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Nick Burningham[1]
This paper discusses some of the reasons for building replica sailing ships, and preserving historic sailing ships. The second part of the paper discusses the building of the Duyfken replica, in Fremantle, Western Australia, as a research project of experimental archaeology.
Only a land-locked nation could contemplate a major national celebration, such as a bicentennial, without calling in the tallships. The efficacy of tallships for evoking pageantry and a sense of historical celebration has so often been remarked that it has become a cliché.
Tallships are big, ideal for flying lots of large flags, universally recognised, obviously ‘historical’ and imposing. They can create an air of celebration simply by being there with flags flying. Here in Fremantle visiting tallships always attract a lot of visitors and the two replica projects that have been completed here – Endeavour and Duyfken – have been major attractions during construction and as floating exhibits.
Australia’s history, since the first historically recorded voyage to our shores made by Duyfken in 1606, is a history in which sailing ships and mariners were the bearers or harbingers of every major development for more than two centuries. Replicas and preserved sailing ships that celebrate that history include Duyfken, Endeavour, Amity, Enterprise, Lady Nelson, James Craig, Polly Woodside, Hati Marege, Alma Dopel, and the Batavia replica built in the Netherlands, and a number of pearling luggers.
There are also the sail training ships, Leeuwin, and Young Endeavour which have somewhat different raisons d’être.
All tallships are, in some way, in the museum business. Most large sail training ships contain a small museum of their own history. Historic ships such as Cutty Sark or James Craig are very explicitly museum ships, as are replicas of historic ships such as the Endeavour and the Duyfken replicas. Indeed the Duyfken has been a museum ship since the day her keel was laid. Like Endeavour, she continues to be a museum ship as well as being an operational sea-going ship surveyed for commercial use.
The construction of replicas such as Duyfken can contribute to two of the major purposes of museology – to the exhibition-educative role and to research.
For curation and interpretation, sailing ships suggest many possible narratives, but they rather insist on some interpretation as technology, even as ‘monuments to masculine technology’ (Anderson 1990) and as such they might be shunned as being too over-determined with meaning for fashionable interpretation.
In general though, the public like sailing ships and regard them as inspiring. They can work well as museum exhibitions, at least in a traditionalist view of what museums should try to do.
Why are sailing ships popular with a large portion of the public? They are widely regarded as aesthetically attractive – a factor that is, perhaps, particularly important in countries like Australia that have few recognised venerable and beautiful architectural monuments. At close quarters sailing ships are impressive to the point of being awe-inspiring. They are rarely completely static display objects, even those that do not sail. Maintenance and even cleaning provide activity.
The Duyfken replica was built in the grounds of the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle by the Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation. The mission statement of the Foundation states the following aims:
To build a reconstruction of the ship Duyfken of Maximum Practicable Authenticity.
To increase awareness and appreciation of the Dutch Exploration of Australia in 1606.
To maximise the project’s potential for Research and Learning, and to make all aspects of the project Accessible and Interesting to Schools and to the Community.
To enhance Fremantle’s reputation for Replica Ship Construction, and as a site of great Maritime Heritage Significance.
To Forge Links and Friendship, through experience of Mutual History, between the Indigenous and European peoples of Australia, Indonesia and the Netherlands; and to Honour their Histories.
To Work Closely with the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Achieving this Mission
The construction of the ship was presented as an exhibition. The ‘Lotteries Duyfken Shipyard’ was designed to allow visitor access. The $5 entry fee paid by adult visitors (children free) contributed to the funding of the project. In truth, not a great deal of expense or effort went in to making the yard an interpreted display. It was mainly a wooden ship building yard, with a large mural at one end, a couple of interactives for children, and a couple of interpretive panels. Often shipbuilding activities and timber storage subsumed space that was supposed to give visitors access to the few interpretive elements or to viewing areas.
A few visitors expressed dissatisfaction (and not without justification in some cases). The Foundation staff tried to remedy their dissatisfaction and our volunteer guides were good at presenting the project and coping with the difficulties.
