Tradesman
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
This story is particularly appropriate for Labor Day.
A couple of years ago, I did a research project focusing on the counties where my ancestors lived since settling in the American colonies before the American Revolution. I had ancestors in 11 of the 13 colonies before the revolution; by 1850, they were all living west of the Appalachian Mountains. This means they lived in lots of counties – enough that I could call my project 52 Counties in 52 Weeks and meet that goal. The resulting book was 569 pages long, and I consult it all the time as I’m looking at different aspects of my family history.
In searching through this book, I came up with three ship’s carpenters in my family history – two of them in Newport, Rhode Island, and one in Scituate, Massachusetts. A ship’s carpenter would be an important figure in these seaport communities.
I had a good idea of what the words “ship” and “carpenter” mean, but I wasn’t sure what a “ship’s carpenter” would be responsible for. Here’s some information I found online:
The main job of the ship’s Carpenter was to care for the hull of the ship. Even in peaceful times, the hull of a wooden ship was under constant attack from barnacles, rot, and a nasty sort of burrowing clam known as a ship-worm. Ships also took damage from running over coral or rock formations.
Masts sometimes broke under the strain of wind pressure, or failed because of tropical rot. Accidents damaged the decks, stairs, railing and furnishings of the ship.
In a perfect world, the ship would carry a spare for every useful item on board. But in the real world such a wide variety of equipment would eat into valuable cargo space. So ships did the next best thing – they carried a wide supply of unworked wood, and one or more skilled Carpenters to turn it into whatever was needed.
Carpentry equipment during the Golden Age was tried and true. Many of the designs of tools and equipment went back to the middle ages. It was primitive, but all worked, and with it a trained man could make anything from a deck to a mast to a new arm for the ship’s figurehead.
The first tool of an 18th century Carpenter was his work bench. This was a sturdy block of wood, about six feet long and about 18 inches wide. It had 4 strong legs on each end, making it unlikely to tilt of wobble. But unlike modern work-benches, it was chair-height instead of table-height. The reason was simple. The screw vise that we use today to steady a piece of wood we ae working on was not yet a common tool.
To keep a piece of wood steady, the carpenter placed it on the bench and then simply sat on it. This worked quite well for most applications. The Carpenter would sit, and then saw, drill, or chisel the wood to the desired shape.
Drills existed, but not in a form we would easily recognize. For small applications, the Carpenter might use a bow drill. The drill head was set on the end of a long shaft. The shaft was run through a loop in the string of a bow, and as the bow was moved back and forth, the bit would turn.
For larger applications, one might use a Brace and Bit. This was a primitive sort of crank (the brace) with a removable drill bit. The Carpenter placed the bit where he wanted to drill, then turned the crank by hand. Though slow, this was a perfectly adequate way to drill wood. My own father owned a brace-and-bit set, which he used during the 1930’s and 40’s at job sites where no electricity was available.
An 18the century hammer and saw look very much like the modern equivalent, but both were designed so they could be repaired – the saw by replacing its blade, the hammer by replacing its wooden handle. Back in the day, you didn’t throw away a whole tool just because part of it was broken. Chisels were nearly exactly the same as those today.
Few modern-day Carpenters own an adze, but for the 18th century wood worker it was essential. This tool looks something like an ax, but the blade is horizontal rather than vertical. The adze can be used to cut grooves in wood, or to smooth a beam for use, or even to cut planks from a felled tree. It can take the place of an ax, and was used as a plane, the modern plane not having been invented yet.
With these simple tools, a good Carpenter could make nearly anything, using only the roughest pf materials. But his most important work lay in simply keeping the ship afloat.
All wooden boats leak to some extent. Water will come right through wood, given enough time. Furthermore, the normal flexing and moving of a ship at sea loosens all the ship’s joints over time. Water comes in at the seams. Day by day, the carpenter maintained these joints. Often this meant driving fibers such as frayed rope between boards that had too much space between them. The fibers would then swell and block the gaps. The Carpenter would finish it off with a coating of tar, to complete the waterproof seal.
Small holes were plugged by driving in a wooden wedge or cone. Once the device was in place, it swelled from exposure to water, and completed the seal. Excess wood could be cut away. Making these wedges and cones was also work for the Carpenter and his apprentices.
