Wooden Boats

To build a boat as big as Rebecca, the builders needed a place to build it in. Nat and Ross did not have such a thing. The space they rented, their little spot of beach, was usually squeezed to capacity with boats under repair and under construction. They’d fixed When and If—the 63-foot schooner built for General Patton and smashed on rocks in Manchester Harbor, Massachusetts, during a bad blow—beside the boatshop, but they couldn’t tie up such valuable space for an entire construction, estimated to take two years. So Nat and Ross found an open area behind the Tisbury Marketplace, down the road a few steps from G&B, a faux-New England strip mall of shops and service stores. They quickly made arrangements to lease the lot and ran a proposal through the zoning and conservation boards.

Ross returned to his house-building efficiency and within seven working days had raised a 2,100-square-foot clear-span pole barn, seventy by thirty feet, ten feet longer than the intended boat and more than twice as wide. The walls were fourteen feet high, and a corrugated metal roof extended upward from there, with open windows running the length of the eaves to let in plenty of light. A door big enough to slip a finished 60-foot schooner through was made in front, and an old canvas sail was rigged like a giant window blind to enclose the doorway. Brad wired the building for electricity.

Ross and Nat had been skeptical from the outset, and the monkeying with the checking account while Brad was in Suriname had enhanced the sense that something here was not right. This Rebecca project was no more substantial than the rumors surrounding it. But when the big pole shed was built, Ross could say confidently, “This job is going to go forward.” What reason was there to believe otherwise? There was the big pile of wood over there, and there was a big shed right there!

Ross collects heavy antique machinery the way other people collect Fabergé eggs or snow domes, and he happened to have an industrial cast-iron planer, originally steam-powered, in his yard under a tarp (“It’s worthless to most people, but for us it’s just perfect,” he says). They hauled that over to Mugwump, the official name of the building and the name Dan Adams had given to the corporation he’d created to build Rebecca. They picked up some big band saws cheap because they didn’t work, and Brad repaired them, scavenging what parts he needed. David Stimson, having closed his own boatshop, had arrived that fall from Boothbay, Maine, with his wife, their two sons (ages eleven and thirteen), a table saw, a small band saw, and a finish planer. The Stimsons made their home in an old corn shed behind Dan Adams’s barn; David would be one of the key builders of the project. Mugwump bought a minimum of hand tools—a Skilsaw, an electric planer, drills, and auger bits. Nat and David began to loft the boat. By January 15 they were taking a chain saw to the main keel timber and then to that curved piece of angelique, ripping out the first pieces of the boat. Rebecca was actually under way.

Of all the boatwrights at G&B, David Stimson may have been the one most representative of the contemporary wooden boat builder, the quintessential solitary worker constructing relatively small, traditional boats way down a bumpy rural road in Maine, a man who did the work without regard to profit because it was what he loved. Maine was simply where you did it. No other state was more closely associated with wooden boats. Wooden boats, whether yachts or workboats, were not unusual there, as they were most everywhere else. That ensured at least a modicum of business in repair and, with luck, new construction every now and then. The Directory of Wooden Boat Builders and Designers listed eighty-eight separate concerns in Maine; the state with the next-highest number in the Directory lay at the opposite northern corner of the country: Washington, with forty-seven yards listed.

The work was precarious at Stimson Marine, Inc., where new construction was limited to boats under 22 feet, generally skiffs and kayaks. But he felt glad for the work he had—he loved those boats. “I was lucky,” he told me. “Others do house carpentry.” He paused. “I just starved.” Winters were particularly difficult, especially given that the nearest school was thirty-seven miles away, and his wife, Tamara, had to drive the boys there and back daily; over the rural roads in winter, the trip exceeded an hour each way. And both of them knew that David was just scraping by—neither could predict from one year to the next if he’d be able to continue. David described the boatyard dynamic this way: “There’s always a job that had to be finished yesterday and not enough money to pay the bills.” This resulted in more stress than boats.

David, born and raised on Cape Cod, had known of G&B almost from its beginnings, and he and Tamara had remained good friends with Nat and Pam through the years they were in Maine. In the summer of 1997 the couple had visited the Vineyard for some sailing and to see friends, among them Nat and Pam. Nat showed David the drawings of Rebecca and said, “It looks like we’re going to start work on this in the fall.” Without thinking, David replied, “Wow, do you need any help?” Nat said that indeed he did—would David be interested in helping to oversee the project?

By the time David and Tamara crossed the Maine border on their drive home, they’d decided to do it: close down the shop (despite the fact that they’d just bought a 30-foot sloop he was fixing, and he had a big repair job that had to be finished), find homes for all their animals, make arrangements for school for the kids, pack up their belongings, and move to an island, all in a month and a half. But the decision wasn’t difficult: it was an opportunity for David to learn from the combined experience of Nat and Ross and to work on a schooner of that size, and more, the long-term prospects were promising.

