Nothing Endures but Change

Three weeks ago lead shipwright Joe Connor and I traveled from Roskilde Denmark to Stockholm Sweden to work with our consulting maritime archaeologist Fred Hocker. Fred Hocker is the head of research at the Vasa Museum where he has worked for 16 years. Aside from his work at Vasa, he has taught maritime archaeology at Texas A&M and has written and edited countless works on the subject of archaeology and shipbuilding. Fred is an American expat and to the chagrin of Joe, an Anglophile. His expert consultation is an invaluable resource as we begin to work through further details in the Maryland Dove’s rigging, deck furniture, longitudinal structural joinery, and deck planking schedule. His survey, excavation, and research of 16th and 17th century wrecks provides us with tangible artifacts from the time period of which we wish to replicate in our current project at CBMM.

The Vasa museum is essentially a massive carefully climate controlled container which cradles the meticulously preserved and partially reconstructed 1628 time capsule wreck, Vasa, a 64 gun ornately decorated Dutch built Swedish warship of 1200 displacement tons. The Museum interprets the history of the ship as well as the geopolitical and social context which generated such vessels.

Deep in the bowels of this industrial modern building we found archivists and collections staff recording various material fragments of the ship which had yet to be completely cataloged and high aloft on floor seven was the office of Fred Hocker perched in the realm of research. Like the boatyards of the 19th century with loft floors above the boat shop, men in white coats carefully handing patterns down to the boat builders below them. I always get a kick out of the Platonic divisions of these institutions. Of course it is all quite natural, light things are always to be handed down. Like Raphael’s painting The School of Athens, with Plato found center left gesturing toward the heavens, towards the idea and his student Aristotle right with open palm facing down toward the earth.

Plato holds his late Socratic dialogue Timaeus while standing beside his star student Aristotle toting his Nicomachaen Ethics.

Lead shipwright Joe Conner and head of research Fred Hocker, decked out in tweed. Fred is making us a drawing of a structural detail that we are hoping to reproduce.

“What is spoken of the unchanging intelligible must be certain and true; but what is spoken of the created image can only be probable; being is to becoming what truth is to belief.” (Plato. Timaeus)

There is a great conservitivism and simplicity to archaeology, yes there exists painstaking research into the chemical processes effecting artifacts, to their story, origins, construction, meaning, etc, but the truth is to be found in the midst of the artifact. If the artifact does not point toward what you are looking at you best look elsewhere. When archaeologist Anders Franzén in 1961 undertook to excavate and raise the Vasa from 105ft deep to the oxygen rich surface of the earth, to our realm, he moved toward Aristotle. Aristotelian philosophy is in no way the antithesis to Plato. Aristotle borrows more than virtually any other philosopher from his teacher, but his thinking shifts radically toward the dynamic, toward life. Truth can be found within the dynamic. The dynamic, that is, the changing, is exalted. Within Platonic thinking the heavy and burdensome is what is changing and what changes is fleeting and falling from perfection, from what it attempts to approximate which is its unchanging eternal truth. Our embodied existence as a form of basic human extensionality, the core prosthetic nature of human being, shifts the vulnerable and ephemeral burden of memory retention away from the body and offers it up further and further to our craft, our technological being, our revealing and remembering (τέχνη). The artifact as a known unknown for the human is the oblivion of generational amnesia and the gift of remembrance. The Vasa will never stop changing, much work in preservation can be done to inhibit decay and deterioration, but eventually she will be no longer, and yet all truth of her derives from her changing, from her life. The vault has been opened with the raising of the Vasa. The Lazarus story is powerful partly because it is so familiar to us, living and dying through remembering and through forgetting, we thrive in our struggle to move forward into oblivion while reaching backward into the vault. Fred had told us that the museum strives toward the mission of preserving the Vasa for 1000 years. 1000 years of life brought back from the dead. 1000 years of revealing, of exalting the hulk and bulk of material in all of its dynamic foreboding.

The rebellious student and mentor of archaeologists, Aristotle, states in his Ethics already revealing the truth in the practical, in what it is that can be done, in the dynamic:

“In everything continuous and divisible, it is possible to grasp the more, the less, and the equal, and these either in reference to the thing itself, or in relation to us.”

Archaeology has as its study dimension and perspective- time, place, and our species, or in other words human being. Archaios (αρχαίος) meaning, “ancient” derived from arche (Àρχὴ) meaning, the beginning- a fitting object of study for the anthropologist, perhaps even the only real kind of anthropology. As I had mused in a previous post, the human being is a being without end, the study of man is then, the study of our beginnings, the study of dynamics and change as the only given for the human being. The archaeologist hopes to build a bridge between a chasm of time as she strives to recover the memory within a hidden remnant of human being, for we are not simply a species, a skeleton with organs and biological capacities; but include everything that we equip ourselves with, everything we make meaning out of- the human being is also the world divulged from the abyss.

