Sam Llewellyn is editor of The Marine Quarterly,
http://www.marinequarterly.com, and author of nautical thrillers.
Three years ago he bought a Corribee on eBay
Flotsam and jetsamFlotsam and jetsamSam Llewellyn
B
ack in the beginning was
the hammer. It was a bit of
stick to which a lump of stone
had been lashed with animal
sinews. Stone Age Man used it
to knock down trees. Then he used it to
conk animals on the head, and collect
more sinews, which he employed to bind
the trees together. He then dragged the
whole lot into the sea and set off on slow
and perilous voyages of discovery.
After a while he realised that if you
knocked some chips off the stone end of
the hammer it could be persuaded to cut
things, and become an axe.
This spelled an end to the often
unsuccessful process of felling mighty
oaks by hitting their trunks hard, and led
to the discovery that if you made the front
end of the trunks pointed, it helped them
travel through the water.The sky’s the limit
Discovery now speeded up. The pressure
on wildlife caused by the increased
demand for sinews led to the invention of
string. But string tended to rot, so someone
discovered that if you found a knothole in
the wood and banged in a stick to connect
it with another knothole, you had
something called a trenail. But the odds
against two knotholes aligning weredepressingly long. So someone chipped
the hammer to a point, and rotated it
instead of banging it, and bingo, a drill.
The sky was now just about the limit.
Large boats came into being, built from
planks riven by a kind of sharp hammer
without a handle called a wedge, and
smoothed by axes with blades rotated
through ninety degrees, called adzes.
No longer did you have to sit on a raft
made of tree trunks
and gristle, feeling
that you perhaps
looked less
impressive than
you felt. Now you
could sail the two
seas in something
relatively sleek.
Further tools evolved, and with them
discovery, increasing the number of seas
to seven. With new tools came new kinds
of boat – Viking double enders, tubby
cogs, the cod’s-head-and-mackerel-tailed
fl yers built by Matthew Baker for Francis
Drake and his heavy friends.
Iron nails proliferated, so hammers
survived; but gadgetry became ever more
ingenious. Tool development pushed boat
development and vice versa. And before
you could say draw-knife, here came
William Fife and other poets in timber, andAscent of Man
Forget your Silicon Valley, steam railway or the
wheel – it was boatbuilding and the humble
hammer that kickstarted technology
steel on the Clyde, and GRP everywhere.
Finally, at the pinnacle of boatbuilding
evolution, PBO arrived on the scene.
A month ago, inspired by the advice in
the richly informative pages of this organ,
I added to the personal fl eet an ancient
plastic ketch we found slumped under
brambles in the corner of a boatyard.
Hauling fi ve toolboxes and an inverter on
board, we commenced restoration.
We are doing nicely so far. For the
engine there is a variety of spanners,
socket, ring, adjustable, and tube. We
are using many stainless screws, and
we drill holes for them with something
electric, and screw in the screws with
something else electric, in a manner that
would have astonished the cog builders
of Stettin, let alone the sinew-binders of
the Stone Hammer age.
The carpentry will be largely power-
assisted. When it comes to paint and
varnish, we will be
using electric
sanders –
disc, belt and detail- and keeping the
dust out of our
lungs with a rich
variety of
medically-
approved masks and respirators.
We will apply the various gunks with
rollers, foam brushes, regular brushes,
sprayers and forced labour.
Rig tension? There is a meter for that,
and for just about everything else. The
toolboxes, in short, contain a state-of-the-
art DIY inventory, and every single item in
them is used.
Frontier mentality
We are pushing some tool frontiers of our
own. There is the domestic ladder we put
up to the mizzen jumper struts when it
was time to reconnect the triatic, and the
dodgy mainsail on which we recline for
the after-lunch snooze.
Apart from this fi ne tuning, though, the
restoration represents the apex of boat
tool history. We have risen far beyond
primitive implements such as hammers...
What do you mean, the propeller won’t
go round? There’s a rope cutter? Which is
seized? Jam some grease into the grease
nipple. No good? Blowlamp, then. Heat
gun. WD40. Still no good? Big Stilsons?
Puller? Whaddayamean, hammer? All
right, all right. I think there’s one down at
the bottom of the box. Give it a welt. There
it goes!
Like I said. In the beginning was
the hammer.Swede Olaus Magnus’s 1555 depiction of boats being built
using tree roots, sinews, an axe and – no doubt – a hammerGadgetry became ever
more ingenious. Tool
development pushed boat
development and vice versa