“They’re on a roll here,” David reasoned. “There’s money here. It’s a perfect place. There’s a level of culture here that you don’t find in other places with money”—that is, most places popular among the rich didn’t typically value traditional wooden boat construction (too much maintenance!). And so they moved from a house on fifty acres to a former corn shed behind Dan Adams’s brick barn, with winter approaching and work on Rebecca about to begin. David’s first job was to hunt for the trees on Dan’s land that would become the poles supporting the structure in which he expected to spend the next year and a half of his life, and then who knew how long after that.

Nat Benjamin taught himself how to draw boats by reading, by working on boats, by sailing them, and by staring at them. When certain people stare at boats long enough, pretty soon they need to start drawing them. Nat had felt an affinity with boats ever since he built a raft as a boy to ride like a Hudson River Huck Finn, and when he stopped sailing as a way of life, he began to put the boats he had in his head down on paper. One thing about boats is that the very sight of them is infinitely engaging. You can look at a well-designed wooden boat for hours and hours over a period of years, even decades, and never tire of it, never see all there is to see, never fail to be elevated by the aesthetics of that one shape. Those curves, they draw you in, tantalize you, because they don’t end; there’s always a little more curve just out of view that keeps it interesting forever.

Rebecca began as an idea in Nat’s mind for a full 60-foot schooner. He then shrank it down exactly, reducing each foot to ⅜ inch to create a profile sketch, and then enlarging it again to ½ inch per foot for the lines drawing, each curve precisely mapped out. On the lines drawing, the hull of the boat was divided into ten equal sections, or “stations,” and from this scheme Nat created the diagonals, waterlines, buttock lines, body plan, and table of offsets (offsets are the measurements of the three dimensions of the hull: its height and width, where these heights and widths fall at any given point along the length of the boat, and diagonals, distances measured from the center line to sections drawn diagonally through the hull).

to whom a lines drawing resemble[d] a cross section through a barrel of frozen angleworms, and meant but little more; and these same people thought of a table of offsets as something you might expect to come from the maw of a mad computer that had been fed on Pictish runes, rock and all. Both these conceptions are faulty and exaggerated. If you have managed (as I did, rather late in childhood) to master the technique of drawing a line from 1 to 2 and so on in proper sequence to 87, and got for your diligence the picture of a nice horsie, you should have no trouble with a table of offsets.

From this easy-as-a-horsie table of offsets, Nat made pencil marks on a big grid on the lofting floor of Mugwump and, by connecting those marks, reinflated the boat to its proper size. Drawing a boat on a piece of paper is simply a miniature version of doing it life size; just as ducks and splines had been used to create fair curves on the drawing board, nails and spruce battens, some as long as seventy feet, were used on the floor of the shop. The loftsman put nails at each X demarcating a certain line, a batten was held tight against this curved line of nails, and a pencil was dragged along the length of the batten. The pencil was then reinserted behind the ear—one of the defining characteristics of the boatbuilder here—or, in the case of Nat Benjamin, slid between ear and beret.

Nat liked to begin with perhaps the most visible line of a boat, the sheer. And so at each station he measured the distance from the waterline (one of the main grid lines) up to the sheer, taking the number from the table of offsets. At station five he measured 4 feet 1½ inches up from the waterline; at station one where the bow is higher, he measured 5 feet 3 inches. Once he had the sheer plotted at each station, he drove a nail into each mark, took a thick batten, one about 1¼ inches square, bent that against the nails, and drew out the complete sheer line. He and David put down on the floor each line of the boat this way; the entire lofting process would take about a week.

Nat’s bangs were short, and the back of his hair curled out from under his beret to the thick green hooded sweatshirt he wore in winter. He typically donned the standard carpenter’s canvas Carhartt trousers, which began life vaguely orange and eventually faded to vaguely mustard, by which time they were a relief map of hardened bedding compound, dried glue, and red lead paint. Nat wore white socks and ratty Top-Siders—“proper yachting shoes,” he called them in his throaty basso—or heavy workboots if the weather was very cold. In addition to the pencil, he carried with him always an Opinel pocket-knife, a folding rule, a bevel square, and a red bandanna on which to blow his nose. If he was making patterns for the keel pieces, a hammer would always be nearby, along with a bag of bright 4d nails in an Ace Hardware brown paper bag—nails that would be used over and over and only part of the time pounded straight down; the other times they would be laid flat, and their heads pounded into the floor along this or that curved pencil line.

The low winter sunlight beamed straight in through the Mugwump doorway and across the lofting floor all morning. As Nat got to work, he gazed at the lines on the floor and then, when he had decided what the first order of business would be, cleared his throat loudly—HhhhhHHHEH!—and finished with “Aaaaaallright.” The prelude completed, he dropped to his knees on the sun-golden lofting floor and held his stick rule across a piece of quarter-inch plywood on its way to becoming a pattern.

