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This is only last for a month, so go and get some books. I work on the merchant's sailing ship of the early modern world primarily in the Atlantic from the history of technology perspective. I have a background in Atlantic history, maritime history, maritime archaeology, though not at the professional level, just graduate training. But I do know the discipline and I use it.
My master's degree was from East Carolina University, Maritime History, and Alkal Archaeology. It's now called Maritime Studies. That program is flourishing, thankfully. That was many moons ago.
In 2017, I finished my PhD in Maritime History at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's. The book we're talking about today grew out of the dissertation study that I did as part of that degree. What was it that led you to write a dissertation and then a book about the merchant ships that were built and operated in the British Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries?
The interest in sailing ships is very old. I got obsessed with sailing myself when I was about 19 and I'm 52, so that's been a while. It recreationally, I learned how to do it. I just kind of got this general obsession with the ocean.
I got certified as a diver. And then because I just can't stop, I eventually got certified as an instructor. So this whole being at or on or under the water was an obsession for a long long time. And it morphed into something professional by a roundabout process.
But I wrote my master's thesis in 1998 on a square-ric sailing ship. And as far as this particular project goes, I would say the origins of it came from studying the British Atlantic in this period and realizing that there really hadn't been any work done on the ordinary merchant ship that really brought together the types of source material and the disciplinary foci that really needed to come together. It seemed to me to do a proper study of it. I think it's a good example of something that sort of slipped through the cracks.
And as you know, the cracks between disciplines are more like canyons most of the time, unfortunately. So it struck me that I sort of had the background and the interest and the perspective that I might be able to pull something like that off. And it began to intrigue me that I didn't think it was as well understood as the literature sort of would lead you to believe it was. And so I thought, well, this might be a good rabbit hole to go down.
And it is an extremely broad and vicious topic. Some of your listeners will be familiar with the eminent early American scholar, Jack Green. I met with Dr. Green at the John Carter Brown Library five years ago and he asked me, he's a very nice man.
He asked me when I was working on it, told him, and said, well, that's an ambitious topic. And I said, yes, there it is. So it is indeed. And as we'll cover in the book, which we talk about the book, it's really the purpose of this project is to sort of resurrect this topic as something worth studying.
And basically just say, hey, this is not all, it's not all settled. It does have something to teach us and it's worth some work. I have to say personally, that's what surprised me when I was reading your book because on one level, it's a topic with which we, it seems like we've never really gotten away from. I mean, there's plenty of books out there about American sailing ships.
It's long had this huge cultural imprint. We talk about it in a lot of different contexts. And yet reading your book, it was fascinating to see just how little we really know about it, how little we know about the ships themselves, how they were operated. We can reconstruct them.
We can pull together a lot of details. And yet it's kind of like piecing together a skeleton of a dinosaur, which we can get, we have the general form. We know this part back here and there. But as you point out, there are these huge gaps in our knowledge that we are only really just beginning to fill in.
I like the dinosaur skeleton analogy. And I think it's apps. The reality is, you know, this is lost technology and it's been lost technology for some time. And even those who were still sailing in, let's say, 1912, say, on the big German square rangers or whatever, there was lots of about 17th, early 18th century vessels that they would not have known because those were no longer in use.
And so you mentioned that we reconstruct them. And when we do reconstruct them as I discuss a little bit in the book, there's this process of relearning just basically through trial and error, what these things do. I was wondering if you could start us off by explaining what it was that we have known about the topic until now. Basically, what is it that we've understood about the ships and what is it that we didn't really fully understand about the technology until we began this process of rediscovery?
I think we understood that there's sort of the incredulity factor. If you hang around in Jamestown or Grey's Harbor, Washington, or any number of places where they have really well done, believable, credible, operational replicas, if you hang around there and listen to visitors, I think one of the things you'll run across quickly is this incredulity. Like, I can't believe that these things did, all the things that they did. So we know how capable they were.
And we know that goes back a long ways. So I think that's common knowledge. We know we have a basic sense of, okay, these things are made of wood and they're powered by cloth sails, they're run by ropes. We know that.
