The reuse of wooden ships: Wrecks, timber and souvenirs

Throughout prehistory and history, vast numbers of trees were required for all kinds of structures, supplemented by materials such as hides, mud, reeds, straw and stones. Although on land artificially made materials were adopted, including bricks, cement, concrete and glass, timber was the main shipbuilding material until iron and later on steel took over. The construction of just one large wooden sailing ship for the navy or for commercial use would require thousands of trees. The hull of HMS Temeraire (launched in 1798) was constructed at Chatham Dockyard in Kent using around 5,000 oak trees felled in the forests of Essex, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.2 The impact of shipbuilding on the environment was therefore significant, and it was long feared that the depletion of forests would make Britain dependent on imported timber, a concern shared by other seafaring nations. The main shortage was of seasoned oak and of timber for specific parts of a ship, such as masts. Even by the 16th century, Britain’s woodland lacked tall conifer trees, which were imported instead from Russia, the Baltic and North America, though when trade was disrupted, the navy resorted to composite masts.3 

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Royal Dockyards of Georgian England were constantly urged to be economical with timber, and timbers from ships dismantled at Chatham can be recognised in the dockyard buildings today.4 A French shipwright and spy, Blaise Ollivier, actually recorded this practice in 1737: 

The English shipwrights break their ships as soon as they are no longer fit to put to sea ... They preserve here with great care all their old ship timbers, and find a useful purpose for each timber, whether to build the dockyard buildings or to line the sides and the building platforms of their docks. I saw this economy at Portsmouth and at Chatham, where several sheds and other buildings are composed solely of old ship timbers.5

 

In 1792 a survey of woodland in England and Wales concluded that 100-year-old oak trees, essential for naval warships, were becoming scarce and that ‘it remains still an object well deserving the attention of Government, to discover some other kind of tree, which may be expected to answer instead of oak, at least in the construction of trading ships, and which will grow to sufficient size on soil not fit of tillage’.6 Britain and other seafaring nations looked much further afield for timber, and in a report on Plymouth Dockyard one newspaper commented: ‘The extraordinary number of 7,300 trees was used in Plymouth yard between January and December, 1817 ... Timber is expected from Dalmatia, and even Africa ... Some ships of war are immediately to be laid down in India ... They will be built of teak, which is very superior in hardness and durability to the best European oak.’7

Ships no longer needed might be reused by being incorporated in coastal and riverside structures, such as foundations for breakwaters and wharves, while the sides of vessels made convenient retaining walls in harbours and ports. Such recycling dates back more than two millennia, and one early example was at the ancient Egyptian port of Heracleion in the Nile Delta. Over 70 vessels from the 8th to 2nd centuries BC have been discovered and several excavated. One group had been reused to extend a jetty and create a pontoon bridge and its foundation.8 This practice is well attested from Roman times, as at Pag Island, Croatia, where several scuttled ships filled with stones helped create the ancient waterfront, while in Italy in AD 42 the Roman emperor Claudius built a harbour at Portus, near Rome, with a lighthouse supported on an artificial island whose foundations included two ships. The largest one had originally been built to transport an obelisk from Egypt to Rome for the emperor Caligula. Both hulls had been cut down to the waterline and filled with hydraulic cement, and although the timbers did not survive, the cement preserved a cast of the ships.9

The hulls of old ships, as well as disarticulated ship timbers, have been discovered in medieval waterfronts, such as at Bergen in Norway, Staveren in the Netherlands and Dublin in Ireland. This was a time in northern Europe when harbours were being improved to accommodate the increased maritime trade. Along the River Thames at London, there have been frequent discoveries of fragments of ships and ship timbers in excavations of waterfronts dating from the Roman times onwards. They include timbers from at least three large ocean-going naval vessels of the early to mid-17th century reused in a riverside wall and dock at Bellamy’s Wharf, Rotherhithe, on the south side of the Thames. At Limehouse on the north side of the river, in 1829, the Canton East Indiaman (built 1790) was turned into the foundations of a new dry dock for the shipbuilding firm of Fletcher, Son and Fearnall. This was used until 1898, but demolition proved problematic because the timbers were still in such good condition. Further downstream at Erith, in the mid-19th century, five lighters have been discovered sunk end-to-end to form a river wall, yielding invaluable evidence about what was once the most ubiquitous vessel on the River Thames, carrying cargoes such as coal and building materials. The name of one even survived – Minnie.10

