Moby Dick the Pequod

Hi,

 

If your talking about the bar (the proper name escapes me) that is at the very bottom of the shrouds, it serves as a "spreader" for the shrouds. A lot ships from about 1800 had them.

Jake

Not having seen the film I don't know what the Pequod looked like, but these are the (plastic) whaler kits I know of:

Academy/Minicraft make a kit of a 19th century whaler in 1/200 scale - I've never seen this kit so can't comment on the quality. Based on other Academy ships I've seen, it is probably cleanly moulded without the flash and poor fit endemic to the usual 1960s/70s kits, but I've no idea how accurate it is.
Pyro made a kit of the Charles W. Morgan in about 1/250 (since re-issued by Life-Like and Lindberg), the hull/deck and details are quite good considering the kit's age (I have this kit myself), but it has clunky, overscale injection-moulded sails, like all the Pyro kits, which are rather a pain to remove.
Revell also made a kit of the Charles Morgan, in about 1/150 I think, which is supposed to be a good kit, but it has been out of production for some time and is quite hard to find.
There's also the old Aurora "Wanderer" whaler, also around 1/150, but this is even scarcer than the Revell Morgan.

(edit: Must have posted this almost simultaneously with jtilley and GeorgeW - apologies for any duplication of info!)

The term that escaped Jake's memory is "sheer pole."  It appeared around the end of the seventeenth century, became fairlyy common in the eighteenth, and was in near-universal use from about 1800 onward.  It remained in use for the rest of the sailing ship period.  It addition to acting as a spreader for the shrouds (and sometimes the backstays), it prevented the deadeye/lanyard assemblies from twisting.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century, some (but not all) sailing vessels started replacing their rope ratlines with iron rods.  By 1880 or so it was quite common to see good-size ships with iron "ratlines."  (Actually the riggers often added the rods without bothering to remove the rope ratlines.  That arrangement shows up in a surprising number of contemporary photos.)  Sometimes they used the iron ones on the lower shrouds and left the rope ones on the topmast shrouds; sometimes the iron ones went all the way up.  And the iron ratlines were not used universally by any means.  Some modern sail training ships have iron ratlines; some (the U.S. Coast Guard's Eagle, for instance) have rope ones.

I'm aware of three plastic whaler kits - all of them, unfortunately, long out of production.  The best by far was the Revell Charles W. Morgan, one of the nicest, most detailed kits that company ever produced.  It was released (according to Dr. Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits) in 1968, and reissued in 1972 and 1979.  Aurora, back in the late sixties, did a fairly large-scale Wanderer kit.  The hull and deck of it weren't bad, but the hulls of the whaleboats were ludicrously distorted and the "sails" were injection-molded plastic, cast integrally with the yards.  The only other plastic whaler I know about was an old Pyro kit, in what the company used to call its "$1.00 series."  It was less than a foot long, and also had injection-molded sails.  Not bad for its size and age, but not a convenient basis for a serious scale model.  All those kits are very hard to find today, though they do turn up occasionally in places like e-bay.

Lots of litarary experts turn up their noses at the John Huston/Gregory Peck movie, but I've always enjoyed it.  (Let's all acknowledge that it can't hold a candle to the book, but as a movie it's pretty entertaining.)  Don't pay too much attention to the ship in the movie, though.  Like most Hollywood sea stories, this one didn't pay much attention to accuracy when it came to maritime hardware.  That ship was, as I recall, an old wood schooner that the moviemakers were able to buy in England or somewhere in the Mediterranean, and had their prop department modify so it looked something like a whaler.  The whaleboats in the movie were acquired in the Azores Islands, a few of whose inhabitants were still using oared whaleboats in the 1950s.  Unfortunately, Azores whaleboats didn't look much like New England ones. 

I remember reading, quite a few years ago, a book called Give Me a Ship To Sail, by the great sea captain/author Alan Villiers.  The book is a description of his efforts to keep his hand in as a sailing ship captain during the mid-twentieth century, when sailing ships were becoming scarce.  Among many other interesting jobs, he served as captain of the Mayflower II and commanded the ships used in several Hollywood movies, including "John Paul Jones" (with Robert Stack) and "Moby Dick."  Villiers regarded that Pequod reproduction with utter contempt, but "at least she was a ship to sail."  He told some interesting anecdotes - including the one about how Moby Dick himself, who was made of inflatable rubber, broke his towline and drifted out of sight in an Irish Sea fog, with Gregory Peck lashed to his side. 

