Howard Chapelle question

[Matt J.]

Chapelle, Howard I. - what's the problem
In "100 Boat Designs Reviewed" (approx title) there's a reference to "recent" questions about the contributions he's made to the research of small boats in America. I just bought his "American Small Sailing Craft" and enjoy it immensely. Is there a problem thatI should be aware of before accepting the information in the book as useful? I enjoy his work and writing... is there a basic flaw or something?

Thanks,
Matt

[pjwalsh]

Matt,

Some folks claim that Chappelle added quite a bit of his own design ideas to his representations of historical designs - even if that is true it has never bothered me much - I still find his work interesting and inspiring.

I used to live in Church Creek near his former eastern shore residence and I met quite few older boatbuilders in the area who had known Chappelle - lots of good stories, the usual builder's disdain of the designer etc... but there was always a lot of respect for his work too.

[Bill Perkins]

How did the man pronounce his last name ? John Gardner wrote of him with respect which is a good endorsment to have .

[ 02-14-2003, 11:00 AM: Message edited by: Bill Perkins ]

[Matt Middleton]

Did you catch this in another thread in B&R?

http://camden.villagesoup.com/opinions/GuestCols.cfm?StoryID=1543

Matt

[Bill Perkins]

That's not good . Was Chapelle involved in a scholarly dispute over the history of the Constitution ?

[John Gearing]

At a time when nobody in America seemed to care much about documenting our historic vessel types, Chapelle stepped up. By doing so, and by writing "Boatbuilding" he did a lot to keep the flickering flame of traditional design and construction alive so that those who came later, like Jon Wilson and WB, could extend and advance the art, science, and craft of wooden boatbuilding and designing.

My understanding is that in some cases Chapelle was able to take the lines off existing boats. At least some boats appear to have been successfully built to Chapelle designs (the cowhorn mentioned in another thread, a Bahama Dinghy featured in "Small Boat Journal", Thad Danielson's sailing peapod, and Chapelle's own pinky schooner come to mind).

If he had to do reconstructions based on historical research I can see where problems could develop. And here, where it seems as though this boat was "shrunk" from the original/normal size, it's hard to know to what extent Chapelle was personally involved with the drawings this builder used.

I guess the lesson to be taken from this sad story is that if you're an amateur taking on a fairly big design and you get your plans from a source like Smithsonian (rather than a designer or NA), you should have a naval architect check them over before you start work.

[Alan D. Hyde]

In a post of several years ago, now apparently gone from the archives, I related the story of an afternoon in the mid-1960's spent in the Smithsonian (as a boy), watching my father and Howard Chappelle discuss (sometimes somewhat heatedly, though always politely) the virtues (or lack thereof) of English N/A Eric Manners' trimaran designs.

My father is a well-read and well-informed engineer who'd done a fair amount of sailing by then, and who later went on to win many races in his Hobie Cat. Mr. Chappelle came across as a master of his craft, and indeed, my father treated him with a certain deference, although, to my father, no traditional ideas were sacrosanct.

Each, perhaps, thought they had the better of their dispute. I'm not sure but what they were both right.

Alan

[ 02-14-2003, 02:10 PM: Message edited by: Alan D. Hyde ]

[rbgarr]

Matt-

I've seen (or helped build) at least six Chapelle designs from his 'American Small Sailing Craft' Smithsonian plans: a Washington County peapod, a Newfoundland skiff, the two Crotch Island pinkies, a Muscongus Bay Sloop, and the Jersey skiff (?). Some things to keep in mind about using his plans are that they are based on measurements taken from old boats and thus have to be lofted out to find where corrections in the lines are necessary. Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the designs are workboats, which means that they often carried alot of ballast when on their best sailing lines (sometimes hundreds and hundreds of pounds). This makes them awkward to use (now)as daysailers on a trailer becasue of all the ballast loading and removing. You don't want to be bouncing all that ballast around inside a wooden hull on a trailer going down the highway, IMO. This was not the case with the Washington County peapod , which was a great sailer right off the shop floor, especially with the jib and sprit main rig. A real witch!

If you can find it, Chapelle's book 'American Sailing Craft' is also an interesting read because he used some of the traditional boat designs as a starting point for suggesting small cruising boat ideas.

Have you been on the erg? I've reached 200k of the 500k trip and am wondering if you've 'rowed' past me already, or if I should be looking for you coming up from 'astern'.

[johnw]

The dispute was not about the Constitution, it was about the Constellation, and Chapelle's views have been vindicated.

My favorite book of his is "The Search for Speed Under Sail." It has a table at the back that is replete with mathematical errors in calculating the length/displacement ratios, but it is still an important book.

One of the largest and most famous of his designs built was the Swift of Ipswich, which I think had stability problems and required rig modifications.

Workboats often were used in different trims depending on the load they carried, but the point is, they were intended to carry cargo. I've often thought that water ballast would be a good solution for some designs, because you can get water wherever you launch and you can just put it back when you leave. Or you could build a lighter boat to a more modern design.