I think though we don't, the biggest thing I would say that we don't appreciate in general is the, especially in this period, is the evolutionary adaptation that went on, the incremental technological change that went on against the backdrop of these really strong technological continuities that are legit, they're real, that they persisted from, let's just roughly say 1500 until 1900, or at least until most of us were no longer playing on frame, wooden construction. And so yes, those common news were real, but the common news had been over emphasized and then as I discussed, if you want to start getting a little bit mentality focused, the current obsession with innovation and that intellectual history that actually has a long history, the obsession with innovation, the obsession with drastic change, and the tendency to focus on that out of proportion, have made, that all has helped to make this technology seem static and stagnant. And I think one of the things that actually abetted that was a lot of the literature that survived from the period. And I've learned since then in more reading of history of technology outside this particular topic that one of the things we have to be careful with when we read treatises and pamphlets and handbooks and all of this wonderful stuff from the period that we rightly think is so valuable, it's like these are our written sources, is those things are all written with an agenda.
And with treatises and handbooks and pamphlets and stuff, the agenda is frequently, I'm going to tell you why the way things are now isn't acceptable and why we need to change it and how we should. And if you listen to me, everything will get better. So, you know, there's an axe to grind there to some extent. And so a lot of the technical literature from this period helps us think that this technology was high bound and overly traditionalistic and that shipwrights were this jealous, you know, closed guild of secretive practices that didn't want to innovate because they were vested interest and they wanted to protect their, their trade and their money and all this.
And, you know, always with stuff like that, there's a granite truth there. But I think it's ultimately very misleading. It doesn't encourage you to look for the ability of this technology to be responsive to changes or new challenges. It encourages you to see the opposite or to assume the opposite.
And if anything, I think studying this the way that I did shows you that no, that is not about that's not accurate. I like that point that you make in your book. And I also like how you go about explaining it, how you do it by effectively walking the reader through the various steps that you begin by explaining what, you know, the terminology period is, what these things mean. But then you begin, but then you move on to talk about things like how the ships were built, how the ships were designed, how they were operated.
And in the process, you know, focus upon those innovations. You also highlight as well those changes that were made. And I was worried to do that for us by talking about by beginning where you begin that process with how these ships were constructed. And what were the, what were those continuities and what were those innovations that you see during this two century period?
Well, they were constructed first and foremost by artisanal ship rights. These are people who came up in the, you know, what we now think of accurately as the sort of apprentice journeyman master system. Originally, they were, they were a craft guild in England, certainly going back to the late Middle Ages. So like any other skilled trade, you learned it from somebody who already knew how to do it.
And then you worked your way up. So these were not skills that were taught in some sort of vocational school, generally speaking, you didn't learn it from a book. You learned it by doing it and by watching it done by those who were really good at it. And the skills involved in doing this are difficult to acquire.
It actually, I think, to speak in a nutshell, it requires a pretty advanced level of brain programming. You have to be able to visualize and conceptualize things that most of us can't. And you have to be able to do things with your hands with your fine motor skills that most of us would really have to work long and hard to be able to do. And unlike playing a piano or tuning a Dulsomer, those fine motor skills have to be executed with a quick deal of strength as well.
So you have to be able to execute on very precise motor skill movements, but you have to do it with strength. So there's force behind it. So acquiring the skills to do it would have been a big deal. And we know that because we do it.
The people who are doing that now, you know, they know this and they know when they try to teach people to help. That it's a real learning curve to learn to do this. They were built using resources that were we wanted to send to you to just widely available. Well, they were widely available in England anymore.
And we're going to get scarce. They were widely available in the Americans, at least, especially on the Eastern Sea, were of course, so then in the West Indies. But but in the on the Eastern Sea board and certainly in Spanish, America to trees were not exactly in short supply. Having said that, you know, if there's one thing we humans are good at, it is rapid depletion of any resource we come across.
