Roll on, Vain Days!

O'er hearts divided and o'er hopes destroyed: Roll on, vain days! full reckless may ye flow, Since Time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoyed, And with the ills of eld mine earlier years alloyed.

Lord Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 2: 97

CHARACTERS:

Dionysus: Greco-Roman deity. God of the grape harvest, of fertility and ecstasy. Also called Bacchus by the Romans. Often representing the unrestrained chaotic and irrational.

Hephaestus: Club footed Greek god of craftsman, sculpture, and metallurgy. After being exiled from Olympus by his mother Hera the gods would beg his return so that he might save her from the invisible fetters of a magical chair that he had crafted. His trusted friend Dionysus would intoxicate the god and on the back of a mule cart him back to Olympus.

Shipwright: Not so much a singular character, but a plethora of iterations and manifestations of a kind of sea obsessed craftsperson. Often found carrying out sisyphean tasks with enigmatic ends.

As the worlds breezes do prevail further northward and the great light does further reveal the upside down earth southward; as our patrons from this nations capital, from Charm City, and from the unseen clefts of the Eastern Shore turn late beneath their sheets or soften the threads on their sofa, or cool coffee with waining comfort- an eclectic assortment of miscreants and dreamers beckon the call of craft despite the soaring cold news brought down to them by avian messengers of the Canadian north. They praise rather the poetry of Russian Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky who had said, “beauty at low temperatures- is beauty”. As if possessed through the ancient whispering Hephaestus in union with wine god Dionysus, we do not heed the request to return to worldly delight from our chasm of shipbuilding back to the pedestrian atmosphere, for we need not breath till our work is complete, and our work will never be complete, for this work is an open project, a work projected forth through mysterious time. We laugh loudly across time as our bacchantical madness should someday hold fast to a coming generation of unsuspecting laymen whispering to them the same imperative- to indulge in this eternal feast of shipbuilding with wine grapes falling one by one from the vine into the sea. Our non figurative skeletal crew will smile with glistening and chattering bones like Latin sugar skulls and the Maryland Dove will shine between thin places unknown.

We toil and jest together this month approaching the standing of our last full frame, the laying of the keelson, and the completion of the transom. Below you will find images of the progress that has taken place since the European travels of November.

Frosty Cortez Keelson. Our keelson rests here on the band-mill after being cut down to its finished 10x12 dimension.

12 Frames in early morning Chesapeake light.

As glory becomes quotidian or the quotidian becomes glorious, we repeat the process of double sawn frame construction day in and day out. Two months ago lead shipwright Joe Connor had hoped that we might complete one frame a week, today we are averaging at two and have hit our stride at three. The last post regarding framing showed a Dove with one rib, now we enter the new year with 12 and the 13th ready to raise.

We’ve sped up our process by having one team roughing out live oak stock for futtucks three or four frames ahead of the teams putting the frames together. Meanwhile, one person flattens our roughed out stock using our flattening box which you can see in a previous post titled “A Boat Shaped Shadow”. Two more teams work to horn the frame which is the process of fitting the butts of the futtucks to one another while maintaining proper frame shape with the master pattern. One team finishes the layer of the frame early while the other works to completion of the cover. To recap: the cover and layer are the names given to the two sides of the double sawn frame. As the layer is delivered complete the cover has its rolling bevel cut into it, for a detailed look at how we retrieve the necessary information to cut an accurate rolling bevel read “Frames from the Loft Floor”. Working in this way, frame team one continues with progress on the following frame while team two fits both cover and layer and prepares for treenail fastening. We then stand our frames and dive into the next round of work.

After the full frames are complete we can then lay our keelson which is the longitudinal structural piece that sandwiches the frames along with the keel. This keelson steps into the framing with joining open mortises in a method observed in the construction of the Vasa. The keelson will bed in roofing tar and get bolted through the framing, keel, and lead ballast with 3/4” bronze bolts threaded in house using our threading machine.

In the background working away systematically and with supreme precision you will find master shipwright Frank Townsend working on building the complex 17th century transom of the Maryland Dove using local osage orange from Wye Island.

The transom of the 17th century which found endurance through to the 18th century and can be seen on such ships as the Sultana is comprised of a flat transom which was traditionally cross planked and a stacking raking portion which sits on top giving the aft deck further space aft and a well in which the rudder and tiller may extend through rather than having a transom hung rudder where the transom and sternpost follow one another in line with the tiller projecting forward over the transom. The language here is sure to lose some of you, but find respite in knowing that an entire blog post will be dedicated to the transom as it nears installation.

The roaring 20s can be felt as we round the bend of this decade and if indeed history should repeat itself, we may find ourselves in a time of record breaking inflation and avantgarde artistic improvisation. Whatever the approaching future has in store for us we will proceed unaffected by novelty and with a sparkle in our collective eye gazing outward toward other things, perhaps gazing outward toward a Dove clipping along merrily with an amicable sea.

Till next time

SH