Careening across the Lowcountry in the Age of Sail

The waterways of coastal South Carolina once teemed with a large variety of wooden sailing vessels, all of which required frequent maintenance to keep their hulls in ship shape. The work of careening, or rotating a vessel to expose its lower hull, was difficult and dangerous, but so routine that few records of this work survive. In today’s episode of Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore the documentary evidence that illuminates the techniques, locations, and laborers involved in one of the Lowcountry’s least-remembered maritime traditions.

The coastal Lowcountry of South Carolina has a rich maritime heritage, spanning from prehistoric times to the present. For most of that long history, these waters were occupied by wooden vessels of varying sizes powered by human strength or by sails that harnessed the wind.[1] Steam locomotion introduced paddlewheels and then propellors that rendered sails obsolete in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, just as steel and fiberglass replaced wood as the material of choice for ship construction. Modern vessels made from state-of-the-art materials still require routine maintenance, of course, but the techniques and vocabulary of modern ship maintenance are very different from those related to the repair of wooden ships and boats. One could argue that it’s no big deal that we’ve largely forgotten the details related to the maintenance of wooden watercraft, but I disagree. If you’re curious about the people who inhabited this place before us, and the sights, sounds, and smells they experienced, then this topic is important. Careening and maintaining wooden vessels was an everyday part of Lowcountry life in centuries past.

<

What is careening?

In modern parlance, we often use the word “careening” to describe a state of being off-balance or disrupted from a state of equilibrium. A speeding car careens around a sharp curve on two wheels, for example, while a piece of tragic news sends one’s mind careening. These are modern metaphors, however, referring back to a nautical concept now unfamiliar. Careening, in the maritime sense of the word, is the act of rotating or rolling a watercraft along its longitudinal axis to expose one side of the vessel’s lower hull and keel—the bottom-most feature of a watercraft. The English verb “to careen” is derived from the Latin word for keel, carina, variants of which are still used in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. In the vocabulary of early South Carolina, the English phrase “to heave down” was a very common synonym for the act of careening. In the past tense, one might say a ship was “hove down,” as in the sentence “Blackbeard hove down his pirate ship at Ocracoke.”

Careening a vessel of any size is an exercise in physics and geometry, as we can demonstrate with a quick thought exercise. The vertical axis of a sailing vessel at rest extends from the top of its mast to its keel, while the waterline on the hull represents its horizontal axis. The intersection of these two axes forms a fulcrum on which the vessel pivots from side to side. To expose the keel above the waterline, one has to rotate the vessel to one side or the other more than forty-five degrees from the vertical axis towards the horizontal axis. Careening is similar to, but distinct from the related act of heeling. When a ship is anchored in calm waters, the crew can shift its cargo and ballast to one side of the hull to cause the vessel to lean or heel less than forty-five degrees to one side or the other. The act of heeling brings part of the lower hull above the water line, but it does not expose the keel. Both of these techniques are useful, but they are not interchangeable.

Why careen a vessel?

Careening is a prelude to the work of inspecting, cleaning, and repairing a vessel’s hull below the waterline. In fact, the term was often used in the past as a synecdoche for hull maintenance in general. “The old ship is as good as new,” one might say, “she was careened last month.” Charleston’s early newspapers contain many sale advertisements for ships of all sizes, some of which specify that the vessel in question had been “lately hove down.”

In Britain and Continental Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, numerous ports hosted drydocks and slipways designed to expedite the work of cleaning and repairing vessels by maintaining their normal upright position. Such facilities often included fixed machinery like capstans and cranes that further reduced the physical burden of the laborers involved.[2] None of these mechanical advantages were available to the early inhabitants of South Carolina, however, so careening remained a common practice here and throughout the American colonies for many generations.[3]

The wooden fabric of old sailing vessels demanded constant maintenance. In centuries past, the hull of an ocean-going ship was a massive wooden frame, like the ribcage of a whale, sheathed with a skin of wooden planks nailed in place. This organic fabric, when immersed in fresh or salt water, accumulates a coating of algae, seaweed, and barnacles that slow its movement through the water and attracts boring worms that can devour a ship’s bottom like underwater termites. Ancient mariners learned to protect their hulls by slathering them with noxious compounds like tar and tallow, and the builders of large ships often added a second layer of sacrificial wooden planks to the lower hull. To keep such a vessel in good condition and operating at maximum speed, one had to maintain the hull below the waterline at regular intervals—not unlike the modern practice of taking one’s car to a garage to get the oil changed or the tires rotated.