Every shape of the boat’s backbone was on the loft floor—keel, forekeel, stem, sternpost, knees, horn timber, and the rest; patterns of each piece were created by copying the shape on the floor onto a piece of plywood, or onto several pieces of plywood screwed together. Plywood is not transparent, so you can’t simply take a piece, lay it over the shape you want, and cut it out. This creates the problem of how to duplicate the shape on the floor onto plywood with mirror-perfect accuracy.

A common method, and the one Nat chose for the sharp curves of the rudder, was to use box nails laid sideways. If a builder wants a half-moon shape, for instance, he lays a nail flat on the floor every few inches or so and pounds the head of it into the line of the curve, so that half of the nail head protrudes. Plywood is then placed on top and pounded on, the nail heads thus making a series of indentations in the shape of the curve underneath. The boatbuilder then turns the plywood over, pounds a nail conventionally into each indentation, holds a batten against these nails, retrieves a pencil from behind his ear, and drags it against the batten to reproduce exactly the curve represented on the floor.

(In a boatshop, such plywood patterns lie all over the place. Often they are dismantled and tossed in the stove. Sometimes, for Rebecca, they were so long and wobbly it took three people to carry them, one person supporting the middle. Compared with the mighty timbers of angelique that they gave their shape to, the ¼-inch ply patterns seemed flimsy as paper. They looked like useless scraps. Step on a pattern for a keel piece by accident, though, hear the wood crack, and Nat would come about as close to raising his voice as he ever did: “Don’t break it!” he’d say. “That’s the most important part of the boat!” But he never lost his equilibrium for long. He’d find a small piece of wood to screw into the pattern above the crease of the crack, a plywood bandage, and say, “If it’s wood, you can fix it.”)

With the Mugwump pole shed built, the earthen floor covered with plywood painted white and now dynamic with the pencil lines of a schooner, and numerous patterns lying about, David and Nat rolled the main keel timber, the first piece of the boat, into the shed. It measured more than half a foot thick, 2 feet wide, and 35 feet long. Nat and David did not have a forklift or other heavy machinery to move it, nor did they have a motorized block and tackle overhead, as Brad had had in the lumberyards of Suriname. But they did have a small hydraulic jack, some heavy metal poles to use as levers, and metal and wood cylinders that served as rollers. These items were more than sufficient to enable the two of them to maneuver a one-ton main keel timber and a three-ton forekeel. They simply levered the wood onto rollers and then levered it forward, the weight creeping along not unlike the stones of the great pyramids in Egypt four thousand years earlier, David or Nat racing the back roller around to the front of the timber as it progressed (Nat invariably referred to G&B’s heavy-lifting technique as “Egyptian technology”). Raising these pieces to different heights was often just a matter of balance: one person could lift one end of a 6,000-pound piece of wood a foot or more if it was balanced properly. “It’s amazing what you can do with rollers and levers and jacks,” David said.

The first piece of wood cut for Rebecca, the main keel timber, did not require a complete pattern and was not fully drawn on the lofting floor. When Nat designed the boat, he believed that the best width for Rebecca’s keel would be about two feet, but he didn’t know if Brad could get him something that wide. In fact, the timber Brad ultimately sent for this piece was about an inch shy of the ideal width, but it compensated for the deficiency with its virtual lack of knots or checks. Furthermore, there was no way of knowing ahead of time if there would be sapwood—the soft outer layer, typically a map of worm trails—intruding on the piece of wood. So when Nat and David got the timber into the shop and up on blocks in the center of the lofting floor, over its pencil image (what there was of it), Nat knew he would have to let the piece of wood tell him how wide to make the keel. The eventual shape was drawn onto the timber to maximize the width, cut out, and then transferred onto the lofting floor. It was a fairly simple, rectangular shape—35 feet by 2 feet by 7 inches, tapered toward each end—and would for all its life lie bolted against the 26,000-pound lead ballast.

The next piece of Rebecca—the forekeel—was a little trickier than the straight keel timber. Nat had designed Rebecca with a cutaway forefoot, meaning that instead of having a bow that dropped straight down and connected almost perpendicularly to the keel, like a plow, her hull would slope from stem to keel at something closer to a 45-degree angle, more like a bullet, via the forekeel piece Brad had been so lucky to find—the one with the long, lazy curve. This forekeel was huge. More imposing than its weight, though, was its 1½-foot width. The only way you could cut this monster timber was with a chain saw, but it would be almost impossible to guide a chain saw accurately through so much angelique. And this piece of wood was too remarkable, too important to Rebecca, to allow for any errors.

