Falling Apart Over Oceans: Sailing Ships and Decay in the Oceanic Environment

• In Event: Pathologies of Materials: Environmental Histories of Material Decay and Its Management

Abstract

Discussions of large ships, metaphorical and otherwise, often mention or center around their quality of sealedness—a kind of craft that separates the people within it from their surrounding environment. But this, when viewed from the level of the deck, was not the case; during the so-called Age of Sail, for instance, the interaction between wooden sailing vessels and their oceanic surroundings, the interconnected winds, seas, and skies, reveal the degree to which they were interwoven with and porous to their environment. One way in which this was most perceptible, especially to those working aboard these ships, was their continual deterioration in the usual courses of their labor overseas, where the loss or breakage of sails, spars, masts, and rudders was a common occurrence, as well as leaks or other damage to the hull. This paper will examine the ways in which the life of a wooden sailing ship was composed of it falling to pieces during the nineteenth century, as wood and sail were gradually replaced by iron and steam, and other methods of attempting–but never fully succeeding–to prevent their deterioration were devised. It will consider this ongoing and active decay as integral to their working lives, tying this immediate experience of oceanic interaction to the continuous and always-unstable consumption of forests and the frequent search for a better source of forest resources, particularly in the British Empire.

Author

• Brooke Grasberger, Boston College