American History In Video: Godspeed to Jamestown
Godspeed to Jamestown from The History Channel (A&E Television Networks, 2006) 44:48.
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Steve Thomas A ship called the Godspeed. In 1607 , she was one of three sturdy vessels making the perilous journey across the vast Atlantic. It was a voyage that changed the world. Fifty-two men and boys sailed on the Godspeed from London to Virginia . There, they helped found the Jamestown colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America . Soon after, the Godspeed disappeared from the pages of history.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas Four hundred years later, a full-sized replica is being recreated from scratch, and we'll be there to see it happen.
JOHN ENGLAND Doing good.
Steve Thomas From the first days of construction to her first day at sea.
Steve Thomas Set the spritsail. Hi, I'm Steve Thomas . Come aboard as we set sail Godspeed to Jamestown .
EXPLORATION INVESTIGATION RESTORATION SAVE OUR HISTORY GODSPEED TO JAMESTOWN THE HISTORY CHANNEL
Steve Thomas On a spring day at Rockport, Maine , a butterfly is about to emerge from its cocoon. After 14 months of indoor construction, the replica ship, Godspeed, is ready to come outside.
John England It's always a big moment when the boat first comes out of the shop and you can actually stand back and see what it really looks like.
Steve Thomas The Godspeed is about to commence her first journey, a land voyage through the town of Rockport to the place where she'll be launched.
Tom Brownell BROWNELL BOAT TRANSPORTING
Tom Brownell The setup is gonna be that we're gonna have three tractors pulling this load up the hill. Each tractor has an automatic transmission, so they, they share the load.
Steve Thomas It's a ticklish job. The trailer and ship together weigh nearly 100 tons.
Tom Brownell What we do is very, very precisely apply enormous force very, very gently.
John England ROCKPORT MARINE PROJECT FOREMAN
John England The most interesting part of getting ready for the launch is getting these boats up over the hill and through town to the launch ramp and it's very anachronistic to be standing up at the corner of a coffee shop and watching a 16th-century vessel come right through the middle of town.
Steve Thomas The original Godspeed played an important yet largely overlooked role in American history. Now, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation has commissioned the building of a new replica coinciding with the 400th anniversary of her voyage. After the masts are put in and the final construction completed, the Godspeed will be launched into the cold Maine waters to commence her sea trials.
Steve Thomas But what did it take to get to today? How do you build a replica of a 400-year-old vessel without plans, without illustrations, and with the flimsiest of descriptions? Well, you start with some history detective work.
Steve Thomas The mighty Thames River in London . Four hundered years ago, it would have been thick with sailing ships, trading vessels, privateers, warships, headed out to every point on the compass.
Peter J. Wrike COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG
Peter J. Wrike It would have been a beautiful picture with all the, the white and the off shades of white and the patched sails.
Steve Thomas It was from here in December of 1606 that the Godspeed, the Susan Constant and the Discovery embarked on their historic four-and-a-half-month journey to the New World. Three ships carrying 140 men and boys whose destiny it was to found the colony of Jamestown .
Peter J. Wrike They would have been no more significant amongst the other ships than the bulk of the vessels that were there.
Steve Thomas The Jamestown- Yorktown Foundation hired maritime historian Peter Wrike to do research on the Godspeed in order to ensure that the replica would be as accurate as possible. He started by sifting through London port records.
Peter J. Wrike My first challenge was to brush up and polish Latin. The records are in Latin. The records are, are fragmented. Some were saved. Some were not. Some were destroyed.
Steve Thomas Making the search even harder is the fact that the Godspeed in its day was nothing special, just another small cargo ship. These were often used for exploration because they were expendable and their shallower drafts let them go places that a big ship couldn't.
Peter J. Wrike And those ships, there are hundreds of them out there. They're the pickup trucks of the day. In London , they're ubiquitous.
Steve Thomas Specific information on the Godspeed proved elusive.
Eric Speth JAMESTOWN-YORKTOWN FOUNDATION
Eric Speth In our final research analysis, the only hard information we have is that Godspeed is a 40-ton small merchant vessel.
Steve Thomas But that didn't end the research. Wrike scoured the archives for images and descriptions of similar ships so they could get every detail correct.
Peter J. Wrike There were over 400 different maps and paintings that I used in various repositories throughout the Western world to determine what these vessels look like. What lines are depicted, although it's an artist depiction, what are the common features of these things, what deck equipment is revealed by this.
Steve Thomas Drawings can take you only so far, but Peter Wrike's research turned up an even better way to get inside the mind of a 17th century shipwright. The University of Cambridge in England is one of the oldest in the world. Perhaps its most famous graduate is Sir Isaac Newton . Deep in the bowels of its library is a manuscript that Newton painstakingly copied out in his own hand. It's a copy of an even earlier document dating back to around 1600 , a treatise on shipbuilding. It contains formulas that one 17th-century shipbuilder used to rough out the hull shapes of his vessels. It proved invaluable in building the Godspeed.
