American shipyards up and down the coast turned out everything from fishing boats to four-hundred-ton merchant brigs; they had acquired a reputation for creating fast, sharp, weatherly ships, the schooner emerging in the eighteenth century as the quintessential American vessel possessing those characteristics in abundance. They also had acquired a surprising amount of knowledge of modern warship design, much of it coming directly or indirectly from the Royal Navy’s practices. England’s royal dockyards employed fifteen thousand workers, a third of them skilled shipwrights who had come to their trade in the only way possible, via a seven-year apprenticeship under another royal dockyard shipwright. As early as 1690 there were enough of those English dockyard-trained artisans living and working in America for the Royal Navy to issue a contract to a privately owned shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for construction of a fifty-gun ship of the line, the Falkland.2
By the time of the Revolution, Philadelphia had become the largest shipbuilding center in America, owing less to its inconvenient waterfront, a hundred miles from the sea up the Delaware River, than to its proximity to huge stands of timber. Humphreys’s business partner and cousin John Wharton was a close friend of Morris’s, and when the Continental Congress voted in December 1775 to have thirteen small frigates built, Humphreys immediately submitted a proposed design. The draft of the thirty-two-gun frigate from Humphreys & Wharton followed the basic Royal Navy plan for ships of this class in its arrangement of decks and guns, but was uniquely American in its hull plan, a sharp, fast-sailing design. It was also bigger than its British counterparts, 132 versus 124 feet long on the berth deck. The Randolph would be completed at the Humphreys & Wharton yard in Philadelphia in 1776. That same year Humphreys was “disunited … from religious fellowship” with the Society of Friends for his participation in the work of war.3
A ship of war even more than any other sailing ship was a compromise between a series of utterly irreconcilable forces. A ship built massively enough to absorb enemy fire in her spars and hull and sustain the considerable shock of recoil from her own guns would necessarily ride low in the water from all the weight carried, limiting speed and maneuverability. For the guns to be usable when the ship heeled over in heavy seas, they had to be as high above the waterline as possible, resulting in a high center of gravity and poor stability. Trying to overcome the hull’s resistance in the water with lofty masts and large spreads of canvas exacerbated instability still further. Extra ballast could counter this problem to some extent, but only at the cost of depressing the hull still deeper in the water. A hull with sharp, narrow ends yielded a ship that sailed faster and closer to the wind, but cut into the space available for stowing the large stocks of provisions a man-of-war had to carry for the large crews needed to fight the guns or board an enemy ship. Increasing the length of the hull made it possible to increase weight and storage capacity while still preserving comparatively sleek proportions, but the strains that constantly worked on the elastic wooden structure with every roll of the sea increased rapidly with length as well, causing frames and members to separate, leaks to open and expand, and bow and stern to sag, or “hog,” along the length of the keel.4
By the late eighteenth century every European sea power had evolved its own basic designs for warships and the construction practices required to build them and was generally loath to deviate from what had been found through trial and error to yield a workable if often uninspiring result. Conservatism was built into the process. All the pressures of government policy and practice worked to standardize designs to minimize costs and risks—and to preserve the deeply vested interests of workers and suppliers, nowhere more so than in the Royal Navy’s long-established shipyards, with their long-established traditions. Royal Navy officials regularly railed against the stranglehold the artisans held on the craft and against the corruption that drove up costs and stifled improvements, but nothing changed. One ancient privilege allowed shipwrights to take home “chips,” supposedly small scraps of leftover wood good only for burning but in practice extending to substantial pieces of sawn timber that went out the door every day, a steady stream of legalized pilfering. Captain Thomas Troubridge, a lord of the Admiralty from 1801 to 1804, thought “all the master shipwrights should be hanged, every one of them, without exception.” Lord St. Vincent, first lord of the Admiralty in the same period, more mildly proposed that all dockyard artisans be given a pension—on the condition that “they should reside fifty miles from any dockyard.”5
IF AMERICAN shipbuilders were less experienced, they were also free of all those hindrances. And so the design that Humphreys drew up when the first frigates of the United States navy were to become a reality in 1794 was like none ever seen. With a nominal rating of forty-four guns, his frigate was not only longer but proportionately more slender than any other frigate of the day. The design also incorporated a number of striking structural innovations that liberated it from some of the constraints that had forced so many trade-offs on designers of warships in the past. A series of long, arcing diagonal braces, six on each side, three sweeping forward and three aft, hugged the inside frame of the hull and were tied to it every two feet with one-inch copper bolts. These “diagonal riders” were an entirely new idea, and they greatly improved the strength and stiffness of the entire structure while counteracting the tendency of the long ship to hog. The deck planking was pressed into service as a structural reinforcement too; four pairs of extra-thick planks ran fore to aft the length of the ship, each plank of the pair “joggled” into the other and to the beams below with interlocking cuts like a jigsaw puzzle. This also added to longitudinal stiffness. A series of mutually supporting stanchions and knees carried the weight from the top, spar deck to the gun and berth decks below, and finally onto the diagonal riders beneath, which made for a substantial boost in the gun-carrying capacity of the entire ship. The top deck of standard European frigates consisted of a quarterdeck aft and forecastle forward with only lightweight, narrow gangways running between them on each side and a large open hatch between them and the fore- and mainmasts. A total of about twenty carronades and chasers could be carried on the quarterdeck and forecastle of a typical British frigate. But Humphreys’s bracing system allowed for a nearly complete spar deck running flush fore to aft, broken only by the main hatch, with room and support for as many as twenty-six guns along its entire length.6
Secretary of War Henry Knox showed the plan to another Quaker shipwright who had recently arrived in America and made an impression in Philadelphia, still the nation’s capital at that time. Josiah Fox was born in England to a well-off family, served an apprenticeship to a master shipwright at the Royal Navy’s dockyard in Plymouth, and then, having come into his inheritance, spent the following seven years traveling the world, visiting dockyards and educating himself on the design of ships across Europe. In the fall of 1793 he went to America to study timber and was introduced to Knox in Philadelphia.
