Now that I have your attention, I want to assure you that
there is indeed a kinship that I
feel deeply, that reaches into history to a period extending as far back as the
third millennium BC and in particular the twelve centuries between 1500 BC and
300 BC, when the great traders and shipbuilders of Phoenicia were a dominant
culture in the Mediterranean region. In the second millennium and even in the
third millennium metal workers made tools for wresting boards and timbers out
of logs so furniture, buildings, ships, and even coffins could be constructed.
They evolved from bronze tools to iron, as their “metallurgists” discovered how to produce this metal,
and further, with the addition of a little carbon, a type of iron that can be
worked into various shapes without breaking, unlike cast iron. Steel didn’t
arrive until recently. This material was what we call wrought iron. The
technology seems to have spread throughout the region, including Egypt, Crete,
Greece, the Balkans and Mesopotamia, the “Fertile Crescent” that spanned the
territory between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.
The tools they produced were mallets, hammers, chisels, adzes, axes, bow- operated
augers, possibly foot powered lathes for producing pegs and dowels, and saws in
a wide variety. Everything they built was done with these tools. Of particular
interest to me are saws. The ability to flatten iron to the thickness needed
for a saw, and then cut dimensionally identical teeth into the edge, and then
file the teeth to sharpness bespeaks of a metal working capability beyond what
anyone has yet discovered.
Something occurred at about the beginning of second millennium
that paralleled the westward movement in America nearly four thousand years
later, that ended up in settlements along the Pacific Coast. In Mesopotamia,
trading out of the Persian gulf had already been established for centuries. But
there were dreamers, traders, adventurers, craftsmen and venture capitalists
among the Mespotamians who perceived that the west coast, bordering on the
Mediterranean, was the land of opportunity, so they headed for the region now known as Lebanon,
which had fertile lands along the coast, rivers leading inland, hills and
mountains covered with magnificent cedar trees, and natural harbors with waters
teeming with fish - a virtual paradise where a convergence of talents led to
one of the greatest trading enterprises ever. Egyptians had already been making
forays for centuries into Lebanon for the prized Cedars, as that nation had few
indigenous trees that were useful for lumber.
The settlers were a loosely organized civilization, occupying
independent city states - Sidon, Byblos, and later the close-by island of Tyre,
a prosperous, fortified trading center that took Alexander the Great seven
months to subdue on his way to building an empire. Once in business, Phoenicians
traded in slaves, lumber, wine, textiles, glass, and purple dye extracted from
Murex shells that was prized by royalty wherever they travelled. Phoenicians
traded along the southern Mediterranean, Egypt and other North Africa nations
over thousands of kilometers, and set up trading colonies like Carthage as they
moved westward. They were advanced in navigation and eventually sailed out of
the Mediterranean in their trading ventures and travelled north, as far as
England, where they traded for tin, and also south along the African coast. To
facilitate their trade with various cultures they developed a common language
that eventually became the alphabet we know, after the Greeks, Etruscans
and finally the Romans worked it
over. (The first two letters were
alpha and bethe, so guess where alphabet originated, and also the word
phonetics.) Needless to say, as the world’s dominant traders during that period,
Phoenicians got to be very wealthy even while withstanding occasional
invasions.
Of course, none of this
would have occurred had the Phoenicians not gotten to be great ship builders.
They had the craftsmen, they had the vast cedar forests in their back yard, and
they had the metallurgists and toolmakers to fashion the tools for felling the
trees and rendering them into the boards and timbers for building their ships
and for trade with nations like Egypt. But the foundation for the entire
fortunes of the Phoenicians are directly traceable to the excruciating, time
consuming labor of pairs of men, probably slaves, wielding rip saws up and
down, engaged in sawing logs into boards and timbers. The actual sawing of the
boards was accomplished in an arrangement where the log, first hewed to
flatness with axes and adzes on one side, was moved on rollers over a pit in
the ground. The saws were rip-saws, with the teeth pointing in one direction.
One of the men stood in the pit and drew the saw down in the cutting action and
the other stood on the log and lifted the saw for the next stroke. They did
this all day long. In a way the man in the pit had it easier as he had the help
of gravity. But he had sawdust falling on him all day and the heat, especially
in summer, must have been deadly. Millions of board feet of lumber were cut in
this manner.
This method of sawing
lumber didn’t change over thousands of years, although as far back as the
Romans AD some experimentation was done with water wheels powering the saws.
Pit sawing is even practiced today in places like Zambia, where high-value,
individual trees are “poached” by natives. Gradually, water powered mills
spread across Europe. They didn’t have much flexibility and production was
largely limited to trees that were cut in the immediate vicinity. During
colonial times n the United states most of the lumber was cut by two man teams
in a manner nearly identical to that of the Phoenicians, except that there was
no pit. The logs were placed on raised platforms. In Maine, where lumbering was
very active, workers resisted mechanization in fear of losing their jobs. But
the demand for lumber in the new nation grew rapidly, thus powered sawmills
sprung up everywhere. Following the Europeans, water wheels were the initial
power source with a device like a crankshaft that produced the reciprocating
action for sawing. As there was plenty of power, mill operators emplaced several
saws in a framework so more than one board could be cut a time- something like
the hand held tomato slicer that
has ten little saws in it, side by side, separated by the thickness of a tomato
slice. In this scheme logs had to
be transported to the mill. Not until the early nineteenth century, when steam
engine power became available, did sawmills become more or less portable, thus
could be located where the trees were.
