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16th July 2017, 04:54 PM
#1
The making of sailing ship's masts
I came across the following in one of my magazines and I think it may be of interest:
"...My great-grandfather Volicheimer says all of a sudden, "I was a sawyer in the years before the steamships, when everything was by sail.* Back then, all of Europe needed masts for their navies.* But most of the countries had cut down all their big trees.* England didn't have a tall tree worth its wood on the whole island.* So the masts for the British and Spanish navies, the Portuguese too, would all come from Prussia, from the woods where I grew up.* Some of the trees would take a crew of five men three days to bring down.* First the wedges would go in, like needles."* he said, "in the hide of an elephant.* The biggest trunks could swallow a hundred wedges. before they'd creak.* Great-grandfather said he loved to imagine the big trees sledding down behind teams of horses across Europe, across rivers, across the sea to Britain, where they'd be stripped and treated and raised up against the masts, where they'd see decades of battle, giving second life, sailing the great oceans, until they'd fall and die their second death."
"All the Light We Cannot see."
—Anthony Doerr—* (Pulitzer Prize 2014)
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