And it's important to understand that early modern people were just as good at that as we are. No, they didn't do it on the scale that we do, but they were really good at it. You know, they, for example, we know that that here where I am, they had cut down all of the really big old cypress trees that they could get to probably by 1750 or 1760. And this was not exactly the most happening crossroads of Western civilization back then.
So, you know, anything they could get to, they took it and that required adapting your techniques, you know, as your big logs disappear, well, now I'm going to make this out of three pieces. I used to make it out of one. So you got to change how you do that. But if you could get the wood, you can build one pretty much anywhere you got access to water.
So naturally enough, they were generally built next to harbors next to the mouths of rivers that led out to the sea. You just needed to build stocks, which is like scaffolding out of timber. And you get the timber that you want to use to build on the vessel in our period in our location that we're generally talking about the most common ship building timber was way out. But there were plenty of others that had had their place and there was a tendency to use a mix if it was available.
Different woods with different properties for different purposes in the ships. So most ships were in mix. They were not just one type, but if there were, white oak is going to be that wood. Generally speaking, that would need to be seasoned and needed to be dried before being used.
Greenwood is prone to rot. So it's not that you don't want to just cut a tree down and saw a millet and throw it into a ship's hole. That's a crappy way to build a ship. It was done in a hurry, you know, out of necessity, especially building, you know, small warships to meet an exigency, but not good.
Not best practice and not something that they normally would have done. Normally you would fashion a skeleton starting with that big old longitudinal bottom timber called the keel. Then you would fashion what we would think of as ribs on a called frames and those were fashioned out of several pieces. The shape of those frames would then define the shape of the hole and they would generally remain more or less the same.
Girth from about the midpoint or forward of the midpoint all the way up to where the ship started to curve into its bow at the front. These ships carried their maximum breath forward. Very consistent design trend, very consistent continuity throughout the period and not just British. Of course, I might as well just say right here, there's almost nothing unique about British or English.
The reason that that's not why I did the study about that, that has to do with the setting, the environment. As I talk about in the book, as far as technology goes, almost all this technology is originally Dutch. The Dutch gave the Atlantic basically its merchant ship technology. We learn more about that all the time.
So I'm not suggesting that these are unique to British practice. From the midpoint back, the frames are going to narrow and how much they narrow and how quickly and what particular shape. Well, that depends on the design that ship rides going for. This is all done by I.
We're not talking about blueprints. We're not talking about what we call a locking. We're talking about something that's done basically by I and by a very sophisticated understanding of proportion and the relationship of one dimension to another. That's what I kind of met by.
It seems to me that you really just need to have this conceptual and dimensional perspective in your brain that is just there. You probably, you and a lot of other people have probably heard the stories about which are true about how they've proven that the London cavities have reprogrammed brains that their brains contain London. And if they don't, they don't pass the license exam. And so, you know, psychologists have proven that these guys brains are reprogrammed to have London mapped in their heads.
I think there's some that similar going on with these ship rides. I think their brains are programmed to actually be able to conceptualize things that you're certainly not born able to do. So they fashion these things according to their concept of how it's going to be designed. What's the skeleton and then you've got deck beams that hold it up together up top.
Once the skeleton's done, it's planked. Planking is, you know, when you and I think of a plank, we think, well, you know, like a one by six or something that we would throw down on, you know, make a deck or a floorboard. These planks tended to be worn the long lines of two, three inches thick. So we would call them big, big, thick boards, but they were planks and they were they were laid over the skeleton.
And then usually fastened by a what we would call a big dowel. It was called a trundle that was driven through a carefully precisely bored hole in both pieces. And that way you've got a fastener made of the same material as the pieces being fastened. It goes into the hole so tight, banging in there with a big mallet or a sledgehammer.
That it seals and then to make it stay there, you drive a wedge into the head of it to widen it even more and anchor in there. So it's this it's the ship is hundreds of pieces. Then the seams of those planks are cocked and sealed over with pitch. So it's amazing that they were watertight given that they flexed the way that they did.