Most visitors did enjoy a visit to the Duyfken yard, and most dissatisfaction related to not being permitted to wander all through the construction areas and workshops (which could not be allowed for safety reasons). Most visitors were clearly interested by what they saw and wanted to see more.
We tried to discover specifically what visitors to the Duyfken yard enjoyed, both by interviewing visitors, and by interviewing the guides who had access to unselfconscious and unsolicited feedback, and had contact with a much larger sample of visitors.
A considerable number of visitors, of both genders, expressed strongly a feeling of being inspired by what the shipwrights were achieving. Those shipwrights were highly skilled, clever, and fairly hard-working, but a visit to a well-run, major, building construction site might give visitors access to a construction team with fairly similar attributes and a faster rate of achievement. Working with timber excites more admiration. The appearance of the timber, the workmanship, and the actual shape of the ship were often remarked on as being pleasing. The Duyfken team used power tools but also employed some interesting low-technology. Bending to shape 60mm thick oak planks over open fires impressed most visitors, and ‘I’d never have thought it possible’ was a common reaction.
Several guides observed something to the effect that ‘visitors come expecting just to see a ship under construction and leave feeling that they’ve had a much more informative experience’ and more specifically ‘visitors learn quite a lot about the basics of wooden shipbuilding as it was done by the Dutch in the 16th-17th centuries’.
It seems unlikely that most visitors would be motivated to learn so much from viewing a static display or that they would imagine themselves interested in such an arcane subject.
Of course there is no particular virtue in filling the heads of members of public with that kind of arcana except that they seem to derive genuine satisfaction from the experience.
It might be asked whether visitors only express satisfaction at having an educative experience because they feel they ought to? And we have not tested the retention or accuracy of the information imparted. But there does seem to be genuine satisfaction at having a painless and interesting learning experience relating to our nation’s history.
If that is the case, then one can ask whether it is the kind of experience that museums should aim to give? What are the intended roles of museums today? Museums are about letting people tell their stories. They are repositories of cultural and scientific material, they should be research institutions. Is it too naive and old-fashioned to propose that museums can contribute to, promote, and even celebrate a culture of learning and knowledge? There are unsophisticated readings of Foucault’s writing about power knowledge relations which would posit that any such project would be part of a conspiracy to entrench the power of the elites. But Foucault’s thesis isn’t that simple (at least it shouldn’t be since he, or his translators, write such complicated sentences).
Sailing ships are excellent vehicles for celebration of a culture of knowledge and icons of our shared history. A sailing ship need not be interpreted to reflect an idealised picture of the past. The great majority of people looking at a replica sailing ship are very clear that they would not want to go to sea on it for any length of time, particularly without modem safety and comforts. The tight discipline of the British and European navies is well-known. Foucault, as far as I know, did not write about discipline and punishment at sea, but it might be argued that the cramped accommodation organisation of sailing ships, with no opportunity for privacy, the rigid hierarchy, along with their strict time (watch) keeping regimes represent an earlier and more complete development towards the panopticon model of surveillance and control exercised over the bodies of the crew than the army camp which was Foucault’s choice of example.
Despite their association with harsh discipline, brutality, and high mortality, sailing ships are now strongly associated with celebration; they interest and impress a large portion of the public and they are hugely expensive to build and not cheap to maintain. The Duyfken project could not be justified purely in terms of its operation as an informative museum display and neither could its cost be justified in terms of the program of experimental archaeology that its construction and sailing are intended to be.
Sailing ships get built or preserved for a whole range of reasons that have a lot to do with celebration of shared history and their ability to capture the popular imagination. Sailing ships symbolise adventure, daring, escape and freedom of the seas, independence, voyages of discovery, treasure, the origins of the nation, international contact, and there is also the widely perceived value of sail training, for young people in particular.
I have argued elsewhere (http://www.maritime. org/conf-burningham.htm) that in some cases the role of a maritime museum could be to interpret the activities of a sail training organisation based in close proximity, or to facilitate and interpret the activities of vintage ship and boat owners and this could be done without the museum itself having to own the vessels. If maritime museums are to celebrate our nautical heritage in a properly celebratory way they need to be more than homes for dead boats.
