San 1 fon1 ia PHOTOGR?)PHS REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS WRITTEN ISTORICAL AND DESCRIPT VE DATA i i c Arne .i can Eng i 11 r n Pe conj Na onal Park Service rtmen of the Int r r P.O. Bm< 37127 Wash ngton, D .. 2001 7 27 IllSTORIC AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD SHIP BALCLUTHA (Ship Star of Alaska) (Ship Pacific Queen) HAER No. CA-54 Rig/Type of craft: Ship Trade: Cargo Official Number: 3882 Principal Length: 256.3 1 Gross tonnage: 1862 Dimensions: Beam: 38.5' Net tonnage: 1590 Depth: 17.5 Location: Hyde Street Pier San Francisco, California Date of Construction: 1886 Designer: Unknown Builder: Charles Connell & Co. Scotstoun, Scotland Present Owner: National Park Service San Francisco, California Present Use: Historic ship exhibit Significance: One of the. last surviving steel-hulled full­ rigged ships. Vessel involved in the 19th century Pacific Coast grain trade and the 20th century Pacific Coast salmon packing trade. Researcher: Norman J. Brouwer South Street Seaport Museum, New York, 1990 Ship BALCLUTHA ( HAER No. CA-54 Page 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Background: The Sailing Ship and the Industrial Revolution 3 Robert McMillan, Owner of the BALCLUTHA 8 SIRENIA, the Brief Career of the Only Near-sistership 13 Charles Connell & Co., Builders of the BALCLUTHA 18 The Building of the BALCLUTHA 21 BALCLUTHA's Career Under the British Merchant Ensign 35 BALCLUTHA's Years in the Pacific Lumbar Trade 52 BALCLUTHA's Years In the Alaska Salmon Packing Trade 57 PACIFIC QUEEN, "Ark of Nautical curiosities" 66 BALCLUTHA and the San Francisco Maritime Museum 76 The Design of BALCLUTHA 88 Endnotes 97 Appendix 1. Ships Built by Charles Connell & Co. 105 Appendix 2 The Charles Connell Letters 125 Appendix 3. Movements of the BALCLUTHA 1886-1989 145 Appendix 4. The Alaska Packers' Repairs and Alterations 156 Appendix 5. Specifications for the 1954 Restoration 159 Appendix 6. Surviving Artifacts from the BALCLUTHA 170 Appendix 7. Surviving Plans of the BALCLUTHA 173 Bibliography 174 Ship BALCLUTHA HAER No. CA-54 Page 3 Background: The Sailing Ship and the Industrial Revolution The industrial age got underway in the British Isles in the early 1700s, with the development of the first successful steam engines, and major advances in methods of producing iron. Britain continued to lead the world in industrialization through the remainder of that century and much of the next. One result of the industrial revolution was an equally dramatic transport revolution also having its beginnings in the British Isles, as means were sought to keep growing industries supplied with raw materials and to carry the finished products to consumers. These two revolutions were to have profound effects on the development of the sailing vessel. Through the 1600s the world's merchant ships were small in size and numbers, and engaged primarily in the movement of luxury items. Britain's sailing merchant fleet began to expand in the 1700s with the development of a major export trade in textiles to the continent of Europe. As the industrial revolution grew this expansion of the fleet accelerated. The ultimate effect of the industrial revolution on the sailing vessel was its virtual extinction as a means of transporting people and goods. However, this process was not completed until the midpoint of the 20th century. First, the sailing vessel went through the most dramatic period of technological evolution in its long history. Most of this evolution was to take place within the span of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of that century the typical sailing vessel was little over 100 feet in length, and had a wooden hull, wooden spars, and hemp rigging. At the end of the century the typical deepwater sailing vessel was around 300 feet in length, and had a steel hull, steel spars, and much of its rigging made of steel wire. The sailing vessel that had evolved by the late 1800s was a technological anachronism. In its fabric it was almost totally a product of the industrial era. In its mode of operation, utilizing only wind and human muscle, it remained a survival from the pre-industrial age. Much of the early history of the industrial revolution is the story of the search for substitutes for wood. It was a Ship BALCLUTHA HAER No. CA-54 Page 4 declining supply of wood for fuel that led Britain to develop a major coal mining industry. This in turn led to the development of the steam engine, initially as a means of pumping water out of the increasingly deeper workings. By the late 1700s Britain was also experiencing a growing shortage of good shipbuilding timber. The naval wars with Napoleon, which lasted until 1815, worsened the problem, while demonstrating the uncertainty of alternate overseas sources. The first metal substituted for wood in the construction of ships was wrought iron. Henry Cort revolutionized the production of malleable iron with his invention of the rolling mill, patented in 1784. Three years later John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson built the first iron-hulled boat. 1 Over the next few decades a number of iron canal boats and river craft were built in Britain, but apparently no vessels intended for use on the open sea. The first iron vessel to appear in Lloyd's Register of Shipping was the ketch GOLIATH built at Liverpool, England in 1836. The first deepwater sailing ship built of iron was the IRONSIDES, a full-rigged ship launched at Liverpool in 1838. 