King's Pine

Discussed in this Post

  • Geaghan Brothers King’s Pine IPA, 6.2% ABV 66 IBU

  • Eastern White Pine 

  • Mast Trade

We recently had a Geaghan Brothers’ King’s Pine IPA.  The beer is a tasty drinkable American IPA, and the label has an image of a pine tree trunk with three slashes, like this /|\.  In a small box, it briefly explains that “King’s Broad Arrow.” We propose to explain it at more length in the following paragraphs.  If you’re only here for the beer, you can stop reading now, and go try any of the Geaghan Brothers products. If you care to read on, the following pairs well with a King’s Pine IPA or any beer you enjoy.

As Portland tour guides and Portland History Docents, we knew that the three-slash King’s Broad Arrow was a mark put on the biggest pine tree trunks by Crown Surveyor-generals, to reserve the trees as masts for the British Navy.  At one time Portland, then called Falmouth, was the biggest, busiest mast port in the British Empire. The King’s Arrow policy was resented by colonists, and became one of the causes of the Revolution.

However, we did not know much more than that.  We turned to our friend Stephen, a docent at the Tate House Museum (see the Coloniale post) for details.  “In the 1600’s when England became a great sea power and was competing with other European powers, goods and people traveled by sail.  To capture the power of the wind, sails needed masts. Modern civilization runs on oil. In the 1600’s civilization ran on wood,” he said.  “By that time England was completely depleted of trees large enough to make masts. The Baltic was England’s closest source of great masts. To keep the Baltic open for timber trade became a focal point of British naval policy.”  

Stephen also loaned us a copy of New England Masts and The King’s Broad Arrow by Samuel F. Manning.  Another major source for this work is Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862, by Robert Albion.  In his introduction, he speaks of “the close resemblance of the old timber problem to the modern oil situation.”  Timber then, as oil in modern times, was “abundant at the outset, but liable to ultimate exhaustion.” 

In 1605, Captain George Weymouth explored the coast of what is now Maine. He discovered vast shoals of fish, and on the shore, “James Rosier, chronicler of the voyage, noted, ‘The wood it bearith is no shrubbish fit only for Fewell, but good, tall Firre, Spruce, Birds, Beeche, and Oake.’”  (quoted in Manning).

 New England’s giant white pines, (Pinus Strobus), stand up to 230 feet. Their wood is soft, easy to cut, straight, and generally without knots. Unlike hardwood, white pine can stand for years without cracking, and it bends, rather than breaks, in a high wind. It was a perfect tree to make masts.  While white pine was not as strong as the wood from the Baltic, it weighed only ¼ as much. Still the American colonies did not become a significant source of lumber for the Royal Navy for several decades.

Europeans had been exploiting the New England coast as a distant-water fishery for a century before colonization began in earnest.  Early coastal settlements needed a mere foothold for the sake of trading for furs, but harvesting lumber called for an infrastructure that risked being wiped out by natives at any time.   Manning put it, “Loading of masts aboard a regular carrier assumes that the tallest trees of the forest have been cut, moved, hewn, and assembled for shipment in a hostile, unpopulated region much farther east.” 

Actually, before the mast trade developed, because islands in the Caribbean had gone all in on sugar cane, New England merchants found a market for oak barrel parts, and dried fish to feed sugar plantation slaves.  The return of sugar, molasses, and rum cargoes were salable anywhere.

Finally, in 1652 the Admiralty dispatched mast ships to New England, and annual mast trade began. Once the area was pacified and accessible, settlers and merchants came to view the woods of Maine as an unending magazine of masts. As the facilities developed merchants sent mast logs to French and Spanish customers as well.

The Admiralty and forces in England were generally opposed to supporting the timber and ship-building industries of New England, concerned from the start that they might be developing a future enemy.  Albion put it, “The fear was expressed as early as 1664, that New England threatened to become the ‘Most prejudicial’ of colonies because of its growing maritime strength.” Later policy made this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ve been invited to do a presentation on this topic at Three of Strong Distillery (see this link for details), so this post has been extended and expanded and will be continued…

Jeff LyonsComment