Condemned or redundant wooden ships that were still in reasonable condition might be converted to floating hulks by removing their masts and rigging and perhaps adding structures and a roof. They had varied uses, and many nations made use of them to hold prisoners-of-war and civilian convicts. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain relied on prison hulks, which were generally two- or three-deckers moored at Woolwich, Sheerness, Chatham, Plymouth, Gosport, Portsmouth and nearby Langstone Harbour.11 In 1812, after breaking his parole, General René-Martin Pillet was confined on board the Brunswick prison hulk at Chatham. He complained about the conditions: ‘The hulks are moored in the midst of fetid and stagnant mud, which at every tide is left bare ... The height of the deck of the Brunswick, on board of which I was confined, is exactly four feet ten inches, so that a man of the shortest stature can never stand erect.’12 

Prison hulks for civilian convicts also housed those waiting to be transported to Australia. In February 1809 James Vaux was sentenced to death for theft, but on being commuted to transportation for life, he was taken to the Retribution hulk on the River Thames at Woolwich: ‘There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed; and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants.’13 Before being appointed to a warship, naval recruits (even volunteers) were frequently held on board hulks, causing much resentment because they were little better than prison hulks. Some hulks were converted into floating chapels for seamen, as at Bristol City Docks, where in the 1820s the Aristomenes was purchased by the Seamen’s Friend Society as a place of worship. This was replaced in 1846 by the redundant Aetna naval bomb-ship, and at the opening ceremony the Reverend Wood commented that ‘in an age of novelties, it was a great novelty to see a vessel of war lighted with gas, and fitted up as a chapel; indeed, he believed that it was the first vessel that ever was so lit’.14

In times of war, hulks of old merchant and fishing vessels as well as warships might be scuttled to obstruct or blockade ports, usually weighted down with rocks and stones. Hulks were also converted into weapons for one-off assaults on the enemy. At Algeciras in Spain during the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779–83), nine old Spanish vessels were made into fireships by packing them with tar, gunpowder, other flammable material and fuses. On 6 June 1780 they were taken across the Bay of Gibraltar to destroy a Royal Navy squadron, but the mission failed. Two years later ten redundant merchant ships were turned into floating batteries by reinforcing the hulls with timber, cork, hides and oakum (old rope), along with protective roofs. Thousands of tourists flocked to the Spanish hills to watch the attack on Gibraltar, on 13 September 1782, but it was a disaster, with immense loss of life and the destruction of floating batteries by fire.15  

Hulks could be adapted for carrying cranes and other equipment for maintaining and repairing ships in harbours, and they also acted as mooring places and storage hulks, where vessels could load or unload cargoes. The Glory of the Seas ended her working days as a hulk. Built at the East Boston shipyard of Donald McKay and launched in 1869, she was one of America’s finest clippers, involved for many years in carrying grain and coal. In 1913 she was stripped to her lower masts and converted into a refrigeration ship, and for nearly a decade the hulk (by now the property of the Glacier Fish Company of Tacoma) was towed each season to Alaska to be loaded with tons of salmon, before being towed back to Puget Sound.16

Coal hulks were especially common at coaling stations across the world,  many of them once well-known sailing ships. The Java East Indiaman, which was built of teak at Calcutta in 1813, became a coal hulk at Gibraltar around 1859, but in 1939 was sold for breaking up at Genoa in Italy, as The Times reported: ‘The ship, which had been moored in Gibraltar Bay for more than 80 years, was perhaps the most familiar mark in Gibraltar territorial waters. She ... was known to generations of merchant seamen as Hulk No. 16, for from her spacious holds thousands of merchant vessels have been supplied with bunkering coal for the best part of a century.’17

On dry land ship hulls might be turned upside down and converted into dwellings. In his novel David Copperfield Charles Dickens describes Copperfield being taken by Ham Peggotty to stay with his family at Great Yarmouth: 

...we came out upon the dull waste I had already seen at a distance; when Ham said, 

“Yon’s our house, Mas’r Davy!” 

I looked in all directions, as far I could stare over the wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make out. There was a black barge, or some other kind of superannuated boat, not far off, high and dry on the ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and smoking very coseyly; but nothing else in the way of a habitation that was visible to me. 

“That’s not it?” said I. “That ship-looking thing?” 