Replica ships are built for many reasons (besides the aesthetic and romantic attraction of a sailing ship) ranging from the maritime equivalent of the big ferro-concrete banana or pineapple intended to stop passing tourists through commemoration, celebration, pre-vocational training, to academic research. There are also replicas confected specifically for films. All are legitimate objectives, and the more goals that can be identified and combined in a project the better justified it is. The broader the objectives, the greater the community involvement that can be engendered.
Replica ship projects are sometimes criticised for diverting funds and energy from other programs. There is no question that they are not cheap, but a good project should provide focus and visibility for other heritage and museum programs. A replica ship project can provide a very effective icon or focus for museum and heritage programs. The funds that a replica project can attract are not usually funds that would otherwise flow to other ‘lower profile’ projects.
• Community Enthusiasm
• Building Community Identity – a more cohesive society.
• Tourist Attraction
• Tourism Promotion – an ‘icon’
• Commemoration of Regional/National History
• Publicising and Raising Awareness of Regional/National History
• Focus for regional museum and heritage activities
• Preserving and Enhancing Traditional Skills (Building and Sailing)
• Youth Training: Pre-vocational and Trades
• Education – Museum-type display
• Research and ‘Experimental Archaeology’
• Go Sailing
When the Duyfken project began to emerge as a reality the Western Australian Maritime Museum’s archaeology department, headed by Jeremy Green, was building a one-tenth scale model of the 17th-century Dutch ship Batavia, using the plank-first system of construction. Apart from being an inter-active exhibit with a model-maker on display, the model building was a research project – testing how plank-first construction might influence the shape of the hull and some of the theorised advantages and disadvantages of that system of construction.
The possibility of doing the same kind of research at full-size was tantalising. The Duyfken project was gaining momentum and public support for a range of reasons that had nothing to do with our research interests. The challenge for maritime archaeology was to enhance the project through good research and a program of experimental archaeology, and to do that without greatly increasing costs and difficulties. The Board of the Duyfken Replica Foundation courageously backed our proposed experimental archaeology and maximum authenticity approach. It was agreed that Duyfken was to be built plank first using oak.
There are no authentic plans of any ship from the Age of Discovery because in those days no shipwrights used plans as we understand them. The plans were in the shipwrights’ heads – the design and construction processes were very integrated. Most reconstructions of those lost designs seem to have paid little attention to performance and, perhaps, we have been too willing to infer design from the more plentiful evidence from later times. Reconstructions of 16th-century ships from northern Europe have been given the long, narrow, boxy-shape of late 17th-century ships which is inappropriate and unsafe when combined with the high aftercastle and large billowing sails of the 16th century ship.
Our aim was to build a replica that would sail as well as the original ship did while fitting with other types of data. We also wanted to replicate the plank-first construction and, as far as possible, let the construction and designing be the same process.
Plank-first construction is a little-understood process in the modem, western world. The recovery and study of the remains of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, wrecked on the Western Australian coast in 1629, had contributed to a complete reappraisal of Dutch shipbuilding traditions. During the 16th and 17th century the Dutch had dominated merchant shipping in Europe. It was well accepted that Dutch ships had been uniquely efficient. It had been largely forgotten that they were not built by the frame-first construction process that some historians believed to have been an innovation that made possible the European Age of Discovery.
As shown by the remains of Batavia, Dutch shipwrights had continued a more ancient conception of how a ship was assembled. Once the keel, stem and sternpost were set up the shipwrights began forming the ship’s outer shell, plank by plank, with no frames or moulds to pre-determine the shape – or so it was proposed. This, we believe, allowed them to work by eye and gave them the flexibility to create whatever hull shape they thought best suited to the trade and conditions the ship was being built for. By contrast, in the frame-first construction process used elsewhere in Europe, simple geometrical principles were employed to design the shape of the frames and this restricted the range of shapes that could be built.
If we were to build the Duyfken exactly as the original ship had been built, little formal preconstruction designing would have been necessary beyond deciding the basic dimensions. A contract would be drawn up to specify the scantlings or sizes of timbers used so that the builder would not be tempted to cut costs by using undersize materials and the shipwrights would then build the ship according to their experience to best suit its intended function. A jacht such as Duyfken would be shaped for speed and manoeuvrability and with a gundeck high enough above the waterline for use in the open sea but not too high for stability and sailing performance.