Fox had several critiques to offer of Humphreys’ plans; in particular, he objected to “any hollows in the Body; by no means to have any hollow in either her Waterlines or Timbers in the Fore Body.”7 He also strongly opposed the size of the ship and offered his own alternative plan for a more conventionally dimensioned frigate. After seeking a third opinion from John Wharton, Knox settled on a compromise: many of Fox’s specific objections were addressed in a final redesign under Humphreys’s direction, but the size of the final ship remained as Humphreys wished.
As work began in Philadelphia on the first of the forty-fours in the spring of 1794, copies of Humphreys’s final drawings were prepared by Fox to send to the shipyards up and down the coast that had been contracted to build the other five frigates. The work had been distributed in an unfeigned bid to build political support for the program, and at each yard a private “Constructor or Master Builder” was hired at an annual salary of $2,000 to oversee the building. Humphreys was chosen in Philadelphia; yards in Boston and New York were selected to build the othe
r two large frigates, while three smaller thirty-six-gun ships, built to a design Fox supervised, were assigned to Norfolk, Baltimore, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
To make patterns for the large riblike frames of the ship, a full-size plan was drawn in chalk on the floor of what was known as a mold loft. Humphreys found it would cost $2,000 to erect his own building large enough to house a mold loft for his frigate and was forced to rent space from another builder. Following the chalk outlines, thin battens of quarter- or half-inch wood were cut and nailed together to form flat templates for the curved shapes of the frames, and copies of these too were sent to the New York and Boston yards. In the summer of 1794 copies also went to woodcutters and ship’s carpenters dispatched to the islands of Georgia to seek out large timbers of the right rough shapes.
They were looking for live oak, Quercus virginiana, a tree unique to the seacoasts of the southeastern United States. The name “live” came from its evergreen habit, and it was a beautiful tree, growing 40 to 70 feet high with a magnificent spread, 150 feet or more at the crown, usually draped with Spanish moss; a single tree could shade half an acre. Its attraction to shipbuilders, though, lay in its incredible density and resistance to decay. At seventy-five pounds per cubic foot, it was 50 percent denser than white oak. And its large angled branches offered ready-made timbers whose strong grain would follow the curve of each finished section of the frame without any weakening cross-grain angle cuts.
British surveyors had identified live oak as a promising wood for ships back in the 1770s. To build a single seventy-four-gun ship of the line required three thousand loads of six hundred board feet of oak, the equivalent of sixty acres of mature wood, and the Royal Navy was already importing oak from as far away as Spain and the Baltic to meet its burgeoning needs. But live oak was a difficult wood to harvest and work. On the Sea Islands of Georgia, where the trees grew in abundance, the local planters were making too much money growing indigo to be interested in going into the lumber business, and other places the trees were found tended to be wild and inaccessible. Many live oaks were afflicted with rot that spread from the taproot up into the heartwood and was only apparent after the tree had been laboriously felled. Ship’s carpenters dreaded working with it; the wood was so hard that a nail driven in was impossible to remove, tools were instantly dulled, and augers had to be hammered in to start drilling a hole.8
But Humphreys had used live oak in the Randolph in 1775 and thought its value in the new big frigates was indisputable. His design called for abundant use of two other uniquely American woods that combined decay resistance with resilience, pitch pine and red cedar, but only live oak had the strength and density to form the backbone of what Humphreys envisioned as an enveloping cage that would not only support the ship’s structure but provide a solid barrier to enemy shot. British ships had 6 or 8 inches between frames, but the new American frigates were designed to have frames butting flush together in pairs with only 2 inches of space between each pair, not enough room for a cannonball to penetrate. At the waterline, a ball would have to smash its way through 22 inches of wood formed in a three-ply sandwich: an outer layer of white oak planking, the live oak frame, and then another interior layer of white oak plank. Given the higher density of live oak, it was altogether equivalent to something closer to 30 inches of white oak, which was the typical thickness of the walls in a seventy-four-gun ship of the line. A thirty-two-pound carronade ball fired even point-blank at maximum charge would not have sufficient momentum to penetrate that.9