“That’s it, Mas’r Davy,” returned Ham.18

 

Copperfield was thrilled: ‘There was a delightful door cut in the side, and it was roofed in, and there were little windows in it; but the wonderful charm of it was, that it was a real boat which had no doubt been upon the water hundreds of times, and which had never intended to be lived in, on dry land.’19 Also easily recognised along the coast were sheds and storage huts made from boats that had been sawn in half and set upright. In the years before metal hulls, such structures must have been commonplace. When passing through the village of Beadnell in Northumberland in 1858, the traveller Walter White noticed such boats being used by fishermen, ‘amphibious edifices, half boat and half hovel, receptacles for yarns and lines’. A 17th-century Dutch painting (‘Winter Landscape with Skaters’ by Hendrick Avercamp) even shows a sawn boat turned into a latrine.20

Much more common on land was the construction or repair of buildings using old ship timbers salvaged from wrecks along the coast or sold by shipbreakers. When travelling along the Norfolk coast in October 1722, the writer Daniel Defoe saw how the inhabitants benefited from shipwrecks:

As I went by land from Yarmouth Northward, along the shoar towards Cromer aforesaid, and was not then fully master of the reason of these things, I was surpriz’d to see, in all the way from Winterton, that the farmers, and country people had scarce a barn, or a shed, or a stable; nay, not the pales of their yards, and gardens, not a hogstye, not a necessary-house, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers, &c., the wrecks of ships, and ruins of mariners, and merchant’s fortunes; and in some places were whole yards fill’d, and piled up very high with the same stuff laid up, as I suppos’d to sell for the like building purposes, as there should be occasion.21 

 

There is a tendency to claim a nautical origin for every old beam in a building, especially if there are signs of reuse, since this is a more evocative provenance than reused materials from some nearby structure. The further from the coast, recycled ship timbers are less likely because of the problems and costs of transport in the past. At times there are tell-tale signs that timbers did indeed come from ships, including their shape, evidence of how they were originally fixed in place, and sometimes marks made during shipbuilding.22 

Shipbreakers purchased redundant timber vessels to break up, and the work was costly and time-consuming because of all the nails, bolts and other iron and copper fittings. They made money by selling the timber, primarily for building or joinery, as well as for shipbuilding and repairs, and by selling any metal fittings that could be salvaged. Much scrap timber was sold for firewood, but more valuable timber and fittings were usually auctioned, as at Bristol in November 1846: 

AT REDCLIFF WHARF, BRISTOL, 

On WEDNESDAY next, NOVEMBER 25, at Eleven o’Clock, 

THE HULL of the Seamen’s Floating Chapel; 

also sundry valuable MATERIALS of H.M.S. AETNA 

(now converted into a floating Chapel), consisting of double-bar-relied patent capstan complete, rudder, tiller, wheel, pumps, beams, stanchions, masts, skylights, companion, timber fit for building purposes, and a variety of articles too numerous to particularise in an advertisement.23

 

Shipbreakers generally worked on a beach or foreshore, such as the Thames. In 1936 the maritime journalist Frank C Bowen wrote that it was too expensive in America to break up timber ships and their usual practice was to burn ships in order to recover valuable metals.24 As a child in the 1920s and 1930s Ed Shields witnessed such shipbreaking by Nieder & Marcus on the Puget Sound at Seattle. Established in 1908, this company  dealt mainly with marine salvage and scrap metals. For timber vessels they removed anything useful at their wharf, such as donkey engines and rigging wire, and after suitable preparation would tow each hulk to a nearby beach and soak it with oil. At high tide, the hulk was set alight, which would burn for hours and be visible for miles around. Afterwards the workers gathered up tons of scrap metal to be sent to the steel mills.25 

All too often the name of the vessel from which reused timber originated was unknown or forgotten, but occasionally a ship’s name has survived. During the War of 1812, the American frigate Chesapeake was refitting in Boston harbour, which was being blockaded by HMS Shannon. American frigates were more strongly built than British ones, and on 1 June 1813 her captain decided to break out, but the Shannon’s crew was thoroughly trained in gunnery. The Chesapeake was severely damaged and then captured, but after being repaired, she was taken into the Royal Navy. In 1819 the ship was sold to Joshua Holmes, who had shipbreaking operations close to Portsmouth Dockyard. Much of the timber, primarily pine and oak, was sold for building houses, but some went to Mr John Prior, a miller, for the construction of a new watermill on the River Meon at the nearby village of Wickham. It has since been known as ‘Chesapeake Mill’.26

