Schooner - Building a wooden boat on Martha's Vineyard by Alison Shaw and Tom DunlopBooks reviewed by Bruce Stannard


Schooner

Building a wooden boat on Martha’s Vineyard

by Alison Shaw and Tom Dunlop
published by Vineyard Stories.

The Martha’s Vineyard boat builders, Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin, have long enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for excellence among America’s wooden boat craftsmen. Their meticulous work in designing and building the handsome 60ft schooner Rebecca of Vineyard Haven is the subject of a beautiful new book that celebrates each phase of her construction in vivid and compelling detail.
There are any number of glossy coffee table picture books these days that dwell on the breathtaking beauty of classic boats under sail, but it is rare indeed to come across one that focuses entirely on the creation of a single vessel, documenting each and every aspect of her building, from lofting to launching.
SchoonerIn 160 lavishly illustrated colour pages, Schooner focuses on the traditional craftsmanship in wooden boat building and turns it into something approaching High Art.
In an age of built-in obsolescence in which everything from computers to plastic production yachts seems to have only a fleeting life, we look at the pages of this beautiful book and begin to understand how a vessel of significance, the product of hundreds of thousands of hours of skill and passion, ultimately assumes a unique aura, the kind of noble spirit that only plank on frame boats can posses.
Fine art photographer Alison Shaw has a painter’s eye for the subtle interplay of light and shade in the boatyard, a place in which she obviously spent a great deal of time, patiently waiting for precisely the right moments to record the often quirky details that make this book so special.
Her artist’s eye allowed her to see things that perhaps the busy boatbuilders themselves might have overlooked. She zooms in on stalactites of red lead dribbling from keel timbers under compression; the elegant symmetry of the bird’s mouth joints at the butt-end of a hollow spar; the sweeping curves of pencil lines on the dusty lofting floor; the golden arc of the unpainted hull. She invests each of these ordinary images with extra-ordinary power and interest.
Just looking at Alison Shaw’s photographs is enough to make the hair stand up on the nape of my neck.
Ross GannonThis is a fine book about the design and building of a beautiful new wooden schooner, but as Mystic Seaport’s Matthew Stackpole points out in his eloquent foreword, it’s also a story about dreams, tradition, initiative, personal vales, perseverance, a place and a community.
“Given their shared love of the sea,” he writes, “it isn’t surprising that Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin were both drawn to Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1970s. What is perhaps surprising is that they should ultimately choose to begin a business focused on what many would have then argued was a vestigial material and a dying craft.
“After all, fibreglass was the miracle material of the future and wood and the skills of wooden boat building were relics of the past. But Vineyard Haven, with both a strong history of wooden boat building and an intriguing array of wooden vessels, had attracted and inspired them both.”
Schooner - RebeccaThe creation of Gannon and Benjamin 30 years ago was welcomed by Vineyard Haven’s vibrant wooden boat community and it was this sense of island kinship that kept them going through two disasters that would have been enough to kill most small businesses.
The first was a mysterious night fire that all but destroyed the yard in October 1987. At dawn the next day, Vineyarders appeared with offers of help. They gave the boatbuilders tools their grandfathers had used. They placed orders for boats and sails and paid in advance. They lent office space, donated sewing machines, held benefit dinners and a fund-raising concert. Less than a month after the fire a shed-raising was scheduled.
At least 30 master carpenters and hundreds of regular folk came ready to build. That morning the framing lay on the ground. Two days later they were shingling the roof. Gannon and Benjamin was back in business.
But there was still another trial in store for them. In February 1998 work on the schooner Rebecca stopped when it became clear that the man who had commissioned her could no longer pay for her construction.
Schooner - Rebecca aseaGannon and Benjamin, a company that had built its reputation on individual integrity and honesty, now had to deal with complaints from a host of longtime suppliers. With Rebecca’s fitout very nearly complete, the shed was padlocked. For 21 months nothing happened at the boatyard.
In the meantime, the schooner’s owner filed for bankruptcy protection. The US federal bankruptcy court ordered the boat to be sold at auction. The successful bidders, Scottish couple Brian and Pamela Malcolm, paid US$700,000 and immediately gave the go-ahead for Rebecca’s completion. Alison Shaw and the writer, Tom Dunlop, were on hand to record the launch and the installation of Rebecca’s meticulously hand-crafted rigging.
Rebecca was the largest sailing vessel built on the island of Martha’s Vineyard since the election of President Abraham Lincoln. The book that documents her gestation deserves to be in the hands of everyone who loves wooden boats. This must surely be the boat book of the year.