Eric Speth Our naval architects, Tri-Coastal Marine, used the information to ensure that the hull design of Godspeed reflects very accurately an early 17th-century small merchant ship.
Steve Thomas The original Godspeed was most likely built here in London's docklands. Four hundred years ago, we would have seen at least a dozen ships under construction on this spot. The new Godspeed is being built 3000 miles away in a place that also claims a centuries-old tradition of shipbuilding.
Steve Thomas Welcome to Rockport, Maine . On a coast that's filled with pretty harbors, this one is one of the prettiest. During the 1800s , some of the largest wooden ships in the world were crafted and launched in Maine . That business died off in the early years of the 20th century. Within the last couple of decades, wooden boat building has made a comeback here. Today, skilled craftsman can build you anything from a sleek state-of-the-art racing machine to a copy of a classic schooner. And it's here at Rockport Marine that a replica of the ship that brought settlers to Jamestown in 1607 is taking shape. Hey, John . Good to see you.
John England Yeah, you too.
[sil.]
John England Welcome to Rockport .
Steve Thomas Thank you. Nice to be here.
John England Great.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas This is great, John .
John England Welcome to Godspeed, Steve . As you can see, we're in the initial phases of construction here. We've got keel laid, sternpost up, transom framing all ready to go. This kind of construction you start at the bottom and work your way up, and the first piece of this case is a lead shoe, 14,000 pounds of lead.
Steve Thomas That's the gray piece that we see here. So lead was not part of the original equipment.
John England It was not. Originally, the stability of the boat would have been gained from ballast stones or from cargo. But in a case like this with a display vessel, we need the lead ballast shoe on the outside for stability. On the top of that is a wood keel that's 47 feet long.
Steve Thomas And then the frames on top of the keel. And what I noticed about the frames is that each one is unique. It's got a unique outline shape. But then the inside and the outside face also has a bevel and that bevel changes as the frame runs up. These are not trivial pieces of carpentry work.
John England They aren't, but they're the key to developing the shape of the boat. The master builder 400 years ago was the one who actually designed the boat and he had a sense of the shapes that he wanted to create. There were no plans, only what was in the master builder's head.
Steve Thomas That's obviously different on today's Godspeed. The crew is working with a full set of blueprints.
John England We take the designer's lines and then have to make a pattern of each piece that we're gonna cut the shape to develop that overall shape.
Steve Thomas The Godspeed is a double sawn frame vessel. Its skeleton consists of 31 frames, each two layers of wood thick. A single frame is constructed from a dozen curved pieces called futtocks. On the Godspeed, these are made from Angelique, a tropical hardwood.
Steve Thomas The woodpile.
John England The woodpile. This is our Angelique framing stock. And we'll be usin' a total of about 30,000 board feet of Angelique in the boat, which is roughly the same as a 2 by 6, six miles long.
Steve Thomas Wow.
Steve Thomas The original Godspeed would have been built from English oak. The replica is being made from tropical hardwoods from Surinam that will last longer in the warm waters of Virginia .
John England So now, all I'm gonna do is roughly mark a line around the pattern and a line to chainsaw it off.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas Power tools are a lot easier than doing by hand.
John England You're exactly right, yeah. Four hundred years ago, I don't know how they did it.
Steve Thomas So I'm starting to get boat building. There's a lot of lifting heavy stuff.
John England Enjoying the romance, are you?
Steve Thomas After making rough cuts with the chainsaw, each futtock is run through the planer.
John England Steve , now that we've got all the futtock stock planed to thickness, it's time to just mark them from our patterns so that we can cut the final shape.
STEVE THOMAS H5.
JOHN ENGLAND Yep.
STEVE THOMAS Waterline 10.
JOHN ENGLAND Yep.
STEVE THOMAS Just right up on the table.
JOHN ENGLAND Right up on the table.
STEVE THOMAS Wow. This is one beautiful piece of machinery.
John England It's quite something. That's a tilting-arbor band saw or a ship saw made specifically for doing just what we're doing right now, sawing the bevels on a double sawn frame vessel.
Steve Thomas So tilting arbor, what does that mean?
John England Let me show you. When you're sawing heavy stock, you don't wanna be able to change the angle of the table 'cause that's too hard to do so you change the angle of the saw.
Steve Thomas Okay.
John England All right, Steve . What I want you to do is just crank the bevels with this wheel from zero to one degrees out on this cage.
Steve Thomas All right.
John England And then, we'll go back to zero again.
Steve Thomas Zero to one to zero.