Robert Parthesius, a Dutch maritime historian, provided three examples of contracts for building jachts, but without a 16th-century Dutch shipwright to interpret them we needed to commit detailed plans to paper before starting construction. The research to produce those plans is described in Burningham and Jong (1997).
Plans for the ship evolved. There is always more research that one could do, but it was important that the research never delay the construction.
Some aspects of the design were not worked out on paper. The iconography showed a wide range of stem shapes so, rather than prescribe a particular shape, we asked the timber suppliers in Latvia to look for a suitably bent tree and let the shape of the tree define the shape of the stem. That was, most likely, how it was done in Duyfken’s time, although with much more wooden shipbuilding going on there would have been a selection of potential stems to choose from.
Since we were building the ship plank-first to investigate the integration of design and construction in that tradition of shipbuilding, a principle of the project was that almost no aspect of the design was settled until it was built. Practical shipwrightery, the properties of the timber and any new evidence could modify the design during construction. As it turned out, practical shipwrightery and properties of the timber modified the design right from the very first stage. Archaeology and 17th-century treatises on shipbuilding agreed about joining baulks of oak using stepped scarfs sloping upwards towards the bow to make the ship’s keel, but occasionally a scarf ran the other way. In our keel timbers a patch of rot could be cut out if we reversed the direction of one of the scarfs. Fortuitously, the reversed scarf also made smoother the keel laying ceremony at which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, officiated.
The research and design work takes time and needs the meticulous approach that my colleague Adriaan de Jong epitomises, but it is, in some ways, the easy part of a replica project. Fund raising is probably the most challenging part, and in the Duyfken project our shipwrights, led by Bill Leonard, were faced with an unusually daunting challenge since Duyfken was to built in a completely different way from the British tradition of which Bill is a master.
To build a ship plank by plank, with no frames to determine the shape, the shipwrights need to bend each plank to shape before it is fitted, and this is done by heating the plank over an open fire until it becomes plastic, then twisting and bending it to the desired form. This is all done ‘by eye’ and at the risk of burning the valuable slabs of oak. For shipwrights trained to modem standards of precision, the switch to the craft of plank-first construction was a huge leap in the dark. Not all of Bill’s team were confident that it could work, it was, after all an experiment. As it turned out, not all of them could make it work. Some had real difficulty conceptualising the shapes required.
A program of experimental archaeology should start with properly formulated hypotheses and experiments. However, something as complex as full-scale ship construction is likely to raise many specific questions and provide types of data which were not anticipated at the outset.
The Duyfken replica’s keel was laid in January 1997, then the stem and sternposts were erected. It was May before the planking began, and almost immediately an unplanned experiment tested the flexibility of plank-first construction/ design. It had been argued that planking could not start on a ‘by-eye’ basis – that it was necessary to have a system for determining the angle between the planks of the garboard strake (first row of planks) and the keel at regular intervals in order to make the cleats that hold the planks to the keel and to start the planking going in the direction of the desired hull form. Although there was no clear evidence for this we accepted the argument and measured the angles from the plans. However, misunderstanding occurred and some of the cleats were positioned by measuring from the forward end of the keel instead of the correct datum 2m further forward. By the time the mistake was realised the second strake was going on. We had the choice of starting again or trying to correct to the desired type of shape over the next couple of strakes. Bill Leonard, the master shipwright, was confident that the adjustment could be made, and it turned out that he was right. The hypothesis that a precise system for determining those ‘deadrise’ angles was necessary was very effectively falsified.
Three months into planking my journal of the construction recorded a mood of frustration and growing crisis – planking was progressing very slowly and the learning curve seemed to be very flat. Some things were being learned. It was important to get a plank with a lot of bend or twist in place while it was still hot, and it was best to cut the plank approximately to shape before bending because sometimes when cutting the scarf the plank straightened. The shipwrights were probably working with more concern for precision and symmetry of the hull than would have been the case four-hundred years ago. They were also more concerned to use good clean planks, avoiding knots and other defects which were probably less a concern four hundred years ago.
