Launching forty tons of timber down a stone incline is not an act of muscle. It’s an act of grease and shape.
The standing ways of Slipway Two consisted of two parallel tracks of fourteen-inch squared English heart-oak, bolted to the solid mountain stone of the yard on a steady decline of five-eighths of an inch to the foot. Upon these tracks rested the sliding cradle. A six-ton framework of seasoned pine and oak bilge-blocks shaped to cup the hull of a thirty-ton naval munitions barge. Between the sliding wood of the cradle and the fixed wood of the ways lay three inches of animal fat compound. A boiled mixture of mutton fat, soft potash soap, and whale grease that allowed thirty-six tons of deadweight to slide into the harbor with the ease of a wet seal leaving an ice floe.
If the grease was fresh, the launch was smooth. If the grease was cold, fouled with wind-blown granite dust, or scraped dry by friction, the timber ways became an anvil.
Tomas Reed stood by the dry-dock tool-shed. He held a mug of hot chicory brew from the caulkers’ soup committee. The morning was raw, salt mist clinging to his coat. Beside him, Nessa Vale knelt on an overturned nail-keg, checking the level-bubbles on her brass transit.
