C.W. Morgan Fans--CWM was on This Old House

They also showed her under sail on the 18 Oct show.

Dang it, DVR must have missed that one.

The latest issue of Wooden Boat Magazine has an article on her recent sailing.  www.woodenboat.com/current-issue-woodenboat-magazine

As a matter of principle I'm not among those who favor actually sailing historic ships. But the Morgan is providing ship modelers with lots of valuable images of how things work in a real sailing vessel.

Here's a particularly good shot:

I can't get the computer to let me type anything under the photo in the preceding post, so forgive me if I do it here.

The shot shows the Morgan under way, either entering or leaving a harbor. (Note the towline leading to the bow just above the waterline; the tugboat presumably is just out of the picture to the left.) She appears to be in the process of furling her lower topsails. They've been gathered up by the clewlines and buntlines, and their sheets have been slacked off; in a few seconds, presumably, some of the crew will go aloft to furl them. All the other sails have already been furled. Modelers thinking about modeling furled sails: please note how small the bundles of canvas are. The upper topsails, the topgallants and the main royal (the fore royal yard apparently has been sent down to the deck) are so skinny that they're barely visible. The fore and main courses make slightly fatter bundles - and they're noticeably fatter in the center, where the clews have been hauled up. The upper and lower topsail bundles are about the same thickness throughout their lengths; the difference there is that the upper and lower topsail clewlines run to the yardarms, whereas the course clewlines lead to blocks near the centers of the yards.

The spanker is furled tight against the back of the mizzen mast. (That's one of several gaff-and-boom rigs that were used in the nineteenth century.) The jibs and fore staysails are furled into tidy bundles along the bowsprit; the gaff topsail is a rather untidy bundle at the mizzen masthead.

This is what furled sails are supposed to look like - in a mid-nineteenth-century bark. (A seventeenth- or eighteenth-century ship would look different in several respects.) The only big feature I can see that isn't quite realistic is that the sails are cleaner and whiter than any that would be seen on an active whaler. Those ships were notorious for their dirty sails, especially where the smoke from the tryworks hit them.

Lots of valuable information for modelers here. Google "Charles W. Morgan" for dozens more equally useful ones.

The article in Wooden Boat says that Mystic Seaport hasn't decided whether the Morgan will ever sail again. Frankly I hope not - for the same reason I don't think WWII aircraft ought to be flown. But I'm mighty glad we have these pictures.

Here's another good picture:

In this photo the ship is backlit - i.e., she's between the sun and the photographer. It's worth noting what the sails look like. The strips where the individual cloths overlap, and the various parts of the sail that are made of several layers of canvas, are in silhouette. And if you look at the spanker you can see that several pieces of rigging behind it, including the shrouds and the iron "ratlines," also appear in silhouette - as though they were shadows on the sail.

This is one big reason why I'm so reluctant to put "set" sails on models. If anybody's ever figured out a way to reproduce that effect of backlighting in a model, I've never seen it.

Another comment about nice white sails.  I have heard that only US ships commonly had wthite sails because of the low price of cotton here.  But did cotton make good sail material?  I understand flax was the fiber most used for sails, and those sails were more of a tan.  Any good museum ships that have good representations of period sails?

I notice in the picture of her being towed that the ratlines between the dead-eyes and tops are taut on all three masts but are slack, for the most part, between the top platform and cross-trees and for the rest of the way up.

Is this something to which I should pay attention when I get around to working on my CWM or is this simply a matter of the lower ratlines not having been subjected the constant weight of the crew running up and down the rigging? If so, why the taut below and slack above?

Mike

On the lower shrouds the "ratlines" are in fact iron bars.  Those on the topmost shrouds are rope.

Whether you should replicate that on a model depends on the period you're trying to represent. The Revell kit shows her more-or-less as built, in the 1840s with a full ship rig. Mystic has restored her to her configuration of the 1870s and 1880s, with the bark rig. I'd be willing to bet that when she was built, all the ratlines were rope.

Why iron bars, is there some advantage to using them?

Iron "ratlines" don't rot and don't bend. Few things can be more disconcerting than having a rope ratline break when you put your weight on it.

Iron ratlnes started appearing in the 1860s or thereabouts. I've read that some riggers and sailors had reservations about these new-tangled gadgets; some claimed that a slightly sagging rope gave better support to a man with bare feet. Many ships kept their rope ratlines. I don't think the Cutty Sark, for instance, ever gave up her rope ratlines. But plenty of ships - including the Morgan - did. And the big steel German bulk carriers of the twentieth century used iron ratlines on their lower shrouds almost exclusively.

The best discussion of stuff like this probably is Harold Underhill's Masting and Rigging the Clipper Ship and Ocean Carrier.

Thank you John.

Mike

Thank you for the information.  I will look Harold's book up.

Marcus

I rmember learning that using bars was a Caribbean "thing."  From "Bermuda" cutters--a singl-masted ship with a huge gaff-rigged spanker as the main sail, and a topmast of one or two topsails.

These cutters would use teak bars on the shrouds, which then acted like battens to preserve the geometry, as the lee shrouds were often slacked away to allow the spanker boom to .get as close to 90º abeam as the rig would allow.  The battens kept the shrouds orderly for when they needed to be tautened again after wearing about (one does not want to gibe a Cutter).

I have also heard that it was a resonance to wire rope as you could use a stirrup clamp to hold a bar to a wire rope, which might be too slick to hold a natural-fiber line seizing (needed to have a place to fasten the rat lines).

Nice!

Noticeably absent are the stern gallery windows, which the Revell kit has. Those came after 1906.

And I'd say she looks great without the gun port paint job. I am sure that was solely post service when she was in the movies.