The first optimistic note in my diary appeared on 10th August:
Nick Truelove agrees that plank bending is going much better now. He ascribes it partly to having someone [Steven Edwards] who is dedicated fulltime to the fire bending. Rather than running backwards and forwards from other jobs, when planks are being bent Steven stays with them. Result is better bends, less burning of the planks.
There was more to it than that. Steven was more careful in keeping the fires burning evenly with uniformly chopped firewood and he had the patience to let the planks heat until they bent reasonably easily rather than forcing them to bend using levers and pulleys, and then trying to set the bend by applying heat. Simpler was definitely better.
Meanwhile huge piles of twisted tree limbs were being slabbed by Rick and Jules Martin to provide the frame timbers that would strengthen the slowly developing plank shell. There were some fifty pieces that had been selected as suitable for making the ‘floors’ – the frame timbers that stretch right across the bottom of the hull – each has a particular shape ranging from a shallow V midships to an acute Y in the bow and stem. In the old days a shipwright in a confined yard would probably take a timber from the top of the pile, eye it up to decide approximately where in the ship it might fit, rough it out to the finished shape and trial fit it. After a bit of fairing off it would be fitted into the plank shell. The end result of that haphazard approach can be seen in the shipwreck archaeology: the floors were not evenly spaced and some of them were not quite square to the keel. A more ordered approach was wanted by our shipwrights but it required more searching through piles of heavy timbers and making plywood templates to determine the shapes required at each position.
The size and enclosed design of the yard was a problem. Shipwrights building another little ship on the muddy banks of a river four hundred years ago could probably spread out a large number of sawn timber crooks so that the shape of each one was visible. In a confined yard where ship building and visitors compete for space the timbers had to be piled up in any available space. No doubt there were confined yards in the past too.
In September planking was really going well and the shipwrights were enjoying the creative process.
On September 5th I noted:
We have the International Congress of Maritime Museum’s conference here these last three days. The delegates are amazed by the speed of progress – ‘It’s like it’s growing organically’ one of them said. And it is. Planking is finally going extremely well, and, I hope, fitting the floors is speeding up too.
The beauty of the shape is generally agreed on.
The next great challenge in the construction was shaping the first wale. Wales are double thickness planks that strengthen and protect the hull at certain important points. The first wale runs from bow to stem at the widest point of the hull, near the waterline. The shipwrights had become good at bending the 60mm planking but we were all anxious to find out about bending 120mm thick wales through the tight curve at the bow. Adriaan de Jong had shown me a historical document that complains about planks being burnt ‘to a shame’ in the bending process. What we learned was that some pieces of wood will bend and others will not unless they are burned to a shame. There were a couple of failures in bending the wales but in the end it was done. The Duyfken replica team faced a difficulty, that the original shipwrights would have thought most extraordinary. It was near mid-summer when the wales were fitted and some days the temperature in the shade was over 40°C making Steven’s job tending the fire very unpleasant.
By early February, the whole shape of the hull up to the height of the rail was defined by top timbers or top futtocks (the uppermost pieces of frame timber). and Gerard Russell commenced cutting the camber (curve) of the main deck beams. The layout of the decks had been the subject of much discussion. On the one hand there was an argument that an armed ship of the late 16th century necessarily had two decks since the guns would be positioned below decks. But that arrangement either gave a gun deck too close to the waterline or a ship too high sided. We had tentatively designed Duyfken with one deck, had noted criticism of that, and changed to two decks. Then the discovery of a Dutch painting of a small jacht like Duyfken with a single deck layout (in the collection of the Swedish National Maritime Museum) caused us to look at the question again. Just before cutting the deck beams started we decided to revert to a single deck. Since then the evidence of three contracts for construction of small armed ships in 1594, again supplied by Robert Parthesius, and others supplied by Ab Hoving, has shown that the single-deck is the most likely arrangement.