But they tended to be until they got sold and knackered, as the Bruce would say, that it was hard to keep them from working and taking on water. That was the point at which you knew if you were responsible that it was time to retire that vessel. And they had reasonably longevity very tremendously. Of course, anything you use all in the Caribbean is not going to have near as long a life as something that you would use in colder water because it's exposed to a lot more marine growth that's destructive, especially the shipworms.
So maybe five years of hard use down there. But we know if plenty of these ships that were still in service 20, maybe more years after they were built. So they were not disposable items, even though they didn't last as long as most of our steel ships do. But they had a pretty respectable longevity.
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Another aspect of the ships that was very important, which is their flexibility. How they, or you describe how you met, you alluded to the fact that you're talking about sometimes they're building small warships, they're building merchant ships. And yet as you explain in your book, those ships were not dramatically different. I mean, nowadays you can't use, say, a super tanker as an aircraft carrier.
You can't use a patrol boat as a container ship. And whereas back then the ships that they were designing and building were much more flexible in terms of their roles. Yes, that is true. And the way that I try to think about that is there was certainly much more bleed over between a merchant vessel and a warship in the 18th century and the 17th century than there is now.
I think though we can take that too far. And I think that one of the ways it's been taken too far is by perhaps assuming too much or with too much confidence that if we learn something about how a warship was built or designed, then we can just apply that to the merchant counterpart. The problem with that is that the two are built for a completely different purpose. In most cases, they are built with completely different budgetary financial considerations and they're built with different physical demands expected of them.
So while there is overlap, certainly plenty of it, I think that what we have to do when we are looking to understand, and the reason this is important is because of course the documentation, the source material on warships is much better, because the Royal Navy kept documentation of everything they ever built. We have wonderful plans, redrawing, inventories, spec sheets as we would call them of vessels, because they were naval vessels. You don't find that. These vessels were not documented that way.
There was no imperative to do that. And so merchant vessel is built to be cost effective and to carry cargo for profit. And a warship is built to be basically a floating gun platform, more so the bigger ones. But to some extent, they all were, especially by the 18th century.
Especially even in the 17th century. By the time we get to say 1640s, the divergence of warships and merchant ships was already obvious to anyone at the time who was remotely not exactly savvy. So while it was true that you could take a fast merchantman and turn her into a privateer, if you felt that that was the way to go, your battleships, they were never going to be converted to merchantman and vice versa. So anything that was a purpose-built warship wasn't a purpose-built warship, and anything that was a purpose-built merchant ship was going to remain so.
So yes, you're right, that there was a lot more overlap. But there was enough distinction that we need to be careful about trying to learn too much about merchant ships from warships. I think that the British ship story of Brian Laverie, who is well respected for good reason, has put forth a rule of thumb. I think I put this in the book, I'm pretty sure I did.
A lot of times you can sort of assume at least for the British fleet that ten of a lot of innovations on warships would appear easily about 20 years later on merchant ships. There's probably a lot of truth to that, but on the other hand, there's going to be innovations on a warship that there's not going to be an imperative to put them on a merchant ship, or maybe vice versa. Because again, they're built for two different purposes and with two different sets of financial imperatives. The Navy overmands everything.
They don't care about economies on the cruise size. They want all the able bodies that can cram on there for various reasons that we don't need to go into. But the exact opposite imperative is true of a merchant ship. The merchant owner wants a small screw he could possibly get away with because that's a big money.
And the small crew you can get away with to run that ship effectively, it just increases his bottom line. They didn't care about that. That actually gets something to talk about later in the book. That's how it's really fascinating, which is this notion of the amount of manpower necessary to operate these ships and how, while that dynamic describes very true, at the same time, these ships were so much more labor intensive than their counterparts were not even talking about modern age.
