#9 Special Episode: Preserving Historic Ships with Rigger Josh Payne and Shipwright Josh Brown

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TRANSCRIPT:

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TRANSCRIPT: “Preserving Historic Ships with Rigger Josh Payne and Shipwright Josh Brown”

[intro music]

SABRINA OLIVEROS (SO): Hi! I’m Sabrina Oliveros.

ANNE MONK (AM): And I’m Anne Monk.

SO: You may know us from San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park’s podcast, Better Lives, Bitter Lies. In that series, we trace events and ideas that shaped the lives of people who arrived on the San Francisco waterfront in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

AM: Today, we’re shifting gears and introducing the first episode of a new series, where we get to know people who preserve and pass on maritime history in the present.

SO: This new podcast is called Two Mics Before the Mast. And if that sounds like a maritime literary reference to you, it is.

AM: “Before the mast” refers to the forecastle [pronounced “fo’c’sle”], or the quarters of common sailors, in the front of a ship. Life there was famously chronicled by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. in his wildly popular memoir, Two Years Before the Mast.

SO: In 1834, 19-year-old Dana of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was afflicted by the measles, which affected his eyesight. Hoping fresh air and time away from his studies would heal him, he joined the crew of a merchant ship in Boston, which eventually found its way around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Many things have changed since Dana first set foot on the Pilgrim, but the hard work and dedication needed to keep a boat – or a fleet of historic vessels – afloat hasn’t.

AM: For this series, we’ll be interviewing our fellow crewmates: the rangers, riggers, carpenters, librarians – [SO: and so many more job titles] haha, true – whose work often finds them before the public, as well as the mast.

SO: We’ve already released a special episode talking with our resident chanteyman and former ranger, Peter Kasin. You can catch that on the park’s website and iTunes. Today, we’ll continue with an interview with not one, but two Maritime park staff... who are both named Josh.

AM: Two Mics, Two Joshes? [SO laughs] Josh Brown is a shipwright and Josh Payne a rigger. We’ll learn more about what they do for the park, how they got here, and why they do what they do... but, first, here’s one quick and simple way of differentiating them. As a shipwright, Josh Brown’s job is to build or repair a boat. And as a rigger – since rigging refers to the ropes and cables that support a ship’s masts, and which control its yards and sails – Josh Payne’s job is to make sure the boat moves.

SO: And, together, both of them make sure it doesn’t sink!

AM: [AM laughs] And both of them should probably be the ones elaborating on this.

SO: [SO laughs] True! From here on, we’ll be playing excerpts from our interview.

AM: So grab a bitt, take a sit, [SO: Good lord] join us outside of our figurative fo’c’sle... and listen to the stories they shared, given Two Mics Before the Mast.

[music interlude]

PART ONE: What is your job?

AM: Feel free to introduce yourselves, guys.

JOSH PAYNE (JP): Hello.

JOSH BROWN (JB): Hi. You'll have to guess which one is which. [All laugh]

SO: Yeah.

AM: Yeah. So, Josh Payne, let's start with you. What's your job title?

JP: My job title is a Historic Ship Rigger at San Francisco Maritime National Historic[al] Park. I work on, uh, maintaining and, um, keeping the rigging operable on the ships that we have in our collection. Mainly, Balclutha, C.A. Thayer, and Alma. Uh, we maintain the ships' running rigging and standing rigging on all the vessels. Um, we also, uh, fabricate the mooring lines and mooring systems that moor the ships to the pier. But our primary focus is the ships' rigging. And we, we make standing rigging, which is the wire, uh, that holds the masts and yards up. And we also maintain the running rigging on the ships, which is the block and tackles, uh, ropes and lines that you use to, um, manipulate the yards and sails. It's an endless kind of cycle. You're constantly replacing running rigging and standing rigging, rebuilding blocks, replacing ironwork that's washed up or worn out. And that’s pretty much it.

AM: And Josh Brown, what is your job title? JB: Um, I believe officially it's, uh, C.A. Thayer Shipwright 'cause my job is tied to one boat specifically at the moment, uh, which is a little unusual in the park. But, uh, yeah, marine carpenter is kind of the more commonly used term today. We also employ, uh, preservation specialist, um, historic preservation specialist. So there's kind of a range of titles, you know, very modern to, um, technical-sounding, to a shipwright, which if you put on your resume, 99% of people have no idea what, what you do. [AM & SO laugh] I recently learned though that, uh, so a "wright" is just an old English word, not Old English, but English word for someone that makes some stuff out of wood.

