Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Tall ships!

I am a big fan of wooden ships. The idea of moving over the sea in a mass of wood and iron having to prey that you have thought of everything you might need to take with you kind of exciting.
Imagine you are on a ship that is in the middle of the Pacific ocean. There are 250 crew on board. You've been out there for months. Food is stale but still passable and you should have enough water to wash down the weevils that are in the bread. A storm hits and your mast breaks. The one thing that can keep you moving forward with any sort of control. What would you do? Now a days we call for help, use the gps and wait for rescue. 200 years ago all you had was the combined knowledge and experience of the people on the ship. No one else. There are cases of ships being wrecked on remote islands and the crew figured out how to salvage enough wood to make a new boat but first they had to do a few things. They had to hunt down some large animals on the island. Luckily they had some goats. They killed then skinned them. The skins they cured into leather. They needed the leather to make a bellows for the forge they needed to melt down any metal they could find into nails to build the ship. Not to mention making rope from vegetation on the island.
How many of us could do that today?

Anyway here are some photos of three tall ships that came into Miramichi this week. The biggest was a mere 109 feet and the smallest some 50 feet. All ocean going and beautifully designed.


A small deck gun.


This is on the Pride of Baltimore 2



Arrh!






1 comment:

Jen Miller said...

Beautiful! We occasionally see a tall ship down here in Dominica, and it is always breathtaking for me.