John England Zero.
Steve Thomas I think I can handle that one.
John England Okay. We'll see. Clear, Steve ?
Steve Thomas I'm clear.
John England One degree.
Steve Thomas One degree.
John England Down to three quarter.
Steve Thomas Three quarter.
John England A half.
Steve Thomas Half, quarter.
John England Head back up. Half.
Steve Thomas Half.
John England Three quarter.
Steve Thomas Three quarter.
John England One (crosstalk).
Steve Thomas One. All right. That's one futtock down.
John England One futtock down and 11 more to go for that frame. This is called the framing stage. It's where we assemble all the frames and it sits on the top of the keel. It's been done this way for hundreds of years in double sawn frame vessels.
Steve Thomas So you can put the frame together here and just tip it right up?
John England Exactly.
Steve Thomas Set it on the keel.
John England Slide it along the keel. Swing it up into place.
Steve Thomas This one's ready to go on.
John England Then you set it right into place.
[sil.]
John England That's it.
Steve Thomas The futtocks are held together just the way they would have been 400 years ago, with wooden nails called trunnels, short for tree nails.
Steve Thomas So the frame is assembled.
John England Frame's all assembled and the next step to do is hook on with these two overhead cranes and we'll move the frame right down onto the keel.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas With the framing done, the next step of construction on the Godspeed involves something you might not expect, a concrete truck.
SAVE OUR HISTORY GODSPEED TO JAMESTOWN
Steve Thomas With the frame of the Godspeed complete, the next phase of construction involves something a little out of the ordinary. A concrete truck shows up and a large hose is snaked into the ship. The original Godspeed was designed to hold 40 tons of cargo. Since this ship won't carry cargo, it needs weight for balance. The lead under the keel isn't enough, so the bilges are being lined with six tons of lead weights and filled with another six tons of concrete.
[sil.]
You're gonna sink it if you keep on going.
Steve Thomas Once the concrete is done, the planking can begin in earnest.
Steve Thomas To the uninitiated eye, putting planks on a boat looks as easy as putting clapboards on the side of a house.
John England And it isn't really that easy, Steve . It's more like planking up an apple or an orange. Each plank has got to be both tapered and curved to fit the plank below it.
Steve Thomas So how do you develop that shape?
John England What we do is we put up against the frames here what we call a spiling batten. You go along with a little homemade jig and lay it up on the spiling batten and then we just mark it and that defines both direction and distance from that edge.
Steve Thomas You mark each frame?
John England Each frame.
JOHN ENGLAND Rockport Marine Project Foreman
John England Spiling is that magical process that gives the boat builder a reputation of being some sort of genius, which we're not. Spiling is nothing but a method of scribing, which is a way you fit any two pieces of anything together. You can scribe one against the shape of the other. You're trying to use exactly the shape that you've spiled off the boat. So if there's a little hump or bump in it, you want that hump or bump in it.
Steve Thomas Well, you can really see the curve. So despite all the measuring, the final adjustment is by eye.
John England It's all by eye. The eye is the final arbiter in most all boat building. If it looks good, it is good.
Steve Thomas I can't get over how much shape there is in this plank.
John England There's a lot of shape, but this will look exactly right on the boat. All right. Time to put it in the steam box and take the fight out of it.
Steve Thomas The fight out of it?
John England Come on. I'll show you. In order to wrap the plank around the sharp curve at the front of the boat, we steam it to soften it up.
Steve Thomas In this?
John England In this. Two pieces of culvert, that's all it is. Galvanized culvert. Steam boxes don't have to be pretty, they just have to work. And this a boiler that we made here where we can keep the water in it up to the right level, fired by propane torch.
Steve Thomas How long do you have to steam them to get them soft enough to bend?
John England The old boat builder's rule of thumb: about an hour per inch of thickness. We're two inches, so two hours.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas The shipwrights on the original Godspeed would have done things just a little differently.
Eric Speth In the 17th century, shipwrights would take a timber that needed to be bent around the shape of the hull and put it next to a fire to heat the wood up and allow it to be bent more easily. The steam vent technology that we're using today in construction of Godspeed is really a 19th-century innovation.
John England What's happening is the plank's coming out of the steam box, being passed along hand-to-hand down the side of the boat to get it into place. All right. Now, we'll just hold it up there and let them do their thing. Thank you. Got it?
Yup.
Yeah.
John England And now, we're wrapping it into place 'coz they've got the hood end fastened so we wrap the bank end into to place and just work our way down, clamping it to the frame. You like it?
Yep.
John England Cool.
Steve Thomas How long does it take before the board stiffens up again?
John England Probably about 15 minutes, but we'll have it on in less than five.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
John England It is a neat moment and everybody has to work fast and everybody knows what to do. We've done it enough now that everybody kind of has a position to get in and nobody has to say anything. They just do it.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas How was that, John ?
