Short Trees and Short Timbers
Nantucket, Massachusetts island lies 30 miles off the southern coastline of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In 1775, Nantucket was the largest whaling Port in the world, and the third largest port in Massachusetts. However, dominance in this most adventurous, dangerous and potentially lucrative of all maritime trades was not supported by an extensive, local, ship building industry. Early Nantucket Forests were unusual and determined the scope of indigenous and colonial wooden ship building on Nantucket Island. Nantucket island has not been home to forests of tall trees for at least 4,000 years. Continual salt spray and the absence of a rich loam soil forced an unusual dwarf morphology on trees such as oak, beech, cedar and pine. Architectural and ship building timbers of large size were not available to the early European and American colonists of Nantucket island nor to the indigenous Wampanoag who made canoes and used offshore waters, rivers and streams to hunt and fish throughout the year.
Read more about this topic: Nantucket Shipbuilding
Famous quotes containing the words short, trees and/or timbers:
“Life’s too short for chess.”
—Henry J. Byron (1834–1884)
“The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the main timbers in the house are not straight, the smaller timbers will be unsafe; and if the smaller timbers are not straight, the house will fall.”
—Chinese proverb.