The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [300]
But equally interesting, Fanny soon discovered, was the subtle change in Mr Martell. She had seen him as a proud aristocrat, a man of education and – she might as well admit it – a charming companion and no doubt lover. But as he went round with old Mr Adams she saw something else. His tall frame stooped forward just a little to catch everything the shipbuilder said; he asked sharp questions, to which the older man was soon answering with obvious respect. His handsome, saturnine face had grown concentrated and hard. This was the face of the powerful landowner, the Norman knight who knew his business and expected to be obeyed. To her surprise, she felt a little shudder pass through her body as she watched him. She had not realized he possessed such power.
The building of a great sea-going vessel, as the eighteenth century drew towards its close, was a remarkable business. Like so much industry at that time it was still a rural affair, small in scale and done by hand. Yet the little shipyard at the Forest’s edge was highly productive: as well as numerous merchant vessels, more than a tenth of all the new naval warships built had come from the Beaulieu River yard.
Taking them first to a large barn-like wooden building just above the slipways and beside the blacksmith’s, Mr Adams showed them a large, long space where a series of line patterns had been marked out on the floor. ‘This we call the mould loft,’ he explained. ‘We lay out the designs to scale on this floor; then we make wooden moulds so that we can check the shape of every inch of the ship as we build it.’
Then he walked them up to the huge sawpit. Two men were busily at work on a section of tree trunk, which they were sawing with a huge saw, the man holding the upper end standing up on the trunk, the man with the other end down in the pit.
‘The fellow on top is the master. He guides the saw,’ Mr Adams told them. ‘The man below is his junior. He has the harder work for he pulls the saw.’
‘Why is the man in the pit wearing such a big hat?’ asked Louisa.
‘Watch and you will see,’ answered Mr Adams with a wry look. And as the great saw swept downwards, the reason was all too clear as a cascade of sawdust fell down on the poor man’s head.
Inspired, it seemed, by the stern, practical mind of the aristocrat at his side, Mr Adams was becoming quite affable. He took them by several spots where individual men were at work on particular projects. One was shaping a huge rudder with a gouge and mallet; another was making holes in a timber post with an instrument like a huge two-handed corkscrew.
‘He makes a hole with the augur,’ the shipbuilder explained, ‘and then it will be fastened with one of these.’ He picked up a great wooden spike as long as his arm. ‘This is a wooden nail. We make them here. We always use the same wood for the nail as the timber it is to fasten, otherwise it will work loose and the ship will rot. Some of them are even bigger.’
‘Don’t you use any iron nails in the ship?’ asked Edward.
‘Yes, we do.’ A thought seemed to strike the old man.
‘You passed by the rope works up at Beaulieu, I believe? Well, the monks over at Sowley built a great fish pond in times past. And now it is used by an iron works. That’s where our nails come from.’ He smiled. ‘So even a monastery’ – he clearly meant, ‘even something so useless and popish as a monastery – may be changed, with time, to serve a useful purpose.’ And, clearly delighted with this reflection, he led them down towards the river.
There were three vessels of different sizes and stages of completion in the slipways.
Martell looked at them appraisingly. ‘I assume you try to build a smaller vessel alongside a larger, for reasons of economy,’ he remarked.
‘Precisely, Sir. You have it,’ Mr Adams responded. ‘The larger ship’, he explained to the others, ‘uses the larger timbers and the lesser ship the smaller, all from the same tree. Even so,’