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Question about Shroud Deadeye Lanyards

So, the question is: Was this the way that the French rigged deadeyes in the period when Hermoine was built or was this an expedient by the modern day crew?

Considering the overall expense of the project, it would seem unlikely that her crew would use some juty rigged solution. We must have members with a collection of Ancre books who can answer this question.

Roger
 
Roger Pellett said:
So, the question is: Was this the way that the French rigged deadeyes in the period when Hermoine was built or was this an expedient by the modern day crew?

Considering the overall expense of the project, it would seem unlikely that her crew would use some juty rigged solution. We must have members with a collection of Ancre books who can a
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Roger Pellett said:
So, the question is: Was this the way that the French rigged deadeyes in the period when Hermoine was built or was this an expedient by the modern day crew?

Considering the overall expense of the project, it would seem unlikely that her crew would use some juty rigged solution. We must have members with a collection of Ancre books who can answer this question.

Roger
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Ive got the Ancre book and monographs for Hermione and it's a bit light on specifics. it also differs notably from the reproduction in a number of ways. Some subtle, like the distribution of belaying points. Some of them are pretty big, the monograph had a full Lateen rear mizzen sail, the reproduction has a gaff rigged spanker
 
The video linked by Adry was EXCELLENT! As were the other posts on this tread. A great example of why this resource is so valuable.
 
Part of the problem is that the photos are of a "replica" or "reconstruction" where things are seldom "historically accurate" or even correctly done for the time-frame the vessel represents.
Odds are the pictures were when L’Hermione was new-ish, and they were still adjusting her rig quite often, so they just hitched the lanyards till they had to adjust them again.
These vessels are never good guides for modeling, unless you're building a model of the recreated vessel.
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As the old saying goes, different ships, different long splices. The lanyard needs plenty of extra length both for adjustment and for downrigging/uprigging. Since there are six passes of the line between the deadeyes, every inch of adjustment needs six inches of lanyard, and a surprising amount of lanyard can be needed to take up all the desired slack and stretch in the shroud, especially when the ship is new and the shrouds have not yet gone "dead", with all of the stretch taken out. There are lots of variations known from the historical record (and even a few archaeological examples) in how the lanyard is made off and what to do with the extra length. The solution shown on l'Hermione could be one of them, or it could be a modern solution (there are a lot more of those among working vessels than most people realize; sailing ships, even traditional ones, is a constantly evolving process). I know one of the people who rigged the ship, and they were constantly working the balance between historical authenticity (where it could be determined), practicality, and the needs of modern seaworthiness standards. And, as one person alluded to, the captain gets what the captain wants (a long-standing tradition in the rigging department, especially in respect to largely aesthetic details).

As an aside, I am afraid I have to defend my profession here. Jim wrote: "I get a bit sceptical of the experimental archaeologists? who can barely use a tool coming up with elaborate ideas when anyone used to doing real work can say why a ‘something’ is the way it is - because when you do the job every day you make it as easy as possible." As a professional experimental archaeologist, I think I know what Jim is referring to, but the people who do not know which end of a hammer you hold are not the experimental archaeologists (most of us have professional backgrounds in technical trades; I was a wooden shipwright and a machinist) but the theoretical archaeologists, who often come up with the most convoluted explanations for simple things while sitting in air-conditioned offices.

Experimental archaeologists are the people who figured out how to tack a Viking ship, or why the most important variable in the lethality of cannon fire against ships is not the velocity of the projectile but the thickness of the target (thinner is better!). Archaeologists are, for the most part, practical people. We work in the field, doing manual labour (digging holes...), and we understand the world through our hands. On underwater projects, we have to keep engines, pumps and compressors running in harsh environments (I once hand-filed a high-pressure valve seal out of a kitchen knife blade). In Jim's terms, we do the job every day and have to figure out how to do it efficiently and safely.

Fred
 
Very interesting. Having owned a ketch with deadeyes and lanyards and having sailed many vessels with the same in my days working for a classic yacht brokerage, I've never seen anybody whip line around the lanyard falls to marry them for any reason. In fact, I've never even seen a need to adjust deadeye lanyards once the rig was properly set up, although this may be because modernly, standing rigging is wire cable rather than fiber rope which does stretch a lot more when new. (Except for the modern cordage such as Dyneema which is now replacing standing rigging on high-tech racing craft due to its low stretching, superior strength and lower weight.) There's no reason not to do so, save the waste of expensive cordage, but I similarly fail to see any valid purpose or advantage in marrying the lanyard falls. In theory, pulling them together would make them a small bit tighter, but in practice so little more is gained that it is negligible considering the inherent stretch factor of the rig. Neither do I ever recall anybody who knew what they were doing actually using deadeyes and lanyards as a "triple purchase block," which it is mechanically, to tighten the shroud to which it was attached. Greasing the "eyes" with a liberal amount of tallow will make pulling the lanyard through much easier to a point, but once the slack is taken up and the lanyard takes a strain, the friction created quickly makes tightening past that point with the lanyard a fool's errand.