John England That's not too bad. I expect we could train you if given enough time.
Steve Thomas Well, this is one plank, and it's taking about half a day.
John England There's a lot of steps in the process, but a good man can get out two of these a day, so you're kind of behind. This is the first one we've done. You better get to work.
Steve Thomas Okay.
Steve Thomas Planking the ship takes months. After the part below the waterline is done, a plastic skirt is put around it and a humidifier placed inside to keep the wood from drying out.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas When the planking is done, the caulking begins. Gino Scalzo has been caulking traditional boats for 30 years and will spend eight weeks doing the entire job by hand. He does it almost exactly the same way they did 400 years ago.
Gino Scalzo What we're doing here is we're caulking the vessel to provide water-tight integrity as well as structural integrity. The first layer that goes into the seam is cotton.
Steve Thomas So you don't want too much material in the seams nor too little.
GINO SCALZO Caulker
Gino Scalzo That's why they pay me. That's what I'm doing here.
Steve Thomas Otherwise, I could be a caulker but it wouldn't be the right job.
Gino Scalzo That's right.
Steve Thomas The cotton will be followed by a layer of oakum, a mixture of hemp fibers and pine tar.
Steve Thomas Why cotton on the bottom and oakum on top of the seam?
Gino Scalzo Cotton is nice and soft, caulks real well into the bottom of the seam and the oakum is used to fill up, to give you a little more bulk, plus it has a little more water-tight integrity than the cotton does. This particular iron is called the threading iron. This is used in the first part of the process of caulking. It's a small iron. It's narrow enough to get into most all caulking seams. The next part of the process is to set that material to its proper depth. And to do that, I use what is known as a making or a setting iron. It's slightly thicker at its end. It's sometimes grooved often to help gather the material to the center of the seam.
Steve Thomas And you just wail away. How old is this?
Gino Scalzo Oh, probably at least a hundred years. It's made out of, of wood they call Black Mesquite, which was used for its density and hardness.
Steve Thomas Why the groove in it?
Gino Scalzo The groove in the mallet helps it chirp. All good caulking mallets have a good slot that helps give the mallet its distinctive ring or chirp.
Steve Thomas The sound the chirp makes tells him if he has set the oakum to the proper depth.
Gino Scalzo This is the test at this point here. It's to make that material down hard and hear that chirp and hear everything become solid together.
Steve Thomas As Gino finishes up the caulking, the biggest single piece of the Godspeed is about to finish a 4,000-mile journey.
Steve Thomas Construction on the Godspeed has been underway for nearly 10 months.
SAVE OUR HISTORY GODSPEED TO JAMESTOWN
Steve Thomas Laying the keel, standing the frames on top of it and wrapping the planking around those frames has created the lovely form we're sitting in now. But the Godspeed is more than just a wooden hall. It's a complex hybrid of 17th and 21st century technologies requiring hundreds of handcrafted custom components. From the towering main-mast to the tiny block in my hand.
Steve Thomas The masts and yardarms are being crafted in Bar Harbor, Maine . The wood is Douglas-fir trucked in from Western Canada . It's a long grained wood that's both strong and flexible without being too heavy. The biggest timber, for the main-mast, is 48 feet long and weighs more than a ton. It has to be carefully shaped into a tapered mast.
FRED ASPLEN Carpenter
Fred Asplen It's just satisfying, taking a giant piece of wood and turning it into something and then envisioning that, yeah, that's gonna be the fore-mast or this is gonna be the main-mast to that awesome ship. It's not just any ship, it's a replica of the ship that brought some of our early settlers over.
[sil.]
Fred Asplen I really get into the history and even holding the adz. That adz is probably a hundred and some years old and you're working away using this tool, and you try to envision what the original person, you know? That's kinda cool.
Steve Thomas The sails on the Godspeed are being made by a man generally acknowledged as the world's foremost sail maker and rigger for traditional vessels. Nat Wilson did the sails for the Constitution, the Mayflower, and dozens of other historic ships.
Steve Thomas Nat , you've been building traditional sails for traditional sailing craft for over 30 years and you're building the sails for the Godspeed.
NAT WILSON Nathaniel Wilson Sailmakers
Nat Wilson Yes, Steve . This is the first of six sails that we're building for Godspeed.
Steve Thomas Which one is it?
Nat Wilson This is the foresail.
Steve Thomas Orient me on the sail. It just looks like a big square canvas to me.
Nat Wilson Well, Steve , over here, we have the head edge. This is the top of the sail. And on either end is an earring.
Steve Thomas So they named them after different parts of their body?
Nat Wilson That's right. The sailors were generally illiterate and it was an easy way to describe the corner of the sail.