I think the bar fixed just above the deadeyes is called a 'sheer' pole used as you say to maintain the form of the shrouds. They were common on merchant ships of the 19th century but were not used I believe on British warships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They were not fitted on 'Victory' for instance. Did the 'Constitution' have them?

I don't believe that  rigid battens were fitted further up the shrouds on clipper ships, pehaps this is a New Bedford Whaler sort of arrangement, I'm sure those of you in the USA know far more about it than I do.

As far as a model of the 'Pequod' is concerned Revell used to make a kit of the 'Charles W Morgan' a whaler that would probably be excellent for the job. I made this model more years ago than I care to remember and it still resides in my Loft to this day. I think it is an attractive model with plenty of detail, and the ship's whale boats can be  made to look extra special with a little internal fitting out.

It can still probably be found on E-bay

 

     Thanks guys, I'll keep a lookout for those kits, yea the film is top rate with plenty of ship details to find plus the acting is great.   Karl

EPinniger and I must have been typing at the same time.  Now that he's jogged my memory I do recall seeing that little Academy kit.  I suppose it could conceivably be a reboxing of the Pyro one; it seems like it's about the same size.  On the other hand, it's entirely possible that it's Japanese in origin.  I've never seen the inside of the box.

There's also the old Aurora "Wanderer" whaler, also around 1/150, but this is even scarcer than the Revell Morgan.

   The wanderer was 116' long (unspecified, but I suspect that is length on deck) 27' beam 15' depth. If the proportions of the Aurora kit are close to correct, with the beam, and depth measuring exactly at HO, 1/87 scale, the length on deck measures 116' at 1/87.

    The Charles W. Morgan was 105.6' long, 27.7' beam, and drew 17.6'.  It's been too many decades since I read "Moby Dick", and can't remember exactly what "Pequod" was described as. Added to that is the influence of the movie version, and I don't have a copy of the book here to go to. There is also a 1/64 scale wood kit of the "Kate Cory", a 75' whaling( brig?, with no square sails on the main, I'd be more comfortable calling her a brigantine), available through Model Expo. The book, "The Whaleboat a study of design, construction, and use from 1850 to 1970" by Willits D. Ansel, available from Mystic Seaport Museum inc. Mystic Ct. is an excellent reference for whaleboats.

Looks like quite a few of us were typing replies on this thread at the same time.  Regarding sheer poles - here's what James Lees's The Masting and Rigging of English Ships of War, 1625-1860, has to say about the subject (p. 42):

"To prevent the shrouds from twisting it was the practice, especially during the nineteenth century, to lash an iron bar across the shrouds just above the upper deadeye; this was known as the sheer pole.  It was carried on the outboard side of the shrouds and was about 2 inches in diameter."

That's pretty vague - and of course the author is only talking about British warships.  When I was working on my little model of the Hancock I tried to figure out whether an American frigate of 1776 would be likely to have sheer poles.  After looking at all the contemporary pictures and models I could find, my answer was "well, maybe."  The sheer pole seems to have come into use gradually between the very late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

That the Victory currently lacks sheer poles just establishes that the eminently-qualified people currently in charge of her don't think she had them in 1805.  I think they're probably right.  George Campbell apparently agreed; his drawings, reproduced in the Longridge book, don't show them.  Neither does J.M.W. Turner's famous Trafalgar painting, which is known to have been based on sketches he made on board the ship shortly after the battle.  (That painting and the surviving sketches open up several interesting cans of worms.  They suggest, for instance, that Heller was absolutely right to omit the ornamented entry ports from the ship's sides.  But that's another topic.)  If I were building a model of the Victory I wouldn't give it sheer poles.  But I also wouldn't argue violently with anybody who did.

I'm pretty sure the famous Isaac Hull model of the Constitution does have sheer poles on the lower shrouds.  (I say "pretty sure" because I've misinterpreted photos of that model more than once.)  That model apparently dates from 1812 or shortly thereafter, and is generally regarded as the best source of information regarding the ship's rigging during that period.

