Context and Perspective: Fastenings and wood use in colonial Chesapeake shipbuilding.

Ships fastenings cannot be understood as a standalone topic.  They are intimately linked to the materials they join together.  Neither can ships fastenings be understood without the economic context in which they are used.

Several studies have been completed on the merchant fleet employed in the Chesapeake during the 17^th and 18^th century and some data on wood use has been introduced into this regions research paradigms, but the goal of this past collected works was of a broad scope.  The finite use of wood in the Chesapeake is best discussed in a two part dialogue.  The first deals with how the wood was selected for shipbuilding, and export.  The second part deals with how the types of wood for shipbuilding and export changed through time. 

Selecting Timber:

First and foremost, it must be understood that wood selection could come from two avenues, by plantation owners, or by agents of the crown for shipbuilding.  A series of parliamentary acts beginning in 1691 made the selection of timber from the North American colonies a priority.  Either way, the tending, selecting, and harvesting of trees would have been as follows.

Trees in stands or forests are the preferred source for tall wood for making planning, keel, deadrise, sternpost, and gripe structures on ships.  The competition for light causes the primary species (white oak) employed in the making of these parts to grow proportionally than if they had been grown in an open field.  It would have been difficult for the shipwright, lumber merchant to determine the exact height of a tree in a crowded forest, however, by measuring the diameter of the base of the trunk, for oak a general ratio of 1:15 could be used to approximate.  1 being the diameter, and 15 being the height.  That process can be seen in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

After performing a measurement on the trunk of a disease and knot free round white oak tree, it would be felled with either an ax or long saw.  The branches would be trimmed back to where their curvature had a still useful diameter.  All of the timber would have had all of its bark removed for sale to tanneries and other industries.  The shipwright/ timber merchant would choose likely between 20-100 trees at a time for this process, often assisted in his labors by slaves.  The long logs would then be rolled downslope and floated down creeks and rivers to the larger towns for processing.  Some of the logs would be turned into expanded extended logboats of a type employed in the British Isles during the 17^th-19^th centuries as can be seen in Fig. 2.  This logboat is in essence the canoe version of the much larger cargo “Rose’s Tobacco” boat. 

Fig. 2

As all species of lumber trees became less prevalent during the later half of the 18^th century many properties were dedicated to their growth, and forests were jealously guarded.  In these more sparsely dense forests, and plantation roads, trees had less competition for light and grew shorter, often having a width to height ratio of 1:10-12.  They were more prone to disease such as core rot, and if not tended to they would develop knots which prevented the wood from being easily split to make long boards.  Saw marks become the norm and show the decline in lumber resources when one examines late 18^th and 19^th century buildings in the Chesapeake region as prior to the third quarter of the century building employed split and broadaxed toolmarks.

The plantation owner or his agent would have employed the same type of simple ratio mathematics to determine the height and readiness of the trees on the plantation estate.  Using perspective, the workman would have employed simple formula a x d = h, where a is the actual height, d is the distance the observer has walked from the object, and h is the observed height.  The workman would have tied a knotted line unto the tree, with knots in 1 foot intervals, similar in style to the maritime chip log, and once the tree to be measured was one foot in perspective, he would count the knots back to the tree and do very simple arithmetic as can be seen in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

The same method would be employed for moving the trees, water was a natural resource that enable exports to go out and imports to come into the Chesapeake.  However, during the later part of the 18^th century trees often fell into the river and caused “snags”, these had to be cleared by slaves and servants to keep the inland waterways open for trade, but often meant the slave master had several slaves managing the riverbanks, making the clearing and herding trees along the rivers for the first stretch of their journey easier Fig 4.

Fig. 4

Once the timber had reached a port town after floating, it would be left to dry for several months before it was processed.  The two types of processing most common at port towns such as Alexandria, would have been splitting with wedges, or pit sawing.  Splitting wood enables the preservation of the long grain of the wood, making boards, beams, and frames prepared this way more durable than pit sawing.  Pit sawing, achieved with the long saw Fig 5. Would have enabled more control and efficient usage of lumber, however, it was often employed when wood of lower quality was brought in.