2 During the 1840s British production of iron sailing ships averaged around a half dozen a year. In the 1850s this increased to over two dozen a year. Construction boomed in the 1860s. In 1864 alone, 154 iron sailing vessels were launched in the British Isles. 3 The construction of wooden sailing ships for deepwater trade virtually ceased in Britain during the 1870s. Iron hulls, in addition to reducing consumption of scarce ship timber, had some definite advantages. More paying cargo could be carried, since metal plating and frames took up less space, and a hull built of iron weighed less than the same hull built of wood. Iron hulls required less maintenance than wooden ones and were less likely to leak and damage cargo. This led to lower insurance rates. Iron hulls also had value as scrap when they were finally retired from seagoing use. There were also some disadvantages that had to be remedied. Cargo could be damaged by condensation if it came in contact with side plating. To prevent this wooden "cargo battens" were placed across the inner edges of the frames, with spaces between for ventilation. Decks continued to be built of thick, caulked wood planking, usually without plating underneath, to reduce the chance of condensation forming and dripping on the cargo. Navigation was dependent on the magnetic compass, which was strongly affected by an iron hull. The error produced on each heading could be determined by "swinging ship" before port to take comparative bearings of known landmarks. Elaborate systems of magnets and masses of soft iron placed in the binnacles that held the compasses were then used to largely Ship BALCLUTHA HAER No. CA-54 Page 5 eliminate this error. Iron hulls were susceptible to the growth of marine life such as seaweeds and barnacles, whose drag could take knots off the speed of a ship. Coppersheathing on wooden hulls repelled these organisms, but iron hulls could not be copper sheathed due to the rapid breakdown of the iron through electrolysis. This problem was eventually partially solved by the development of copper-based bottom paints. Steel was not produced on a large scale until the invention of the Bessemer converter in England in the 1850s. The first steel-hulled steamer was the MA ROBERT, pre-fabricated by Laird Brothers at Birkenhead, England in 1858 for use by Dr. Livingstone on the Zambesi River in Africa. 4 The shipbuilding firm of Jones, Quiggin & Company in Liverpool, England built the steel schooners DONIETTA and DOMITILLA in 1861 and 1863, and in the latter year launched the first deepwater sailing vessel built of steel, the 209 foot full-rigged ship FORMBY. 5 The main advantage of steel was its strength. If thinner and lighter steel plating could be used in place of thicker and heavier iron plating, the weight of paying cargo the ship could carry would be increased. Unfortunately, the rapid Bessemer process did not produce steel of sufficiently uniform quality and purity, and shipowners were also unhappy with the rapid rate of deterioration of steel plating, which corroded more rapidly than iron. As a result, steel shipbuilding failed to catch on in the 1860s. No other builders adopted the material and Jones, Quiggin, after launching two more steel sailing ships and a few steel blockade runners for our Civil War, also went back to iron. Efforts to produce suitable steel for shipbuilding continued through the 1870s. The solution was the Siemens-Martin open hearth process, largely perfected by 1877. In an open hearth furnace the molten metal was subjected to gas flames for around eight hours, resulting in a steel of uniform composition. Successful tests were performed which led Lloyd's Register to issue its first rules for the classification of steel vessels. The rules specified scantlings for steel hulls 20 per cent lighter than those for iron. In 1878 seven steel steamers were classed by Lloyd's. In 1882 10 per cent of the ships classed by Lloyd's were built of steel. By 1885, the year before BALCLUTHA was built, this figure had risen to 30 per cent. 6 The continued viability of the sailing ship in world trade in the second half of the nineteenth century was largely the result of the retarded development of the marine steam engine.