Steve Thomas And the sailcloth itself is, uh, I guess in the Godspeed, they would have been linen.
Nat Wilson With linen, yes. That's correct. Today, it's a, it's a custom cloth called Oceanis.
Steve Thomas You actually helped to develop Oceanis.
Nat Wilson Yes, I did.
Steve Thomas Everywhere I look, I see a tremendous amount of handwork.
Nat Wilson The structure, Steve , is in the roping around the edge which is called boat rope. And we're constructing this sail the same way they would have made in 1600 .
Steve Thomas I feel like I've stepped back a couple of centuries as I look at your bench and toolkit.
Nat Wilson Well, you have, Steve , because the tools are very basic. This is my palm which I use for actually pushing the needle through the cloth and sewing the boat rope to the sail. Assortment of needles different sizes for different size threads.
Steve Thomas And then what are these?
Nat Wilson Those are fids. There's three or four different sizes there for splicing rope.
Steve Thomas What about this?
Nat Wilson That's a heaver.
Steve Thomas A heaver?
Nat Wilson A heaver for, it's used for hauling the stitching extra tight. This belonged to a local sailmaker in East Boothbay who drowned from the river here in 1853 .
Steve Thomas So this really is.
Nat Wilson It's very old.
Steve Thomas Over a century old. Old tools, old techniques.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas Not too much tension?
Nat Wilson No, you just want enough tension to get the stitch heaved nicely down into the, into the lay of the rope.
Steve Thomas Looks like you're just about there.
Nat Wilson Ah, one final backstitch and then I'm ready for the next step.
Steve Thomas The next step is to worm, parcel, and serve the corner or clew of the sail.
Nat Wilson It's a process for preparing rope to preserve it really, in areas where it's wo, can get worn. And this is the worming, which is ah, you're filling the strands of the rope ah, with a, with ah, yarn.
Steve Thomas And the reason for that?
Nat Wilson Is to just fill this cavity to make it smooth.
Steve Thomas Then comes the parceling.
Steve Thomas That looks like standard friction tape.
Nat Wilson That's what it is, Steve .
Steve Thomas What did they used to use in the old days?
Nat Wilson Usually, they would use tarred sailcloth, anything that was, maybe an old sail.
Steve Thomas And finally, the serving, wrapping twine or Marlin around the rope as tightly as possible.
Nat Wilson This is a serving board.
Steve Thomas Serving board.
Nat Wilson Serving board. And this is a tool that's used to efficiently wrap the Marlin around the rope.
Steve Thomas Sail-making was a labor-intensive activity.
Nat Wilson All these practices were developed over hundreds of years even in the early days in this country. To be a sailmaker was a seven-year apprentice. They were the aristocrats of the waterfront.
Steve Thomas Really?
Nat Wilson And sailmakers would generally tend to be pretty wealthy men in the days of commercial sail because they would take payment for the sails partly in cash and partly in shares on a vessel. So if a vessel was successful and made money on a trip, they got a return on every voyage.
Steve Thomas Uh-huh. So that locks the end of the Marlin.
Nat Wilson That locks the end. I'm using an acrylic house stain.
Steve Thomas I suppose in the old days, they woulda used tar for this.
Nat Wilson Yeah. They would use a mixture of tar and oil to protect the, the rope. Next, I go to the rigging device to form the loop.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas That's it?
Nat Wilson That's it, Steve .
Steve Thomas It's just one corner of one sail and it's all by hand.
Nat Wilson It's a lot of work involved in making these sails, but we're all very proud of the work that we do.
Steve Thomas And it shows.
Nat Wilson Thank you.
Steve Thomas There are countless other jobs that need to be done. Carving the hundreds of blocks and deadeyes that will fasten the ropes. Constructing the windlass that will allow the crew to haul up the anchor. Hand stitching dozens of tiny grommets into each sail.
John England Boats were complex 400 years ago and they're even more complex now. You've got to be part architect, part woodworker, part mechanic, part electrician, part plumber, part monkey, and 2/3 crazy to be able to do this.
Steve Thomas As week after week turns to month after month, the Godspeed approaches completion. Soon will come the dramatic moment when she's pulled out of the shed and everything comes together. After 14 months of construction, the Godspeed emerges from the boat shed.
GODSPEED TO JAMESTOWN
Steve Thomas She's sporting a brand-new paint job, modeled on pictures and descriptions of 17th-century vessels. The ship is trucked through the town of Rockport to her launch site. Once upon a time, the masts were hoisted up using sheer muscle power alone. Now, a crane does the heavy lifting.
[sil.]
John England We're gonna put the coin under the main mast. It's a tradition. I don't know where it came from. But then you always do it.