Ross remembered seeing a colleague—Gary Maynard, who ran the Alabama project, the restoration of a 90-foot schooner originally launched in 1926, a project then nearing completion across the sound, in Fairhaven—rough out big spars by rigging up a two-handled chain saw, and he figured that would work here. So he drilled two holes in the bar a few inches from the tip of one of the yard’s chain saws—no easy task, since it was solid steel and not intended to be drilled. He then fabricated from scrap bronze an attachment to fit through these holes, bolted it to the chain saw, and attached a 2½-foot-long oak handle to the bronze fabrication, long enough to give the man on that end as much leverage as the man holding the motor end. Nat and David then carried the contraption over to the forekeel timber—the pattern had been drawn on both sides, and a center line drawn across the top—and began ripping through the wood. They started a couple of inches above the actual line, not knowing how accurate the gizmo would be, but they, and curious others who tried it out, soon found it to be so accurate that they could approach the line up to ¼ inch.

Having cut the rough shape of the backbone timbers, Nat and David got to work with Skilsaws, broadaxes, and adzes to reduce the pieces of wood further and get them nearer to the shapes of the patterns. When they approached the shapes, they used power planers and then eventually hand planes, until the timbers were exact. They cut scarfs on both ends, long tapered joints where the forekeel would fit into the keel timber and into the stem, the keel to sternpost, horn timber to transom knee. And finally they cut the rabbet.

Thus the backbone of the boat took shape, piece by enormous, hand-worked piece. It happened virtually the same way for big Rebecca as it had for smaller boats such as G&B’s 44-foot schooner Lana & Harley, or Blue Rhythm, the 21-foot gaff sloop the boatshop had launched the previous summer. The pieces were the same, but with a small sailboat you didn’t have to move them around using levers and rollers. A few months into the project, two new crew members arrived, Pat Cassidy and Todd McGee, who had been working on the Alabama project under Gary Maynard. The 150-ton Alabama was to Rebecca what Rebecca was to the 44-foot Lana & Harley, so these young men were used to working with truly large timbers, 3-inch-thick planks, deck beams that spanned a 21-foot width. When they first arrived at Mugwump, Todd and Pat kept the others’ awe in check by noting how pleasantly tiny Rebecca was, by bolting in yet another “dinky” deck beam. Rebecca was almost like a toy to them.

That was big enough for Nat and Ross to decide to ask a naval architect to perform some calculations based on Rebecca’s lines. For all their boats thus far, Nat and Ross had estimated the amount of ballast that would be needed according to standard ratios. And they had enough experience sailing boats of the sizes they built to get it right. They had misjudged slightly on Lana & Harley: after being launched, she’d sat higher on her marks than Nat liked, and both Nat and Ross had felt a little tender under sail, so they’d added an extra thousand pounds of trim ballast, and now she sailed beautifully. Nat liked to ballast a boat slightly light; he’d seen enough boats that were ten or twenty years old riding low on their marks because of extra equipment their owners had loaded on after construction. Rebecca was a much bigger boat by far than they’d built before, and so some precautions were warranted. Also, Nat was curious to know how modern techniques and computerized readouts would compare with his eye and his “ancient arithmetic.” So it was worth the small expense (to Dan) to hire a naval architect, especially since that architect was Ross’s nephew Antonio Salguero, his older sister’s son, who’d practically grown up at the yard and whom Nat had watched develop. Antonio had studied yacht design and had begun his own business as a boatwright and designer in Port Townsend, Washington, the West Coast center of wooden boats. “I really respect his judgment and expertise,” Nat said of Antonio.

Antonio, not yet thirty at the time, was thrilled and honored to be asked to do the work on what he felt might be, in his words, “the pinnacle of Nat’s career.” It would also give him a chance to put to use what he’d learned at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. And so he created a construction drawing and ran some numbers to determine such things as optimal engine size, skin-friction coefficients, wave-making resistance in pounds, and stability curves, as well as, of course, how much ballast Rebecca would need and where exactly it should go on the boat, given her center of gravity and her center of buoyancy.

To decide on the weight of the ballast, and to make the boat’s waterline fall exactly where Nat had drawn it, Antonio first had to calculate how much water Rebecca’s hull would displace, which gave him a volume of water and therefore its required weight. He then added up the weights of every piece of the boat—every keel piece, every frame and deck beam, all the wood, all the rigging, all the bolts, all the hardware that would go on, the weight of the anchor and its chain—and the weight of the fire extinguishers, the life jackets, the linens, the galley stove, every single thing on the boat insofar as anyone could know such things exactly (Antonio noted that Nat liked to figure out a boat as he went, leaving many decisions up to the builder at the moment of construction: “That’s the way Nat does things,” Antonio said. “Very organic planning”). The boat was traditional enough in its design to allow good guesses, and after plugging in all the numbers, he determined that the boat and all its contents would weigh 50,015 pounds. From Nat’s drawings he knew that the boat needed to displace 76,867 pounds of water, which meant that a ballast of 26,852 pounds should be cast—almost 35 percent of the total weight, a good ballast ratio. Despite the exactitude of the numbers, much was guesswork, and Nat furthermore wanted the boat to carry about 2,000 pounds in trim ballast that could be jettisoned should the owner load up the boat as the years passed. Nat was especially gratified to learn that Antonio’s figures, gleaned from complex computer programs, concurred completely with the figures he’d arrived at using a pencil.

