specifications for hatch sizes and iron spar dimensions. We had a few photographs of her that Karl Kortum's research had turned up, but these were taken after she had been made an auxiliary and her rig reduced . We had no on-deck views and no crew memoirs . There was nothing left in the ship either, except the palms of the chainplates and other stray rivet holes in the bulwarks to indicate where some fittings had been. I had been to Aberdeen, Greenwich, San Francisco, San Diego and Mystic and found that while the history of sailing vessels was well documented and photographed, there was very little concrete information about just how everything was designed and built. There are very few men left with sailing experience in commercial squareriggers, and while their recollections are an invaluable guide to how the gear was used, most of them never had to solve the problems of how each piece was made. We could have opted for a simple rig of welded fabrications that would function as a modern sail training ship's rig, but our mission was to restore an English bark of 1877 as authentically as possible. Everything had to look right and at the same time function just right. We obtained photos of other Hall-built ships, worked out the proportions of the spars and compared them with Lloyd's rules for scantlings. Hundreds of photos were taken of details of the Balclutha, Star of India, and other vessels. The process was a sort of algebra of solving an equation with one or two known bits of information and ha! fa dozen variables, since there were at least that many different ways of doing
everything . We kept feeling that our research was inadequate, but we had to keep the design work ahead of construction to make our 2-year plan work. Therefore at a certain point it became a question of our best guess and that was what we were going to have to live with. I believe we have succeeded in restoring Elissa as a typical small British bark of her period. But I have a recurring nightmare of a trunkfull of photographs surfacing some day and showing every detail a bit different than the ship we have just built! Fortunately at about this time Don Birkholz, Sr. became available through the closing of the firm of naval architects he was working for. He had volunteered a great deal of work in the earlier years of the project and now came to work with us as a full time consultant. We hired another engineer
"The only way to stay on budget and to get the ship done right was to ... set up that shipyard to build one ship. " and yet another draftsman and in a year and a half produced close to three hundred drawings of every construction detail in the ship. It was Don who had to work out all the details and translate an idea into a drawing, and I could not have gotten through the job without him. Getting the stuff built was something else. We had to choose processes of welding, casting, forging, or machining mostly based on what it looked like the local vendors could produce. Most of the good shops were back-ordered for oilfield work and
Ship's new bulwarks, fabricated al Todd's are rive/led by the ship's own crew, learning to do the unusual and labor-intensive jobs themselves.
quoted astronomical prices. The shops within our budget couldn't produce the quality we were looking for. There is something about these ships that is proven time and time again: there is more to them than at first meets the eye. We weren't the only ones to underestimate the work, and so we were repeatedly faced with vendors halfway into a job realizing they were going to lose money at about the time we realized we weren't going to get what we wanted and both sides ending up wishing they'd never heard of each other. We eventually came upon one blacksmith and one machine shop that did first-rate work at a good price and took a real interest in the ship . Eventually we reversed our position of contracting out work and decided the only way to stay on budget and get the ship done right was going to be to hire people directly, buy the needed tools, and set up that shipyard to build one ship. In the case of welders qualified people could be hired locally. Carpenters came from all over the country. Rivetting we had to teach ourselves. Todd's had fabricated the bulwarks but quoted a price for rivetting to the sheer strake that we could not afford, so we left with a few bolts in the holes . Subsequently the bulwarks, new chain plates, numerous other fittings, and part of the collision bulkhead were all done as in-house work; about 1500 rivets were driven. A forge was set up and one of our helpers, Doug McLean, was sent to work with Joe Pehoski of Salado, Texas (the smith who made many of our fittings) and after some weeks was able to produce many of the simpler fittings and continued to get better and better until the end of the project. By July 1981 we were a little behind schedule. The poop planking wasn't finished, but the main deck was. The ship had seen most of the steelwork done, been blasted and painted and was becoming believable as a ship. A party was thrown on July 11 to step the foremast and get in the bowsprit. The other masts were lying alongside and almost ready to go. The timetable was being kept close enough to keep up the credibility to keep up the fundraising. In August Elissa was towed to Houston for drydocking. It had been three years since Piraeus and besides painting, the rebuilt rudder was finally hung. During the fall more carpenters were hired and the rails and deckhouse begun. The steelwork for the foe's'! head deck began, main and mizzen masts were stepped and fore and main topmasts sent up. All this time we had been alongside an unused bulkhead two miles out of town and thus out of the puhlic eye. Meanwhile a long process had been gone through to obtain a lease on the east side of Pier 22, downtown just off the 21