Kimberly Hagen
MARSHFIELD — Vermont may be landlocked, but the art of historic sail making will be the focus of a weekend symposium July 25 and 26 called “Reclaiming the Art of Historic Sailmaking” at the Weaver’s Croft in Marshfield. Owner and founder Kate Smith is bringing together an international group of experts to discuss — in one place, and for the first time ever — what they have each learned about historic sail making.
Participants will share reproductions of the historic sails they have woven by hand, from woolen types used on Viking ships to hemp, cotton, and linen sails used over the centuries on other sailing vessels.
One of the more interesting aspects of this craft is the various mixtures used to waterproof the sails. Translations and an odd vocabulary make for some wild speculation and great fun in trying some of these brews and how to apply them to the sail cloth.
A symposium focused on historic sail making is unique. Notes Smith, “This has never really been done before.”
Several individuals had been researching independently, and some had worked on recreating the sails they were researching. But they were not necessarily in communication with each other. Smith’s conversation with a colleague in southern New England who was weaving a replica sail that would also exhibit the journey of slaves that might have traveled under such a sail, led to more research and more conversations with others across the Atlantic. From these conversations came the idea of bringing all these people together for a symposium to share knowledge and explore more ideas, and to maybe figure things out together.
“It’s particularly of the colonial time … There is hardly anything written about it so we are trying to figure it out. So much of it is really still a mystery.”
Researchers speculate that someone, somewhere, grew weary of pulling and pushing an oar and, feeling a strong wind, spontaneously held up their sarong or cape and tried to capture that wind to move their boat. Maybe it was more than one person. And it’s likely it happened in multiple places. Nevertheless, like other significant technological breakthroughs that have great practical application, the idea of the sail probably spread rapidly.
Pre-sailing days meant moving goods with people power, either by foot or cart on land, or with a paddle and oars on water. While the simple paddle was itself a technological breakthrough, it still required human energy. This was still a very finite source, as people wore out, and that in many instances promoted the use of captured humans, i.e., slaves.
The sail no doubt started out as a remarkably simple piece of equipment, and the earliest evidence of its use exists in drawings from numerous places, the oldest originating from the mideast over 5,000 years ago. And that’s about all that anyone knows.
But over the centuries of human history, the art of making a sail was fine-tuned, utilizing whatever materials were at hand. Curiously, there is very little documentation of how to make what constitutes a “good sail,” yet (very) opinionated references are made in multiple bodies of literature — from the Icelandic sagas, to the British government’s purchases for the Royal Navy, to merchants shipping their goods across the Atlantic — about the performance and durability of a good sail.
So why is it that there is so little information on how to make sails considering how important they were to moving humans and goods, and what materials and techniques were used? Where was the sail cloth made? Who wove the cloth? What types of looms were used? Bringing these researchers together from different parts of the world also in pursuit of answers to these questions, may produce some.
By studying fragments of textiles from archeological sites and combing through archives and museums, some interesting facts are slowly getting pieced together through a mixture of trial and error and hard material evidence.
Pooling knowledge and recreating these sails will advance the understanding of human history.
“This study group will continue as we find out more and we’ll get together again,” says Smith.