The frequency with which one might careen a wooden vessel in the past depended on a number of factors, including the size of the vessel, the type of water in which it sailed, and the nature of the protective materials applied to its hull. There was no general rule of frequency unless some authority dictated as much. In the early eighteenth century, for example, Britain’s Royal Navy instructed the captains of its various warships to clean their respective hulls once every four months, or three times in a calendar year. Ship captains working in the American colonies found this schedule unrealistic, however, so in 1728 the Lords of the Admiralty reduced the requirement to just two careening per year.[4]

How does one careen a vessel?

 The technique and equipment used to expose a vessel’s keel depended largely on its size, but the work generally required a strong and stable surface—like a beach, bluff, or sturdy wharf—to support the mass of the vessel. To careen a row boat, canoe, dory, or yawl, for example, several hands could simply drag it on a beach a low tide and manually turn it over to access the keel. The main principle of careening a sailing vessel, however, was to use one or more of its masts as a lever to rotate a fulcrum within the hull—that is, the intersection of the vessel’s vertical axis with the waterline.

A small sailing vessel, like a sloop or periagua, for example, could careen along a creek bluff or a wooden wharf like those extending from Charleston’s East Bay Street and those found at many riverfront plantations across the Lowcountry. After removing unnecessary cargo to lighten the hull, mariners attached ropes to the top of the mast and pulled downward until the mast descended over the bluff or wharf and the keel rose out of the water.

For medium-sized sailing vessels, the physical stress associated with this technique increased in proportion to the vessel’s size. To counteract the tension applied to the masts when careening a large sloop or a two-masted schooner, for example, crewmen attached auxiliary timbers called “shores” that extended diagonally from the deck to the mast to create an A-frame of support. To multiply the mechanical force of the crewmen hauling the ropes, they attached block and tackle to the top of each mast.

Larger sailing vessels, like brigantines, snows, and ships, required further equipment to gain additional leverage and to reduce the stress applied to the masts. To accommodate such needs, the largest vessels visiting Charleston Harbor during the eighteenth century usually heaved down at a wharf designed specifically for this sort of work. A careening wharf, in early South Carolina and in other colonies, was typically a long wooden structure built along the shoreline of a navigable river or creek and projecting slightly into the water. A ship preparing to careen would moor alongside but several yards distant from the wharf, after which the crew extended temporary gangplanks to connect the two points.

The next step was to lighten the ship by extracting unnecessary materials and carrying them to temporary storage onshore. After removing all the sails, running rigging, cables, and most of the yards, the ship’s three-part masts—composed of a lower mast, topmast, and topgallant mast—were stripped down to the fixed lower thirds. Crewmen then lifted the carriage-mounted cannon from the deck, using ropes and tackle attached the main and fore yards, placed them on the wharf, and rolled them into storage. All of the cargo and barrels of provisions were likewise lifted from the ship’s hold and rolled onshore. Crewmen standing inside the ship’s bottom then handed the iron shot and most of the ballast stones up to a succession of shipmates who passed them along and piled them onshore. Only a portion of the ballast, to be determined by the captain, was left in the hold to maintain the ship’s equilibrium. During this work, carpenters caulked the upper part of the hull facing the wharf and, if necessary, fastened temporary battens over various ports to prevent flooding while the ship was hove-down in the water.

The crew then began to attach implements to facilitate the ship’s roll towards the wharf. To the top of the fore- and mainmast they attached a pair of careening blocks—large wooden cases with brass sheaves—that multiplied the mechanical force exerted on a line rove through them. To brace the two masts, the crew affixed to each a pair of timber shores that extended from the outboard edge of the deck to the middle of the mast. To help distribute the pulling force from the blocks to the hull, the crew installed several outrigger spars across the deck that projected through gun ports over the water side of the ship. Heavy ropes led from the outboard ends of the outriggers to ringbolts set into the hull, while similar rope shrouds led from the outriggers to the mastheads. The crew rove these lines through each of the blocks at the mastheads and led the loose end or “outfall” from each block down to another block attached to a well-braced point on the deck of the wharf or on the nearby shore.