Fig. 5

 Logs with core rot, and knots are difficult if not impossible to split, yet they retain wood that is useful for the architectural wood trade.  The shipwright/ timber merchant would have looked the trees over that were harvested for these imperfections, but as white oak, pine, and tall straight cedar became scarce in the Chesapeake onwards the end of the 18^th century, merchants often did not have a choice in the timber they selected.  Fig. 6 shows knots and core rot.

Fig. 6

A general tendency has emerged for those large wrecks of vessels built in the Middle Atlantic during the 18^th century in regard to wood use.  The center portion of the tree, with its dense core wood was reserved for keel, gripe, deadrise, and other critical structures in boats and ships.  The outer concave grained sections split off from the core were relegated to ceiling, decking, and outer hull planking depending upon quality with more and more pine being employed later in the 18^th century.  The corners of the log where split off would become stringers or bilge clamps, and the scrap wood from the outside would become the treenails. All of this can be seen in Fig. 7.

Fig. 7

Discussion:

Much work in this field work places emphasis on the belief that white oak was preferred for shipbuilding, and in a way it was.  Further scholars have somewhat bent the data to say that it was more durable or wear resistant, both statements are unsupportable.  Upon early exploration of the Chesapeake by the Dutch, English, and Spanish during the late 16^th century, a world of timber resources was revealed and subsequently exploited.  The primary timber species initially exploited were, white oak, red oak, maple, cypress, and white pine.  Species such as yellow or loblolly pine, the devil woods, were relegated to split rail fences. 

Native peoples also heavily exploited wood resources for watercraft.  Large extended ad expanded log canoes of upwards of 12 meters in length existed in the Chesapeake during the 16^th century.  Some of the first laws employed by European colonists in the Chesapeake dealt with the theft of these watercraft by Europeans.  It would appear that cypress and oak were preferred, but any tree with a suitable trunk could be employed.  These logboats may appear in our mind primitive, but the people of the British Isles and Continent employed expanded and extended logboats well into the 19^th century.

Due to the lower population density of the colonies during the 17^th century, wood usage can be described as wasteful.  However, after the Baltic timber collapse during the 1640’s and 1650’s more and more timber was exported from Virginia to Europe, primarily for housing construction.  Wood for export from the entire Middle Atlantic colonies from the 1680’s and later are usually recorded in merchant ledgers as being in board feet.  This is usually taken to mean, boards of 1 foot with, 1 inch thick.  Primary export wood is nearly always white oak. 

Throughout the 18^th century stands of white oak became less prevalent along the Chesapeake estuaries.  Foraging parties were forced to go further inland for ships timbers, as the wood necessary was only available out of 1 in 10 white oak trees or less and even then only certain sections of the tree were useful.  White oak trees of poorer quality were pit sawn after they had been floated downstream to export towns like Alexandria.  This timber made up part of the burgeoning trade with Hispanola for sugar, Martinique for silk and fine clothes, and St Eustatius for everything else the colonies wanted to smuggle in.  Grain and lumber were the most common commodities traded for smuggled goods and were a sticking point which helped lead to the American Revolution. 

Kelso mentions in his text the colonists’ reluctance to buy boats made from mulberry and cedar, however, from a wider perspective, the Spanish had banned the harvesting of fruitwoods and cedar on Cuba during the 2^nd half of the 18^th century, necessitating import of white oak from the colonies for the building of sugar plantations.  The reason why ships constructed of Cuban cedar were so sough after was their rot resistance, a ship build of Cuban cedar would last twice as long as one built form oak.  Here in the colonies fruitwoods and cedar were employed for the same reason but due to the smaller nature of the trees in the Chesapeake.  The small cedar trees meant that shallop to sloop size vessels could be built of these materials but it would be impractical to build anything larger.   Due to the low cargo capacity of these boat designs, the colonists favored boat of oak, which could be built larger and improve their profits. 

For this reason large oceangoing vessels were constructed with their lower hulls of white oak, often with white pine as deck planking.  Eventually, during the late 18^th century, white oak would be largely exhausted and timber of southern live oak would be imported into the Chesapeake from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  Southern live oak and pin oaks can often be found planted on the properties of the former colonial plantations, like historic Scotchtown, home of the patriot Patrick Henry in Hanover, Virginia. 

Special thanks goes to Ann Reid, Historic Site Supervisor for Patrick Henry’s Scotchtown Preservation Virginia.