Mayflower Ship Colors.....

From what I've seen of reconstructed and replica ships there was a bit more colour to sailing ships than we think. You might use some medium blues to trim her out plus some buff yellows.

One of the chores for the crew was to keep things shiny. It cut down on people lounging about, getting into trouble.

.And the wheeled mounts (name?) were those

Carriages, probably left natural wood. Wheel treads would be dirty. Some of the carriage would look newer than the rest from repairs.

Paint them buff then try brushing over them with a Rit dye solution. I'd use a dark brown.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

Guess again. The Mayflower actually fought against the Spanish Armada in 1588

-- as it was an elderly ship, that's one of the reasons the Pilgrims got it cheap.

Cookie Sewell AMPS

One little question: That old plastic model made by Airfix, (which is quite similar to most of the other Mayflowers I've seen,) isn't that actually modeled after the Mayflower II, a slightly bigger ship built some years later?

Built some years after it landed those pilgrims in Plymouth and had been chopped up for firewood, that is ...

Argh! I meant to write "after the _original ship_ landed those pilgrim in Plymouth" ... :-P

Apparently they didn't do that either. There is a barn in England near the south coast where the main beam is purportedly the keel of the Mayflower and some of the major beams in it came from the ship. '

I recall my daughter had a Girl Scout project called "Old World New Dreams" where she had to vist 5 out of 13 places in England with direct US connections and that was one of them (as were Flamborough Head, Selby Abbey, a church in Pickering, Portsmouth and this barn).

We found it then but can't recall where it was.

Cookie Sewell AMPS

I suggest contacting Plimouth Plantation at

Cliff. Jones

A barn in Buckinghamshire? Overcome by a sudden facination I did a search for "Mayflower" on Google and found the sites linked to below. Lots of interesting reading about the "May-Floure" and her passengers.

Oh, and I also found that the Mayflower II was built between 1955 and

Now, Cookie, it may have been a military ship at one time (which is very interesting), but by the time the Pilgrims got it, it was definitely a merchant ship, with the lesser crew that entails. (Besides, can you imagine those ancestors of the legendarily tight-fisted New Englanders paying for any more crew than they had to?)

Steve H

AMPS>

Cannons would likely have been bronze, not brass. Bronze weathers to a brown or a green. Look at bronze statues in your parks and monuments.

Most ships in those days were not painted. They were oiled or coated with various substances. Below waterline it would likely have had a mixture of tallow and lime applied, which is a semi-matt light cream color.

Above waterline, various oils including fish oil would be used, which weathers wood to a dark brown. Mayflower was not a fancy ship with a very wealthy owner, so would probably have had a minimum of painted decorations. And, what there were, would have been low saturation colors, usually primary colors. Umbers were popular for reds.

Sails, if you include them, would have been cream, not white, as they would be unbleached linen. Or at least, not bleached to a washday white.

Stand>

Many of the recent replicas were of nineteeth century ships which had a lot more paint than ones in early centuries. In sixteenth and seventeenth centuries paint was very expensive and not very good.

I also th>

General Question: Isn't there a volume in "The Anatomy of The Ship" series on the Mayflower?? U.S.Naval Institute publications in the U.S. and Conway Maritime press in the U.K. Or am I confusing this with their volume on Christopher Columbus' ships? Memory ain't what it used to be.

Bill Shuey

Craig wrote:

This was way before the days of copper plating the hull to resist marine growth so I would bet that her bottom was tarred to above the water line. Above that, browns and greys are probably correct. Basically, the color of the wood.

Bill Shuey

We used to soak cloth sails in tea to give them some color. Made the sails from draftsmen's linen with the sizing soaked out. Great stuff, probably don't make it any more. That roll I have upstairs might belong in a museum. :-)