A few weeks ago we toured the gorgeous property of long-time Greenbelt supporters Cliff and Gay Hall who have granted GLT a conservation easement on sections of their land along the Luckiamute in the Kings Valley. It is a site of special interest in more ways than one. The Halls live in a pioneer dwelling, surrounded by the earliest evidence of settlers in the valley on a homestead between two streams that flow west into the Luckiamute—the sort of Eden migrants from the Midwest prized. But they were not the first people sheltering beneath the oaks. Led by archaeologist Dave Brauner, we wandered through what was perhaps one of the most densely populated areas of indigenous settlements in North America. Centuries of human lives, of human activity lie just beneath the surface. Incomers built persisting structures, cleared land, established sawmills and farms—this much is still evident. But the soil here is conducive neither to excavation nor the preservation of organic remains, plus it’s terribly hard to work with thick clay, so not much has been done to develop ancient sites for systematic exploration. Scant evidence of those centuries of human occupation has yet to emerge into the light again. The oaks above are silent on what transpired in their shadow a century or two ago. Nearby Ft. Hoskins, established only 150 years ago to monitor the newly created reservation on the coast, has recently been restored—much of the feel of the place comes from the fact that many of the trees that once shaded soldiers still shade today’s visitors. And the same is true for the riparian areas of the Hall property—the oaks are the only remaining witnesses to its earliest inhabitants. Everything else lies beneath the green veil. “I am the grass”, Sandburg writes: “Let me work.” And work it does.
Oaks seem impervious to time: impervious, solitary sentinels, as in Whitman’s paean to a Louisiana live-oak—“All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,/ Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green.” For him, oaks might grow joyously even without companions, without community, and because of that they cannot be like us. Thinking of Whitman’s oak in Louisiana with its collection of Spanish moss (not a true moss but rather an epiphyte. Whitman’s prodigious beard, on the other hand, may well be moss. . . .) we bring to mind an emblem of endurance, outlasting generations of those who marvel at its sheer presence. Yet when you look long, you see that even oaks must fade to grass. And entire forests, one way or another; these days I’m beavering away on a massive Oregon white oak that came down in last winter’s storms—its trunk is easily 3 feet thick, and will yield a full season’s firewood or more. That’s its lone and humble destiny. Not so some of its 19th century European cousins that perished en masse. The battle of Trafalgar, six hours on a late October afternoon in 1805, destroyed hundreds and hundreds of acres of oaks that had been refashioned into French and Spanish ships of the line. English losses were lighter, but their ships too were gone by mid-century: broken up and sold, or left to rot after serving as floating storehouses, gun platforms, or prisons. Dickens’ Magwitch, to Pip’s horror, crawls ashore in the fens after escaping from just such a ship.
Napoleonic–era frigates consumed entire forests. England’s two most famous—the HMS Temeraire and Nelson’s HMS Victory—between them gobbled up nearly eleven thousand English oaks (Quercus robur), drawn mainly from the open forests of Dean in Gloucestershire and Hainault in Essex and harvested at maximum age to strength ratio of around 150 years old. Lumber from trees grown in unfettered forests has natural twists and curves that make it stronger than straight-grained wood and less likely to splinter when hit, and lends itself easily to being fashioned into the distinctive wine-glass shaped hulls—thick branches for the frame’s futtocks– and the bent knees that support the gundecks. For the Temeraire’s hull alone, English shipwrights cut 288,000 cubic feet of oak from Hainault Forest. That’s about 5000 trees, each the size of the one I’m cutting away at for firewood. The stern post, from which the rudder hangs, was 40 feet long and more than two feet thick: pure heartwood. It must have been an impressive tree, well over two centuries old.
A word about Hainault Forest, besides the killing irony of a French name dating back to the Normans for a forest whose legacy is that it supplied lumber for an English navy fighting the French. In Henry VIII’s day, its royal hunting preserve alone covered over 3000 acres. Oak, hornbeam, chestnut—this was a brilliant mature climax hardwood forest. Far better (as the shipwrights tell us) for producing trees than the cramped light-starved royal forests of France, whose density made for long straight trees lacking the compression wood vital to curved supports. Naturally, because Hainault Forest had such fine oak, it was cut to pieces, and never recovered; a Royal Forest for centuries, it was declared ‘wasteland’ by Parliament in 1851, stripped of its remaining old growth, and engulfed by the City of London as thoroughly as the seas off Trafalgar had consumed those doomed French. Only a few hundred acres remain, now preserved by a land trust. In another incandescent irony, the amount of land that trust now guards is roughly the same as the size as the shipyard where HMS Temeraire’s keel was laid and where most of Hainault’s oak lumber ended up. Hainault Forest was not replanted– England’s next navies would be made of iron and in the interim there were other forests: in Canada and New Zealand, for example. Turner’s famous painting of the Temeraire’s last voyage tells all—a squat steam tug belching smoke like a floating furnace towing the de-rigged frigate to the mudflats of Rotherhithe, up the Thames, where she will be broken up. And where some of Temeraire’s Hainault oak futtocks ended as beams in parlours and inns. If you are ever in the presence of a piece of HMS Temeraire’s wood, those around you will point it out. Do your duty, as Nelson famously signalled, and bend a knee.
Nelson’s Trafalgar flagship, the HMS Victory (now a museum), was even larger, and we needn’t go into detail here (roughly 6000 oaks, 27 miles of rope rigging, 4 acres of canvas)—but think of this: at Trafalgar, a few hours conflict involved 60 ships of the line (and many smaller vessels) from the combined navies of France, England and Spain. Each ship was actually a small forest, and together, the floating oak on that October afternoon came to at least 330,000 trees, each over a century old. Not to mention the thousands of trees for masts, spars, sprits and decking.
Some of the trees around the Hall property were shading the banks of the Luckiamute even as the Temeraire bore down off Cape Trafalgar on that fateful late October afternoon in 1805.