Work on a new building for Liberty’s department store in Great Marlborough Street, London, started in 1922, in the Tudor revival style. Timber was purchased from two scrapped naval vessels – the  second-rate two-decker HMS Hindostan (launched 1841) and the screw first-rate three-decker HMS Howe (launched 1860), both of which were broken up by J B Garnham and Sons at Woolwich in 1921. Over 24,000 cubic feet of recycled wood was used, and the decking formed the floors of the store. Arthur Lasenby Liberty, the store’s founder, is said to have ‘imagined docking a ship in the middle of London’s shopping streets, laden with art and design treasures sourced from the four corners of the globe’.27

Timber from specific ships was prized for making souvenirs, and the more famous the ship, the greater the demand. The Temeraire, known for her role at the Battle of Trafalgar, was sold for breaking up in 1838 to the shipbreaker and timber merchant John Beatson at Rotherhithe on the Thames.28 Two years later, the Belfast Commercial Chronicle reported that much of the timber had been sold to craftsmen:  

The wood which composed the old Temeraire has fetched large prices, and a great portion of it has been converted into chairs, tables, snuff-boxes, cigar cases, ladies’ workboxes, and other articles. The family of the gallant Admiral Harvey, who took such a distinguished part in the great naval victory of Trafalgar, have had numerous pieces of ornamental furniture manufactured out of the oak of the Temeraire ... Admirals, captains, and other naval officers, have eagerly sought relics of the Temeraire, and some thousands of snuff-boxes have been made out of her remains.29

 

One intriguing story of ship souvenirs relates to the Betsy Cains, though the very first issue of The Mariner’s Mirror in 1911 debunked the legend surrounding her. It was claimed that she was built in the early 17th century as the Princess Mary and in 1688 brought the Prince of Orange to England – the start of the Glorious Revolution and his reign as King William III. This royal yacht was subsequently sold and used for trade with the West Indies under the name Betsy Cains. Later on she was converted to a collier, carrying coal from Newcastle to London, until she was wrecked on the Black Midden rocks near the mouth of the River Tyne in February 1827. According to various Lloyd’s Registers, the Betsy Cains was actually built in the King’s Yard in 1720, so there was no connection with William III.30 News of the wreck nevertheless spread far and wide, focusing on the legendary association, as The Leisure Hour explained some three decades later: 

The news of her disaster excited a very lively sensation throughout the country ... As soon as the news of her wreck became known throughout the country, the people of Shields were inundated with applications for portions of her remains. The applications on the part of the Orange Lodges were especially importunate. Snuff-boxes and souvenirs of various kinds were made in large numbers, and brought exorbitant prices.31

 

When rumours circulated in 1922 that the hulk of the Glory of the Seas at Seattle was to be scrapped, a campaign began to buy, refit and rerig the vessel and use her as a maritime museum. Instead she was burned on the beach by the shipbreakers Nieder & Marcus at Endolyne near Seattle on 13 May 1923 in order to recover the metal fittings. A local maritime artist, W Francis, reported that very few people witnessed the event, which would have attracted thousands had they known: 

The bow of the Glory was almost under the trees that grow on the high banks and when I arrived there the hull had been burning a few hours. However, nothing was left of her but a fire-punctured shell, a section of which would occasionally fall into the water with a dull explosion. The badly charred fore and main masts had fallen alongside, while the mizzen was hanging over the port quarter, the whole mixed up with bolts, wire and remnants of another burned hull ... The day was gloomy and threatening, the water calm and silent and the scene rather melancholy, so that riding home I felt as though returning from the funeral of an old friend.32

 

The historic vessel could not be rescued, and there were no souvenirs, only memories and a destructive method of dealing with the remains of an old timber ship. As iron and steel took over from wood, the way of life in coastal settlements changed, as did shipbreaking, and a completely new recycling industry developed. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Lloyd’s Register Group or Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

• Reuse of ship timbers in buildings: myth and reality 

• For coal hulks, see Coal at Sea: The Hazards of Cargoes, Bunkers, Loading, Unloading, Trimming and Shifting 

• The Java, a coal hulk and tragic end 

• ‘Drake’s Chair’, made of timbers from the Golden Hind  

• Nieder and Marcus shipbreakers  

• The Resolute Desk, used by several Presidents of the USA in the White House, made of timber from HMS Resolute