The majority of the fastenings are trunnels or treenails (large oak dowels with wedges driven into the ends so they would grip like rivets). There are thousands of trunnels in the hull. By the end of July 1998 trunneling had been going on for six months, most of the 25mm holes had been drilled and the trunnels driven home by Jim Lucas, a former Colonel of the US Marines It takes a steady hand with the maul (shipwright’s sledge hammer) to drive those tight fitting trunnels. Our trunnels were made to a much higher standard than the originals would have been. They were precision machined from kiln dried oak. Originally they would have been hand whittled to an approximate size from whatever oak was available and would have relied more on their irregular shape and the wedges to grip and make a secure fastening.
By mid-May 1998 all the main deck beams were in place and it was clear that not all of the large hanging knees that bracket the beams to the inside of the hull could be got from the oak pieces shipped from Latvia. Those right-angled knees are usually sawn from the root boles of trees where the main roots branch from the trunk. The Latvian suppliers had done their best but the heavy earth moving equipment necessary to grub out root boles was simply not available deep in the oak forests. I had wondered whether they could be dug out by hand, but my first short walk on the snowcovered, hard-frozen, soil of a Latvian forest had persuaded me to keep that suggestion to myself.
Fortunately there are a number of Western Australian species that provide excellent hanging knees and large mature trees are quite often felled around the suburbs of Perth. Cutting out those massive knees was an interesting experience for the shipwrights and apprentices and it adds to one’s respect for the shipwrights of old who did it all with axes and pit saws rather than chain saws.
While undertakings such as finding and cutting the hanging knees have been interesting and educative, particularly for the apprentices, they are not of themselves experimental archaeology. Whereas an archaeological experiment should serve to confirm or falsify a theory, or to inform thought and theory about the past; cutting out hanging knees serves, if anything, to mystify the past. That thousands of grown knees were used every year in ship building is known. Certainly they were hewn with axes and sawn with pit saws. The experience of collecting knees for Duyfken makes it more difficult to understand how large timber knees could have been supplied in large numbers and at reasonable cost in the past.
There are limits to the efficacy of ‘experimental archaeology’. You can never completely recreate the past. Late 20th-century shipwrights working under the public gaze on high-profile projects like Duyfken cannot be expected to have the same ethos as late 16th-century shipwrights knocking out another little jacht every six months. Greater authenticity in the detail of construction could have been insisted on but it is important not to have an acrimonious conflict between the research and the shipbuilding team. There will always be an element of ‘them and us’ – from the ship builders’ point of view ‘us practical shipwrights and them boffins with their computers’. As long as the relationship remains cordial, workable compromises can be reached through good will on both sides.
At the time of writing, early April 2000, the Duyfken replica has just set out on her first major voyage and another phase of the experimental archaeology is under way. The ship is rigged entirely with hemp rope, including tarred hemp for the standing rigging which stays the masts. The sails are linen canvas. The masts themselves are shaped from locally grown pine trees. Captain Peter Manthorpe and first officer Garry Wilson are both highly experienced square rig mariners, but sailing Duyfken is for them an experiment and a research project. Some parts of her rig, such as the botte-loef which extends the fore tacks below the beakhead in the bow, have almost certainly not been used in nearly four hundred years. Duyfken has auxiliary power, but her fuel capacity limits her range under power. The intention is to sail the ship to Cape York Peninsula, re-enacting the original 1606 landing, and this voyage will involve tacking hundreds of miles to windward against the southeast trade winds.
Building replicas or reconstructions of ancient ships is a spectacular form of experimental archaeology and it is popular with the public. One of the reasons that it can work well is that shipwrights are clever at interpreting and adapting to different designs and construction techniques. Wooden ship building in almost any tradition involves a great deal of problem solving. Experimental archaeology projects, such as attempting to recreate northern European bronze age villages, have to depend on the practicality, skill, and ingenuity of the participating academics which may be less finely honed.
Burningham, N. & Jong, A. de, 1997, ‘The Duyfken Project: an Age of Discovery ship reconstruction as experimental archaeology’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 26, 4, 277-92.
Anderson, M., 1990, ‘Women’s History and Material Culture in Australian Museums’, Museums Australia Journal: special issue.
[1] Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation.
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