Antonio would also be tapped to build Rebecca’s two masts for a marconi mainsail and a gaff foresail. The marconi rig—tall mast, triangular sail—is all but ubiquitous in the industry; the gaff rig—four-sided sail attached to the boom along the foot of the sail, shorter gaff above attached to the head—is all but nonexistent. The gaff rig vanished from the mainstream seventy years ago. Boats built before the 1930s were designed to carry gaff rigs, and so they can still be seen here and there—typically at classic boat shows and regattas—but a gaff rig on a new boat is an oddity. That part of Rebecca’s rig was to be gaff, though, was hardly unusual for a G&B boat. What was unusual in this Benjamin design—unprecedented, in fact—was the marconi main. Most of Nat’s boats had been designed with a gaff rig. And furthermore, no one here seemed to think that the least bit peculiar or remarkable.

A few people have written about the gaff rig, with varying measures of appreciation. No one argues that it’s not beautiful to look at. As Ross put it, “When you see the silhouette of one, or you’re on one and you look up, it takes you to another time.” Ross moreover maintained that such rigs were easier to sail and, because they put less strain on a boat, better for the boat. But historians of the rig have noted, for instance, that by “the 1950s anyone ordering a new yacht with a gaff rig would have been considered eccentric.” And by 1975 “the eclipse would become total . . . gaff rig sailors were an extinct breed.”

Gaff rigs came into use in the 1600s and quickly proved to be an efficient and effective design. Historically, the first sails had been rectangular or square, a shape that was used almost exclusively for at least four thousand years. Such sails still work quite well today for those few ships that carry them, but they’re no good if the wind is blowing straight at you. A rig running fore-and-aft, as opposed to athwartships, was developed precisely to surmount this problem, and sails grew progressively more triangular. In the 1800s the gaff rig evolved rapidly because of large-scale manufacturing of equipment such as sails, blocks, and lines; improved ironwork and the development of iron wire rope allowed bigger ships to carry bigger rigs and more sail. The rig predominated until the 1920s, when the marconi or Bermuda rig, which had been used in the Caribbean since the late 1700s, emerged as a popular new choice, one that many people thought would be a passing fad. But workboats soon traded rigging for engines, and yacht design, always shaped in large measure by the quest for speed, found that the marconi was faster to windward and could point closer to the wind by far than the gaff rig. And how fast a boat was to windward was always the ultimate definition of a boat’s speed, at least as far as selling rigs was concerned. The gaff rig’s numerous advantages were ignored. It was more powerful than the marconi, many said, when the wind moved more than 60 degrees off the bow; a variety of sails could be set, and the shape of the sail could be fine-tuned by adjusting the peak or the throat of the gaff; a gaff rig could carry a lot of sail, making it perfect for heavy boats; it was easier to handle; the mast was shorter and therefore easier overall; and the rig strained the hull less. But never mind all that—how fast was it to windward?

Nat was never willfully retrograde—like those Creative Anachronism guys who re-create Civil War battles—or wistfully nostalgic. Going fast to windward or beating hard into the wind was never his main concern. But if you wanted to talk about speed, he’d tell you that gaffs were faster than marconi rigs downwind—on many points of sail, for that matter—and furthermore didn’t require all kinds of sail changes to get the boat to do what you wanted it to do. The gaff rig was simply the best rig, as far as he was concerned.

“For cruising boats, you don’t go hard on the wind very often,” Nat said. “For a cruising boat, a family boat, you don’t need high performance. You want something comfortable and simple. It’s very simple. Everything is held together with pieces of string; there’s no fancy outhaul, worm-gear castings, cunninghams—it just doesn’t need that stuff. Very low-tech. Most people really aren’t into high-performance racing. Most people just want to go out there with their family, have a picnic, and enjoy themselves. Most people want simplicity and comfort and safety. But the reputation that gaff rigs are slow is false.

Thus Antonio would fashion a foremast almost 59 feet tall and 10 inches in diameter at its widest point, from deck level on up to the highest reach of the gaff jaws, after which it would taper to about 6 inches. Nat opted to give the mainmast a marconi rig, though, because while a gaff rig can be simpler, a gaff-rigged mainsail in a boat that size can be more labor-intensive than a marconi sail; Nat felt that a marconi mainsail would better suit the buyer, and furthermore, he had enjoyed the similarly rigged When and If. The 72-foot mainmast would have a uniform taper. Both would be made of Sitka spruce from Canada.

