Thursday, September 10, 2009

A hypothetical Halve Maen is better than no moon at all

The trouble with recreations of this sort is that they only give you the cleaned-up version of things. Hudson and his men were at the end of a five months voyage when they came into New York Harbor, and you know the boat didn’t look this good then. I bet it had a high stench, too. Conditions on such ships were primitive in the extreme. Note how small this is. You can't see how it was bobbing like a cork in the wake of passing ferries, so I sure hope the original rode smoother.
I read all of C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, and about the only thing I remember is the hardtack, the well-baked biscuits they used as bread aboard HM's ships. It was customary to bang them on the table before eating (they were so hard they were best dunked) to dislodge all the weevils … and that was two centuries after Hudson’s time.
This design, like much of the boat, is conjectural, but it’s nice. Would make a nice tat.

BTW, there was a Disneyfied Dutch village at Bowling Green selling clogs, tulips, and stroopwafels to eat on your stoop.

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