Screen Grab from Land and Sea website, tip off supplied by David Rye
OK – time to kick the kids off the computer again and settle down to watch 20 odd minutes of nice video discovered by our friend and ace ferretter out of shipwright-related video, David Rye. In this case he has found a nice TV programme about the shipbuilding history of the ‘Maritime Provinces’ of Canada, e.g. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The film starts with mention of the ‘Blue Nose’ wooden fishing schooners famous from that area for fishing the Atlantic Banks but then works its way through the history of wooden boat and ship building all around that area. Apparently they had good beaches on which to build, a handy supply of trees right down to the beaches and good tides to make the launch easy. The industry started in the early 1800’s and was promptl;y given a massive boost by Napolean’s blockade of the UK from the Continent; we needed the wood and the Canadians spotted that they might as well build the ship to transport it, and sell ship and cargo in Liverpool.
It all went a bit ‘Pete Tong’ when steam and steel hulls came in, as they had no steel, but the modern shipbuilding industry there still does the historic stuff on wooden hulled sailing boats for movie stars and replica ships like the Bounty (recently sunk in Hurricane Sandy) and the Rose (featured in ‘Master and Commander’) and builds steel stuff for the Canadian Navy.
It’s a nice little film which includes plenty of the ship-wrightery we love on this website – swinging adzes, using mauls to whack in spikes, caulking and so on, plus, for Dave and Tony Brooks, some nice pics of some modelers at work.
The film is on http://www.cbc.ca/landandsea/2012/12/shipbuilding-in-the-maritimes.html
Enjoy!
Matt,
Very nice stuff.
Steel: an ancient alloy of iron and carbon and bit of this and that … it wasn’t and couldn’t be produced in large quantities at an affordable price until Bessemer came along with his blast furness. That was around the mid 1800s. Until then, it was iron that was displacing wood for ship construction … not steel. Iron still held on for quite a time in this field too.
Iron was used for constructing the SS Great Britain … a notablle survivor . It was used for a few Thames barges too and the Ironsides is a survivor sitting under her covers below Iron Bridge Wharf, Faversham…
Ooops. I stand corrected. Go to the back of the class, Care!