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We're standing next to a replica of the Half Moon, the very ship that sailed up this river
400 years ago with Henry Hudson and his crew. We're going to be speaking with the captain
of the replica, Chip Reynolds. Let's see what he has inside. Give us an outlay real quick
about the dimensions of the ship. How big is it from front to back, how wide is it,
how tall are the masts? Well you're looking at a vessel that's just over 100 tons in modern
terms and the extreme length from the sprit to the transom is about 100 feet. The mast
height goes up to about 87 feet. The hull length itself is right around 85 and the keel
length is something more like 65 feet. The breath of the ship is about 18 feet. So it's
a very commodious vessel but as you look around it you begin to see that the greatest volume
is in the hole, that is the lowest level below the ship. What makes sense this is a commercial
vessel. It's job is trade so they need that hole space to carry the commodities that they're
trading for. On Hudson's voyage it was not so much trade, although they did engage in
some minor trade just to see wether the opportunity for trade existed here. But in addition to
the commodities they're bringing back, the spices and such like that, they also needed
to have capacity for all their spare gear, fuel, the beer, the water, the meat, and the
fish they were carrying as well as spare wood, ship's boat that might have been prefabricated
and the pieces assembled down below deck. Everything had to be backed up on here. The
Half Moon had no blueprints. How is it possible that we are able to recreate a ship 400 years
after the fact with no blueprints? Well in the 17th century, shipwrights did not build
to blueprints, they built to rule of thumb. So they established the cargo carrying capacity
of the vessel and from that all the other measures were very standard and they were
proportional to both the tonnage and the keel length of the vessel. So we have the original
contract of the vessel that specifies its tonnage in Dutch measure called 'last' and
from that we can project what the size of the vessel would have been. Furthermore there
is extensive documentation about this particular style of vessel, the Dutch Yacht. These vessels
were well documented in artwork of the time and also in the narrative record that gives
us the items that were aboard the ship, the navigational instruments used, the accommodations
that were found on here. So the entire rig you see here, the shape of the ship, the designs
that are found on the vessel, the coloration that is used is all documentable through the
artwork of that time period. We know very clearly that in this first decade of the 1600s,
ship building was exploding because the profits that were to be made out of this particular
enterprise, there was tremendous incentive for the East India Company to find more efficient
routes. That is those that are less vulnerable to piracy, the extremes of weather to the
depredation on the crew from nutritional diseases when they were underway. And thus Henry Hudson
comes into play here as someone who is exploring these alternate routes and looking for a way
to get that more efficient route to the Indies for the East India Company.