Steve Thomas The tradition, a token of good luck, actually dates back at least to Roman times and possibly to the Phoenicians before them.
John England We've got one for each mast, got a Maine quarter, a Virginia quarter, and the silver dollar for the main.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas This process is known as "stepping the mast" because the base of the mast is fitted into a step that anchors it to the ship's keel.
John England Three and a half feet to go, so. Two and a half.
Good.
John England The coin is going in. There's one small drop for men and one giant leap backwards 400 years for mankind. Ha ha ha ha.
John England That's it, come straight down. Okay on that side?
Doing good.
John England Doing good.
Four-three-two.
John England Stop.
Stop.
John England Can you take just a whisker of weight off?
(inaudible )
John England It's almost.
Oh, stop! Stop!.
John England Ah, ha ha ha.
Yeah.
It did come down?
John England Come down hard.
Yeah. Down
John England Smooth.
Steve Thomas After the mast is stepped, chocks are driven in and lines attached to secure it firmly to the ship.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas The big day has finally come. After 450 days of construction, the Godspeed is about to be launched.
John England We need to figure out this line situation. Who's gonna be handling what line? You'll take one of them, and Carter , could you take the other one over there? Everybody having fun?
Oh yeah.
John England Everybody nervous? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Steve Thomas What can go wrong?
John England Nothing. We planned this perfectly. Nothing can go wrong.
Steve Thomas You better knock on wood.
John England We don't allow for it to go wrong. My daughter, Susan England , is gonna christen the boat.
Susan Thomas May this vessel bring fair winds and good fortune to all who sail on her. I christen thee Godspeed. Oh! I got it. Don't worry. Oh, my God.
John England Eric , where did you put that bottle?
For Susan .
Get 10 feet back from the wires please. We're gonna launch the boat.
[sil.]
John England We're always nervous going into a launch 'coz we don't know exactly how the boat's gonna float. We don't know whether it's gonna leak a little bit. We just like to worry about every little thing, ah, but it is a very exciting time 'coz you finally get to see the boat where it's supposed to be: in the water.
Susan England There (crosstalk)
John England There she goes.
Susan England She's floating.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas The launch is a success. The Godspeed is underway.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas But the voyage is a short one. She's headed for the other side of the inlet where the rigging will be done.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas One of the riggers is Jim Nelson , an award-winning maritime novelist taking a break between books.
Steve Thomas Jim , 400 years ago, you couldn't just turn a key, crank up a diesel, and get a ship to move through the water.
James L. Nelson AUTHOR AND RIGGER
James L. Nelson That's right, Steve . Back in the old days, it was all the wind and the sails. It was the wind that got you from one place to another. It was the wind that got you out of trouble, the sails, ah, you know, if you were caught on the lee shore, the only way to get off was to sail off. I think it's worth noting that a ship like the Godspeed was the most expensive, most advanced piece of equipment in the world at the time she was sailing.
Steve Thomas So this was high technology.
James L. Nelson This was very high technology. And you'll see when the ship is actually fully rigged, there'll be a great array of rigging. It will look like just a tangle to the layman. Each one of these square sails has about 16 individual lines that control it. So a sailor could go from ship to ship and very quickly learn the lines of the new ship 'coz they're all done the same way.
Steve Thomas So what are you working on now?
James L. Nelson Well, right now, we're setting up ah, the ratlines. These are essentially rope ladder. This will allow us to climb up aloft.
Steve Thomas Well, take me aloft and show me what you're doing.
James L. Nelson Are you afraid of heights?
Steve Thomas No.
James L. Nelson Okay.
Steve Thomas Maybe I will be. It's easy now that we're in harbor, but you can imagine trying to scamper up these things in the middle of a gale with a.
James L. Nelson Well, that's right. We wouldn't be climbing on both sides if we were out at sea. We just.
Steve Thomas No 'coz I guess the ship would be heeled over.
James L. Nelson Exactly. So we just climb on the windward side. The wind blows you into the shrouds instead of off them.
Steve Thomas So these rigs were entirely handmade.
James L. Nelson That's right. The entire rig is made out of rope. Big pieces of rope tied to smaller pieces of rope, tied with smaller piece of rope. There's no mechanical fastenings. The, the whole thing is literally lashed together.
Steve Thomas It was incredibly labor intensive to put a rig together.
James L. Nelson It's extremely labor intensive. If you figure all the work that went into this one little block, multiply it by the hundred and more blocks we've got on the ship, you see it takes a long time to do this sort of thing. Now traditionally the sailors thought that the riggers did a lousy job, so the first thing they'd do when they got on their way is start redoing everything that the riggers did 'cause, of course, all the sailors had the same skills that the riggers had.
Steve Thomas Right.