Larger leaks or damage from cannon fire could be “shored up” by placing a slab of wood against the hole on the inside and bracing it with a log or beam placed at a 45-degree angle and wedged between the plug and the deck blow. This was difficult, dangerous work. Even as the Carpenter and his mates worked, the water rose around them, and the sea fought them every inch of the way.
Cracked masts would be splinted, in much the same way a broken bone is splinted. This might involve a cooperative effort by the Carpenter and Bosun, as the proper pieces of wood needed to be selected and shaped, then hauled into place and bound to the mast with ropes.
If a whole mast was carried away, something needed to be rigged up to replace it, if the ship was to move at all. . . . Many ships have limped back into port with makeshift masts constructed out of anything available. The point was to get to shore before the ship sank, or ran out of food or water.
Because he was so vital, a merchant ship’s Carpenter commanded a high rate of pay, and was usually treated with respect by his captain. Because of this, [ship] captains faced a shortage of skilled carpenters. . . .
http://thepirateempire.blogspot.com/2016/12/pirate-carpenter.html
My 9th great-grandfather Thomas Hazard (1610-1680?) was a ship’s carpenter in Newport, Rhode Island from the 1630s through 1670s. He migrated to Rhode Island in 1638 with Anne Hutchinson’s party and was a signer of the 1639 Loyalty Compact in Portsmouth. He was made a freeman of the new colony in 1639 and was counted among the residents of Aquidneck in 1640. In 1655, he was included in the Portsmouth list of freemen. He had married Martha Potter in England in 1607 and came to Rhode Island with her and their children. I am descended from two of their children: Elizabeth and Hannah. Elizabeth’s 2nd great-grandson William Wilcox married Hannah’s 3rd great-granddaughter Elizabeth Baker in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1753. By 1790, they had relocated to Vermont.
Another of my 9th great-grandfathers, John Tripp (1610-1678), was also a ship’s carpenter, also in Newport, Rhode Island. John was from a humble background; at age 14, he was apprenticed to a ship’s carpenter in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, where he served for over seven years. A few years later, in 1634, he apprenticed himself to Frances East, another carpenter, who moved to Boston and sold John’s apprenticeship to another Boston resident. When Ann Hutchinson and other dissenters moved to Rhode Island in 1638, his indenture was sold once again, this time to Randall Holden of Portsmouth. John soon bought out the rest of his contract.
John was not among the elites who signed the Portsmouth Contract in 1638. He was admitted to Portsmouth as an inhabitant (but not a freeman) in 1638. This meant he could own land, but he couldn’t vote or hold office. As a skilled ship’s carpenter, John was likely in great demand in the fledgling seaport of Portsmouth. He had established himself well enough that he was a signer of the 1639 Compact of Loyalty, which affirmed the independence of Portsmouth from the newly formed town of Newport, on the southern end of Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay. John married Mary Paine in Portsmouth in 1639, and they had 10 children, including my 8th great-grandfather James Tripp.
It wasn’t until I wrote this blog post that I realized that these two different ancestors knew one another and worked together in colonial Rhode Island.
My final ship’s carpenter is my 10th great-grandfather, Samuel House (1610-1661). Samuel was closely associated with Rev. John Lothrop, the founder of Scituate; Samuel’s sister, Hannah House, was Lothrop’s wife. Lothrop was a dissenting minister in London, where he ran afoul of the clergy establishment there. He was imprisoned for his beliefs and activities, and Hannah died while he was imprisoned. When he was released, his freedom was contingent on his leaving England to go to the colonies. It’s important to the story of my ancestors in Scituate that Samuel House was also imprisoned, and came to Scituate with Lothrop in 1634.
These three ship’s carpenters’ lines came together when my paternal great-grandparents Warner Lismond Arnold and Angelina Wilcox married in 1878. Angelina was the great-granddaughter of Nathan Wilcox (and thus descended from both Thomas Hazard and John Tripp) and Warner was the 7th great-grandson of Samuel House. Warner and Lina married in Hancock County, Illinois, where each of their family lines had settled by 1875. Warner’s ancestors had moved from Massachusetts to Maine and then to Ohio before settling in Hancock County. Lina’s ancestors had moved from Rhode Island to Vermont, New York, and Indiana before settling in Hancock County.