The town of Cornish, New Hampshire was
created by charter in 1763, to a group of 69 incorporators led by
Reverend Samuel McClintock of Greenland, New Hampshire. Governor
Benning Wentworth granted charters to 12 other towns that year. The
charter outlined some requirements the grantees had to fulfill to be
able to keep their land. They had to plant and cultivate 5 acres for
every 50 acres of land he owned in the township after 5 years. For
the first 10 years, town incorporators had to pay one ear of Indian
corn every year on December 25th. After 10 years, they
would owe one shilling for every 100 acres, also on December 25th.
One of the most important provisions
of the grant was that all “White and other Pine Trees fit for
masting for our royal navy must be preserved for that use”.
Although England's forests had been cut down by the mid 1700's, the
British navy needed lumber to use for ship building. The Eastern
White Pine grows the tallest of any of the pine species of North
America. White Pines grow 150 – 250 feet tall. Lumber from these
trees is strong, light, and rot-resistant. Because these trees grow
so tall and straight, they were ideal for making ship masts. Much of
the speed and prowess associated with British ships was due to their
masts made out of New England White Pine.
Before Cornish was chartered, an area
just south of where the Windsor Covered Bridge is now was called the
“Mast Camp”. Every winter, representatives of the King would
travel through the woods, marking White Pines fit for becoming masts
with the “King's Broad Arrow”.
These trees were to be saved for
the Royal Navy. When Spring came and the ice broke, logging crews
set up at “Mast Camp”. These crews went into the woods, cut down
the White Pines marked with the King's Mark, and using oxen, dragged
them to the riverbank, where they dumped them into the Connecticut
River and sent them on a 200 mile trip downstream.
Cutting down White Pines was an
arduous and dangerous job. White Pines are bare of limbs for 80 or
so feet above the ground. When they fall, they can split if they
fall hard enough. If the logging was done in the winter, several
feet of snow would soften the fall of the tree. However, it wasa
impossible to house and feed a logging crew in the New Hampshire
wilderness in the dead of winter. There really couldn't have been a
“Mast Camp” in the deep snow. In the summer, lumbermen cleared
the ground underneath the mast tree from any rocks or boulders. They
chopped down smaller trees and arranged them so they would cushion
the fall of the big tree.
Once the mast tree was safely felled,
it had to be cut into a straight log. The log was cut in a proportion
of a yard in length for every inch in diameter. A ship's mast had to
be at least 24 inches in diameter, so the mast logs had to be at
least 24 yards long. Logs more than 24 inches in diameter would
match their width in length.
The logs were tied to two sets of
wheels, and up to 40 oxen pulled the mast and machine to the edge of
the river. Dragging the logs on the ground could damage them. At the
edge of the river, the huge logs were dumped into the water to begin
a 200 mile journey to Connecticut, where they were loaded on ships
specially built to transport such long cargo to Britain.
I am far, far from being an expert on
colonial ships, but I do want to explain what the mast was, for
people who may not know. The masts are the tall poles that carry the
sails of the ships. The rigging (ropes, or lines) was attached to
the mast and then the sails were attached to the rigging. When the
wind caught in the sails, it propelled the ships forward. Using the
rigging, sailors could adjust the sails to catch less wind or more
wind to go faster or slower, but in a total absence of wind, there
was nothing they could do but sit and wait. If you look at the illustration, you can easily imagine the masts being tall White Pines. This is a picture of a replica of the "HMS Bounty", a little bit more recent ship than we're talking about here, but you can get an idea of the height and straightness of the masts, as well as the extensive system of lines that made up the rigging.
Ships were steered by a steering
wheel, attached to an apparatus that led down to the bottom of the
ship that attached to a rudder. The rudder was a sort of paddle that
turned in the water, and turned the ship. Adjusting the sails could
also help a ship turn.
Commonly, British warships and
merchant ships of the 18th century had three masts. The
tallest one was in the middle of the ship, with shorter ones at
either end. Larger ships needed taller masts that would hold larger
sails to take in the increased amount of wind needed to propel more
weight. The very biggest ships had four masts. These ships could
carry a lot of cargo, but were not very fast.
Ship's masts could break, in a storm
or naval battle. When a ship's mast broke, the crew would use the
sails on the remaining whole masts to get it to a friendly port as
soon as possible, where the broken mast would be replaced with
another, temporary one, until the ship could get back to England,
where it would either be scrapped, or the mast replaced with a good
one made from Northern White Pine. Either way, a broken mast would
call for a least one more White Pine, four more if the ship was
scrapped, because a the Royal Navy would build a new ship to replace
it. The term “jury rigged” isn't as common today as it was when I
was a kid, but it means a makeshift repair job done with whatever
tools and supplies you have on hand. On my father's farm something
would be “jury rigged” with black plastic and baling twine. “Jury
rigged” is an old nautical term for fixing a broken mast at sea.
The “rigged” comes from the rigging of the sails. There is some
argument over where the “jury” comes from, but it probably comes
from the French term “joury” which means “for a day”. Thus
“jury rigged” literally means “rigged for a day”, or a
temporary rigging.
The ship mast industry continued to
supply England with White Pines until the Revolution. As time went
on, property owners grew more and more resentful over the law
reserving the White Pines for the Royal Navy. Not only did the
colonists want to use the lumber from the White Pines themselves,
they were also in the way during land clearing. Even when White Pines
fell in the forest naturally, the landowners were not allowed to
touch them. Sometimes fallen mast trees would rot on the ground if a
King's surveyor did not get around to approving it for local use. In
April of 1772, in Weare and Gofftown, New Hampshire, hatred of the
White Pine Act expressed itself in riots against King's Surveyors
inspecting local sawmills for suspected poached White Pines.
Although less well known than the
Stamp Act or the Tea Tax, the White Pine Act was equal in inflaming
the passions of the colonists against the rule of the king, inciting
the movement for independence. One of the first flags of the
Colonists during Revolutionary War featured an emblem of the White
Pine, and the tree remains on the Vermont State Flag. Throughout New
Hampshire, roads that are named “Mast Road” were once the path
used by oxen pulling the masts to a river.