I’d like to spend the remainder of this post looking at the various build details that we will incorporate into our project, some of which come directly from our time with Fred aboard the Vasa others from the excavation and surveying of vessels of the same region and time period as the Dove.

The lower hold on the Vasa. Looking forward. Here we can see massive floor timbers and knees bolted to ceiling planking with a notched longitudinal stringer.

You might notice the irregularity of structural timbers and assume it to be a product of wear and decay considering that the vessel sat on the bottom of Stockholm harbor for over 300 years, however this rather organic character points rather to the Dutch boat builder’s proclivity toward incorporating as much useful material as possible even to the effect of apparent inconsistency. The English on the other hand began to differentiate themselves in their ship building through repetition, predictability, and regularity. Being builder’s familiar with the Chesapeake’s tradition of log construction and rack of eye building we were quite sympathetic to the style of the early 17th century Dutch.

detail of an integrated “sister plank” from a model of the Vasa displaying her structure.

Many 19th century and later wooden boats have a core semi structural plank running the length of the fore-and-aft line called the “king plank”. The drawback of orienting your deck around one central plank becomes obvious when approached by a cabin, deckhouse, capstan, mast, or any other feature of the ship that by necessity falls within the fore-and-aft line. The Vasa and other vessels of the 17th century incorporate two sister planks framing the hatches which relieve into the deck beams and have a step to allow the joining of surrounding planking. This creates two longitudinal stiffening structural members which conceal there function in an uninterrupted and elegant manner. The deck itself tapers slightly to create an appearance somewhere between the modern straight laid and steam bent edge set decks. This 17th century method of decking will be designed into our deck layout after reviewing this rather substantial detail with Fred.

Clamps were straight scarfed in their thickness while planks and whales received a nibbed scarf along their width. The English did not scarf outer planking as often as the Dutch but rather used butts in the manner of 19th and 20th century boat building which we are more familiar with. We will plank in the English manner while maintaining the use of nibbed scarfs for ceiling planking.

Another very intriguing feature that we couldn’t help but notice while touring through the Vasa was the ships bilge pump which looks like a log just chopped from the forest a few months ago, bark and all. The pump is essentially a pipe, with the bark protecting against checking which would render the pump useless. There were only a few species used for bilge pumps as they possessed a superior ability to maintain their watertight integrity after being bored out and put to use.

The Vasa’s righteous bilge pump

The post on blocks titled Chock-a-block foreshadows our trip and delves into the details and archaeological backing of our block design and building style. While a drawing may suffice to design the Dove’s blocks it proved to be very helpful to view more than a few 400 year old blocks and rigging bits from the catacombs of the Vasa. Topsail sheet blocks, lift blocks, euphroes, bowline blocks, ram’s heads, and dead eyes from the Vasa will all be incorporated into our rig build with a few modifications taking difference in regional technique between the Dutch and English into account. Journeyman blacksmith and CBMM shipwright Noah Thomas will be busy forging iron strapping for the heavier lower blocks such as the cat fall blocks as well as a few fully integrated iron hooks into the lower blocks on the running backstays and vangs. During our time period we also find high strain blocks with cast iron and bronze sheaves, an exciting challenge for our casting workshops hosted at the museum annually.

Our sail will be effected by research performed by Fred on an early 17th century sprit-rigged vessel of a similar size. Typically, traditional vessels panel quadrilateral sails following the leech, or aft side of the sail. Fragments of sail suggest that sprit sails were cut with panels following the the luff, or forward side of the sail near the mast, a sailmaking feature which will surely by followed as the proper functioning and setting of our sprit is of particular challenge and interest to us in designing a rig which has fallen out of familiarity to the 21st century sailor. Aside from build detail, functionality has also been observed and taken note of. The staysail of the 18th to 20th centuries is set on a halliard with “hanks” attached to the luff of the sail which ride up and down the forestay. Our vessel will have hanks which are semi-permanently integrated into the forestay like a square sails robands with setting and striking being dependent upon the use of brails. Sails were not yet thought of as riding along stays in the 1620’s but were attached to yards, so during the early experimentation with yardless fore and aft sails it follows that the stay would take the place of the yard with the rest of the gear resembling that of a mizzen lateen.

These are but a few details informed by archaeological research and gleaned by Joe and myself during our visit to the Vasa hosted by head of research Fred Hocker. While our little nerd brains churned and grinded on the overwhelming presentation of technical minutiae before us, we found our hilarious predicament the subject of reflection while in the presence of this miracle of human achievement and grave testament of time flung headlong into uncertainty. Vasa! An artifact, a phantom, a war machine, a work of art.

SH