French Town Sets Sail Into Its Rich Past

Under the milky-colored plastic tarp stretched taut by a latticework of steel poles, power tools are whining in a nasty, nasally chorus. The air is fragrant with the tang of freshly worked oak.

Down in the yawning cobblestone-lined dry dock is what looks like the fossil of some enormous and strange dinosaur, its spinal column stretching 145 feet, its ribs vaulting skyward.

Christian Le Gallic, who left a 17-year career in the French navy in hopes of becoming part of all this, is thrilled. The 40-year-old who works as a boat builder on France’s Atlantic coast drinks in with his eyes the great sailing ship taking form beneath him.

“This is so moving when you are attached to the ocean,” he said.

In a calculated gamble, the town of Rochefort, founded more than three centuries ago as a shipyard for France’s kings but now a depressed river port, is trying to revive an illustrious chapter from its past, one that links it with the United States.

On March 10, 1780, the Hermione, a 32-gun frigate that recently had rolled down the ways at Rochefort, embarked a French nobleman named Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. The captain noted in his log that the 23-year-old blueblood, a native of the Auvergne region in central France, quickly became seasick.

Ahead lay a perilous, 38-day voyage across the Atlantic. On returning to America, the Frenchman was supposed to inform his commander, Gen. George Washington, that King Louis XVI was pleased to commit half a dozen ships of the line and 5,000 infantry to help the colonial rebels in their struggle against the English.

“From the moment when I heard the name of America pronounced, I loved it,” the messenger on board the Hermione, who is far better known to history as the Marquis de Lafayette, recalled later.

Frigate, Lafayette Shared Similar Fates

Nobody better personifies the shared ideals of the United States and France, and their long--if sometimes testy--alliance than Lafayette, a recruit to the cause of American liberty whom Washington treated like a beloved son. It is a relationship the vessel from Rochefort helped cement.

“If the United States exist, it is a little bit thanks to Hermione,” contends Maryse Vital, coordinator of the association created to build the replica.

The three-master that carried the welcome news of French assistance to the American revolutionaries ran aground 13 years later on a sandbar off Brittany and sank. Its rusty multi-ton anchor still marks the spot.

In a way, a similar fate befell Lafayette when he returned to his own land. After playing a hero’s role at first in the French Revolution as commander of the National Guard, he fell from favor when he ordered his men to fire on a mob in Paris. He died in 1834 and was buried in a little-known Parisian cemetery. Enamored of the United States to the end, he left instructions to have his coffin covered with a trunkful of dirt he had brought back from America.

To remind people of Rochefort’s glory days, provide it with a major tourist attraction and trademark--and, yes, to cash in on the long-neglected, tenuous connection with the United States--leaders here decided to rebuild the ship they call “The Frigate of Liberty.”

The original Hermione was constructed in 1779, one of the rare periods when France’s shipbuilders were on a par with those of England. The task took 11 months and required as many as 1,500 shipwrights, drillers, nailers, joiners and other craftsmen. Convicts by the hundreds furnished the brute force to saw timber or work the hoists.

These days, only half a dozen carpenters are on the job, working 41-hour weeks with electric saws and planes but with the same type of adzes and long iron chisels used in the 18th century. If all goes as planned, they should have the skeleton and hull of the reproduction finished by 2005.

“Hats off to the people back then who did this with the means at hand,” said foreman Jacques Haie, 45, his work clothes sprinkled with sawdust, as he showed a visitor the new Hermione’s massive, foot-wide ribs of oak. “We’ve really got nothing to be proud of. We’re copiers, that’s all.”

It is hardly so simple. Rebuilding a sailing vessel on the scale of the Hermione, which weighed 1,200 tons and was big enough to carry a 231-man crew, has never before been attempted in France. Crafts as common in the 18th century as computer literacy is today have vanished, or nearly so. Much detective work was required to re-create the design, since no known picture of the Hermione exists.

“For this ship, no way are we going to find what we need in a hardware store,” said Raymond Labbe, 75, a retired shipbuilder from Brittany who has been brought in to inspect work on the replica.

More Than 65,000 Feet of Rope Is Required

Where, for example, do you look these days for a foundry capable of casting replicas of Hermione’s cannons, which fired 12-pound cannonballs? Or somebody to carve 835 pulleys out of elm?

More than 65,000 feet of rope for the rigging and 16,000 square feet of sail will have to be woven from hemp if the new Hermione is to be an authentic copy. Even finding the right wood is problematic. The Baltic coast may still supply the light, whippy pine needed for masts, including a main mast that will tower 150 feet above the deck. But for wooden sailing vessels, builders need curved beams and planking. And these days, trees are grown to produce straight timber.

So an added co-worker of Haie’s now spends his workdays visiting forests across western France, hunting for oaks with the right crooks and bends. A total of 2,000 trees will have to be felled.

On the symbolic date of July 4, 1997, anniversary of U.S. independence, the 9-ton wooden keel of the new Hermione was laid in one of Rochefort’s dry docks.

Now, every two weeks on average, a new rib--a wishbone-shaped assembly of as many as 18 pieces of oak weighing 2 to 3 tons--is maneuvered by overhead gantry and dropped into a notch in the keel. Haie and his men are now at rib No. 32; there will be a total of 63.