After all of this tedious preparation, which took several days to accomplish, the ship was ready to careen. Crewmen standing on the wharf pulled the rope falls in unison to rotate or “heave down” the ship. Their combined force travelled from the wharf to the mastheads, to the outboard ends of the outriggers, to the ringbolts in the opposite side of the hull. As the hull rolled toward the shore, the masts slowly descended over the wharf while the keel gradually ascended through the water on the opposite side of the ship. When they had achieved the necessary degree of heel to expose the lower hull and keel, mariners tied off or “made fast” the loose ends of the falls to secure the ship’s position. The vessel was now under a great deal of mechanical stress and tethered in a compromising position. A sudden gale or rogue wave could easily sink the hull, while a failure in any of the equipment under tension might cause a sudden, jerking movement that could snap the masts like twigs and perhaps crush anyone standing nearby. But this was a typical day in the life many South Carolinians working in the maritime industry during the age of sail.

Once a vessel has been careened, then what?

The purpose of careening was to facilitate the inspection, cleaning, and repair of a vessel’s hull below its waterline. Remember, however, that such work was complicated by the location of the job site, which was suspended over a body of water. Whether the vessel in question was a small sloop or a massive warship, the exposed area of a careened hull faced away from the shore or the wharf supporting the rest of the vessel. How was a ship carpenter supposed to perform his work, and where was he supposed to put his tools and supplies? The solution to this conundrum, in South Carolina and beyond, was to construct simple floating platforms or raft-like “stages” sturdy enough to support a number of laborers and their equipment.[5]

Standing on a floating stage tethered to the ship, carpenters could inspect the wooden hull and determine the extent of the necessary repairs. Such work might include removing rotten or damaged planks and fitting new ones, or replacing the sacrificial false keel that protected the actual keel from damage. Vessels with carvel-planked hulls—that is, boards laid edge to edge—also required regular caulking to keep the water out. Ship caulkers with specialized hammers tapped dense stands of tar-soak oakum into the seams to keep the water out, and their tedious work formed a staccato chorus that put local woodpeckers to shame.

Before copper, steel, and fiberglass coated-hulls became common, the bottom of nearly every type of watercraft was coated with some kind of anti-fouling and water-proofing substance. Row boats and small sailing vessels in the Lowcountry commonly received a simple coating of pitch, which is boiled tar made from distilled pine resin.[6] Pitch and tar were also widely used to waterproof ropes, cables, and textiles, but the hulls of larger, ocean-going vessels usually received a more substantial form of protection. Over the planking and caulking, and perhaps over a generous layer of pitch, laborers slathered a viscous compound called “graving.” The ingredients varied, but graving generally included some combination of tallow (rendered animal fat), quicklime, white lead, and rosin. A vessel with a black bottom had minimal graving, while a ship with a white bottom had a more expensive, fatty graving suffused with toxic lime and lead.

The unpleasant work of applying pitch and graving to the bottom of a wooden vessel was rendered even more disagreeable by several extenuating circumstances. First, any remnants of an older layer of graving had to be removed by a process called “breaming.” Workers gathered reeds and pine brush from local maritime forests to create torches that they held against the hull. While the flames burned the accumulated bio-growth and melted the old graving, workers used iron tools to scrape the residue from the wooden hull into the water below.[7] After the surface was thoroughly breamed, all of the ingredients for the fresh graving had to be heated before application. If thoughts of boiling animal fat and tar turn your stomach, consider one other common factor. Because the laborers stood on platforms floating off-shore, the graving materials were often heated in iron cauldrons standing on the same platforms. In short, the men performing the breaming and graving worked in a noxious atmosphere of acrid fumes and smoke, and occasionally suffered burns from the bubbling brew near their feet.[8]

The hot graving, applied with a mop or coarse brush, dried quickly into a smooth layer of waterproof protection. Workers then moved the floating stages, untethered the ropes, and carefully returned the ship to its normal upright position. But wait—there’s more! The ship had to be rotated 180 degrees to bring the opposite side of the hull to the wharf, and the entire process was repeated. After graving the second side of the hull, workers could begin the tedious work of removing the careening tackle, returning the ballast, provisions, and guns to their former places, raising the topmasts and topgallant masts, and re-reeving all of the running rigging. Extant records of British warship posted on the Carolina Station during the eighteenth century demonstrate the entire careening process might be completed in as little as nine or ten days during an emergency situation, but it usually consumed two to four weeks of labor.[9]

Who performed the work of careening in the Lowcountry?

