't hear you!" whenever a student sans safety goggles addressed him.
After lunch, my group goes upstairs in the boatyard workshop to an area called the lofting room. This is the central nervous system from which complex shipbuilding plans are transmuted into actions. It even looks like a nervous system: Large plans show a maddening morass of multicolored lines, bisecting, intersecting, and overlapping in seemingly random patterns that, upon closer inspection, resolve into two- and three-dimensional drawings of the boat's architecture. We are here, Josh announces, to create wooden patterns, templates, from the renderings. The patterns would then be used to cut out pieces of lumber into futtocks that would be used to create a single frame. Josh shows us how to use a batten--a long, pliable wooden device--to mark out the templates.
The builders of the original Sultana did not use lofting, but rather worked from small-scale models of the hull. Once the British got hold of the ship, they created the first drafts of its design. (The British apparently were far more obsessive than early Americans about keeping records on everything pertaining to military expenditures, Josh explains.)
No one knows for sure what kind of wood was used to build the original ship. But just as shipwrights in Boston surely relied on some native hardwoods, their Chestertown counterparts are following suit. The new ship's keel was hewn from white oak found at nearby Still Pond, and Osage orange from nearby farms was used for the frames. Osage orange is a homely wood, its crooked, curved growth looking almost deformed compared to arrow-straight hardwoods such as oak. But it resists rot well, and its natural crooks make it ideal for shaping into a hull's curved ribs. It is so dense and resilient that the Osage tribe, for which it is named, fashioned their famously powerful bows from the wood; pioneers cut it into axles for their Conestoga wagons, and Midwestern settlers sometimes used it instead of bricks and mortar for home foundations.
Saturday
We spend the morning cutting patterns from the Osage orange, using the ship's saw, which changes angles so you can cut different degrees of bevels. One person guides the 60-pound milled trunks into the saw, another adjusts the blade's angle by cranking a hand wheel, and a third person catches the wood as it comes out the other side and heaves it up onto a sawhorse. This is my job. The pieces of lumber are long enough that I'm guiding them at one end while the other end is still going through the saw; if it's placed on the sawhorse too late, it can affect the accuracy of the ongoing cutting. I screw up once: As Pete Wirtz works the saw, I forget to lift the wood onto the sawhorse in time. Pete grimaces as the blade cuts into the pattern.
Later that afternoon, the whole group is back in the lofting room. When I ask Rich why we need to know about these markings, Steve jumps in and tells the group about the importance of making the frames perfectly equidistant from the keel. As the Air Force man readies the troops with their orders, I mention to Margie how funny it is that three of the eight people working together to build the boat this weekend are Jewish. I mention the old Jewish joke about us not doing this kind of work--shouldn't we be paying gentiles to take the class? "You think that's funny?" says Margie, who's 56. "When I was in the Girl Scouts I came home one day and told my mother how much I loved making cookies. Know what she told me? "Jews don't make cookies. We make meat. That's the only thing we put into an oven.'"
Toward the end of the afternoon, a steady stream of tourists fills up the boatyard. And a steady stream of volunteers are giving tours, planing beams, taking pictures, and checking on the ship's progress. "This boatyard has become a community center," CRCA's Thielke, says. Not only did volunteers build the two-story workshop; some are working on the ship's construction.
Others assist in other ways. Farmers who donated their Osage orange trees routinely drop by to see their caterpillars turning into butterflies. The boatyard was turned into a stage last summer when a local Shakespeare company gave six performances here.
Perhaps most impressive, of the $935,000 raised so far for the project, 70 percent has come from private local donors. (There are no deep-pocketed corporations nearby.) The groundswell of grass-roots support has added a facet to Chestertown's civic identity, Thielke says, distinct from the "brick sidewalks and Washington College" that have dominated the town's image.
Sunday
This is the big day. When we arrive at the boatyard the futtocks are all laid out under a tarp, ready to become the two frames. But just as we are about to start joining together one frame's futtocks, Josh stops everything. "It's hollow by a quarter inch," he says. One futtock is narrower than its partner, which could affect how the frame fits with the rest of the hull. The process of picking out lumber with the right contour, measuring, cutting, and planing it--which took us more than six hours yesterday--will have to be repeated. I hear Pete Wirtz fuming and decide to make myself scarce.
Luckily, Josh comes to the rescue. With his experience and expertise, he's got a new futtock ready in an hour. Our momentum regained, we dig holes into the futtocks with power drills the size of small jackhammers, then coat the pieces of wood with copper bottom paint and roofing tar, both of which coat so thickly on my hands that I have to wipe them on my jeans to see flesh again. The paint will keep in moisture so the wood doesn't crack, and the tar will seal out fungus and insects that can cause rot. The builders of the original ship would have used lead paint and pitch from pine trees for similar purposes.
Next we take the trunnels we made Friday and lather them with linseed oil. This will cause them to expand into a tight fit after they are hammered into the futtocks. Pounding the trunnel in requires a hard but accurate hit at the top; hit it wrong and the trunnel splits. Mine does.
We finish assembling the frames by hammering 12-inch bronze bolts into them. The finished frames weigh about 375 pounds each and took about 20 hours to construct. We spend the next two hours lining one up to the keel and its watermarks--the marks on the frame where pieces of planking will go. A rope is attached to one end, a chain to the other, and it is hoisted into the air by pulley and muscle.
During lunch at the nearby Blue Plate Restaurant, John Swain tells us he'll probably be looking for new work once the Sultana is finished--it's the construction part of the project, not the educational component, that he loves. In fact, he gave up a lucrative, steady business building and repairing wooden watercraft to start up this project. But he isn't worried; there's at least a year and a half more work to be done on the Sultana, and he's assuming there'll be steady work afterward; during the course of this project, he's had three offers to build other large wooden vessels. The resurgence of interest in such craft is creating a nomadic tribe of shipwrights who travel from project to project, he says.
After lunch we raise the second frame--with ease, compared to the first--then drive in the trunnels to connect it to the keel. We have built and installed one of the 38 ribs that will carry the Sultana across seas exotic and familiar. Afterward, we slather one frame with turpentine and linseed oil and trace our names into it. Rick Wirtz writes THIS SIDE UP; Steve Croker adds USAF to his tagline.
As we say our goodbyes and imagine what the Sultana will look like after the next class starts laying planking over her hull--our hull--John Swain tells everyone to take a T-shirt. I don't. No T-shirt is going to convince anyone who knows me that I, Andrew of the Ribboned Hammer, helped build a ship. They'll think I just passed through Chestertown and bought the shirt, feeding my historical jones. Maybe I'll wait a few months before washing my paint- and tar-smeared jeans.
The Sultana's frame was completed earlier this month. Classes to perform the next step of the construction--laying planking over the hull--will begin in February. To enroll, or to donate to the Schooner Sultana Project, call (410) 778-6461.