“When you see the scale model of the boat and then look at what still has to be done, you say: This is madness,” Vital acknowledged.

For nobody knows yet how Hermione is going to be paid for. About $2.3 million in funds, mostly from the town of Rochefort, French governmental bodies and the European Union in Brussels, have been secured to finance work through the end of this year. But if today’s estimates are correct, about $11 million will be needed to finish and launch Hermione.

That is the equivalent of two annual budgets for Rochefort.

Mayor Jean-Louis Frot is a Hermione advocate. “For several years, we’d been saying to ourselves, ‘There’s something missing here,’ ” said the 67-year-old mayor. “Rochefort was a naval arsenal. And there is no naval arsenal without a ship.”

Located about 250 miles southwest of Paris, Rochefort these days is a sad economic case, with 18% joblessness, or nearly twice the national average. And there’s been more bad news. Downsizing by the French military means that by 2002 the town will lose its remaining naval facilities: a school to train aircraft carrier flight mechanics and another for cooks, secretaries and naval orderlies.

Contrast that with centuries past, when Rochefort was the equivalent of the Kennedy Space Center. In 1665, a minister of Louis XIV seeking the ideal site for a new shipyard selected a marshy spot on the slow-moving Charente River downstream from the vineyards of Cognac.

Only a church and a few huts were here then. But Rochefort quickly grew to encompass dry docks; a powder works, smithy and bakery for ship biscuit; and what is believed to be the longest industrial edifice of the era, the Royal Rope Works, a narrow building almost a quarter-mile long where cable and rope for ships’ rigging were woven.

At its height, 8,000 carpenters and other craftsmen were at work in Rochefort, constructing, victualing and repairing the ships of France’s navy. In boom periods, 20 new vessels were launched a year.

In 1926, however, the French government closed the Rochefort arsenal. Advances in naval gunnery meant that even 14 miles up the Charente from the Atlantic, the arsenal here was no longer safe.

It was a devastating blow, one from which Rochefort still hasn’t recovered. The population, which had reached 37,000, fell by 10,000. During World War II, the retreating Germans set fire to the rope works, reducing a graceful edifice of honey-colored limestone to a blackened hulk.

In the mid-1960s, the local admiral in charge, Maurice Dupont, championed restoration of the rope works, a goal many at first found eccentric. After 11 years of refurbishing, the edifice reopened in 1985 as a museum and research center devoted to ships and the sea.

Project Is Meant to Cap Town’s Renaissance

Last year, 120,000 people visited the attraction, enough to keep 40 Rochefort residents employed. At the beginning of the 1990s, two 18th century stone dry docks, monuments of the shipbuilding art and science, were cleaned of mud and put on display. One is now home to the Hermione construction site.

Building the replica is meant to be the crowning act in this town’s renaissance. The Hermione-Lafayette Assn. was formed in 1993 to get the project going; it now has 2,000 members.

Though hundreds of ships were constructed in Rochefort, there never was much debate about which one to rebuild. Hermione, one of an innovative class of lightweight, speedy frigates, has the virtue of being smaller--and therefore cheaper to copy--than battleships of the period, called ships of the line.

Just as important, the Lafayette connection meant Rochefort could hope for financial help from across the ocean. Already, Mayor Frot says, he’s been given checks by sympathetic American visitors, though so far only for small sums.

Once the new Hermione is built, fully rigged and trimmed with sail--perhaps in 2007--plans call for it to retrace the path of Lafayette’s 1780 voyage to Boston, then return here to moor as the jewel of a growing tourist complex devoted to ships and the sea.

For the Hermione, authenticity is supposed to be the watchword, insofar as possible. The frigate will not be modified to carry a motor, as have been some other modern reproductions of sailing ships. That means it will not be making regular cruises or carrying passengers.

Modern safety regulations, however, do require concessions. A marine engineering firm in nearby La Rochelle used the table of measurements drawn up by the original builder, Chevillard the Elder, to do a computer simulation of the ship’s seaworthiness. To make the frame fit more tightly, the keelson, a beam that runs the length of the ship at the bottom of the hold and pins the ribs to the keel, has been made 9 inches thicker.

Until recently, what the Hermione project had failed to do was generate much enthusiasm among ordinary citizens in Rochefort. “People here especially notice what this will cost them in taxes, and not what it will bring,” said Benoit Rivalland, 32, the sole local resident among Haie’s team of carpenters.

But Rivalland and others say attitudes may be changing. This year, receipts from visitors paying $4 to watch as the ship’s frame slowly takes shape should defray 15% of expenses, organizers believe.

This summer, more visitor-friendly attractions are planned, such as workshops showing how shipwrights went about their tasks in the days before electric saws and planes. Le Gallic, the navy veteran, hopes for a spot in one of the workshops.

But why rebuild a sailing ship that at best went 12 knots when at present many nations, France included, are collaborating to put a space station in orbit? Beyond immediate economic issues, believes Labbe, it is a matter of remembering who we are.

“Nobody knows how to do anything anymore; there is less and less savoir-faire,” said the shipbuilder from Brittany. “If we make a future that contains nothing but computers, all we’ll inherit from the past is photographs.”