Rebecca, while not enormous by yacht standards, of course, was nonetheless one of the biggest new plank-on-frame boats under construction in the last half of the century, big enough to cross any ocean and make the lives of the many on board comfortable and safe on virtually any crossing. And more, she would look every bit her size. A two-masted traditional wooden vessel 60 feet long looks majestic at anchor in any harbor, but heeled over, bombing across the ocean, her 1,800 square feet of sail set tight, Rebecca would look awesome.

The gradual accumulation of pieces, this majesty and awe in the making, were on view every day as the backbone took shape during the month of February 1998. When the backbone was complete, double-sawn frames of white oak—the boat’s ribs—were bolted together; patterns were drawn on them, and they were cut out on the ship’s saw, whose tilting blade beveled their edges to whatever predetermined degree would accommodate the planks that would be bent around them and bolted in flush. As these frames piled up, Nat created a plug for the lead ballast, which was poured at a foundry in Providence, Rhode Island, delivered to Mugwump on a flatbed truck, maneuvered to the center of the building, and attached to the keel timber with custom-made 1¼-inch silicon-bronze hanger bolts.

And soon the frames began to go up, bolted to keel and floor timbers, then faired. Fairing and fair are broadly used terms that refer to a boat’s curves. You fair a curve, whether a single frame or an entire hull. The sheer on a beautiful boat is a fair curve. Scrutinizing the line of a plank, one eye closed, a boatwright might see an imperfection, a hump or a dip in the line, and say, “That plank’s not fair.” (If Nat was in earshot, he’d say, “Life’s not fair!”) And the big heavy sawn frames, they needed to be faired so that the planks, as they bent their way around the boat, would lie like onionskin against their bevel. Fairing these frames was an arduous, painstaking task. Each fat frame, rough-sawn on the ship’s saw, had to be carved with both block planes and spoke shaves till it was perfectly smooth, its bevel just right. Each frame of the hull had a slightly different bevel.

All this work would take the crew five months—Nat and David and then Pat and Todd; an apprentice named Casson Kennedy; Brad Ives; Daniel Feinstein, a man with more sailing experience (including two Atlantic crossings in his 25-foot double-ender) than his age, twenty-three, would seem to accommodate; and Mark LaPlume, an itinerant woodworker, bongo maker, and visual artist. With all the frames slowly being raised and bolted in, and then hand-planed for many weeks, you couldn’t help but stop several times a day just to stare at this thing, this enormous wooden boat, its hull coming together before your eyes. Once all the sawn frames were up, you could for the first time understand the size and shape of the boat, sense its scope. The sight of it could halt you if you didn’t know it was coming. Having heard about the schooner, passersby—and they were many—often said they felt their breath leave them upon beholding this creature.

“There are sizable vessels being built here and there out of wood,” David said, standing at the starboard sheer, on staging that had been erected around the circumference of Rebecca. “But I don’t know of any that are really of this era. There are reproductions of older working vessels, but I don’t think there’s anything being built to this scale that would be called a yacht, that’s all traditional. There are big yachts being built, but they’re all being built out of . . . goop.” Fiberglass. “So what’s important is that this boat is being built to outlast by far any other boat being made today—cold-molded, fiberglass, steel. It’ll be here sailing when we’re long gone.”

Daniel looked the part of seafarer, with his thick, dark, jutting beard and a solid black bar of an eyebrow running across his eyes; from way up on Rebecca’s sheer, hammer in hand, he shouted down to Nat, “Some guys from the lumberyard came by to have a look yesterday.” (It is an irony of fate that each day, to get to Mugwump, Nat had to walk through the Hinkley lumberyard, striding down an aisle of rectangular stacks of boards—“worthless wood,” he said, noting that lumber companies accelerated the growth of the trees to such an extent that hardwood wasn’t even hard anymore.) “All they wanted to know is how we bent all those boards,” Daniel continued. “ ‘How did you bend the wood?’ they kept asking. That was all they wanted to know. They don’t understand anything that’s not precut into two-by-fours.” He laughed, then brought the mallet down hard onto a bronze bolt, driving it into the sweeping oak deck beam.