Iron "ratlines" were quite common - though not by any means in universal use - in American and European merchant ships beginning in about the last quarter of the ninenteenth century.  (I don't think there's any firm date for their introduction, and, as I said in my earlier post, plenty of ships never used them.)  Some years ago I was boning up on the famous British merchantman Torrens, with the intention of building a model of her.  (That model, like most of my big ideas, barely got started.)  I found an excellent photo of her showing quite clearly that (at least at the time the picture was taken) she had iron "ratlines" on her lower masts - but that the rope ones had been left in place.  (She looked kind of weird.  The rope ratlines only stretched across the two center shrouds of each gang, and the iron bars, stretching from the first shroud to the last, had been lashed on top of them.)   The Cutty Sark, launched in 1869, never, so far as I can tell, had iron ratlines.  But many big and medium-sized merchantment were using them by that time, and their popularity increased as the years went by.  They were, as GeorgeW suggested, extremely common in American whalers.  Some of the big steel square riggers of the early twentieth century had rope ratlines; some had iron ones.  (Iron "ratlines," so far as I can tell, never became popular in warhips.) 

It's easy to see why there would be some disagreement on the subject.  Iron ratlines would be durable, and wouldn't require much maintenance.  On the other hand, a rope ratline, sagging a little under the weight of the person climbing it, might feel a little more secure - and would be slightly less dangerous if wet or covered with ice.  And iron rods cost considerably more than rope.

If I were building a model of a latter-day sailing ship, I'd search long and hard for photos of the prototype before deciding whether to make the ratlines of iron or rope.  Iron ones, by the way, are remarkably easy to represent on small-scale models.  A nice, straight piece of blackened wire, adhered to the shrouds with tiny spots of adhesive, will do the job quite nicely.

The Model Shipways Kate Cory kit, unfortunately, has been out of production for many years.  (The company has been making rumbling noises about bringing back many of its old solid-hull kits; I hope that will be one of them.)  MS does currently offer a plank-on-bulkhead Charles W. Morgan.  Those Model Shipways p-o-b kits occupy a completely different planet than the HECEPOB kits; the Model Shipways designers understand scale modeling.  A couple of guys in our model club have built that MS Charles W. Morgan, with extremely impressive results.  Of the currently-available whaler kits, that one gets my highest recommendation.  Be aware, though, that it's a big, expensive, complex kit - definitely not intended for newcomers.

   Man, I ask a question and am amazed from the response......thanks to all of you, manny years ago in the mid 1960's my parents and I toured the Charles W Morgan at Mystic Seaport what a step back into time to be able to walk on the last whaling ship that was used in the United States, of all the things that I saw on that ship the one thing that I still remember was the size of the sleeping quaters of the captian and the crew, the bunk would fit children rather than adults but one must remember that most adults back then were not as tall as adults are today I'd love to go back to Mystic Seaport and take another tour of that great ship and  this time take a camera to record what Mystic Seaport has to offer, I just wish that we out here in the north west have such a lavish historical place such as Mystic Seaport with the shops and recreating the daily life of time long gone.  Karl

Now there, look to this thread ! The depth and seriousness of this forum amazes me every time I login. Being a member of some academic mailgroups, I swear that none can even near the pleasure of reading, writing and discussing that this forum gives me. And here finally, a thread about a subject that I'm emotionally tied to core. That's about Moby Dick and of course Herman Melville.

Well, I dont know the literary taste of forum members (and I'd really like to hear it ! That's how we learn literature ). For me, Herman Melville-Cervantes and Dostoyevsky form the holy trinity of literature. I think that there are very very few people who understood the sea and life in the sea than Melville. Even fewer were successful to tell this experience with such a shaking but utmostly elegant style. and, I think only Melville was able to mate nautical lore with an extremely avant-garde and touching philosophy. I carry everywhere a full text translation of Moby Dick by late professor Mina Urgan; one of the greatest experts of Anglo-Saxon literature, not only in Turkey but also in the World. While reading the crypto-prosaic lines of Moby Dick, I can easily breath the salt air, hear the rolling ocean waves and listen to the wind in the rigging. Meanwhile, Melville gives me plenty of opportunities to think about the extremities of mankind and his struggle with his own nature. Anybody who misses this canonical masterpiece misses also a lifetime experience for sure.

