Restoring a 100-Year-Old Sailing Dinghy. Ep. 3 Replacing Timbers & the Story of Mahogany

So this here is the mechanism by which the centre plate is raised up and it should be it's a pulley on a plate which is fixed into here and what has happened is that over the years the water has got in underneath these screws, laid there probably fresh water and has rotted away the oak all around it. Hello and welcome back. Well you know that point in a restoration where you seem to be working on it a long time and you've still got a long way to go? Well I think we've kind of reached that point. In this episode we're going to be replacing some of the rotten planks, we're going to be rebuilding the centre plate casing and we're going to be continuing to look at the history of Odette which takes a more sombre and serious turn. Thank you. Right let's make sure we've got it the right way, that way. I think that'll do. Are you filming? Right now, there he is. Can you just lift that one out like that for me? Yep. Yeah. You haven't got the rule on that. Oh sorry. These are the right rules? In the yellow? Yeah. Perfect. Ready? You may remember that last time I removed the centre plate casing and cast it to one side. Well now it's time to look at the damage and see what can be done. So this is the, just the kind of extra protection and thickening on the centre plate casing. When we take this off, which is kind of coming off, we'll begin to see the extent of the damage beneath it which isn't looking great. That looks a horrible mess doesn't it? Carble rock and crack and bleurgh. So we're going to have to think quite carefully about what we do about that. So I think the plan is going to be clean this up and then we're going to cut away a whole section there and a whole section there to replace that piece of wood in the bank. It's possible it's a bit of old kitchen. Right, put that in like that. That's good. Yeah. Do you want the clamp on? Yeah. Okay so we're now beginning to think about the sail. This is the original sail. It's in quite, it's in relatively good condition but there's some nasty holes in it. It's paper thin and it's very very thin and we don't know if that's because it was designed, well partly because it was designed to be thin but also probably because of age. This is the gaff which is all covered in old varnish which is pooled and blistering and we're just going to take the sail off now. It's even got the original lovely brass pulleys here and she has a sail number which is 35. When I began restoring this boat I thought mostly about the people who'd built her. The boat builders, the sail makers, the people who sailed her but as the restoration went on I found myself looking more closely at the timber itself. Not simply asking how it had been worked but where it had come from and what was its story. Of course these questions turned out to be much larger than I expected. So it looks like the closest wood it resembles is this one, Honduras Mahogany. Odette's story doesn't really start at Laver's Yard in Dartmouth. It goes back far further to another world but an episode of the story which is just as important to understand as any other. Today we know this country as Belize. When Odette was built it was still British Honduras. Unlike many Caribbean colonies whose wealth depended on sugar, British Honduras grew around timber. First logwood then mahogany. The Honduras Mahogany trees are very tall and rise 40 to 50 feet to the branches. This noble tree, the mahogany is perhaps the most majestic of timber trees. Thomas Belt, an English naturalist who travelled through Central America in the 19th century. The forests of what is now Belize were unlike anything most Europeans had ever known. Dense tropical rainforest, hundreds of tree species growing together, vines, orchids, insects, birds and scattered amongst them mahogany. Finding the tree was only the beginning. Everything that followed depended upon human labour. And if I'm honest that's the part of the story I had thought least about. The tree had to be felled with axes, its branches removed, its trunk roughly squared, then somehow moved through a swamp and forests towards the rivers. It was dangerous work, it was exhausting work and for much of the 18th and early 19th century it relied upon enslaved African labour. That history is inseparable from the history of the wood itself. When slavery ended across the empire in 1834 these forests did not fall silent. The industry adapted. Historians describe a gradual transition towards wage labour, seasonal contracts, debt relationships and company systems that still tied many workers closely to the timber trade. Legally the world had changed but economically change was slower. The forests still demanded labour, Britain still demanded mahogany. By the early 20th century the forests were changing. The largest and most accessible trees had already disappeared from many areas. Railways, tractors and roads pushed logging deeper inland. Foresters were beginning to worry about how much remained. One British Honduras report warned that the best mahogany was becoming increasingly difficult to reach. The frontier had not ended, it had simply moved further into the rainforest. But why was mahogany used to build Odette? Why not use native timbers like elm and oak which were plentiful locally? The answer to that is simple, fashion. For 200 years mahogany furniture was associated with wealth, prestige and luxury. I guess the uncomfortable truth is that having a mahogany boat put you a cut above the ordinary working clinker vessels around you. It was a question of class. Wooden boats are not all romantic and there is a temptation to think of the past as much simpler than it really was. There's so much we can learn from the past but not all of it is positive. The history of mahogany is one of suffering and exploitation and maybe we should be looking at those rhymes from history and applying them to today, making sure that we don't make the same mistakes. Well, thanks very much for watching. Hope you've found this slightly different episode interesting and helpful. Next time we're going to be continuing with the restoration, we're going to be making some oars, we're going to be getting the boat very close to finished and putting it in the water. So thanks again for watching and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.