So, as steam became the dominant power source for ships, and the old sailing ships were broken up, what did people use the scrap lumber for?
I imagine most of the interior timber was used for housing material, but what about the planking that formed the outer hull?
The parts below the waterline probably weren’t good for much other than firewood (if that), what with all the barnacles and seaweed. However, the planks above the waterline would likely be free of such encrustations, but they’d also be coated with pitch, tar, and other nastiness you wouldn’t want in your home. Dockyard facilities, maybe (piers, gangplanks, taverns, warehouses, etc.)?
They built all kinds of things out of it. There were commercial ship salvage yards that broke them apart and then sold the salvageable lumber so the wood from one ship may have ended up in many different structure.
For example, there is a barn in Jordans, Buckinghamshire England that was partially built from the remains of a ship called Mayflower. Some people claim that it came from The Mayflower of Pilgrim fame but that isn’t proven because there were a number of ships with the same name. Regardless of the specific ship that the wood came from, it still serves as a good example of how the wood from them was reused.
I know several fireplace mantels made from ship parts, often found as driftwood from wrecks. I know a cottage that was a pilothouse from a tug. It was installed on a foundation and connected to the usual utilities. I know an old fisherman who whittled things like chairs from such scraps. It’s recycling at its best.
How many years did this transition take? My assumption had been that it took decades and the way the transition proceeded was that the new ships built were steam and and the sailing ships mostly continued to be used until they wore out.
I saw houses in, I think, St. Jean de Luz, France, with beams made from old sailing ships. I don’t remember how old they were, but obviously contemporary to the ships.
Sailing ships continued while it remained economic for them to do so. Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race describes his voyage in a (steel-hulled) sailing barque between England and Australia in 1939, carrying grain. Until the invention of the compound-expansion steam engine, coal consumption was too high for really long voyages to be economic and would have required significant investment in coaling stations.
I don’t think they were ever broken up because they were obsolete, they were disposed of at the end of their serviceable life and replaced by a more modern ship. This site has some info:
Curiously enough that is the same ;link that I posted earlier.
I did read a book a couple of years ago that mentioned a big Victorian shipbreakers yard on the Thames - probably Castle’s. They had a huge pile of figureheads and other richly carved wood near the entrance. Presumably sold to the highest bidder - with quite a lot of it preserved for posterity in various ways.
Either I’m amazingly transparent, or some people here are psychic. The painting “The Fighting Téméraire” is exactly what sparked this thread.
Not that I know more than Jacque Merde about art, it was just mentioned in a Bill Bailey special, and stuck with me because of it’s beauty, and the elegantly simple way it portrays the death of sail.
Some of the decorative flotsam from Titanic ended up in a pub, IIRC. The entire first-class smoking room or something like that, a whole bunch of fabulously carved and finished cabinetry from a sister ship, ended up as a dining room or pub hall as well.
