Table of Contents Excerpt Rave and Reviews. About The Book. The path, which had been broad and easy to follow, suddenly changed. As the river valley continued to drop, the path maintained its level, but only by cutting into the walls of an almost-sheer rock face. The path continued like this for almost a mile before the gorge finally opened out, and we descended down to the level of the river and once again felt safe.
Why had such a spectacular path been built in the middle of nowhere? The answer lies in the rivalry that developed in the eighteenth century between the two emerging superpowers of the Western world, France and Britain, and provides just one of the more striking examples of the way wood has helped shape the human story. With the two nations vying for power and influence over their developing colonies and territories in the Caribbean and North America, an arms race started as they built up their navies.
Both nations strove to build bigger and more heavily armed ships of the line, capable of acting as firing platforms for up to a hundred huge cannons, which could batter other ships and shore defenses into submission.
But both countries came up against the same problem; how could they access enough trees to build their ships? The problem was not the lack of wood itself. France in particular had large areas of forest, which covered around 30 percent of the country.
The problem was the lack of trees tall and straight enough to make the tofoot masts of the ships. Most forests in Europe were already being managed, and it was becoming harder to find areas of primary forest where tall trees could still be found.
For France the answer lay in the wilds of the Pyrenees, where stands of huge fir trees still stood. Soon masts and other timbers were being hauled down the new path, before being rafted down to the sea. In Britain the problem of obtaining masts was even more acute. The country had a tree cover below 10 percent, and its forests had long before been put under management. Even by the sixteenth century, Britain had been forced to obtain almost all its masts from the countries adjoining the Baltic Sea.
The problem was that the fleets of its northern rivals, Holland and Sweden, were always threatening to cut off this supply, and in any case tall trees were becoming scarcer and more expensive. Britain turned to its American colonies, where the old-growth forests of New England contained huge, straight-trunked eastern white pine trees in seemingly limitless numbers.
From the mid-seventeenth century onward these trees, which could grow up to feet tall with a diameter of over five feet, became the tree of choice for the British navy; Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator, mentions the trade several times in his famous diary, rejoicing on December 3, , when a convoy carrying masts managed to evade a Dutch blockade: There is also the very good news come of four New England ships come home safe to Falmouth with masts for the King; which is a blessing mighty unexpected, and without which, if for nothing else, we must have failed the next year.
But God be praised for thus much good fortune, and send us the continuance of his favour in other things! Unfortunately, in seeking to secure their supply of masts, the British government made a series of policy blunders that were to have disastrous consequences.
They had difficulty buying tree trunks on the open market because the colonists preferred to saw them up for timber; this was after all a much easier way of processing them, considering their huge size, rather than hauling the unwieldy trunks for miles down to navigable rivers.
White pine trees above twenty-four inches in trunk diameter were marked with three strokes of a hatchet in the shape of an upward-pointing arrow and were deemed to be crown property. Research Highlight 04 NOV Research Highlight 29 OCT News 05 NOV Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.
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The effects of these depositional processes may not be quantifiable but should not be overlooked because the carbon 14 dating results might turn out to be too old for the context being dated. Disclaimer: This video is hosted in a third-party site and may contain advertising. Understanding the Old Wood Effect. Beta Analytic S. Methuselah is a bristlecone pine, and the world's oldest living thing. His growth rings document nearly 47 centuries of survival.
Bristlecones grow so slowly that a century of tree rings adds less than an inch of girth. The precise, extended chronology of these trees is directly responsible for the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon Dating.
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