Thank you starduster, for opening this thread.I've recently bought an Aurora Wanderer. I'm determined now to build her as Pequod. this will be my tribute to a masterpiece that tought me a lot and to an extraordinary man who was little understood and forgotten during his lifetime. May you rest in peace Melville.

I believe the "Morgan" was dryberthed during the time you visited her, she's now afloat again. For the record, the Charles W. Morgan departed on her last whaling voyage on September 9th 1920, returning May 28 1921, she was dryberthed at South Dartmouth, Mass.in 1925, and moved to Mystic in 1941. "Wanderer" was the last square rigged whale ship to sail from New Bedford, departing  August 25, 1924. She fell victim to a nor'easter, on Cuttyhunk Island, the following day. For any interested in modeling either the Wanderer, or the Morgan, the book "Whaleships and Whaling" by Albert Cook Church, has some photos of both vessels, pierside, and underway.

   Thank you Kapudan_emor_effendi, I've read Moby Dick many times through the years and it gives me pleasure in reading Melville's work, and watching the movie well I know that Hollywood has a way of making huge blunders in trying to do on film from what is written down in literature, but I see the hardships the men went through from the film and this refines to me anyhow from what I've read, I 'd like to maby tackle a dio on a whaling community somewhat like Mystic Seaport,.

   And I beleive you're correct sumpter250, the Morgan was dryberthed when I visited her in the early 60's, there was other ships there too but the Morgan was my dad's prime intrest, it's kinda funny in a way, when I was in grade school my watching the old pirate movies from the 40's onward had given me a great intrest in the sailing ships seen in those old movies, and even then I knew that most of all the ships shown were models, very well done models to be shure I even was drawing sailing ships all the time, my favorite ones were from the movie The Sea Hawk with Errol Flynn, those galleons with the oars all moving together was fascinating to me and the ornamental carvings the ships had was great, I know that most if not all of those films was of fiction but for a lover of those ships under sail with all guns firing  ( there should be a behind the scenes documentary on how these movies were made ) this fan was ( and still is  ) in heaven. Karl

     

I've noted several times that, in my experience at least, one of the great aspects of ship modeling is that it encourages one to get acquainted with nautical literature.

For what little it's worth, I'm a great admirer of Melville.  I've always found Moby Dick a bit heavy going, largely because of those long discursive chapters about whales.  But, as many literary critics who know far more about such things than I do have said over the years, without those chapters the book just doesn't work.

Since we're talking about Melville-based movies, maybe it would be appropriate to mention another one:  "Billy Budd."  The story is a great one; the short novel is certainly worth reading.  Partly because the novel is so short, the movie was able to render in pretty faithfully.  Peter Ustinov, who both directed and starred in the role of the ship's captain, often called it "my most successful film."  The cast included Robert Ryan, Melvyn Douglas, David McCallum (fresh from "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."), and Terrence Stamp, making his movie debut in the title role.  The ships are kind of hokey looking, but the acting is superb and the depiction of British naval discipline is so accurate as to be downright scary.  Very much worth seeking out.

Those whose interests cross the line between ship models, literature, and music (surely I'm not the only one) might also be interested in the opera Billy Budd, by the twentieth-century British composer Benjamin Britten.  Britten may not have been thoroughly knowledgeable about ships or naval history, but the work is a fine character study containing some really interesting music.  The focus is on the character relationships - with considerable emphasis on the gender-related issues that many critics have found in the original story.  I particularly recommend the recording conducted by Richard Hickox.

If you like the movie "The Sea Hawk," you owe it to yourself to seek out the novel, by Raphael Sabatini.  (He also wrote the book on which another Errol Flynn movie, "Captain Blood," was based.)  The movie version of The Sea Hawk has almost nothing to do with the novel, but both are great fun.  Be warned:  Sabatini didn't know much about ships.  His books are long, beautifully-written romances that force the reader into a "willing suspension of disbelief" when it comes to historical reality.  But they're great for whiling away winter evenings or long airplane rides.

