THE AMERICAN HERITAGE IN THE FALKLANDS
of manning guns or stowing whale oil, the memory here is of people. She lies on an even keel aground in about 12 feet of water at high tide. Her massive structure, 165 feet long, by 35 feet wide by 18 feet deep, is imbedded in mud about 5 feet deep. Given a coat of paint, her tweendecks would not seem unfamiliar to the emigrants who sailed in her to New York from Amsterdam before the American Civil War. If one were to read Lachlan MacKa y's (Daniel MacKay's brother's) laboriously indexed shipwright's manual while walking the Cooper's tweendecks with a ruler in hand, one would feel one's mind boggling with a living illustration of a long-dead art. All the frame models in the world could never substitute for this last remainder of the real thing. William Hall must have known Lachlan MacKay. Did they ever sit down and talk about the infinite variations of thicknesses of timber that become apparent only after hours of measuring-the kind we did there in the wind-swept hold of the Cooper's tweendecks with the Cape Horn rain pattering on the tin roof? Greece still has her Parthenon, and Bassae, and the name of the architect lktinus. Scholars come from all over the world to study and to try to understand Iktinus's miracles of formula and proportion. Yet no one has tried to study the entasis of one of our own Parthenons. The Cooper has survived in order to tell us that we must. The immediate problem, then, of the Cooper is that she must be stabilized. Something must be done to prop up the
starboard side, where 70 feet is missing amidships in a 3 foot gap that runs just under the tweendecks. This will take the strain off those long-suffering stanchions and prevent her from falling, a twisted wreck, into Stanley Harbor. It is the kind of job that can be done with a few oil drums, some balks of timber, some jacks, and a lot of ingenuity, and a little money, by Hilton Matthews, who is ready to go to work. There is a good precedent for working on the Cooper in the work done on the Vasa, whose technical department stands ready to advise us. An immediate, and urgent, project, for instance, would be to copy her decoration with the latexfiberglass mold process that has been so successfully used on the Vasa.
Once the Cooper is stabilized, she can be used as a storage place for the endangered parts of the Snow Squall and the St. Mary and as a temporary base for our activities in the Falklands, including an engineering study of the problems that will be encountered in strengthening her sufficiently so that she can be moved safely onto a barge and returned to her home port, New York. Finally, there is the matter of preservation. The Falkland Islands ships have survived because of constant temperature and constant humidity. Removing them, or parts of them, to a different ¡climate will create problems that must be dealt with before the ships are moved and for the first years of their installation in a new environment. .t
At right, heavy beaded knees in the tweendeck of the Charles Cooper.
Below, the weatherworn bow of the Cooper, survivor of an age that cared about finish and ornamentation, as well as structural soundness.
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