Lumber: boards, staves and masts

What did “lumber” mean in the 1700s?

To a colonial merchant, lumber meant plain wood cut ready for use. The main kinds were:

• Boards and planks, sawn from pine and oak for building.
• Shingles and clapboards, thin pieces of wood for covering roofs and walls.
• Staves, the narrow curved boards that make up the sides of a barrel, usually of oak, together with heading for the round ends and hoops to hold them tight.

Masts, and tar and pitch for ships, were a separate business, closely watched by the British government. Wood was bulky and cheap for its size, so it was a cargo for ordinary traders, not a treasure. It mattered because so many other cargoes, from sugar and rum to flour and salt fish, travelled in wooden barrels.

Where did colonial lumber come from?

The great forests of North America were the source. Settlers in Massachusetts had sawmills by the 1630s, often built beside the mills that ground grain, and several men often clubbed together to pay for one. In the 1600s white oak staves were one of New England’s main exports, sent at first mostly to the wine islands of Madeira, the Azores and the Canaries, where wine was shipped in barrels.

The leading lumber river was the Piscataqua, where Portsmouth in New Hampshire and Berwick in Maine stand. By the early 1700s wood had overtaken fishing as New Hampshire’s main source of wealth, and its mills sent boards and staves out to the Caribbean. Ports such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia and those of the Chesapeake shipped lumber too, alongside flour and salt fish. Figures from the 1770s, later than the game, show that about five out of every six boards and half the staves leaving New England went to the West Indies.

Why did the sugar islands need so much wood?

When English settlers reached Barbados in 1627, the island was covered in thick forest. Once planters found that sugar paid, from the 1640s, they cleared the trees fast, and within a few decades nearly the whole island was cane. By 1665 even firewood had to be brought in, some of it shipped all the way from New England. Other islands lost their forests in the same way as sugar spread.

That left the islands needing wood for almost everything: houses, sugar mills, boiling-house fuel, and above all casks. Every hogshead of sugar, every barrel of molasses and rum was built from staves. In 1768, about fifty years after the game begins, Benjamin Franklin argued in a London newspaper that the sugar islands would be worth little without cheap lumber, casks, horses and food from the northern colonies. The islands paid with sugar, molasses and rum, and for the northern colonies this became one of their most valuable trades.

That sugar was grown by enslaved Africans and their children born on the islands. The boards and barrels from the north were part of the same system that depended on their forced labour.

How were barrels made and shipped?

Barrels were the shipping containers of their age, made by craftsmen called coopers. A cooper shaved each stave to a gentle curve with a drawknife, stood the staves in a ring, bent them together with hoops and fitted a round head into each end. Casks for liquids such as molasses and rum, called wet casks, had to hold liquid without leaking; dry casks held goods such as flour.

An empty barrel is mostly air, so it was wasteful to ship it whole. Instead, merchants often sent staves, heading and hoops loose, or bundled as a knocked-down barrel ready to be put together, later called a “shook”. A cooper at the other end, on a plantation or in a port, assembled them when the sugar or molasses was ready. In 1771, Boston and the Salem area together shipped about 28,000 of these hogshead kits to the West Indies in a single year.

What were naval stores, and who made them?

Wooden sailing ships needed tar and pitch to waterproof their ropes and seams, and Britain had long bought these from Sweden and the other Baltic lands. When war in northern Europe cut off that supply, Parliament passed the Naval Stores Act of 1705, paying a bounty, a reward from the government, on tar, pitch, turpentine, hemp and masts brought from the colonies. Tar and pitch earned £4 a ton.

The Carolinas, with their huge pine forests, answered fastest. Workers stacked pine stumps and fallen resin-rich wood in an earth-covered kiln and burned it slowly, so that tar ran out at the bottom; boiling tar made pitch. Planters around Charles Town bought land and enslaved people, often on credit, to do this work. Exports passed 40,000 barrels a year by 1720 and reached 60,000 in 1725. Then the bounty lapsed, and by 1728 Charles Town shipped only about 5,000 barrels.

What was the King’s broad arrow?

The tallest, straightest white pines of New England were ideal for the masts of Royal Navy warships: tall, light and strong. The first mast was shipped to England in 1634, and by 1670 about ten mast ships a year sailed from Portsmouth.

To protect that supply, the Massachusetts charter of 1691 reserved for the Crown every tree 24 inches or more across, measured a foot above the ground, on land not already granted to private owners. Parliament made this law across the colonies from New Jersey northward in 1711, with a fine of £100 a tree. A new act in 1722 went further, forbidding anyone to cut any white pine outside town bounds without a licence, and sending cases to an admiralty judge instead of local magistrates, who had often sided with their neighbours. Another act in 1729 tightened the rules again.

The King’s surveyors marked reserved trees with the broad arrow, an old English sign of royal property cut with three blows of an axe. In 1715 the Surveyor of the Woods was John Bridger, who complained for years that cutters slipped past the law. Many did: by one estimate, only about 4,500 American masts reached the navy in the whole century.