Harold A. Burnham Shipwright Transcript
- The Burnhams go back in Essex to 1635. Even though I'm the current generation that's running the shipyard here, the history is not something that I alone possess. It's shared at least equally with almost everyone in this town, and if you start to include the fishing, almost everyone in this area. There's a historic marker that says that the adjacent acre of land was set aside by the town fathers in 1668 for the men of Essex to build ships and employ workmen to that end.
The boats I build are almost entirely made of recycled material. Not only is it all of the wood, which is cut for land clearing jobs and tree work and brought to me by local tree companies, but also a lot of the hardware, the gear, the engine is all out of other boats and so all of my material is coming local. I can run a 10 man crew building a new wooden schooner with no dumpster and produced almost no waste. Everything that doesn't go into the boat, either it goes into the house or the shop or the steam box for heat. We just basically build boats with all kinds of gear coming into the yard and nothing leaving, but a boat.
At the end of the day, a wooden boat or a wooden ship is not much more than a pile of wood. My friend, Davis, says, if you start with a good pile of wood, then you'll wind up with a good boat. The person standing at the saw mill, making split second decisions on what goes where and how it's cut, has a lot to do with the longevity of the vessel if the captain can keep it off the rocks. What you have to do is know every piece in the boat, know what it looks like. Once you know what every piece in the boat looks like, you look at each log and you try to see the piece in the log and then just take away everything that doesn't look like the parts of the boat that you want.
I know I've got a long piece of Locust. I could use it for planking or clamps or I could use it for a deck beam. It's not gonna be a frame, it's too long and too straight. So I look for those pieces in a log and then just mill it accordingly. I think it's a deck beam. So if you look, it has a curve going this way, that's a sweep, it'll probably actually make about, One, two, three, four, four deck beams anyway.
When I was growing up, my father built wooden boats in the backyard, just because he enjoyed the boat building. His father had grown up in the shipyards. So the passion for shipbuilding comes from my father, but on my mother's side, my great-grandfather was a fishermen and probably before that they were fishermen over in Sicily. So part of the passion I have from the water probably also comes from my mother and the Sicilian part of the family. The first and foremost requirement of any wooden shipbuilder is experience on the water. The more experience you have on the water, the more you're able to form opinions about construction, engineering, sails, balance, how deep it's got to be or how stable it's got to be. And then having an understanding of the medium you're working in, how to form it in such a way that it will function, pull together and be safe.
This boat that we're looking at right now is the schooner Ardelle and I built her in the fall of 2010 and spring of 2011. She's a 40 ton pinky schooner, which is an older style vessel, indigenous to Essex and Cape Ann. This one I use for taking people out sailing and allowing them to see the waterfront and Cape Ann seascapes and landscapes from a working fishing vessel. It was built sort of as my answer to the economic crisis of 2008, there was just no customers. So it seemed like the only way out of the boat building business for me was to actually build a boat and use it in the charter business. This boat was built with no paid help, it was all friends and family that just chipped in. That's really, what has kept me in business, is the fact that there are so many people who feel the need to keep this business going in spite of the fact that there's no money in it.
So here we are on Thursday in early March, cold and raw day, and there were no less than 20 people here volunteering to help operate this piece of machinery and haul this vessel and that community spirit is really what's kept me going. Because of their commitment I'm able to do what I do. This boat's just hauled out here for a quick shave and a haircut. You can see some of the paint has worn one off at the water line. She needs a quick, light sanding and a little priming and painting and we hope to be back in the water within a week or two.
It was a very lucky thing when Tom Ellis came to hire me to build the Lannon, I was 29 years old. I had worked and played building boats my whole life, and had a lot of experience as a professional mariner, working with Coast Guard Regulations and studying boat design. But what was unique to me at the time was I was able to ask people who had worked in the old shipyards building sawn frame and trunnel fastened vessels, friends of mine who had grown up in Essex building other types of boats as well, and a few old timers who had actually done the heavy construction who I could go to and thankfully they were able to come down and show us what to do and tell us what to do and we were able to get firsthand oral history and firsthand experience out of people who today aren't in any longer with us. Because of that timing kept the town and the methods and the work continuous, as opposed to us having to reinvent the wheel.
The Sylvina W. Beal was built in 1911 by Frank C. Adams in East Boothbay, Maine. It was built as a herring fishing schooner. It was restored to its auxiliary sail configuration, and then worked in the passenger industry in the waterfronts all along the New England coast for over 100 years. What the Beal needs at this point is a complete rehabilitation of the entire hull structure, from the keel to the deck. What we're saving is largely the stories that form what she is and not long from now, will give future generations an opportunity to form their own stories with that same boat that's been running for 110 years. It's just an honor to be involved with it. I don't wanna be the last boat builder. I hope that in every young person I work with, that I'm looking at someone who will find the passion to build boats and follow that passion and that these traditional craft will continue on and that the craft itself of the building, the maintenance and the work and the operation will also continue.