Neither is there any need to do more than take up the slack in standing rigging because any sailing vessel on a tack will necessarily have her leeward standing rigging hanging slack, only to be fetched up on the opposite tack. A super-taunt headstay on a modern fore and aft rig may improve windward performance slightly, although more often in the imagination of the helmsman than in reality. On a sailing vessel with a rig designed for fiber cordage, it really doesn't matter how tight the standing rigging may be, once the slack is taken out of it. Such rigs were designed taking their dynamics into account. They were meant to move, and much like a shock absorber on a car, to soften the impact of constant movement at sea.

The apparent present-day fixation with employing deadeyes and lanyards as triple-purchase blocks to haul standing rigging tight is apparently the result of a lack of understanding of the deadeye and lanyard's true purpose, which is decidedly not to provide any mechanical advantage in hauling the standing rigging tight. This misperception is probably the result of conflating the functions of deadeyes and lanyards with bottle screws and turnbuckles employed with wire cable standing rigging. The deadeyes and lanyards' purpose is only to provide a static connection between the standing rigging and the hull. Deadeyes and lanyards were invented because the size of the standing rigging and the strains imposed upon it required a size of fiber cordage that was too big to tie into a knot, but could be turned around a deadeye and siezed to itself. Those who have ever handled a life-sized wormed, parceled, and served length of standing rigging will certainly understand this limitation. The problem then was that the lanyard, being smaller, was not capable of standing the strain. Enter the deadeye, which by accommodating multiple passes of the lanyard, distributes the strain on the lanyard equally into parts equal to or greater than the breaking strength of the thicker standing rigging. The holes of the deadeyes aren't intended to permit anything more than a slight movement, easily accommodated by the shrouds' self-adjusting when the tension slackens on alternate tacks. For the deadeye to function as a free-running multiple purchase block, it would require free turning sheaves which it does not have.

It is my understanding and practice of long experience that the evolution of setting up standing rigging with a deadeye and lanyard is accomplished by clapping a "handy billy" or similar loose tackle onto the shroud or stay (not the lanyard) with a rolling hitch and fastening the fixed part of the tackle to the chainplate just below the lower deadeye and thence, if the size of the job requires it, the fall is lead to a convenient winch, windlass, or capstan, and the shroud or stay heaved tight, at which time the lanyard is rove in the customary fashion without slack, belayed around the shroud or stay with a cow hitch above the splice turning in the upper deadeye, and the remainder of the lanyard lashed to a lanyard fall between the two deadeyes. (Admiralty practice, however, appears to have been to have been to lead the lanyard end after hitching upwards and tied around the siezed body of the shroud or stay.) Once the lanyard is secured, the tension on the shroud or stay is released and the "handy billy" or other tackle is removed. No fruitless effort trying to tighten the shroud or stay by hauling on the lanyard is ever expended nor are long lengths of excess lanyard cordage wasted.

The "rats' nests" of lanyards wrapped around and around the falls between deadeyes as pictured above and in the video are an arrangement I've never seen before other than on vessels which were obviously maintained in a very lubberly fashion or, as the old timers used to say, "a farmer's boat." You can bet that the penny-pinching Lords of the Admiralty would never have approved of such a waste of cordage! ;)

Marrying deadeye lanyards with a seizing is simply not the way it was ever done by anybody who knew what they were doing, nor is it the way it should be done. For some reason, YouTube DIY videos seem to breed this kind of baloney regardless of the subject matter. It is just another example of spontaneously generated "free-floating online bullsh*t" that gets posted and reposted and ultimately becomes gospel to a generation of people who refuse to heed Albert Einstein's sage advice not to believe everything they read on the internet. :D

The world would be a better place if YouTube had user-generated ratings for its how-to-do-it videos. Something like a rating of between one and five of these guys:
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The normal procedure for tightening or adjusting the shrouds (which did have to be done periodically, especially after uprigging; it is reported in English logbooks of the 17th century and later) was not to use the deadeyes and lanyards as tackles (for the reasons very clearly listed by Bob Cleek above), but to use the mast tackles to pull the mast to one side, then taking the desired amount of slack out of the lanyards, and then easing off the mast tackles.

Fred
 
fred.hocker said:
The normal procedure for tightening or adjusting the shrouds (which did have to be done periodically, especially after uprigging; it is reported in English logbooks of the 17th century and later) was not to use the deadeyes and lanyards as tackles (for the reasons very clearly listed by Bob Cleek above), but to use the mast tackles to pull the mast to one side, then taking the desired amount of slack out of the lanyards, and then easing off the mast tackles.

Fred
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Quite so! And when the vessel was under sail, the deadeye lanyards on the leeward standing rigging, being effortlessly slack, could be taken up in the same fashion.
 
rtwpsom2 said:
So they say if you speak of the devil, he'll appear, and I just came across this video of Kroum Batchvarov discussing this very topic.
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Ya just gotta love Kroum!:) I hadn't seen this one before. Some of his other critiques of certain kits are priceless. He calls them like they are and doesn't pussyfoot around worrying that somebody is going to snivel about the truths he speaks. He must be a wonderful professor. He's so easy to listen to and so precise.
 
To me, after taking the time to adjust/tighten the shroud lanyards to get the shroud tension "just right" for each one, the last thing you'd want to do is then wrap the lanyards around the tightened area between the deadeyes, changing the tension in all the shrouds. The "standard" way of wrapping the lanyards wraps them above the tightened portion of the lanyards (between the deadeyes), which would not change the tension, but just keep it taunt.
 
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