In Britain, Europe, and the northern colonies of North America, professional shipwrights and ship carpenters supervised both skilled and unskilled laborers who performed most of the work of cleaning and repairing the hulls of wooden vessels. Those laborers might have had different skin colors and come from different ethnic backgrounds, but they were generally free people. Here in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, as in the Caribbean, however, where the institution of slavery distorted the culture and the economy until 1865, the most unpleasant tasks related to ship maintenance were generally performed by enslaved men of African descent who were either hired or owned by White shipwrights and carpenters who supervised the work. Skilled free men of color likely participated as well, but they would have formed a distinct minority.

Although the business records of local White shipwrights have long since disappeared, one can find evidence of enslaved ship-workers elsewhere. The estates of most local shipwrights and wharf owners, like David Linn (died 1774), Paul Pritchard (died 1791), and James Marsh (died 1852), for example, included enslaved ship carpenters who worked on numerous Lowcountry vessels.[10] Among the extant records associated with British warships stationed in colonial-era Charleston, one also finds the names of enslaved men hired occasionally to supplement the ship’s crew.[11] This local tradition of African-American ship-workers continued beyond the end of slavery, of course. When James Henry Conyers, the first Black cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy, withdrew from that institution in 1873, for example, he resorted to a lengthy career as a ship caulker on the Charleston waterfront.

Where did careening take place in the Charleston area?

Vessels careened at a variety of locations across the Lowcountry, depending on their size and the time period in question. In general, however, the selection of a careening site depended on three important criteria. Of primary importance was a location adjacent to a body of relatively calm water with minimal wave action. The site also needed to have some protection from prevailing winds that might upset the balance of careening vessels. Lastly, the location had to be within easy reach of the materials and laborers needed to perform the work.

In the earliest days of the Port of Charleston, small and medium-sized vessels often careened on the bank of a river or creek at low tide, or along the east side of the mudflat we now call East Bay Street (see Episode No. 180). The ubiquitous small schooners that ferried people and goods between the town and upriver plantations (and vice-versa) could careen within quiet, secluded creeks, or at one of the private plantation landings along the several rivers of the Lowcountry. As larger merchant vessels from the Caribbean and England began visiting Charleston around the turn of the eighteenth century, a few local property owners like William Rhett began building wooden wharves extending eastward from East Bay Street to the channel of the Cooper River. The number of wharves increased as the decades progressed, providing ample facilities for medium-sized vessels to careen, bream, and grave their hulls.

A smattering of extant evidence demonstrates that some larger vessels, including twenty-gun warships of the Royal Navy, careened at Colonel Rhett’s suburban wharf at “the Hard” (see Episode No. 256). His Majesty’s ship Shoreham, for example, was visiting Charleston harbor in summer of 1716 to assist with the ongoing Yemasee War. While careened at Rhett’s Wharf on the 4th of July, the ship was hit by several stray bullets during a customs dispute that also wounded Colonel Rhett.[12] The first of the Royal Navy warships assigned to the Carolina Station, HMS Flamborough, careened once at Rhett’s wharf in early June 1720 and then refused to pay the colonel for the privilege.[13] The colony’s second station ship, HMS Blandford, hauled alongside Rhett’s Wharf in mid-March 1721/2 to careen, but had to abort when part of the wharf “gave way” under the strain of heaving down the ship. Never again did one of the Royal Navy ships attempt to careen along Charleston’s waterfront.[14]

A dozen years after the accident at Rhett’s Wharf, the South Carolina General Assembly ratified a law to preclude vessels of any size from careening at the wooden wharves in the heart of town. The prohibition was driven primarily by fears that the flames used to bream hulls and heat the graving would ignite other combustible materials stored on the wharves. In April 1734, the provincial government prohibited the practice of breaming “with blazing fire . . . within the limits of Charles Town except in such place or places” to be designated by the governor and his executive Council. Three months later, Governor Robert Johnson and the Council resolved “that all such ship, sloops and vessels shall bream any where upon the Bay, between Granville Bastion and the white Point.”[15] If those landmarks don’t sound familiar to you, we’re talking about a stretch of white-sand beach approximately five hundred yards in length, now covered by the High Battery seawall along Charleston’s East Battery Street. Careening work took place along this stretch for at least two decades, until the construction of fortification walls commenced at this site in the late 1750s.[16] Shipwright John Daniel purchased the beach adjacent to Granville Bastion in 1741, for example, and repaired a Spanish flag-of-truce sloop at this site in 1746.[17]

