Portsmouth Navy Yard Copper Sheathing Scrap in the Civil War

The Yard That Is Not in Portsmouth

Every man in this state speaks of the Portsmouth Navy Yard as though it were ours. It is a federal yard, set up in the year 1800, and it does not stand in Portsmouth at all. It stands on islands on the Kittery side of the Piscataqua, and that is Maine. So the first falsehood in the Navy's books is the name on the cover, and I promise you it is not the last.

Since the war began, that yard has roared like a smithy in the cellar of perdition. Ship carpenters, caulkers, riggers, sawyers and coppersmiths have come down from every hill town in New England for Navy wages. The Suncook mills lost good hands to the shipwrights, and the mill owners have complained of it ever since. In 1861 the yard launched the steam sloop Kearsarge, named for our own Mount Kearsarge in Warner. Last June, in 1864, off Cherbourg, she sent the Confederate raider Alabama to the bottom of the Channel in about an hour of shooting. Before the fight her crew had hung heavy anchor chain down her sides amidships and boxed it in with planking where no eye could find it. The Alabama's shells glanced off it, and the Confederate officers howled that it was no fair fight. That, reader, is exactly what a Yankee calls a fair fight.

Why a Warship Wears a Copper Skirt

Warm salt water breeds the shipworm. It is no worm but a little clam with a drill bit for a face, and it bores into oak planking until a ship's bottom is a honeycomb. Weed and barnacle grow on a bare hull besides and slow her down like a Concord matron wading through a church picnic. So the shipwrights cover everything below the waterline in thin copper sheet, nailed in overlapping courses with copper nails. The sea dissolves that copper very slowly, and what comes away poisons the clam and the weed alike.

It follows that the sheathing wears away every day she is afloat, like a bar of soap in a sailor's bunk. After a few years it is thin, pitted, torn at the seams and crusted with barnacle and pitch. At refit it is stripped off by the cartload. Then there are the bolts, copper or copper-alloy and as long as your arm. Iron will not serve below the waterline, for iron touching copper in salt water makes a sort of battery, and the iron is eaten. When a hull is rebuilt, bent, wasted and condemned bolts come out of her, and good heavy copper lies in a pile. I have one on my table as I write. I shall not say which hull it came from, for I gave my word to the man who sold it to me.

No Navy ledger ever matched what went out at the gate. The honest reason is this. Sheathing is ordered by weight, so many ounces to the square foot, and it comes off years later much lighter, the Atlantic having dined on it, and loaded with nails, pitch, paint and dead barnacles besides. The clerk writes down a figure that signifies nothing and goes to dinner. The dishonest reasons are more diverting. Some auction dealers bid on a pile and carry off a pile and a half. A few pounds fall off the teamsters' wagons at certain taverns, and a sailor going ashore walks heavier than he came aboard. The metal turned up in the tin shops of Exeter and Dover, with the coppersmiths of Concord, and with a certain dentist and blacksmith of Pittsfield.

A Cart of Salt Cod and a Bear on a Chain

In the spring of 1863 I drove my oxen down the old First New Hampshire Turnpike, chartered in 1796. It runs through Northwood and Nottingham to the Piscataqua Bridge at Durham, and it gave me four days of mud the colour of tobacco spit. On the Portsmouth waterfront a one-eyed junk dealer, who kept his good eye on my purse and his glass eye on the Lord, sold me six hundredweight of condemned sheathing and a bundle of bent bolts. The price was so low that I am ashamed of it still.

No man drives Navy copper up the turnpike in plain sight with the Provost Marshal sniffing at every crossroads. So I laid salt cod from a Kittery schooner four feet deep over the load. Salt cod in a warm May sun reaches into a man's soul and goes through his pockets while it is there. The Northwood dogs followed me nine miles, every inn turned me away, and a Barnstead deacon took one breath and joined the Universalists. My beard kept the smell until Independence Day.

When word got about that I kept Navy copper behind the forge, a junk-picker from Manchester came over my back fence at two in the morning. He did not know that my bear Barnaby's chain reaches exactly to the copper pile and a foot past it, for I measured it so. The fellow had sat in pine pitch on his way in, and Barnaby loves anything sticky. I found him pinned on the copper with his trousers peeled off seat first, praying in two languages. I traded Barnaby a ham bone for him and sent him back over the fence. Barnaby kept one boot, and I count it the man's receipt.

