Posted by JLabaree on May 23, 2007 at 17:18:25 from 216.220.235.91 user JLabaree.
In Reply to: Re: Joshua Slucum would not agree (was Re: The Cutty Sark - The ship that died of shame.) posted by Peter H on May 23, 2007 at 16:28:55:
Andrew: I agree with the good captain – restoring a vessel piece by piece does indeed result in the same boat. But I must have misunderstood what you said about Pioneer. I was responding to your comment that she was “built [not rebuilt] in the same way by the same methods out of the same materials to the same dimensions”. That’s very different from saying she was restored piece by piece. After a look at the website, I can see how you could argue that she was restored piece by piece, but you are beginning to stretch the concept when such a small percentage of the original (?) pieces were there when she was hauled out of the mud. In addition, and to your final point, given how little of the original bits and shape remained, there must have been a huge amount of guesswork done to rebuild her.
I worked for a time restoring old sailboats. Our rule of thumb on whether we were restoring the original or not was whether it ever ceased being a boat. If, throughout the process, the vessel remained more or less a recognizable boat, we were content to say the end result was the same boat that we started with, no matter how many pieces we replaced (in some cases virtually all of them). If, however, we had to dismantle the whole thing, scattering the pieces across the floor to use as patterns for an identical boat, we generally agreed that we had a whole new boat.
Peter: this is one of the reasons why some people prefer to preserve whatever is left of the original specimen in its current state (often, as you point out, modified from its original design) and instead build a reproduction or replica based on the evidence at hand. In the case of boats, even large ones, it is often no more expensive to take this approach and allows you to make concessions to modern technology (and modern regulations) without the added controversy of messing with the original.