Careening in colonial-era Charleston also occurred at sandy beaches just outside the environs of the capital. When a thief broke into Joseph Shute’s warehouse on Shute’s Folly in 1752, for example, he carried away a parcel of careening equipment.[18] When numerous mariners began using the broad beachhead at the east of Pinckney Street for careening, property owner Thomas Wright started charging for the privilege in 1757 and published a schedule of fees.[19] Basically, if you spot a quiet, riverfront beach anywhere in the Lowcountry, that site just might have hosted careening activity in the distant past.

For much of Charleston’s colonial era, however, there was just one dedicated, purpose-built careening wharf for large vessels, located in what is now called Hobcaw Creek in the town of Mount Pleasant. The Dearsley family of shipwrights from Barbados purchased this site in 1682 and erected facilities for building and repairing large vessels.[20] The property changed hands and names several times over the years, but Hobcaw Creek continued to function as the center of local ship-work during the eighteenth century. The earliest references I’ve seen to careening at this site date to 1721, when His Majesty’s Ships Flamborough and Blandford both hove down there on separate occasions.[21] After the accident at Rhett’s Wharf in 1722, all of the subsequent British warships visiting Charleston Harbor—including those of Captain George Anson and continuing through the American Revolution—careened in Hobcaw Creek. Around the year 1750, shipwright David Linn erected a second careening wharf upstream from the Dearsley site in Hobcaw Creek. The warship HMS Mermaid experienced two separate accidents at this site in 1752, which we’ll discuss in Episode No. 241.

There were other shipyards across the Charleston area during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of course, in places like James Island Creek, Shem Creek in the village of Mount Pleasant, and the eponymous Shipyard Creek on Charleston Neck. While historians of the Lowcountry have tended to focus on ship construction at such sites, the work of heaving down and repairing vessels probably formed the bulk of their business. In 1772, for example, shipwright William Hart announced that he had leased Robert Cochran’s large shipyard on Charleston Neck, where “any vessel that can come over the bar” could be “hove down and repaired at the wharf.”[22]

When did careening end?

As Charleston’s commercial waterfront expanded northward after the American Revolution and into the early nineteenth century, the proprietors of new wharves continued to host the familiar activities of careening and repairing vessels. In 1825, for example, shipwright James Marsh informed the U.S. Navy that he could “heave out and repair ships” of all sizes at his wharf near the end of Pinckney Street.[23] By that time, however, the business of ship maintenance had already evolved greatly. The old practices of breaming and graving ship bottoms were swept away by the advent of copper sheathing, which first appeared in the 1760s and became widespread during the early 1800s. Vessels still needed to be taken out of the water for repair, but that work was also changing. James Marsh Jr., son of the aforementioned shipwright, opened South Carolina’s first floating drydock in the autumn of 1844.[24] The launch of Marsh’s floating wonder, which allowed large ships to be repaired in an upright position in the Cooper River, heralded the dawn of a new era of Charleston’s maritime history.

Iron-clad hulls began to supplant ancient wooden traditions around the middle of the nineteenth century, followed thereafter by steel hulls and eventually fiberglass. The novel shapes and heavy weight of such vessels rendered careening increasingly impractical. New drydocks and large marine cranes proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century and generally supplanted the laborious work of “heaving down.” While small wooden vessels continued to ply Lowcountry waters throughout the twentieth century, the techniques and vocabulary of careening became largely obsolete.

As an omnivorous consumer of Charleston history, I enjoy learning about a wide variety of topics. Imagining the sights, sounds, and smells of the distant past is our nearest alternative to a functioning time machine, and the business of careening appealed to me as a particularly powerful example of this fact. I hope you’ve enjoyed this program, and apologize if its length made you keel-over!

NEXT: The Stono Rebellion of 1739: Where Did It Begin? 
PREVIOUSLY: Charleston’s Second Ice Age: Rise of the Machines
See more from Charleston Time Machine