James L. Nelson 'Cause you had to repair all this stuff when you're at sea. Now, we're gonna take the ratline and seize it to the shroud. Now, I wanna make sure I haul it good and tight, so I'm gonna use my marlinspike. This is the one of those fancy knots which sailors use called a marlinspike hitch. Allows me, gives me a handle. I got to really, really pull on that.
Steve Thomas And of course, all your tools are tied up, so if you drop them, they won't to go through somebody's head.
James L. Nelson That's right, they take a dim view if you drop this on someone from aloft. So, we keep those tied on. This seems like it's just a minor little seizing here and there are hundreds of them on the ship, but of course someone's gonna stand on this. So if this breaks, it could very well mean that someone is gonna fall out of the rigging. And there is the ratline properly seized on and now, uhm, we've only got about 400 more of those to do.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas Work on the rigging will continue for the next two weeks. Then it will be time to take the Godspeed out to sea, pile on the sail and see what she can do.
[sil.]
Eric Speth Okay. Well, who wants to get to sailing? Let's go.
SAVE OUR HISTORY
Steve Thomas The Godspeed is ready for her sea trials.
GODSPEED TO JAMESTOWN
Eric Speth All right. We'll stand by dock lines.
Okay. We're clear.
Steve Thomas After years of planning and months of construction, it's time to find out how she actually sails. Eric Speth from the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation is the ship's captain.
Steve Thomas Well, Eric , we've got a spectacular day here in Maine . Your crew is aboard for the first time. We're clear of the harbor, still running on our engines, but I'm dying to set sail.
Eric Speth JAMESTOWN-YORKTOWN FOUNDATION
Eric Speth We're ready to set sail now. The wind is from behind us, so we'll go forward, loose the fore-course and set that first.
Eric Speth Lay aloft and loose sail.
Steve Thomas The sea trials are taking place on a chilly April day in the waters of Maine's Penobscot Bay . Twenty-four people are aboard, including a volunteer crew of 12 from Jamestown and members of the team that built the ship.
Eric Speth Set the fore-course!
Alright.
Steve Thomas The original Godspeed would have had twice as many aboard. Fifty-two passengers and crew, all under the command of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold who actually explored these waters in 1602 , five years before sailing to Jamestown .
Eric Speth Set the main-course!
Susan England Okay. Ready on the halyard? Easy on the topping lift. Okay.
[sil.]
Eric Speth Set the spritsail!
[sil.]
Eric Speth Ready now.
Steve Thomas So Eric , it's the first time you've had all the sails up at once. How is she doing?
Eric Speth We're really excited about this today, Steve . The ship's performing beautifully.
Steve Thomas How fast are we going right now?
Eric Speth By GPS, about four and a half knots. That's about the same speed they made on average in the 17th century from England to Jamestown . Wind is kinda light today, though. With more wind we can make easily six, seven, or eight knots.
Steve Thomas I've never sailed a square rigger. Is there any chance I could get a lesson?
Eric Speth I think it's time for you take the helm.
Homer Lanier Come take the tiller, Steve .
Steve Thomas All right. So, Homer , coach me through this here.
Homer Lanier Well, we're gonna be tacking in a few minutes, but for now, if you look aloft here at the main topsail, flag's flying just above the main topsail. You can use that as an indicator as to how close to the wind you're steering.
Steve Thomas So I can actually let her come up a little bit. (crosstalk)
Homer Lanier Looks like you can, yeah. You come up a little bit more and that will give you a little bit more speed.
Steve Thomas Now, if the wind was really hauling, how many guys will it take to control the tiller?
Homer Lanier We'll add people as we need to. It could take two or three. Looking at 17th century firsthand accounts of ships like this crossing the ocean, get caught up in storms. Sometimes, they could put six, seven, eight people on the helm to try and hold it.
Steve Thomas And this was before the invention of the steering wheel?
Homer Lanier About a century before the steering wheel will come along. The earliest reference, written reference we had to a ship's steering wheel is about 1698 . We know the first English patent for a ship's steering wheel is issued in the year 1704 , so about a hundred years after this ship .
Eric Speth Well, Steve , now you're ah, steering a square rigger. Would you like to tack a square rigger?
Steve Thomas Sure. I couldn't pass up that chance.
Eric Speth Okay. Crew, ready the boat. (crosstalk)
Eric Speth Ready sub sharp, port tack. Okay, we're ready to start the tack. Steve , you can shift the tiller over.
Steve Thomas All right.
Eric Speth Helm a-lee.
Steve Thomas Helms a-lee.
Eric Speth This will bring the, the bow of the ship up into the wind and you can see the bow's coming up into the wind. As soon as the bow's right up into the wind, we'll haul the main around, then the fore.
There we go.
Get ready to tack the ship.
Together now. Together now. Okay.
Eric Speth Very good.
