Thursday - March 11, 2010

It’s Peiper’s Fault

Another entry in the continuing Letters from Littleton series

First, I’ve been working, doing the handyman thing again. And I have decided to identify my profession as gigolo when asked. It’s true! My customers are women of a certain age, either divorced or widowed young, or married ones whose husbands can’t give them what they really want. So I go to them, referred by one satisfied client to another, and I let them know that I have certain skills and abilities that most men don’t have, and quite a lot of experience. That I pay attention to detail, don’t rush my job, and work until they are completely thrilled. And in exchange for money, I’ll do whatever they want. I should incorporate, and call the business Sometimes You Just Need A Man.

Second, Peiper sent me another one of his envelopes full of various clippings from the British newspapers. They’re always fun to read. This time, the articles were on the latest political scandals - their MPs have misplaced over ONE MILLION POUNDS in improper reimbursements!! (which is less than what Charlie Rangel probably owes in taxes), how ClimateGate egoist-in-chief Raj Pachauri owns lots of different hats, considers himself to be a test quality cricket bowler, gets himself driven to work one whole mile in a chauffeured Toyota Corolla (!!!) instead of driving the green car his institute gave him, two columns on utterly MAD Harriet Hartmann ("This woman is a plague on England!” engraves an enraged Peiper at the top of the page) is going to ruin the nation with her Equality Bill, a real estate article showing me I can now buy d’Artagnan’s actual house for a mere £3.24 million (I want it. Utterly. Even if I have to buy my own sword to live there. Drool, swoon, and gibber with excitement. It even has a mother-in-law turret on the back side of the castle, with it’s own studded iron door!) And this article on the Cutty Sark.

The what? The which? Your typical American, if she happens to be a drinker, will recognize the name as a brand of very light bodied blended whiskey. Yellow label on a green bottle I think.

I am not your typical American. I knew that the Cutty Sark was a clipper ship. And I know what clipper ships were, and I’m pretty sure I saw the rotting timbers of two or three of them somewhere on the coast of Maine when I was a little kid. Or my great gandmother did and I saw the pictures. Hey, I was small at the time! They were sailing ships from a long time ago, queens of the seven seas from the last dying breaths of the Age of Sail. Back in the long gone times when there was no such thing as stay-fresh packaging, and tea came in a wooden box, clipper ships would race home to England with the fresh crop of tea leaves from China, all the way around the southern tip of Africa, flying past pirates and sailing through storms at the neck snapping speed of 15 knots. 17 mph. Fresher tea sold for more money, and these ships made their owners a fortune.

That era ended when a) steam ships became reliable, and b) the Suez Canal opened, shortening the journey by at least a month. Actually, the short era of the clipper ship never really should have happened. 20 years before they existed you could take a propeller driven steamboat from London to New York. Or to Rio. But steam ships were expensive, and expensive to operate. Sail was cheap. So were the lives of the sailors. Here’s an account of one voyage of the Cutty Sark. I’d rather do time in prison. Or serve under Holly Graf, who seems a whole lot nicer than the first mate. He was so nasty the whole crew ran off. And his replacement was even worse!

Ok, so I knew it was a ship once upon a time. A great and famous one. I did not know that it still existed, and that it was some kind of maritime exhibit in England. In Greenwich. Right across the street - Trafalgar Road naturally - from the meridian building at the Maritime Museum and Sir Harrison’s clocks, eh Peiper? Pretty sly, guy. So it was exciting for me just to see the pictures in the paper of this long legged wooden beauty. And read of how it was undergoing restoration while in drydock. And how it was rusting apart. And that the plan was to raise the ship up 11 feet so that everyone could see the amazing round bottomed hull, which is what gave her her speed. And to do that, the plan was to hang the ship from steel girders driven through the sides. Abhorrence! Sacrilege! The chief curator had already quit over this plan, and I could understand that perfectly. It would be like going to a museum to see the famous race horse Man o’ War, stuffed and displayed, but to better show you the underside of his hooves - that’s the part that made him run fast! - we mounted him to the wall by driving a spear through his heart and another through his eyes. Gross!! And this, this in England, with it’s long and grand maritime history. How dare they! And I knew then that I had to post on it, and that meant a lot of research. For starters, the name. Why name a boat after a bottle of whiskey?

