Samuel F. Manning
Description
This small book brings to focus the early settlement of coastal New England and the forgotten mast trade upon which the American lumbering and shippin
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g enterprises were built.Timber was New England's best cash crop at the beginning of colonial settlement. But not just any timber. The timber instantly salable across the Atlantic were the tallest trees in the white pine forest -- for ship's masts. Mast timber then, like petroleum today, was protected and fought over to keep ships of war in fighting condition. How post-Cromwell England commandeered stands of New England mast pines and sought to harvest them under the repressive acts of the so-called Broad Arrow Policy is a fascinating story.The heart of this book is marine illustrator Sam Manning's drawings, which depict the actual surveying of mast trees, felling them by hand, moving the big sticks to tidal estuaries by means of oxen, hand-hewing the logs to the merchantable sixteen sides, and the loading of hewn mast baulks into ships.
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