[sil.]
Eric Speth At the helm, bring her up towards the wind.
All right.
Eric Speth Beam reach.
[sil.]
Eric Speth Looks good. She really does handle a helm nicely.
Steve Thomas She handles very nicely.
Eric Speth When you put the helm a-lee, she went right up into the wind.
Steve Thomas Yup, snapped right around. So Eric , we've got a gorgeous day and we're all lounging around on deck, but 400 years ago, it might have been a much different scene. After all, you had like 50 people aboard- (crosstalk)
Eric Speth Yeah.
Steve Thomas - That was before toothpaste or deodorant have been invented. So what, what was it like?
Eric Speth The conditions below would be very dark, cramped, cargo, livestock, passengers, ship moving about violently. We know that there was quite a bit of seasickness and the conditions below were vile.
Steve Thomas Must have been disgusting.
Eric Speth They, they were. So much so that the firsthand accounts also talked about what it took to clean these vessels up after they returned to port. They had to clean the entire inside with vinegar and sometimes they lit off trains of gunpowder just to have the smell of sulfur on the inside to mask the vile smells.
Steve Thomas Really? So what's the motivation to put yourself aboard one of these things for two or three months? They must have really wanted to get out of England .
Eric Speth Yeah. This was about a four and a half month voyage from England to Jamestown and they came here to start a, a new colony, a new world with new adventures for all.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas The colonists who came to Jamestown on the Godspeed, the Discovery and the Susan Constant spent four and a half months at sea sailing south to the Canary Islands across to the Caribbean and up the coast of Virginia . The colony of Jamestown was founded on May 14, 1607 . The crew of the new Godspeed uses the ship to explore and understand the experiences of those who dared to go first.
Eric Speth We sail on the same ocean that they did. We have the same challenges with the sea that they did, so as we're sailing Godspeed from one port to another, I'm constantly thinking about what they would have done, how they would have sailed the ship.
[sil.]
Steve Thomas And so 400 years later, the Godspeed sails again, after thousands of hours of painstaking labor that have brought this replica ship to life. And once again, she's headed to Jamestown where she'll be exhibited at the Jamestown settlement.
Steve Thomas There she'll serve as a floating monument to those intrepid souls who helped found a new nation four centuries ago when they set sail Godspeed to Jamestown . For the History Channel, I'm Steve Thomas and thanks for watching.
Host STEVE THOMAS Written, Directed And Produced by RICK BEYER Producer STEVE THOMAS Co-Producer JACQUELINE SHERIDAN Director of Photography DILLARD MORRISON TOM PAKULSKI Editor ERIC HANDLEY Composer MATT MARIANO 3-D Animation SPUTNIK 422 LTD. Sound DARRYL SZUCHRA ROB SYLVAIN KEN FRASER Sound Mix RICHARD BOCK Online Editor MANDY MINICHIELLO After Effects Artist TIM KENNEDY Aerial Photography MAINE HELICOPTER Transcriptions JOHANNA KOVITZ Narration Record THE STUDIO, PORTLAND Additional Photography BING MILLER DARRYL CZUCHRA JACQUELINE SHERIDAN ROB SYLVAIN Time Lapse Photography RICK BEYER Grips STEVE WALLACE INGO SCHAEFFER ALEXANDER R. DAIGLE Production Assistants GIAN GENTLE KATHLEEN CLIFFORD JOE WALLACE Footage Provided By GETTY IMAGES Images Provided By GUILDHALL LIBRARY, CITY OF LONDON THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SWEDEN Images Provided By NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES BY PERMISSION OF THE SYNDICS OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BETTMANN/CORBIS CORBIS SYGMA MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY ALINAR/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK © BRITISH LIBRARY/HIP/ ARE RESOURCE, NY JAMESTOWN-YORKTOWN FOUNDATION TRI-COASTAL MARINE DR. MICHAEL HAYWOOD Closed Captioning MEDIA ACCESS GROUP AT WGBH Special Thanks TAYLOR ALLEN THE CREW AT ROCKPORT MARINE NATHANIEL WILSON SAILMAKERS JAMESTOWN-YORKTOWN FOUNDATION JIM ELK DALLAS FIELDS DEBORAH PAOGETI JEFF DOBBS PRODUCTIONS PETER WRIKE For the History Channel Executive Producer SUSAN WERBE Co-Executive Producer LYBBY O'CONNEL Programming Coordinator EMILY MACDOWELL Produced by PLATE OF PEAS PRODUCTIONS, INC. FOR THE HISTORY CHANNEL(r) © 2006 A TELEVISION NETWORKS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. H THE HISTORY CHANNEL © 2006 A Television Networks. All Rights Reserved.
first movie 44:48
Godspeed to Jamestowne 44:48