Wrongo, Drew. It was the other way around. And the ship was named after the clothing worn by the character Nannie in the Robert Burns poem quoted above. I think it’s a bit of a pun in Scottish, as a cutty sark is a wee slip worn by a wee slip of a girl who grew up to be a naughty witch. Who went dancing in the moonlight wearing only that. Which just goes to show you that sailors never change, and occupy their thoughts with booze and nearly naked women. If they built that ship today it would be named The hot babe in a thong bikini or the X-tra Small Nightie or the SS Underboob or similar. They actually named the ship after a sexy bit of women’s underwear. Not after the oddball little island in the English Channel named Sark, the one that just got around to ending the Middle Ages in 2008. (which is what you get when you let lefty newspapers own entire countries!) See, Nannie the witch almost caught drunk Tam one night, and managed to grab the tail of horse as he rode away in fright.

And I’d be wrong about the fortune part, even though the ship’s figurehead turned out to be quite apt. Cutty Sark never made riches for her owner, John “white hat” Willis. And while she was built for speed, she never beat her rival the Thermopylae. Just caught her tail, finishing the Shanghai to London run 5 days slower. And they both lost to steam and the canal, which opened the year the ship was built.

Her intended lifespan was 30 years when she was commissioned in 1868 by John ‘White Hat’ Willis, a London ship-owner who wore a white topper as he went about his business.

His purpose in ordering the new vessel from Glasgow firm Scott & Linton was not solely commercial.

An old hand in the China tea trade, he owned many clippers, but none as fast as Thermopylae, owned by the rival White Star Line, which had been launched earlier that year and looked set to outpace everything else.

In those days, the annual race of the tea clippers to be the first back to England with the new season’s crop was a national preoccupation. Large sums changed hands in bets.

Her maiden voyage, however, was not triumphant. She had teething troubles on her way out to Shanghai, and her first passage back to England with a hold full of tea took 110 days, compared with Thermopylae’s 105.

That was still pretty swift. The trouble was that however determinedly these two ships raced against each other during the coming years, their real rivalry was with steam.

The Suez Canal opened the very year Cutty Sark was launched. Only powered vessels could use it, and it meant they could do the voyage home in 60 days.

For a time, Willis and the other clipper-owners were defiant, claiming that steamer-carried tea was tainted by coal-dust. But as the price dropped, few tea-drinkers noticed the difference. By 1877, when Cutty Sark carried her last cargo of tea, it had become plain even to Willis that the days of the tea clipper were over.

Like I said, an era that should never have happened. And if Cutty Sark hadn’t split a bunch of sails and lost her rudder in a storm on that trip, she probably would have won.

But why was this old wooden ship rusting apart anyway? Wood doesn’t rust. Well, Cutty Sark is a “composite ship”. Which means it’s only wood on the outside. Teak and elm, actually. The ribs of the ship are iron. Not steel, iron. Not I-beams either. They hadn’t been invented yet. I’d heard of composition ships before, read about them in some little book on ships my aunt gave me when I was young. And in that book was a picture like this one:

which shows half of a rib of a composite ship. Wood on the outside, iron frame members on the inside. But ships have keels and keelsons and bilge boxes and a million other salt encrusted parts. And Wiki is telling me how composite ships were ever so much stronger than plain wood ones. Heck, they practically had the problem of hogging and sagging licked!

