The Gotherborg at Gt. Yarmouth quay
The Gotheborg, the world's largest operational wooden ship, was berthed Great Yarmouth quay at the weekend for the maritime festival and I went to see her. The Gotheborg is in fact a Swedish built replica of a ship of the same name which sailed in the mid eighteenth century. Visitors were charged a reasonable fee to look round her.... and fascinating it was too. Because the vessel is a working boat it conveys that authentic, grimy and untidy ambiance of a going concern; in contrast to the prim scrubbed clean museum piece that HMS Victory has become. The Gotheborg has very much the touch and feel of the real thing and brings the visitor a bit closer to just what it was like to live and work on one of these wooden sailing ships. So, congratulations to the Swedes on their excellent work.
I took some photos of the interior and two of them can be seen below. The first picture is a general view of the gun deck.
This second picture shows us one of the gun portals. with wooden walls around 18 inch thick:
.....So that's how you make an authentic sea going wooden ship! But you don't make it like this:
I doubt this would last five minutes on the high sea, let alone a year
OK, OK, I know that Answers in Genesis's Ark mock up is all about facade, because the real deal would be far too expensive. But for AiG "facade" is very much the name of their game: From their tame academics who produce no young earthist papers for mainstream academia, through the liberal use of the omphalus hypothesis in their cosmology, to the thin walls of this so-called “Ark”; if it's a choice of style over content, style wins out every-time. The whole AiG outfit revolves round the maintenance of a PR charade; Verdict? Must try harder to bring greater authenticity to the ministry!
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