Maritime Wood

I realized that the defects I had noted earlier were mostly cosmetic. Although over 30 years old, the basic hull was strong and sound, and had been put together by a man’s skilled and loving hands. I remembered years back when I had visited Bequia’s south shore at Paget Farm and Friendship Bay, where boats are still being built and repaired in the traditional ways with iron fastenings, deadeyes, and stropped blocks hey are built on the beach in the shade of palm trees only a short distance from the shipwright’s home.

Without plans or blueprints, the boat builders construct their vessels by eye, using age-old rules of thumb. They decide the keel length, then select and lay down a pitch-pine timber. At this early stage, the builder can visualize the shape of his boat; sometimes he will carve a small model as a rough guide. The dry, windswept windward hillsides of the southern Caribbean islands produce twisted, close-grained, tough cedar trees that are ideal for the structural members of the new hull. The builder selects branches and roots that have the right natural curves, bends, and crooks for the frames, knees, stem, and sternpost. After the roughly squared timbers are collected on the building site, they are put in seawater to soak and salt-cure. This pickles the green wood and keeps it from checking and splitting.

When the building of a larger fishing sloop or cargo schooner is completed, the boat is launched with great celebration and the assistance of the whole community, as aptly described by my friend Bill Johnson:

For a year or more, they have passed it several times a day and have watched it grow; they have gossiped about it, given advice, comment, and probably a helping hand, so there is a definite personal community feeling for it. The minister gives a blessing, a bottle is broken on the stem, another bottle is passed around, then all the men and boys put their shoulders to the hull. A shout is raised and everyone strains. The boat shakes, moves, and starts to slide down the skids toward the sea. At the water’s edge there is a pause as a new bottle is passed around again. Another shout, heave, and final strain, and the hull is pushed across the shallows on the side of her bilge, then into the harbor, where she floats light and high.

“Some of the old people say that when such a boat is launched, the waters of the world rise ever so slightly. The months of backbreaking work are done. Now only the mast needs stepping and the standing and running rigging fitted. Then the boat is ready to be sailed to the fishing grounds to earn her price.” Such a boat has to have a soul.

And I remembered some thoughts by Frank Mulville: “SANTA LUCIA was a romantic little boat, a cutter only 18’ long on the waterline with a graceful clipper bow and a rounded counter to match it. She took us to Brittany, to Holland, and across the Bay of Biscay to Spain, but on each trip she frightened us so much that by the end of it we had hardly any nerves left. She was a little bit tender, she had a big open cockpit giving any sea that came aboard direct access to the bilges, and she leaked relentlessly and continuously. But she was fast, comfortable within her own limitations, seaworthy enough after we learned to handle her; and, most important, she had graceful, flowing, romantic lines. To us, she was a symbol of revolt and escape.

When we went to sea in her, it was in defiance of every convention. We had no money, we always left behind some business enterprise which was on the brink of financial ruin and which ought to have had our constant attention, and we were living together in sin. Our affairs, generally, were in ruins. Invariably, when we came back from our trips, everything had to be sold to pay pressing creditors and we had to borrow money and start all over again. But SANTA LUCIA was so shapely and so noble that whenever we saw her graceful lines, we knew that it was all worthwhile. She was slim and distinctive, and lent a spirit of class and adventure to any harbor she was in.”