[holzbt]

I'd be very surprised if you needed to ballast a crabbing skiff.

[Bayboat]

Chapelle's role in preserving and advancing interest in small boat design and building is firmly ensconced in history. In the first half of the 1960's, while I was on the faculty of the University of Virginia, I traveled frequently to DC and often stopped in at the Smithsonian for a chat with him. I never asked him how he pronounced his name, but I heard it pronounced with a soft Ch by other people. To his friends he was "Chappie," with a hard Ch. He was a strong advocate of what could be called environmental determinism with regard to the relationships among boat designs, materials, and the local availability of the materials as well as local geographical conditions. You can pick this up in his publication of Adney's canoes of North America. My persuasion was more toward culturally determined choices of design and materials, so we had a lot to talk about, and often parted agreeing to disagree. But his manner was always gentle, and despite his vast knowledge and great authority he never "pulled rank" to bulldoze one into agreeing with him.

[Bob Cleek]

It must also be remembered that Chapelle himself did not draw all of the lines in his books. First off, the purpose of most all of the lines in his books was to historically document a vessel type, not to provide building plans for amateurs, or even pros. Moreover, the original boats themselves may have been cranky, and did often carry heavy ballast, or were intended to sail while full of fish or cargo.

Many of Chapelle and Smithsonian lines were taken off as part of the National Historic Merchant Marine Survey during the Depression. This was a WPA project which in many instances only sent unemployed draftsmen and who knows what other lubbers with little or no maritime background to the various backwaters around the country (which the survey divided up into regions) to find whatever old boats they could and take their lines. Some of these were hulks sitting in the mud and the true underwater shape and rigs could only be guessed at. Some weren't even complete hulls. Probably, some of the surveyors merely drew the lines freehand! It was a "make work" project. Chapelle did a masterful job of managing the project, but he couldn't be everywhere all the time. The NHMMS lines are notorious for containing errors. For example, perhaps owing to the old vessels being badly hogged, the sheer lines are often off. I can't imagine that Chapelle took every set of lines he every put in one of his many books and ran all the displacement calculations. He never intended them to be builder's drafts. They are a great start, but I sure wouldn't build to them without having a good NA go over them, unless of course we are talking about a little pulling boat or something like that. This guy who took a Colonial Schooner which originally was probably 90-100' between her perps and shrunk it down to 28' got what he had coming. Lucky she rides high than below her lines!

[Dave Fleming]

I can't help it Cleekster but, every time I see something like that I think of the Leavitt mess.

[ 10-12-2005, 12:07 PM: Message edited by: Dave Fleming ]

[John Gearing]

Ah yes, Dave, the "John F. Leavitt"...IIRC....a Culler-designed schooner that an ambitious gentleman hoped he could used in a profitable way in a modern day version of the coasting trade. There were some problems with her as I recall. And in the end she was lost in a storm. WB carried the story of her end and it generated some interesting letters in following issues. One of the things that seemed to come out of the disaster was that the "romance" of working sail ran hard up against the reality of fighting to save a big vessel in a hard chance. In "the good old days" people got swept overboard and killed trying to do things like secure a boom that had broken free and was sweeping the deck.

Seems as though I recall that Culler didn't have much formal training nor much prior experience designing boats the size of the Leavitt, for the purpose to which the Leavitt was to be put. I always liked Culler's boats, but got wary when I read that Bud McIntosh said "stay away from Culler". Dunno exactly what he meant by that, but coming from McIntosh, the words carry some weight.

[rbgarr]

"Stay away from Culler". Where did you read that? Anyone have a reference?

[Bob Cleek]

Oh, yea... take Culler with a BIG grain of salt! Same with Chapelle, but to a somewhat lesser degree if you are dealing with a boat "Chapelle the naval architect" designed, as opposed to "Chapelle the naval historian" published!

Unlike Chapelle, Culler had no formal training in naval architecture or engineering, that I ever heard of. Culler had a nice "eye" and designed very pretty boats, but all were versions of traditional types AS HE SAW THEM. Culler's designs are notorious for surprising their builders with stability problems when launched simply because the math was never done. Culler drew and built boats the old fashioned way, by eye. This works pretty well for small craft, but anything of any size... well the errors compound! I enjoy reading Culler and studying his plans, but, like Chapelle, I sure wouldn't put the effort and money into building one of his boats unless somebody who knew what they were doing went over the design, or somebody had built the boat and proven the design beforehand. We don't have the luxury of building a large boat just to see how she does. In olden days, they'd build them to see how they did and then make changes on subsequent hulls until they got it right. We now have the engineering technology to predict performance before the hull goes "splash." You bet the Leavitt was a prime example of Culler's shortcomings. She LOOKED just like an old coaster, and, like many of her predecessors, she didn't finish her maiden voyage. In the old days, life was mean, nasty, brutish and short. Not part of our seafaring tradition we need to perpetuate!