Once the double-sawn frames were faired, planks of angelique nearly 2 inches thick and half a foot wide—bilge stringers—were bent around the lower interior of the hull, and oak sheer clamps were bolted along the top of the sheer. Then the whole hull was covered on the outside with 2-by-3-inch spruce ribbands up to 20 feet long apiece. These served as a temporary mold against which the boatwrights would bend three white-oak frames between each sawn frame, running from keel to sheer. To bend this 2½-inch-thick white oak without breaking it, they cooked it in a steam box for hours till it was soft. Ross had built one steamer out of some old propane tanks, using a cutting torch and welder; it was simply a big pipe with a tank of water attached to it below. The current G&B model was a long wooden box. The Mugwump crew made theirs out of a section of corrugated-plastic culvert pipe. The water was boiled over a propane flame, and once the steam “box” was hot, in went the frames, and then a wooden door was wedged tight against the opening. Not only did steaming make this wood pliable; many believed that it also helped to preserve and season wood by killing bacteria that caused rot. When they were cooked, the frames were taken damp and steaming out of the box and immediately clamped fast against the ribbands, then secured with screws. After the fifty or so frames were in—between the stations where the masts would be, Nat had used all double-sawn frames for extra strength where the rig stressed the hull most—Rebecca was ready to be planked.

People often use the words nature and natural, as Daniel had done, in their attempts to express their reverence for a wooden boat. Part of a boat’s connection to nature, obviously, is that its shape mirrors those found in the sea, in large fish and limbless mammals, forms largely defined by long, smooth curves. Fish aren’t composed of a lot of right angles, and neither are sailboats. Curves make a sailboat. Often those curves are sawn out, as with the heavy white oak frames bolted in every four and a half feet along Rebecca’s keel. Large deck beams have some arc to them, are often chosen with some sweep, and must be sawn out. But other curves are made by bending wood, such as the steam-bent white oak frames. And just as Nat, on a stool at his board, had bent thin plastic battens to draw the curves of a boat on drawing paper, just as spruce battens had been bent against nails to transfer those curves from paper to the lofting floor, so long pieces of wood—planks—were now bent around sawn frames to form the hull, and screwed into the intermediate steam-bent frames. Because a boat is largely defined by her curves, the act of making these curves without a saw, bending the curves into the wood, is somehow more exciting than almost all other tasks for a boatwright. There is tension in a curve—sometimes an oak frame wrestled into place against the ribbands breaks with a heart-jolting crack! And a curve made by bending clear stock is almost always true.

Planking again is exciting work because it is so big and visually dramatic—if there’s one thing that makes a traditional wooden boat what it is, it’s the planks. All planks, some of which exceed thirty feet, are first planed to a 2-inch thickness and then spiled, the term used for measuring and drawing their shape on the board. One of the marvels to nonboatbuilding boat lovers is how all these miraculous planks are made so that they fit together, given that a single plank is very fat in the middle, bent from end to end, where it might narrow to a point, and often curves up at one end and down at the other like a lazy S.

There are a couple of ways to line off the planking, but generally it’s a matter of dividing the hull into three sections and then dividing each section by the number of planks it will carry. The biggest frame, where the boat is fattest, is measured first to determine how many rows of planks the hull will have. David, in charge of the bottom section, knew he wanted fairly narrow planks, 7 inches at their widest point. He divided the length of the biggest frame by 7, and that was how many rows of planks he would need; they would use that number to divide each frame section. A plank that was 7 inches wide in the middle of the boat would narrow to 3 inches as it approached the bow and then to a thin, tapered end by the time it reached the stem. To get the desired plank shape, David would mark off the widths at each station onto a spiling batten, then transfer the batten measurements onto the silverballi plank and saw it out with a Skilsaw. Each plank would need to be adjusted with a hand plane and fitted exactly, and a caulking bevel would be planed on one edge to allow a space for the cotton caulking to be wedged in. David himself would measure and cut out the plank, and then a crew behind him would do the final fitting, hanging, and fastening (when a plank fitted perfectly, it would be clamped in place, holes would be drilled, and bronze screws would be countersunk into the plank, the holes eventually to be filled with silverballi plugs or bungs). The teams flew through the work in less than two months; a shutterplank party was held at the end of September to celebrate the hanging of the final plank and the closing of the hull.

The last step in making Rebecca’s hull watertight was caulking—filling the space between the planks with strands of cotton, using steel wedges, called caulking irons, and hammering with wood mallets. Two strands of cotton were used in all seams but the lower five, which first got a strand of oakum—hemp fibers treated with tar—that would withstand the corrosion of diesel fuel should any be spilled in the bilge. A professional caulker named Frank Rapoza lived on the Vineyard, and Nat hired him to begin the work and give the crew lessons; most of the crew had caulked before, but here they learned from someone who was a caulker by trade. Any boatwright passing within fifty yards would know from the sound what was happening inside Mugwump. Wood mallets striking iron striking cotton reverberate in the 60-foot drum with a distinctive thunk. With half a dozen caulkers at work, a “funky rhythm,” as David described it, sounded out all day long, muffled and pleasing, the drumbeats of a demented reggae band. Happy music—a boat was being sealed up, this was going to happen!

