by Lloyd C. Irland
(This is the sixth article in a series by Lloyd C. Irland, originally published in the April issue of Maine Woodlands).

Reports by explorers Champlain, Weymouth, and Captain John Smith burst with superlatives describing the size of the trees they found on New England’s shores. They note their significance to the Navy’s needs, and the disadvantages should somebody else’s empire appropriate them. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Lords of the Admiralty were being squeezed by their Baltic timber suppliers. The Royal Navy was very busy, and between naval battles, storm damage, and normal wear and tear, the Royal dockyards needed growing quantities of mast and spar stock – so masts were an attractive export item for the American colonists. Portsmouth, N.H. was an early mast port. Shipments to England were made as early as 1634, and regularly after mid-century. Large, bulky “mast ships” were even built to accommodate them.

By the 1750s, the battleship arms race had made 74- to 100-gun ships, with double or triple gun decks, lords of the sea. Lord Nelson famously observed that the strongest diplomatic argument in Europe was a squadron of these ships. These monsters required masts and spars of stupendous size – mainmasts might be an incredible 40 yards long and 40 inches in diameter. The bowsprit was a huge spar, 25 yards by 37 inches, while the main yard was 35 yards by 25 inches. Yards were often spliced from two pieces of spruce.

The “main mast” described above was just the lower mast, supporting a gigantic topmast, topgallant mast, and royal. The mast supported yards that carried the sails. The main yard alone was 35 yards by 25 inches. Add two more masts with all spars, studding sail yards, and booms, and you have a large pile of wood. A typical 24-gun frigate might need main masts of 24 yards by 20 inches. The numerous brigs, sloops of war, cutters, and supply ships required smaller sticks but in large quantities.

Let’s bring these numbers to modern terms. A 40-yard stick would contain seven (count ’em) 16-foot logs with a 6-inch trim allowance. It would have to be free of large knots or other defects. The mast could only come from below the first live branches. Such a tree would have to stand 160-180 feet tall, closely surrounded by others that would foster self-pruning of all lower branches. Not for nothing was it said that a “great mast” was one tree in ten thousand.

In northern Europe trees of this size simply did not exist. Shipbuilders learned to build “made” masts, requiring smaller wood but costly and elaborate joinery and hopping to produce. Over most of the 18th century, however, conservative British yards relied on single-stick masts. England itself had no native softwoods, and Scotland’s Scots pines were not large enough. Spruce came from Norway and Scots pine from the eastern Baltic, rafted down the Vistula and other great rivers. (Footnote: British writers referred to the Scots pine as “firre”, and modern American authors have stumbled over this errant terminology.)

So much for the trees. But who owned them? During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), the Navy ordered 95 large ships. So it was no coincidence that beginning in 1691, successive governments declared all pines on ungranted lands larger than 24 inches to be property of the king. The colonists were used to cutting when and where they pleased. They continued cutting the “King’s own pines” and selling them to his dockyards. Colonists howled that economic development was hamstrung. Really? There were not enough 23-inch pines to build thousands of houses and buildings, construct seagoing vessels, and still export shiploads of squared timbers and lumber?

The King’s dockyards were not reliable customers. At the end of every war, revenue-starved kings shut down production. While the policy was to stock three years’ worth of masts and spars, these proved inadequate when the next war broke out, and the yard’s staff scrambled for raw materials. Naturally, suppliers gained pricing leverage at such moments.

The King’s enemies also needed masts. One of the most important concerns of Admiralty policy was to prevent New England masts falling into the hands of the French, Spanish, or Dutch, but it’s hardly surprising that when orders from English yards ceased, masts flowed to other customers.

Under colonial conditions, the Mast Acts were unenforceable. When royal agents arrived to supervise the mast trade and halt the unauthorized cutting of King’s pines, righteous outrage by businessmen suddenly become timber thieves was intense. Political orators thundered about “rights” and claims of injury to the local economy. Let’s be honest. Tensions over the pines occurred in local ports, and involved ill-prepared officials seeking to restrain frontier lawlessness. The 19th century history of federal lands replayed the same conflicts.

Several authors contend that grievances over the King’s pines were important causes of the Revolution, but most historians demur. Conflict in 1775 along the Maine coast involved local militias halting shipment of masts. One of these confrontations prompted the burning of Falmouth. These incidents were opening acts of revolt, but causes lay elsewhere, in escalating and arbitrary taxation, Royal efforts to ban settlement west of the Alleghenies, disgust over corruption, and attempts to enforce mercantilist policies controlling seaborne trade.

The King's Pines, the Colonies, and the Revolution