Ship (Re)-Building

Rotterdam, Netherlands –

“Do you want to see the ship?”

Something told me they weren’t expecting many walk-in visitors.

Maybe it was the look on their faces, all wide-eyed and like they didn’t know what to do next.

I know they had been able to see me outside, taking pictures of the old anchor and canons that had been raised from the bottom of the sea.

I guess they just hadn’t expected me to come in.

But in I was, with my money out to pay admission.

When I handed over the fee, they discussed briefly what to do, then made a note on a slip of paper, and one of them came out to be my personal tour guide.

I had the impression that the vast majority of their visitors are groups of school kids on a field trip.

I was there in the middle of the week, in the off-season, and there wasn’t a lot of activity to be seen.

The weather was cold, so no one was working on the actual ship, outside, by the edge of the river.

They were all inside, staying warm and working on what they could.

See, a few years back, someone had found the bones of the H.S.S. Delft sticking out of the mud at the bottom of the sea.

Someone, somewhere, probably a Dutch historian, had determined that this was a significant ship in the history of Dutch warships, and that they should rebuild it.

I don’t know why. After all, I’m just a random tourist from another country, far, far away. I suppose if I were Dutch, I might understand the significance of this particular ship. But I’m not, so to me, it’s just a historic recreation that they’re building.

And they are building it, from the ground up.

After hundreds of years on the bottom of the ocean, there wasn’t anything reusable from the original.

And that’s where the challenge comes in.

See, back when the original ship was built, they didn’t have plans showing what and how they would construct a ship. They just did it.

When you’ve been building ships all your life, and learned it from your family, because it’s what they’ve been doing for generations, you don’t need plans. You know how to do it.

But that was then. Now, it’s a different story.

Ships are no longer built by hand, using only wood.

So they have to study art works from the days of the wooden ships to try and reverse engineer the building techniques.

In fact, the first couple of workshops that I was shown were where the “Masters” were all building scale models, trying to work out how they were going to build the full-size version.

Eventually we came to the workshops where the students were working, building hundreds of wooden pulleys and carving the artwork that would be mounted on the various parts of the finished ship.

Basically, they were doing whatever there was to be done while inside, in the workshops, because they didn’t want to be out in the cold, working on the actual ship.

At least not until warmer weather arrived.

I can’t say I blamed them. It was cold out. There was snow on the ground that morning, and ice in the canals.

Most of what was there to be seen was inside anyway. In the lobby area, they had built recreations of the deck area from where the ship would be piloted, complete with the wheel, a compass, and other navigational tools that would have been used during the time of the original ship.

I even got a lesson on using a sextant, so the next time I’m lost at sea, I’m ready to pitch in trying to help get un-lost. Not that I expect to ever be lost at sea.

At the end of the main hallway, past all the workshops, they had a recreation of the captain’s and crew’s quarters, complete with the furniture that would be put on the ship once it was complete.

George, my guide, admitted that the ceiling in the Captain’s quarters was quite low for a modern Dutch person. Even though it seems that every native of the country is well over six-feet in height, George claimed that this was a recent phenomenon. He said that until quite recently, the Dutch, as a people, had been much shorter, and they he had witnessed them getting taller during his years teaching at a local college.

I didn’t quite believe him, as it seems all generations are tall, not just the younger ones. But it was his story, and he was sticking to it.

Finally, we went outside, to the ship itself.

At this point, the ship was little more than the ribbing, with the Dutch Lion in place at the bow. He explained to me how the ship ribs used to be farmed, with the farmers treating the trees they were growing like large-scale Bonsai, shaping and molding the trunk as it grew from a sapling.

This would take generations of tree farmers to grow ribs for ships.

George admitted that they were taking a few liberties with this part of the construction, using far fewer ribs than would have been in the original ship. The original ship would have had the ribs spaced very close together, to help fend off any canon fire from opposing navies. Something that this recreation wouldn’t have to worry about.

Besides, it’s probably very difficult to find the remaining rib trees, already in the needed shape, since the rib farmers went out of business several generations ago.

Still, it’s a nice lion on the bow…

For more photos of the re-construction of the H.S.S.Delft, click here.