My own personal favorite sea-writer, though, remains Joseph Conrad.  He did know ships and the sea, from long personal experience.  Unfortunately for people like us, sea stories make up only a small percentage of his output.  If you're not familiar with him, the place to start is the short story "Youth."  That one probably will hook you, and you'll want to read the longer Typhoon and The Nigger of the Narcissus.  I tackled the latter novel for the first time when I was in high school; I've read it five or six times since then, always discovering some major aspect of it that I missed earlier.  Conrad's mastery of the language was truly astonishing - especially in view of the fact that his native language was not English but Polish.  I once spent a nice, warm summer evening orking on a model and listening to an unabridged audiobook version of "Typhoon."  On several instances I found myself getting up and looking out the door of the workshop to reassure myself that a typhoon really wasn't raging outside.

By the way, a good way to deal with the more monotonous aspects of model building is to set up a decent stereo system in the workshop.  I've rigged lots of ratlines to the accompaniment of music and books on tape.  At the moment I'm working my way through Sir Ian McKellan's wonderful reading of Homer's Odyssey.  Talk about a great environment for ship modeling....

GeorgeW wrote:

I think the bar fixed just above the deadeyes is called a 'sheer' pole used as you say to maintain the form of the shrouds. They were common on merchant ships of the 19th century but were not used I believe on British warships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They were not fitted on 'Victory' for instance. Did the 'Constitution' have them?

Sheer poles are fitted to the Victory at the level where the futtock shrouds are seized to the main shrouds.

   These are more properly called Futtock Staves.

Longridge describes them thus:

'Oak battens seized along the shrouds horizontally, not including the aftermost shroud, at a level as much below the upper edge of the trestletrees as the top of the cap is above'

The catharpins are lashes to both the shrouds and the Futtock Staves.

To complete the Melville association, modellers particularly of the 'USS United States' may be interested in his book White-Jacket or The world in a Man-of-War. Mellville served on this Frigate in  1843  as an ordinary seaman and relates his experiences. One thing he does refer to is the 'Poop Deck Cabin' - a subject of some contention I understand as to if, when, or how long she had such an arrangement.

One thing that struck me about his book is the apparent admiration he had for the British Navy.

Melville's White Jacket is an important book for reasons he never intended.  The enlisted man of the U.S. Navy in the early nineteenth century is a "forgotten man" of American military history.  The government kept few records about him, and tended to regard him as transient hired help. Scarcely any actual memoirs written by enlisted men describe what life was like for them.  There are, however, several fictionalized accounts by men who went through the experience.  White Jacket is probably the best - and certainly the longest - of these.  Historians have made quite a bit of use of it over the years.

Melville seems to have had a love-hate relationship with the Royal Navy.  ("Billy Budd" could hardly be called an endorsement of its disciplinary system.)  But White Jacket makes it pretty clear that he was hardly and unreserved booster of the U.S. Navy either.  I imagine a guy like that almost inevitably had trouble with the traditional naval conception of discipline, the utter lack of privacy, and various other aspects of life for a sailor on board a warship. 

The United States is known to have been designed as the flagship of the embryonic U.S. Navy.  Her hull lines apparently were the same as those of her two near-sisters, the President and the Constitution, but the contemporary documents are agreed that she differed from them in having a "round house," or raised poop deck.  The space under it presumably served as the quarters for a flag officer.  To my knowledge no contemporary drawing or photo shows the "round house" clearly.  Howard I. Chapelle, in his History of the American Sailing Navy (1949), drew one set of plans for the three ships, with his reconstruction of the United States's round house shown in dotted lines.

The sheer pole and the futtock staff (or stave), as George W. indicated, were different things.  I looked up "futtock staff" in Lees's Masting and Rigging, and found the following rather surprising statement (p. 130):

"Futtock staves were made of rope, wormed, parcelled and served.  They were seized to the under side of the shrouds on all masts that carried futtock shrouds and were long enough to stretech from the first shroud to the last shroud.  They were placed the same distance below the upper side of the trestletrees as the under side of the cap was above the trestletrees.  The size of the rope was the same size as the futtock shrouds."