When internal combustion engines were developed, they replaced the steam
engines. Even as late as the 1850’s
sawmills used reciprocating saw blades. That was when the next major advancements took place. With
the availability of more power and higher shaft speeds, circular saw blades
were adopted, often ganged together to cut several boards at a time. A later
improvement switched to band saws, which also operated in gang arrangements to
cut more boards at a time.
A lost art is that
of the specialist who travelled from sawmill to sawmill, like an itinerant
piano tuner, skilled in hammering circular saws that had warped due to
overheating into trueness so they could be used again.
Modern sawmills are
stationary installations and are highly computerized. Every part of the tree
trunk is used. - the bark for landscaping, sawdust for a type of panel board
used in cheap furniture, chips for a panel board that replaces plywood for construction,
chips for the paper industry from parts of the tree that are trimmed off in the
forest. Tree trunks are trucked to the mills full length, because that is where
they can be cut to optimum lengths for lumber. At the other end of the scale is
a very small portable sawmill that consists of a simple metal frameworks on
which is mounted a gasoline engine engine-powered band saw that travels along
the log. People operate these in
their back yards and can cut hundreds of square feet of lumber in a day.
Throughout the ages,
since the method remained much the same, the hand operated saw created in the
time of the Phoenicians has hardly changed, It is commonly known now as the
two-man crosscut saw. It is still used for felling trees and cutting logs to
length in situations that are temporary, where a chain saw isn’t handy, and
perhaps governed by individuals who see no need to depart from “the old ways.”
You can buy crosscut saws online. Probably the Phoenicians had crosscut saws
too for felling trees and sectioning them into transportable lengths, as that
was simply a matter of the tooth configuration on the blade. Things began to
change when the chain saw was invented by Andreas Stihl in Stuttgart, Germany
in 1926 and placed into production in 1929. It was a two-man, gas engine powered affair that weighed
116 pounds - not something you can use around the home. It was very successful,
but what with the Great Depression just around the corner and Germany ramping
up to conquer the world, there is no history of a significant appearance of
chain saws in the United States until after the war. Stihl continued in business and expanded world wide, and
other manufacturers like McCulloch and Huskavarna began domestic and foreign manufacture. Stihl is a
prosperous company after eighty years and has manufacturing plants in the
United States.
As a side note, chain
saws were first invented in 1790 for use in surgery. They were hand cranked
affairs that gave the surgeon better control in amputations. I suppose if you
hear the howl of a chain saw around a hospital, that might be what is going on.
I’ve not heard that the practice was ever halted. (Well, yes, I have. The
cutting is now done with a special wire that has cutters along its length).
So now we get close to
home, to finally reveal what this kinship with the Phoenicians is all about. It
goes back to the 1938 New England hurricane, which uprooted and laid over most
of the pine forests in southern New Hampshire. As a result, I found my high school
days truncated by time spent at one end of a two-man crosscut saw, with Pa on
the other end. I didn’t know much about the Phoenicians then but I came to
appreciate the conditions under which they worked. Together we cut up fallen
pines, skidded them out of the forest, loaded them onto Pa’s aging Acme truck and
hauled them to either an operating sawmill in Reeds Ferry or Horseshoe pond in
Thornton’s Ferry, where the Federal Government stored them in water to prevent
borer damage before they could be processed. It was exhausting, dangerous work.
I came to understand why the logging business is among the most dangerous of
occupations.
Toward the end, Pa saved
a load of logs to be sawed into boards for his own use. One fine October
afternoon, a great day for football, I thought, we trucked the logs to Fred Hall’s sawmill, a short distance
from our farm, which he operated when the spirit moved him, as he had aged
beyond where any sensible man would be operating a sawmill. He was wizened and
short, seldom shaved and wore bib overalls, a red-plaid woolen shirt and a
Boston & Maine Railroad cap. His eyes had a peculiar brightness. Tobacco
juice oozed from the corners of his mouth. We unloaded the logs and Pa took a
position where he would help Fred secure the logs to the carriage that fed the
logs into the saw. Fred, standing at the big circular saw, touching up the
teeth with a file, looked at me and said, “Start er up.”
I went to the engine, a
big six-cylinder International Harvester stationary power plant, turned the
switch on and started cranking. I didn’t know I was cranking the whole sawmill
and the entire affair suddenly roared into action. Fred jumped back from the
turning circular saw and Pa stood there laughing his head off. Fred started
sawing and I took the boards coming off the carriage and fed them into a
smaller rip saw that squared the edges. In about three hours the job was done.
Fred signaled me with a hand passed across his throat to shut the engine down,
which I did, and suddenly all was quiet except for the siren sounds of the saw
blades in our ears, which would linger for hours. Fred looked at me, his eyes
shining.
“Durn fool!” he said. “Yer
supposed to engage the clutch AFTER you start the engine!”
Author’s note:
The rise and fall of the
Phoenician culture is the lesson of how a civilization which starts out rich in
resources, but with no notion or inclination regarding sustainability, proceeds
to plunder its own territory until there is nothing else left to exploit. The
cedars of Lebanon were the Phoenician’s oil wells. When the trees were gone, or
nearly gone, the entire economy slumped. The hills and mountains eroded, the
rivers carried the soil to the sea and the harbors got silted in. The final insult occurred when the British
harvested the remaining cedars, using them for railroad ties. Only a few acres
remain in protected areas, but the magnificent forests will never be seen
again. Today, worldwide, various conservation efforts are indicators of growing
concern about depletion of resources, but it is probably far short of what is
needed.