We were talking about, say, like the late 19th century, when you're already seeing innovations like steam and so forth and the use of metal ships. I was particularly struck by how you describe that one person who in the 1870s was being assigned an old rigor. He thinks it's going to be 30% more labor. It turns out it's going to take twice the amount of normal labor it would be for the ships he's used to in order to operate these types of ships that were very common place in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Yeah, exactly. It's just the difference between most of that is just the difference between a merchant ship and a warship because we're talking about Captain Rick who is in charge of the brig Niagara up in Erie. And he used to command the 1870 brig, Alyssa, which is in Galveston, Texas, if I'm not mistaken. And now when he went to the Niagara, what is a very well researched on legit reconstruction of a fast brig that was built in a hurry for the war of 1812 and the Great Lakes.
And because she was built to be a fast, maneuverable warship, she was intended to carry out a large group. And the Alyssa, which was designed to run as economically as possible, was not. So the mechanical advantage available on the Niagara, the warship was not as great. She was not rigged for mechanical advantage to the same degree that the 1870 arc was.
And the reason for that was that the more turns or falls as we call them, that you have going through your block and tackle system, the more mechanical advantage you get, the less effort it takes for you to work that rig. But it's slower because you got to run more rope through the tackle system to operate it. Well, you know, on a warship, what you're going for is speed and maneuverability. You need to be able to maneuver the vessels quickly as possible.
It might save the vessel from being destroyed. And you don't care how many minutes takes. How many minutes takes to do that? You're going to pile them on air and pay them and train them.
On a merchant ship, if you were to set things up that way, you would be totally working against your bottom line. It doesn't matter that that speed difference and the ability to move a sail on a merchant ship is not important, really. What is important is being able to cut the crew size so that you have a chance of making a profit given all of the incredible risks that are out there all the time. We know, for example, I've been on one, a New England schooner of the 19th century, which is really, really similar to a New England schooner of the 18th century.
A hundred feet on deck can be operated just fine by a crew of three. Wow. That's a pretty small crew there for. Yeah.
Yeah. But you don't have to climb the, it's a foreign after a vessel. There are no squircles. So you're not climbing the rig.
You're having this work really is your ground tackle. And it's what it's pretty, what a winless can do and a couple of guys that know how to handle a big old anchor. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.
I've got to watch the work because you would think this would be so much more brutal work than it is. And so, you know, we are good as humans at figuring out ways to supplement our brute force, which is it? Let's face it. We're not very strong.
So we usually do best when we figure out how to use our brains and our fun motor skills to overcome our lack of strength. That gets to an approach in your book that I thought was very striking, which was how in so much of history of technology, there's this idea of technology as a supplement or replacement for human labor. Whereas what you talk about in your book, because you're talking about a slightly older period than so many histories of technology, you're talking about how people are employing technology, how they are adapting ways that because they don't quite have the labor saving approaches. And I think about that in different contexts, which is, and here I'm also thinking about in terms of the role, the relationship between the people who designed the ships and the people who built the ships.
You talk about the ship rights. And I thought that was really interesting because I didn't quite appreciate the role. Nowadays, we think of it as much more segmented process. You have the people who designed the ships, people build the ships, and the designers designed the ships completely and build them.
It's a much less divided process. It's much more integrated. And the ship rights are playing this role of having a lot of autonomy to make decisions in terms of how these ships are to be built and how they're to be, you know, to a certain degree, shaped out once you get past the plans. Right.
And really what we're getting at, there's the difference between artisanal craft and what are we going to call it, industrial production, whatever. And yes, you're right, the artisanal craft person generally has a more comprehensive role than any particular person in the way that we tend to do things. You know, there's no engineer, there's no naval architect, there's no foreman of the crew. Generally speaking, I mean, I'm using generalizations here in a big yard.
There's going to be more division of labor. If you were hanging around for the big royal navy courtyard, especially once the French Revolutionary Wars cranked up, you're going to see a specialization division of labor for sure. But in a small yard, you know, on the northeast coast of England or in Ireland or in Massachusetts or Jamaica, you know, not so much. And the most important point, you know, as you suggested, is that whoever's in charge of that construction has the design in their head and is also in charge of executing.
