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Thursday, 21 August 2008

"Elsie" in a Bottle

By Brenton "Sandy" Dickson

As I examined the model ships in bottles that were on display at the Maine Maritime Museum, I became more and more nervous. What was I doing there? I could see no way that I was going to be able to have the patience required to make a miniature ship, let alone get it through that tiny opening and have it look like anything but bottled junk.

I was convinced that in my effort to cope with my outrage at being 70, I had chosen an activity that had gone one step too far. Five months earlier, even though I knew I couldn’t paint or draw, I took a watercolor course. After producing a number of colorful land- and seascapes, I wasn’t so sure.

I knew I couldn’t write. After taking an online creative writing course, I wasn’t so sure.

I knew my 70-year-old body was no longer capable of bending, stretching and folding in any meaningful way. After several months of yoga practice I again proved myself wrong. But, bottling a boat was out of the question!

Jim, my instructor, assured me it would be easy. When I asked him what he had done prior to teaching at the museum, he said he had supported his family for several years writing 14 novels and two maritime histories.

My fellow student, Dick, had managed the fore deck on America’s Cup yachts thirty years earlier. Both Dick and I had taken the half model boat-building course at the museum four years earlier. Difficult as that was, I was at least chiseling, shaping and carving a two-foot block of pine. That was a far cry from dealing with something the size of my thumb.

The art of putting ships in bottles began during the 1800s. Sailors passed time on long sea voyages creating these as well as other types of nautical folk art, such as scrimshaw carving on whale tusks. Many of these treasures ended up in seaports all around the world as their creators exchanged them for various things, most notably the services provided by local brothels.

Our subject was the 100-foot Gloucester fishing schooner, Elsie. Originally built in 1910 in Essex, Massachusetts, she raced and fished successfully for many years off the New England and Nova Scotia coasts. Our task was to reduce this famous vessel to three inches including bowsprit, then rig her with two masts, a mainsail, a foresail, two topsails, and three jibs, and squeeze all this through a one-inch opening of a half-gallon microbrewery beer bottle.

The Elsie was wrecked in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1935. It occurred to me that a reenactment of that event was not just possible, but a strong likelihood during our last class, when I knew I would have to make the final insertion.

Jim had carefully extracted a couple of small pieces of mahogany from the wastebasket of the museum’s Boat Shop. Using plans that had been reduced to our scale on the museum’s Xerox machine, we rough-cut the hulls. Then with Exacto knife in one hand and the scrap of mahogany in the other, we began our task.

I felt relief as each cut removed more wood than finger and an object resembling a ship’s hull actually began to emerge. After a thorough sanding, we added the decking and bulwarks. It actually looked like a fishing schooner. I was beginning to feel quite pleased with myself.

The rigging of Elsie was another matter. The masts and booms were thin, roughly a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. In order to thread the shrouds, backstays, sheets, etc., many tiny holes needed to be drilled through these spars and the hull. I regretted having ignored my doctor’s advice over the previous two years, as I had been postponing inevitable cataract surgery. My visual handicap combined with noticeable trembling in my 70-year-old fingers, resulted in a flood of inappropriate language and gestures too voluminous to include here.

Once the sails were cut and the rigging was threaded, the process entered its “religious” phase. Using what can best be described as a cross (I believe the model builder’s term is trestle), the hull was secured to the shank, and all fifteen strings of rigging were carefully labeled and tied to nails on the cross.

Labeling was crucial, because when and if all of this made its way into the bottle, each string had to be pulled in precisely the correct sequence in order to avert chaos.

I arrived at my final class consumed with apprehension. I had put the ocean (children’s modeling clay) into the bottle, and had painted it greenish blue, complete with white caps. The entry process began.

The masts lay backward on the deck and the larger sails were folded and put in first. Then, in went the hull, collapsed masts and remaining sails. In other words, the model was inserted in a relaxed posture. Once inside, the strings were pulled one at a time and the masts and sails became erect. (Quite the opposite of the procedure employed during human reproductive activity!)

After poking in a bit of glue and cutting away the excess string, I gazed in awe at my finished product. All that remained was to find a brothel!

[EDITORIAL NOTE: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. Instructions are here.]

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