Huh? Hogging and sagging? What on earth is that? Well, ships are fairly large. Otherwise they’d be called boats. But the ocean is much bigger. Otherwise ships would be called bridges. And some ships are about the same size as the length of the waves they sail on. So when the top of the wave goes under the ship, it lifts up the front bit. (The front pointy bit is called the bow. Pronounced the same way as that bit of obsequious toe touching that Obama loves to do when he meets important people) And as the top of the wave goes under the middle of the ship, it lifts that part up too. Leaving the front and back (bow and stern) floating on lower parts of the water. So the ship bends. This is called hogging, after the term hogback, which refers to the top of pigs, which are often curved with a high point in the middle. Unlike horses and similar critters, where the high point on the back is at the shoulder. And when the low point of the wave is at the middle of the ship, the bow and stern are floating on higher bits of water, so the ships bends up at both ends. Or sags in the middle. Same same. That’s called sagging.

I’m a natural engineer. I can see how this kind of bending can stress a ship until it breaks. I realize that it really isn’t an issue on small boats. Or on medium ships made entirely of wood, since wood is flexible. Or on steel ships, because they’re far far stronger than wood ones. But I could not see how composite ships had any strength at all, if all they were made from was wood planks over toroidal girders. And that led me on a long chase, until I found a reprint online of a 120 year old book about ship design, Sir William Henry White’s A Manual of Naval Architecture. And found out that those composite ships had plenty of diagonal strap bracing between the ribs, and often had iron keels and keelsons as well. [ The keel is the bottom spine of a ship. All the ribs and hull parts attach to it. Sometimes the bottom of the keel stick through the bottom of the ship and helps it travel straight through the water, like an extra bit of rudder. Keelsons are smaller, lateral parallels to the keel. They are usually built inside the bottom of the ship and help keep the bottom stiff. ] Reading through that was quite interesting, and showed me what was missing in that picture. So I knew how the Cutty Sark was built, before I even saw a picture.

And I was wrong again. The Cutty Sark is a composite ship. But it’s made up of a whole lot more iron than just the inside bracings of the hull. The keel is iron. So are the masts, at least the lower parts. And some of the yardarms. And the bowsprit. And the stern cap. And many other parts. I think that the only reason they put wood planks on the hull was so that they could use Mentz metal sheathing. Another WTH moment. Mentz metal? Yeah, a “patented” alloy we call brass. 60% copper, 40% zinc. Brass doesn’t rust, and it doesn’t get shipworm, and it doesn’t support Mermaid’s Hair and other tropical plants which tend to stick to wood ships sailing in tropical seas. And that slows a ship down considerably. Ok, so you get some galvanic reaction between the brass plates and the iron ribs. But a lot less if you put wood walls between them, and then fasten the brass plates on with bronze screws.

Satisfied at last on how the ship was put together, and knowing a bit of her history, I felt I could better understand this article on the snags in the restoration process. This is the ultimate kind of handyman work, and has to be done carefully. After all, how long has it been since the last restoration of this 140 year old ship? Well, I won’t say I was wrong again, but I’m not really clear on that question. Seems like the ship has been under restoration for nearly 60 years. This ship, designed to last 30 years, worked from 1869 until 1922, then served as a training ship until 1954, then became a museum piece. During restoration work in 2007 some oik left the vacuum cleaner on when he left for the weekend, and it caught fire. And a large part of the ship was burned.

Fortunately, most of the ship had been taken apart by then, and the greater amount of original parts were not on board. But plenty was damaged nonetheless.

So the work continues, but it’s taking longer, and costing more, than anticipated. Like quality work always does, because it’s impossible to accurately estimate things when you are unwilling to hide problems beneath a thick coat of fresh paint.

Here is the link to the official restoration website. There are several galleries of superb photographs here, well worth seeing. The diagonal bracing I researched can be seen in the pictures from October 2007.

And as for Andrew Gilligan and his article on the plan to spear the old girl and hang her high? I’m still not sure. Searching around the official page I can find letters that say such a support is needed, because the ship is starting to sag around her keel. Probably because it was designed to live in the water, not in perpetual drydock! Or perhaps (quick, somebody call Rosie O’Donnell!!) the fire could have melted or softened the iron ribs (only the 2nd time in history that such a thing has happened, eh Rosie??? Stupid cow.)

