Tidbits: "I Never Thought of it Like That!"

 

View of the main mast looking up from the deck

The mast! 120 feet/36 meters tall, it goes clear through all the decks and sits in a massive collar on the base. (I have a photo of it which I'll add to this post when I find it.) In the past it was made of laminated wood wedges; in the refit it was switched to metal. Same strength for half the weight, less maintenance and as long as we can effectively tell the historical story, every dollar not spent on ship’s maintenance is a dollar we can spend on education. But a surprisingly frequent question we gat is whether the original masts were also made of steel (I’m not even sure that existed in the 17th century?). “Sir/ma’am, if there really was a perfectly straight, 37-metre tall tree in Spain…the government likely wouldn’t let us cut it down for this project.” Much of Europe had used up easily accessible resources by this time, deforested and mined out. If they hadn’t accessed the resources of the western hemisphere, I’m not sure what history would have looked like but it wouldn’t have been what we now know. On of my visitors yesterday also pointed out that over the centuries we’ve done reverse genetic selection—cutting down the best strongest trees and leaving the less desirable ones to reproduce.