Again, he's only talking about English warships.  I'm fairly certain, though, that futtock staves were also made of wood and, later, iron.  R.C. Anderson, in his The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, says simply that "at their lower ends the futtock-shrouds were taken round the futtock staff, a bar seized horizontally outside the lower shrouds about as far below the top as the masthead extended above it." 

In addition to anchoring the lower ends of the futtock shrouds, the futtock staves served as anchors for both ends of the catherpins - the horizontal lines that ran between the port and starboard gangs of shrouds, as a means of bowsing them together.

In ship modeling, especially in small scales, the cramped dimensions of the space just under the top can turn the conglomeration of shrouds, futtock shrouds, and catherpins into a confusing mess.  Here's a little trick that can simplify the job somewhat, by omitting the seizing lines that hold the futtock staves to the shrouds.  Get a sharp-pointed, straight needle that's the right diameter for the futtock stave.  Shove it right through all the lower shrouds at the right level, making sure it's parallel to the top (i.e., horizontal.  Then grab it with two pairs of needle-nosed pliers and break the needle off, just forward of the first shroud and just aft of the last one.  The needle is now the futtock stave.  (If you don't want to waste a perfectly good needle, you can file or sand a point on the end of a piece of brass wire and cut it to length after its in place.)  When the futtock shrouds and catherpins are in place, nobody will notice that it runs right through the shrouds.

Mr. Lees doesn't mention another method of rigging futtock shrouds:  the "Bentick shroud" (or "Bentinck shroud") system.  In this arrangement, the lower ends of the futtock shrouds on one side of the ship are seized together around a thimble, several feet inboard of where they pass between the lower shrouds.  Into the thimble is hooked the "Bentick shroud," which then runs diagonally downward to be secured to an eyebolt in the deck on the other side of the ship.  I'm not sure just how or when this rig got introduced; it may indeed have been rare or unknown in the Royal Navy.  But the Hull model of the Constitution has Bentick shrouds, as does the real ship.  They're also shown in the instructions for the Revell kit.  A ship rigged with Bentick shrouds presumably wouldn't have futtock staves - unless she retained them just as securing points for the catherpins.

Interesting, if in the grand scheme of things trivial, stuff.  Anybody who thinks there's only one "right" way to rig a ship model of any given period is sadly mistaken.

Our earlier discussion of sheer poles and futtock staves got me sufficiently curious that I looked them up today in some primary sources.  The most obvious, David Steel's Elements of Mastmaking, Sailmaking, Rigging, and Seamanship (1797) wasn't much help.  I couldn't find any mention of the sheer pole in it - though it does refer to futtock staves, and they do appear in several of the diagrams.

Darcy Lever's The Young Officer's Sheet Anchor (1808 edition, p. 25) includes, in its discussion of shrouds and deadeyes, the following:

"...A piece of wood, called a Stretcher, or Squaring Staff, is seized to the SHrouds, just above the Dead Eyes, athwart the whole of them, which keeps them from twisting, and makde the Laniards lie fairly."  A diagram on the facing page makes it clear that Lever's "stretcher or squaring staff" is what we've been calling the sheer pole.  He goes on:

"The RATLINES are seized a foot distant from each other, beginning from the Futtock Stave....the Futtock Stave is sometimes made of rope, served; and sometimes of wood; and is only seized to those Shrouds which are to be Catharpined in."

Richard Henry Dana's The Seaman's Friend (1841) offers the following:

"The ratlins [sic] of the lower rigging should be thirteen, and of the topmast rigging eleven inches apart, and all square with the shear pole."  His lengthy glossary doesn't include "shear pole" (or "sheer pole"), but the meaning is pretty clear.

Why the ratlines would be spaced differently in the lower and topmast rigging Dana doesn't explain.  Was it assumed that the sailors would be taking smaller steps as they got higher in the rigging - maybe because they'd be worn out by that time?  Or did somebody just think that configuration would make the ship look better?  It doesn't seem like an inch would make any noticeable difference to the guy doing the climbing.

The bottom line seems to be that by 1808 the sheer pole was in sufficiently common use for Lever to feel like he should explain it.  In the twenty or thirty years before that, it probably could be found on some ships but not on all of them by any means.  And it might be made of rope, wood, or iron.  And please, don't try to tell me there's only one "correct" spacing for ratlines.