Lessons from the Brushy Mountains

Junior Vance of Wilkes County, North Carolina, has handled more contraband copper than any man I ever shared a jug with. His mountain stillmen got their metal from junkmen. One in North Wilkesboro swore he had sold Junior forty pounds of sheet, yet Junior's mule carried it off without flicking an ear. Junior went back after dark and found a lead sinker the size of a hen's egg wired under the scale pan, so that every pound weighed was three-quarters of a pound. After that he carried his own steelyard on his saddle.

Another time lightning struck a little Baptist church out past Moravian Falls, and the preacher sold him the fallen copper roof. Half of it proved to be lead, because some tinsmith had soldered lead flashing into every seam around the steeple. Lead in a still kills a man slow and ugly, turning his gums blue and setting his hands shaking. So Junior took a pocketknife to every seam, since lead is soft and gray and cuts like cheese, and he rubbed every doubtful streak on a page of the feed-store almanac to see if it left a mark. "I went through about half that almanac," he told me. "Lost the whole month of October."

His cousin Dewey wound a worm around a locust fence post and kinked one turn flat without noticing. He fired the still, the vapour could not pass, and the cap blew off and sailed straight into a hornet nest the size of a bushel basket. Dewey took more than forty stings and woke with a head like a boiled ham with ears. A still must breathe. Never seal it, never kink the worm, and never stop the outlet. Pressure does not argue. It explodes.

Assaying Sea-Copper at Your Own Bench

Suppose you have a cart of sea-copper in your barn. First learn what it is. In 1832 an Englishman named George Muntz patented a yellow metal of about sixty parts copper to forty of zinc and sold it to navies as cheaper sheathing. File a fresh corner on every piece. True copper shows salmon-pink, the colour of a healthy gum, and brass shows yellow, like a sick one. Keep the two apart. Hunt out the lead with knife and paper and throw it away. Pull every nail, scrub with sand and vinegar, and burn off the pitch in the open air with the wind at your back.

Copper melts at close to two thousand degrees on Mr. Fahrenheit's scale. You will need a good charcoal fire, a clay crucible, and a bellows boy with strong arms and no plans for the evening. Molten copper drinks up air the way a deacon drinks communion wine when nobody is counting, and it cools brittle. The old refiners cured this by poling: they thrust a stick of green wood into the melt, and the gases from the wood stripped the oxygen back out. The result is tough pitch copper, which you cast as a flat slab and hammer into sheet. Copper grows hard under the hammer. Bring it to a dull red and it goes soft again, whether you quench it or let it cool slowly. Hammer, anneal, and hammer again, and you raise a pot. Join the seams with rivets, silver solder or tight unions. Never use lead.

Why copper at all? The sulfur stinks of a mash rise with the vapour, and bright copper takes them up and keeps them out of the jar. Crusted sheathing that was never properly cleaned does this badly and may shed green crud into the run. The pot is part of the recipe.

The Run and the Cuts

Here is the craft as I learned it, set down for history's sake. Cook your grain, cool it, and ferment it with yeast to a low wash in a warm, airy room. Charge the pot no more than three-quarters full. Keep the fire low, steady and shielded, and check every joint for leaks, because alcohol vapour near an open flame will burn the still-house down around your ears. Remember Dewey.

Methanol, the wood spirit, boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees and good grain spirit at about a hundred and seventy-three. So the poison crowds to the front of the run like debtors at a funeral. Throw out the foreshots and heads. Fruit mash gives more of it, because pectin breaks down into methanol, so the apple-jack man takes a bigger head cut. Keep the sweet hearts, and set the oily tails aside to run again. Judge by smell, by taste on the back of the hand, and by watching the stream. Mind, too, that making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law. I learned as much in the Merrimack lockup.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak, and Other Swamp Medicine

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is lye in waiting, the very potash your grandmother made soap from. It may knock down a little sourness and will surely leave the whiskey tasting of Saturday washing day. It will not touch the methanol, which can only be cut away at the condenser. Oak works on spirit in a barrel over months. Shavings in a hot keg lend a little colour and tannin, but they cure no bad cut. Red oak is the wrong oak in any case. Its pores run open from end to end, while white oak holds whiskey because its pores are plugged inside. Ask any cooper.

Nor is ship's copper the purest in the world, whatever the seacoast tells you. Much of it is Muntz metal, eaten thin, stuck through with nails, and patched by some tinker who thought lead a fine idea. File, scrape and test every piece, keep your copper clean, and keep your fire low.