[John Gearing]

WB ran a long interview with Bud McIntosh, in which he said, IIRC, that some in the wooden boat business made a career out of being "salty"...and he identified Culler as one of these. Back when this forum was pretty young, the regulars had a question from a fellow who had built one of Culler's Concordia Sloopboats and thought it was more than a mite tippy. Overly tender is the way I'd describe his complaint. We all thought he had built the boat to plans, but one of his comments was that the plans he got seemed to have parts of both the sloopboat and the buzzard's bay boat on them. As I recall, he was going to stick a steel centerboard in her in place of the wooden one and see if that would help. That being said, I have a friend with a Culler-built sloopboat and I've never heard him complain about her. Bob C's point is well-taken....it's one thing to design small boats and another to design big ones, and by that I'd say anything much over 20' between perps that's meant for serious work like cruising. The Leavitt came in just under 100 tons displacement (yeah, she was BIG) so as to get past some Coast Guard regs as I recall. Also seem to remember that one of the major controversies about her is that when she was loaded she floated down by her bow.

[dadadata]

Quoth the Cleekster:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
It must also be remembered that Chapelle himself did not draw all of the lines in his books. First off, the purpose of most all of the lines in his books was to historically document a vessel type, not to provide building plans for amateurs, or even pros. Moreover, the original boats themselves may have been cranky, and did often carry heavy ballast, or were intended to sail while full of fish or cargo.
==

I'm a little puzzled by this statement, which is certainly Overstated and Generalized --chuckle--

As far as I can determine, all of the plan drawings in Am Small Sailing Craft, American Sailng Craft, and Boatbuilding, are indeed Chapelle's. Heck, I've seen a lot of the originals - or tracings thereof done by Chapelle himself - at the Ches Bay Maritime Museum.

ASSC is filled with tables of offsets, though they are too small to read and you have to obtain the original plans.

I think this implies he wanted people to build these boats - or to be able to build them.

He is probably guilty of "prettying up" the sheerlines, etc., but then, "so what?" If he hadn't measured the boats there would be nada, zippo, zilch. If you look at old photos of skiffs and scows and sharpies, there were indeed a great many very ugly craft made by local builders. I like some of these just fine but it seems clear that he did make an effort to ask the locals which remaining boats were thought to be good boats.

He also evolved a "rule for designing sharpies" which might be a little overly stringent, but if anyone looked at sharpies and tried to figure them out, it was Chapelle; and FWIW Chapelle's "rule" does work.

It's sad that we lost nearly all of Commodore Munroe's materials in the 1930s due to a hurricane, but we lost the stuff and we have to go with what we have (which Chapelle and others reconstructed, so to speak, from various sources). I don't know that Munroe ever put his designing approach down in a systematic fashion (I've read the Commodore's Story and the Good Little Ship, and they don't really compare with Chapelle or Bolger when you are looking for details and the whys and wherefores).

Furthermore, Chapelle was absolutely convinced that workboat types (mainly skiffs, scows and sharpies) were an ideal starting place for relatively inexpensive amateur built boats. He drew up many yacht plans based on workboats. He was obviously impressed by Munroe's track record.

As for some of his more scholarly works like "Sailing Navy" and "Speed Under Sail" he did trace or redraw lines taken from other sources.

As far as the HAMMS survey, there are some interesting boat types represented in the collection. But this was not a Chapelle project, so what's the beef?

[ 02-17-2003, 09:48 PM: Message edited by: dadadata ]

[dadadata]

==
The dispute was not about the Constitution, it was about the Constellation, and Chapelle's views have been vindicated.
==

This has been discussed to death on the maritime history list in the context of a US Navy policy of 'administratiove rebuilds' to vessels still on the books.

In a nutshell, the Congresses of the 1820-1860 did not want to spend money on a Navy (some of the Navy's largest sailing ships took 20 years to finish, if I recall correctly), so in order to get new ships, the Navy would "rebuild" old ships. Like from the keel up.

[ 02-17-2003, 09:44 PM: Message edited by: dadadata ]

[Gerry S.]

Just to revisit the original problem with "Caledonian", the builder/owner is indeed lucky that she floated high instead of deep. Since displacement decreases as the cube of the reduction in linear measurement (i.e. a half size replica has 1/8th the displacement of the original), the most likely outcome of a serious screw-up would be an overly heavy boat. In that case, there isn't much that can be done. At least in the present case ballast can be added.

I heartily agree with checking yourself (if you know how),or having someone who knows how, check plans before building even a small boat. In my younger days I built an Atkin (yes, the great Wm. Atkin) "Jasper" sharpie skiff, and she proved to have a disasterous lee helm that made her virtually uncontrollable.

Check twice, then build.

[John Gearing]

I just this morning re-read Peter Spectre's article entitled "The Legacy of Howard Chapelle". In it, Spectre acknowledges that it is common to find errors in the plans. Things like transposed numbers in the offsets, etc. He notes that these errors may have crept in because of the sheer volume of work that Chapelle was trying to get through. If he had, as it appears, a serious time crunch, we might be much the poorer had he decided to spend his time perfecting a small number of plans rather than trying to "catch" as many vessels as possible before they disappeared.