The Sea Lion:
Rigging a Sixteenth-Century Ship by Nick Benton
On New York's Lake Chautauqua, a little ship built to the ideas of ship design current four hundred years ago now practices Elizabethan sail drill hundreds of miles from salt water. Her builder Ernie Cowan found a master rigger to rig and sail his Sea Lion. This was Nick Benton, whose Rigging Gang has fitted out many a tall ship. Nick Benton works to the old patterns, discovering new learning along the way. For example, he showed us once a foresheet he'd just made up of hemp. Being made for its purpose rather than simply cut of a coil of line, the foresheet was quite thick at the working end (where great strain comes upon it, bowsed down to sail hard on the wind) and thinned out progressively where less strain would come upon the slackened sheet as the line was eased out. One's head spins at the concepts of the abundance of time and the scarcity of materials which would encourage such refinements-but Nick Benton takes such things in stride. Here he tells us a little what it's like to rig and sail a ship ofthe kind that opened the Atlantic world to human traffic. Ern ie Cowan built Sea Lion carefu ll y , privately- even secretly , in the true fashion of the Elizabethan shipwrights- fo llowing the construction methods outlined in Mathew Baker' s Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry of 1586. Initially, Cowan considered sailing Sea Lion on Lake Erie. But Coast Guard regulations would have imposed severe restrictions on the design, and Cowan decided instead to undertake the project on Lake Chautauqua . Employing almost exclusively Baker' s three-arc system of design to determine the relative proportions of the draft, length and beam , Cowan shaped the hull relying on little more than a compass and straightedge. Later in the building a profile view of the sai l plan was made , based on a theoretical sail plan in Baker's treatise , and there was a standing rigging draft , wh ich was left very simple , in the style prevalent for many centuries . On the whole, though, plans were not used to the extent they are today . A mere 40ft on the waterline, 42 tons in displacement and with 1300 square feet of sail , Sea Lion is small by today ' s standards, but practical in 1586 . By Elizabethan measurements she is 48.5 tons burden , 36.4 tons of tonnage, larger in fact than many of the earl y Eng li sh exploration ships. Cowan followed the methods of earlier sh ipwrights almost to th e letter, even when contemporary views might have led a more ex perienced builder to make " improvements. " In this
sense , he was genuinely lucky that this was hi s first vessel and that he had no prejudices as a modern shipwright. By reason of his professed ignorance, he accepted anything and questioned everything. As a result , Sea Lion is one of the most accurately finished reproductions of a period vessel. Sea Lion has no eng ine or mechanical anac hronisms. Several compromises were made temporarily, such as the use of modern chainpl ates and channel bolts, wh ich wi ll be replaced with clenchbo lts' this winter. To a ll ow the public access below , the whipstaff '- which should be in the coverage on the level of the main deck-was ra ised to the quarter deck. Cowan made th is concess ion because his desire to share the ship with imperfect ions exceeds that of hav ing a "perfect" ship for the benefit of a knowledgeable few. To accomodate this arrangement , we employed steering pendants of hemp with wire rope inserts . Th is was to solve e lasticity and length problems which would not norm ally have been encountered. The contemporary practice also dictated th at th e rudder have a trailing edge thicker than the leading edge. The rudder as installed has parallel sides, but we hope to experiment with this to see if the o lder method, attested to in Baker' s work and in The Rigging Treatise of 1625 , is superior. Sea Lion' s rigging is all made of hemp , with no sisal, manila, syntheti cs or w ire (except in the steerin g pendants). To develop the rigging we researched the rig and detail s for the period lead ing up to 1586. Tudor ri gging in ventories were very useful in unravelling mysteries left unso lved by studies of later seventeenth-century treatises and dictionaries. Of particular use was the rigging in ve ntory for Henry Grace a Dieu. Originally built in 15 14, she underwent a substantial rebuilding in 1545 and the inventory was validated as of that time. Some of the major differences between Sea Lion's ri gging and that of other reproductions are the result o f Cowan's refusal to rely solely on the historical interpretations of others. An important instance of this is Sea Lion's sw ifter. These have often been portrayed by artists as being hooked to the channels to take the load with the shrouds, which is their proper place when they are ' C lenchbolts are much like rivets , with the head and plain end made of metal rings slipped over the ends of a metal rod , after which the ends are widened by hammerin g to ho ld the rings in place. The head is made up in advance , the plain end is tapered sli ghtly to facilitate driv in g through wood, th e bo lt is driven, the plain end is fitted with a ring and then ham mered to w ide n over the ring and secure the bolt . ' Whipstaff: a vertica l wooden rod attached to the till er so that a ship can be steered from a deck above the one on whi ch the tiller is located .