So yes, there is that that's the nature of this kind of artisanal craft that, and I think the main reason, as I mentioned in the book that we got, that the main difference is the trial and error or the risk management strategy that an artisanal ship right was based on experience. So if you were going to innovate something, you needed a really powerful imperative to do that, because if you get it wrong, somebody could die, you lose that ship, somebody, you know, loses a bunch of money, maybe their lives. And your reputation is behind that. So you have to, if any innovator, and they did innovate, they did innovate, they innovated, they riffed on things as we would say, they improvised.
But you needed to do it with a lot of caution, because the stakes were very, very high. We can, to some extent now, and have been able to since probably the mid 19th century, we can do more to anticipate how something's going to work before we build it. And that became more important when you needed to make more quicker, more drastic changes in your technology. And it's really helpful to be able to predict what a certain thing might do.
Very imperfect, though, by no means was this infallible, nothing close. We certainly had our share of spectacular disasters post 1850, but we did increase our ability to use predictive tools, I think. They're predictive tools were experienced and an understanding of the principles. So I think while it is unfair and inaccurate to characterize them as high bound and stubbornly resistant to innovation, they were definitely conservative, because they had to be.
And we consider the amount of resources that went into building ships as perfectly understandable. I mean, this is not a cheap operation. Oh, no, no, no, no, it never has been. You know, you can, there's that old quick, you know, only rich countries have navies.
Well, you got to have money to have a ship. I don't care what kind of ship it is. And, you know, even that's why we see so much fresh ownership, when it's why we see so many ships that have up to 32 owners. In fact, eventually the part eventually probably capped that.
They were like, this is ridiculous. And, you know, you cannot have more than this many owners. I think more typically you might find like four, but it was more common, you know, to have multiple owners of a vessel. You had to be really wealthy and well established to own one outright.
I mean, the examples that I can easily think of from our side of the pond, the Browns, the Crown Shields, the Derbys, they got rich enough over time. That they had the kind of money that they could just order ships built for themselves that they owned outright. But they didn't start out that way. And it also gets to another aspect that you're just addressing a book, which is that yes, these are expensive.
Yes, you have fresh ownership as a risk management strategy. But you also have the fact that they're not doing this as a charitable endeavor. They're seeking to make a profit from it. How do they balance that out?
I think, I think if there's anything that I can say with real confidence in terms of a conclusion from this book, because the book, to a very large extent, is a preliminary exploratory study that wants to raise questions a lot more than answer them. But one of the things that is clear is every decision they made was a risk management. Every decision they made was a risk mitigation, because to do it at all was so risky. You know, to engage in this at all was so risky in every way that once you committed to engaging in it, then you're almost obsessed with trying to mitigate those risks as best you can.
And so things like, well, why didn't you just get bigger when they could have? Well, because a better risk management strategy was to build more ships that were smaller than build few more ships that were bigger. It goes back to don't put all your eggs in one basket, that kind of thing. So in a way, it's kind of a form of diversification.
And speaking of diversification, most ship owners had other things going on that they were not fully invested in ship owning. Because it was too risky, they had other concerns for the most part. Unless it was like Captain so-and-so who managed to save enough money to buy his own scooter and he does like an undersell trade, you know, locally. Yeah, he might be.
That might be all he has. But a merchant ship owner, he's got his fingers in a lot of pots. It is that Belsian is fascinating. It kind of underscores some of the things you talked about earlier in the book, which is that a lot of designs were concerned because they wanted to go with what works and not building something.
So innovated that, I think you have the famous example of the Swedish ship that collapsed in the harbor off Stockholm in the 17th century. This great example of a ship that was very pushing the boundaries for the result of it. Right. The VASA is a perfect example of what happens when you let politicians design ships.
And again, I talked about the different imperatives between worship design and merchant ship design. It was just, you know, the VASA was to be a statement and it's got to have more guns, bigger guns, you know, be more grand and more impressive and more intimidating than anybody else's flagship. And unfortunately, the people who were charged the building that thing did not have the ability to push back against the politicians and say, hey, you know, you don't want to do this. This is not good practice.