Another article by Gilligan, dated yesterday, says the plan is for the ship to be floated on a giant bubble of glass. So maybe I misread the “steel beams, punched through the ship, would hold it in place” part. Wait, no I didn’t. Gilligan is against the plan. And I am too. Unless there is absolutely no other way and even refloating the ship in a giant aquarium full of pure filtered water won’t work. The big glass bubble and I-beam idea “would give the ship a modern, iconic look” according to Gilligan. Who the hell wants that, when we’re talking about a living piece of mi 19th century history. It would be as bad as that damned pyramid at the Louvre. Please England, let the French stand alone with iterations of poor taste like that.

But maybe Andrew is closely related to that Gilligan more famous in America. I tried to go through every page of the official site, and I did not see a word about any big glass bubble, but it is a pretty large web place. They mention that the ship must be supported by a collar, whatever that means. Is there a lack of transparency in their news about that transparency? Who knows. And Gordon Brown wants it done in time for the 2012 Olympics, and some of the restoration funding may truly be contingent on this horrid method of support.

Wrong for the N^th time on this one Drew. Gilligan is no Gilligan. The funding is there, and it is hooked into the glass bottomed dock concept:

Cutty Sark’s consultants suggested suspending the ship above the dry berth to even out the strains on the hull. The approved scheme not only allows the public to admire the ship’s lines for the first time, and appreciate the reasons for her success in carrying cargo under sail, it also frees up the dock below to be used for education, exhibition and entertainment purposes.

The ship’s fame and performance comes ultimately from her shape.  The importance of being able to see Cutty Sark’s under water shape was recognized by Frank Carr during the restoration of 1953.  He originally proposed that the ship should be drawn up on wooden ways on the hard at Greenwich, rather than her exquisite hull being concealed in a dank dock.  He saw that this would enable visitors to wander around her to see her lines from every angle, much as they would have been able to do when she was being built in Dumbarton at Messrs. Scott & Linton’s yard in 1869.

Historic ship conservators have long pondered the best way of conserving a ship out of the water.  It has been recognized that a large vessel tends to “sit down” on her keel over time.  The shores that supported Cutty Sark in her 1953 dock had cut into her hull planking and the keel was stressed. 

Rats. I was hoping that this Gilligan was true to this roots, and I could call a “Gilligan, drop those coconuts!” line. After all, the guy does not know front from back. Or bow from stern, actually:

DUDE. It’s the other end, m’kay? It ain’t the “front”.

And it looks like there will be a History Channel special on the ship next week. Tune in and watch, Tuesday the 16th at 8pm!

On the 140th anniversary of the Cutty Sark’s maiden voyage, and for the first time on television, Ben Fogle presents the full story of this world-famous ship and the dramatic bid to save her.Many believed the infamous fire of May 2007 spelled doom for the Cutty Sark, but using exclusive access, this programme explains the true context and consequence of that disaster.

Her story begins in 1869, launched from a Dumbarton slipway and bound for the lucrative Chinese tea trade. It was the age of the famous ‘tea races’, in which the clippers (merchant ships built almost purely for speed) competed to be first back to London with the new tea crop. The clippers were the fastest commercial sailing ships ever built, and the Cutty Sark was the fastest and most famous of them all. Her speed and grace made her a legend in her own time. 

In her long life she has faced the scrapyard many times. But thanks to good fortune and the hard work of her admirers, today she is the last tea clipper to survive. For fifty years she has stood in dry dock in Greenwich, where she has become a top tourist attraction and famous London landmark. She is, not least, a unique link to Britain’s proud maritime past.

So that’s where I’ve been. It’s all Peiper’s fault, actually.

And I still say it’s wrong - creepy even, in a perv kind of way - to lift up a ship named after a witchy hot babe in a really short dress in a way that lets everyone look up her skirts and see her nicely rounded bottom. Show a little respect.

Posted by Drew458     on 03/11/2010 at 02:18 PM   
Filed Under: • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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