At the end of September, as the planking neared completion, Ross took When and If up to Maine for a short break from the boatyard, a trip that would forever alter his life, though to what extent he would not know for more than a year. September on Martha’s Vineyard—after the frenetic work of summer, after the summer throngs had departed, when the island, no longer burdened, sat a little higher on her marks—was a month that featured various local races. At G&B September was informally considered sailing month. While Nat and his crew had been blazing away on Rebecca, Ross had been running the boatyard, building dinghies, repairing tired old boats, dealing with summer maintenance, and constructing another Bella, this one for Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, historian, and TV host David McCullough, who lived on the island. All of this was valuable work, but not very exciting relative to what was going on up the street at Mugwump.

It was here that I first met Nat and Ross. As Ross and I sat below on When and If, he described the repair of the impressive schooner that had nearly been scrapped after being driven up on rocks in Manchester Harbor in 1990. A publishing executive named Jim Mairs had bought her in partnership with Nat and Ross, who had submitted the lowest bid for her repair. They would come in even under that, Mairs said, probably because, unlike the proprietors of most of the other yards vying for the work, they understood the nature of the damage and the strength of the existing hull.

Ross lamented with a kind of smoldering disdain everything that was cheaply and quickly made. “Even hardware isn’t hard anymore,” he said. It was plastic, everything as weightless as could be. Tools today were no good, they didn’t work. The older the tool, the better, as far as he was concerned. By “old,” he meant century-old. He collected these items for the Gannon & Benjamin boatyard. He scavenged old sea towns for antique hardware to install on the yard’s boats. Not for authenticity; these fittings were usually superior to anything made within the last thirty years, he explained. And usually nobody wanted them anymore, so you could get the stuff cheap, if not for free. This practice of using strong, antique hardware underscored the fact that while there was great aesthetic pleasure to be had in building and sailing wooden boats, it was not fundamentally an artistic endeavor—Nat and Ross weren’t artisan builders. They were sailors.

The plan was for Ross to sail When and If up and anchor at Rockport on the day of the launch; there he would meet Nat and Pam, who had driven up, and they would trade vehicle for vessel for the return trip home. Whispers of Nat’s arrival that day preceded the man. Where’s Nat? Have you seen him? I heard he was here. Yeah, I heard he was here, too. We haven’t seen him, either. But by midday the corporeal Benjamin appeared on the dock with his wife, Pam, tall and beautiful with her thick blond hair going to gray, friends surrounding them. They would take the boat today, do some cruising along the coast, then head back to the Vineyard. It was the kind of sailing that Nat rarely did anymore, and he missed it. When he and Pam and their children were under sail, he felt at home, his senses fully engaged. Nat wrote to friends after this trip, and evident in his recollection is the energy, a kind of nineteenth-century grandeur, that infused his spirit when the schooner was under way:

From the log: September 28, 1998. 1030. Moored just north of Birch Cove, Bartlett’s Island . . . we slip our mooring and under main, fore, and forestaysail, ease off on a port tack to beat up through “The Narrows” between Bartlett and the west side of Mt. Desert Island. A freshening northwest wind lifts us clear of these noble straits into the sparkling inland sea of Blue Hill Bay. Sheets eased a bit and her deck hissing against the press of vanishing flat water, When and If carries us beyond our expectations into that unique dimension of life under sail. All hands find their right place—out on the bowsprit, up in the rig, in the lee of the doghouse, at the helm—in a comfortable niche to absorb the visual feast of gradually changing vistas from the distant Camden Hills and Blue Hill to the west and north, Isle au Haut to the southwest and Mt. Desert to the east. These majestic landmarks provide the background for the moving presence of closer, lower islands with granite fringes and tall spruces spearing the sky—an evolving scenery choreographed by our silent stately advance.

Midday arrives and lunch appears on deck—time to run out the sheets and broad-reach down the west side of the lovely Bartlett observing coves, headlands and the peaceful green pastures which nourish prize Angus and Siementhal cattle wandering about on their private island heaven. Eventually we fetch the southern point off Ram Island and must pull ourselves out of reverie and digestive cycles and trim all four lowers to face what has now become a gentle afternoon breeze. The land closes in on us as we maneuver between the verdant shoreline and curvacious out-croppings of earth-toned rocks. Sails aloft draw on zephyrs unnoticed seventy feet below and pull When and If through the narrow cuts in shifting air with only an occasional nudge from the helmsman. Past another steep bluff and the anchorage comes into view in softer afternoon light. Now clear of the wind shadows, clean air slips by 1,800 square feet of sail cloth and When and If accelerates home like the horses, gazing at us from the fields above, head to the barn at the end of their day. Headsails come down and we shoot 43 tons on a long, measured approach to the mooring. Made fast, all hands move about on a thin cushion of air, lowering sails, stowing gear. . . .