Humphreys confidently predicted that fifty-five men could cut all the live oak needed for one frigate—about five hundred trees’ worth—in two months. But he utterly underestimated the obstacles involved in working in the inhospitable locales where it was found. Finding local labor, hacking out roads through the woods with teams of oxen and horses, and fighting torrential rains and sickness all but unmanned the supervisor sent to manage the business, a Boston shipwright named John T. Morgan. From Georgia he wrote Humphreys, “These Moulds frighten me they are so large,” and cataloged all his woes. “I lost a fine lad, an apprentice last Saturday with fever, I have it now, everybody is sick here. If I am to stay here till all the timber is cut I shall be dead … I cannot stand it.” When Humphreys tried to shame him for his slowness, Morgan replied, “You say that if I was there I should be mortified, if you was here you would curse live Oak.”10 Several more of the northern carpenters died, others deserted, but by the end of the year a shipment arrived in Philadelphia that was everything Humphreys had hoped for. “One cargo of live oak has arrived from Georgia … most of which is now under workmen’s hands,” Humphreys reported in late December 1794. “This timber is greatly superior to any in Europe, and the best which ever came to this place.”11
The frigates were probably the most technologically complex pieces of machinery that existed in the America of 1794, with every part made by hand: iron bolts up to twenty feet long, forged one at a time by blacksmiths; 150,000 treenails, wooden pegs as much as four feet long that were slowly hammered into augered holes to fasten planks together, their ends then split and wedged to hold them tight; more than a thousand pulley blocks of varying dimensions, their sheaves made of ultra-hard lignum vitae. Every plank was sawn over a sawpit, one man in the pit below and another standing on the timber above, each working one end of a two-man saw; large frames were roughed out with an ax, then finished with an adze, which when swung at arm’s length by a skilled master shipwright could shave a whisker off a huge timber in exactly the right spot. Each of the longest of the hundreds of thousands of holes that needed to be drilled might take two men a week to complete by slowly working their way through twelve feet of solid timber, constantly backing the auger out to clear the chips, and finally running a heated iron through the finished hole to leave a smooth, hardened, and somewhat water- and decay-resistant surface. Copper bolts used below the waterline were not threaded but had to be secured by “upsetting” their ends, working them with hammers to form a flattened head.12 Rope had to be spun and tarred, decks caulked with a ton of oakum and a dozen barrels of pitch, sails cut and sewn. The building of the ship went on outside, in all weather. Yet when all went well it could be done start to finish in a year, even a ship the size of one of Humphreys’s large frigates.
But months and then years of delays ensued waiting on the shipments of live oak. By the end of 1795 five of the six shipyards still had only two-thirds of the live oak pieces they needed; New York had only a quarter, because a schooner carrying one of its large shipments was lost off Cape Hatteras.13
Another spring and fall went by before finally, in 1797, three of the frigates were done; the remaining three would follow over the next three years. Humphreys had submitted a long list of proposed names for the ships, mostly rather feeble imitations of Royal Navy names—Ardent, Terrible, Invincible, Resolution, Tartar, Formidable—but after much toing and froing, United States, Constitution, and President were chosen for the Philadelphia, Boston, and New York forty-fours; the thirty-sixes were given the names Congress (Portsmouth), Constellation (Baltimore), and Chesapeake (Norfolk).
It was always an unknown how a ship would perform when the forces of wind and water combined for the first time on a new design, not least because the sizing of the masts and spars of a sailing ship was more of an art than a science. Humphreys had in his possession a book containing long lists of rules of thumb, copied from a British handbook written out at the Royal Navy’s Deptford yard in 1719, which specified numerical proportions for establishing the lengths and diameters of all the yards of a ship. The Philadelphia merchant captain William Jones sent Humphreys his own list of such rules, as did Captain Thomas Truxtun. Though inarguably the product of much trial and error, rules like these were equally obviously ad hoc; there was no law of physics behind them, no mathematical reason for the main topsail yard to be 18⁄25 the length of the lower yards or the mizzenmast 11⁄13 of the mainmast.14 The ultimate decision rested with the ship’s capta
in, however, and so for months as his ships were being fitted out for sea, Humphreys had to sit uncomfortably on the sidelines, an idle spectator as crucial decisions were made that could make or break his reputation, fairly or unfairly.
Republican newspapers were waiting to pounce on any sign that the ships were a failure; they had already had a field day over the snags at the launching of the Constitution in September 1797. The previous May, at the launch of the United States in Philadelphia, the inclined ways that the ship slid down were set at too steep an angle, and the ship hit the water so fast that it struck the river bottom, doing serious damage to the keel. The Constitution’s ways had the opposite problem, sinking into the mud so that the ship came to a halt after sliding only twenty-seven feet. A large crowd had assembled to watch the launch, including President Adams. Two days later a second try sent the ship only a few dozen feet farther. The anti-Federalist newspaper Time Piece responded with a mocking ode that suggested the frigate was far better staying where she was, and singled out her builders for particular derision:
When first you stuck upon your ways
(Where half New England came to gaze)
We antifederals thought it something odd
That where all art had been display’d
And even the builder deem’d a little god,
He had not your ways better laid.15
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