Whereas, you know, on a much more prosaic scale, I talk about a correspondence in the book where you've got a British investor in England who's corresponding with his business associate Philadelphia, and they're working to get a vessel built. And one of the things that they dress in the correspondence is that, well, the shipwright has come back and said that he will not do this. He will not build to this particular dimension. He's going to alter this dimension.
I believe it was the breadth to death ratio, which is typical that's a big one. That influences stability as much as anything. He said, no, he's what you asked for. He said he can't do that.
And it points out, and Charles West was a prominent Philadelphia shipbuilder. He had a reputation protecting you. He was doing the confidence and the autonomy to say, no, we're not doing that. And the owner really had no choice but to acquiesce.
He wasn't given an option. He could have taken his money and gone. But you know, the thing is he'd already committed. So, you know, if you're not going to trust the shipwright, why'd you hire him?
So, you know, these guys were at the mercy to set up to a large degree of these shipwrights and they needed to trust them. And not try to put pressure on them like the pressure that William Hudson complained about where to beat the tax rule owners were having their shipwrights on design vessels that proportionally were less than ideal. And in his view, dangerous, just as a rule-beating measure. And he said, this is a terrible practice.
It shouldn't be allowed. And, you know, it's pretty short-sighted. I think on the part of the shipwright to agree to do that because if that's a word founder and word gets around the docks that, you know, well, you know, he let himself be pressured into doing this. It's not good for his future prospects.
Yeah, it was going back to the example of the boss that we were talking about. I mean, it strikes me that the shipwrights were doing the owners, a real favor, even if the owners didn't appreciate it because in the end, the Swedish state can absorb the loss of the expenditure of a warship. Whereas those owners, you know, if they do something reckless, it turns out to be very penny-wise and pound foolish because they'll avoid the tax, but then they're going to have to eat the loss of the ship. Well, it's like that wonderful rant that I put in there almost verbatim because it's so good of John Crown and Shield.
And we don't know if he actually ever sent a letter. It'd be interesting to know if he did. Of course, Manus doesn't make that clear, but he's just absolutely going off on his father and brother for sending him to see in that vessel that was so poorly equipped for winter at Land of Crossing. And he talks about how long it took, how ridiculously long it took, how uncomfortable it was, how many things broke, you know, how poor a voyage it was because, you know, the owners wanted to save a few pounds by not bidding the ship out properly for that trip.
And that's his whole point is that, you know, this is penny-wise and pound foolish. We would have been way better off and we would have made a lot more money if you had gone ahead and ponied up the whatever it would have taken to properly prepare for this. Well, we think about your time, but before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now? I am working on what we call a micro history, the working title of which is a Boston schooner in the Royal Navy, Commerce and Conflict in maritime British America, 1768 to 1772, which takes a look at the four-year service of the little schooner, Sultana, as a British customs interceptor for the Navy, in the towns and duties period, which deteriorated quite a bit, helped relations between the eastern seaboard and London to deteriorate quite a bit in that period of time.
And a micro history, of course, is a way of taking a specific event or series of events and using that as an entree into something broader and more important. And so it's going to take up some of the questions that were raised in this book, but it's like, okay, so you've got a British American technology adopted by the establishment of the Royal Navy to use against, basically as a stick against British American commerce. So it brings up all the issues of the maturing British American maritime economy, how the British state was responding to that, and the policies that it was developing and trying to enforce, and the technological aspect of that. We know a lot about this vessel because, because she was bought into the Navy, she was completely thoroughly documented.
There is a very careful operational replica of her in Maryland that's been sailing now for almost 20 years. So just a real unusual treasure trove of source material there to use to understand how all of that works. So while this was a very broad survey of a long period of time and a big subject, this one kind of goes the other direction and really zeros in on something specific as a way of looking at broader things. It sounds like a really interesting subject.
I hope that when you complete the book, we can have you back on to discuss it. I don't see any reason why we can't. Phil Brie, thank you very much for taking some time out of here to speak with us. So we have a wonderful day.
Thank you, Mark. I appreciate it.