AM & SO: Uh-huh.

JB: Those are two different roles though, like shipwright, and then ship's carpenter. And if I could do it succinctly, there's a really cool example of, um, I forget if it was a Bendixsen, but a different lumber schooner that was in a gale off the west coast, ended up getting dismasted and the captain and his dog were swept overboard. And because it was a lumber schooner, they had piles and piles of sawn boards. So they like lashed a bunch of them together and made these jury-rigged masts, and then a jury-rigged rudder that just looks like a big barn door hanging off the back of the thing. And they made it all the way to Hawaii, totally waterlogged, flying the American flag. So they were real proud of themselves, but you know, onshore, there's trying to take the time you have to do everything, you know, really right. And then that role of ship's carpenter is more what Josh gets excited about, which is, um [chuckles], you know, using the available materials to really, to just get you home, you know?

AM: Yeah. So just to clarify, what is “jury-rigged”?

JB: Uh, I was wondering, I don't know what the, the etymology of the “jury” part is, but, if part of the rig breaks, you use whatever parts you have on hand to make a replacement. Um, and then, so yeah, a jury rudder is just spiking, lashing together any boards you have to make something to hang off the back of the boat to have steerage, but you know, it's just in a pinch. I don't know where the “jury”, where that vocab word comes from. Be a fun internet search, kids.

AM: Giving them homework already.

JB: For all you listeners at home... [SO & AM laugh]

[music interlude]

SO: So, Josh Brown was on the right track.

AM: Alright. Tell me more...

SO: Thanks to a fun internet search [AM: You mean Merriam-Webster?] – I mean, yeah, of course, I do [AM & SO laugh] – I know now that “jury-rigged” is the oldest of three similar phrases: jerry-rigged, jerry-built, and, of course, jury-rigged.

AM: Go on!

SO: Well, the original term, jury-rigged, dates back to at least the 1700s, but the two words that comprise it, jury and rig, both date back to the 1400s.

AM: “Rig” we know, thanks to Josh Payne!

SO: Yep! And jury, which as an adjective can mean “makeshift” or “improvised for temporary use especially in an emergency”, comes from the Middle English word jory, which means “improvised” and was used to describe improvised devices onboard sailing vessels, such as a “jory sail”, or an improvised sail. AM: Huh, so he really wasn’t far off!

SO: Not at all, but we are maybe getting a little far from the interview.

AM: True. For the next several minutes, we’ll hear the Joshes compare the natures of their jobs today with the same jobs from a century ago.

SO: We will also hear their stories on how they found themselves working for San Francisco Maritime. Let’s get back to the interview. PART TWO: How do your jobs today differ from their historical nature?

AM: So that kind of leads into another question, which is, how do your jobs today differ from the historical roles of riggers and ships carpenters?

JP: Personally, I don't think in, at least in the rigging department, I don't think it really differs that much. Um, the conditions which the rigging usually takes place under, I guess there's two different, there's like at-sea riggers, which would be considered more bosuns, for repairs and stuff underway, which constantly happens. Things are always breaking and having to be mended and fixed. But, um, shore-side riggers, such as I am now... Um, the working conditions are probably more or less the same. Um, they, back in the day, they had long ropewalks and stuff that would be fairly commonly seen on the San Francisco waterfront or anywhere for that matter. Um, so those things have gone, but the actual labor itself is very much the same. We don’t use power tools. The tools have remained the same for literally thousands of years. Um, so marlinspike is one, which is just a metal long spike, and that's used for splicing wire and rope – but primarily wire – and also helping bang on things when they're too rusted to get open. [JP & AM laugh] And, uh, the other tools which have also remained the same for thousands of years are a stick with a hole in it, um, that we use to put seizings on. That's called a seizing stick. And it's literally, just a stick about a foot and a half long with a hole on the end that you run the wire through. And this enables you to lay on, or clap on, seizings extremely tight. And the other tool is a serving mallet. And the serving mallet is, uh, how you wrap the twine tightly around standing rigging to protect it from weather and elements. So in the sense of the tools we use, it's almost identical to what they used back in the day. Yeah. And even the environment we work in at the park is