APPENDIX 4 THE TYPES OF WOOD USED IN SHIPS BUILT ON PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND BETWEEN 1856 AND 1876 BASED ON A SAMPLE OF THE INSPECTOR’S REPORTS FROM THE LLOYD ’S REGISTER OF SHIPPING. INTRODUCTION Apart from a cursory examination by Greenhill and Giffard in 1967‘, the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, now deposited on loan in the National Maritime Museum (at Greenwich, near London in England), is an entirely unexplored source for the quality and workmanship, as well as for the types of woods used in ships built on Prince Edward Island in the nineteenth century. In 2005 I became aware that microfilm copies of the Lloyd’s reports for ships inspected on the island were available in the Provincial Archives 2, and so I decided to carry out a preliminary and partial analysis of a sample of the reports in order to determine what they might tell us about the woods used in island—built ships. Since the eighteenth century Lloyd’s inspectors have carried out surveys of vessels in order to provide information to insurance underwriters on the quality and structural materials in them, and in the mid-nineteenth century Lloyd’s began to appoint full-time surveyors in British North American ports, a resident surveyor being first appointed for Prince Edward Island in 1856.3 Previously, island-built ships had been surveyed at the port of their sale in the British Isles. According to the National Maritime Museum the original report forms for the period 1834 to 1945 survive. For each ship, the inspector, who was a full-time employee of Lloyd's, using a standard form, recorded the name of the vessel and its rigging, dimensions and tonnage; the year, and the place on the island where it was built, as well as the builder and the owner; details of the wood-types that were used in as many as twenty-eight different components of the ship; the dimensions of the various timbers and fastenings; the condition of the masts and yards, as also of the sails, 1 Greenhill & Giffard 1967, p. 203. 2 PARO: Lloyd's Register of Shipping: reports from surveyors In Canadian ports. Prince Edward Island: 1856-1858: Reel A428; 1858-1865: Reel A429; 18654868: Reel A430; 1869-1874: Reel A431; 1874-1877: Reel A432. 3 The appointment of a Lloyd‘s inspector was welcomed in a news report in the Charlottetown Examiner (p. 3, col. 2) of 8 September 1856, entitled “Progress of Shipbuilding in P. E. Island". The surveyor appointed in 1856 was Charles R. Cokes; by 1861 he had been replaced by Richard Hoggett who held the post beyond 1876, 273 anchors, cables, and fittings. He also made general remarks on the quality of the material and workmanship, and most importantly, from the point of view of the insurance underwriters, he recommended the class to which the vessel should be assigned.4 The microfilm copies of the Lloyd’s reports in the Archives contain information of this type on well over twelve hundred ships built and inspected on Prince Edward Island from 1856 onwards. My use of the reports was intended to be narrow: my aim was to look only at the wood-types used in the various parts of ships built on Prince Edward Island between 1856, the year when local inspections first began, and 1876, after which ship-building on the island declined dramatically, and to examine the changes that occurred over the twenty year period. Greenhill & Giffard (1967), based on a casual examination of the reports for some of the ships built by James Yeo at Port Hill, had noted that there were gradual changes in the woods used, from “birch, juniper, oak and yellow pine", as well as "beech, ash and maple” in the 18503 to "spruce” in the 18703, and they suggested that this was due to the gradual depletion of the more preferred woods. My aim was, using an objective and quantitative sampling method, to assess the validity of this conclusion, and to ascertain whether it was applicable to the whole island. The date limits set for the study, 1856 and 1876, as noted, were determined by the archival material available.5 A more comprehensive study of the wood used in island-built ships would require the 4 To designate the class in which a vessel was placed, the Lloyd's Register used a code consisting of a number and a letter, e.g. 7A, the letter indicating the class of the hull. The hulls of all island vessels inspected in the five sampling years examined in this study were placed in class A, the top class, presumably because all were newly built vessels. The associated number represented the years for which this designation applied, and this seems to have been dependant (inter alia) upon the types of wood used in the construction of the hull — thus 7A meant “first class for seven years”. A second number was also sometimes assigned, as in 7A1, where the 1 referred to the condition of the vessel‘s equipment. 5 See Figure 7 of the main report for the chronology of ship- building on the island.