With the same hardiness and commitment that launched the first “Virginia” from the banks of Popham in 1609, a group of volunteers for Maine’s First Ship is determined to recreate the historic vessel.

But the replica pinnace — a fast boat that carries a lot of cargo for its 40-foot size — won’t sail for England this time like it did when colonists abandoned their toehold at the mouth of the Kennebec 400 years ago. Instead, the charted course is set for hands-on education, living history and tourism.

Dressed like a longshoreman on a recent Saturday morning, Orman Hines, president of Maine’s First Ship, supervised frame construction at the boatshop behind the Bath Freight Shed. “It’s been a slower process than we would have hoped,” he said.

Maine’s First Ship developed out of the archeological excavation that began in 1997 of the site of the Popham Colony in Phippsburg, established in 1607 by 100 English colonists. They called their settlement Fort Saint George in honor of George Popham, a nephew of Sir John Popham, the new colony’s primary financial backer and England’s chief justice.

Like their sister colony in Jamestown, Va., Popham colonists were looking for trade, timber and treasures in the New World. Fourteen months later, after experiencing a brutal Maine winter and inhospitable natives, colonists returned to England on the pinnance they built for exploration along the Kennebec River.

“This was the first English ship built in North America,” Hines said. “Some of us who worked on the Popham dig thought it was a good idea to bring it back.”

The group now includes education as an anchor of its mission statement, with local high school students actively involved in hands-on boat building.
“We teach them everything … old tools and new tools, draw knives and spoke planes and the ship’s saw,” Hines said.

For a while, the project took place on the campus of Maine Maritime Museum, but the group couldn’t raise enough money to acheive its goal of launching the Virginia in time for 400-year anniversary of the founding of the Popham Colony, in 2007.

More recent challenges have included damage to the boatshed — but not the Virginia — from the 75-mph wind gusts of Superstorm Sandy in October.
On Dec. 3, volunteers raised the roof and a few days later rebuilt the end walls and reinstalled the doors of the boatshed.

With the boatshed rebuild completed, volunteers started working again on Virginia’s elevated lofting platform.
Straddling the keel, the white platform measures 16 feet square, accommodating the full layout of each of Virginia’s frames for assembly and the drilling and inserting of trunnels.
A trunnel is a wooden peg that swells when wet and is used to fasten timbers.

Virginia’s forward frames are being built between now and May 2013 and consist of progressively beveled futtucks — the curved timbers that forms a rib in the frame of a ship — which are cut using the articulating ship’s saw.

As each futtock is milled, volunteers adjust the saw blade angle to engineered bevels as the cuts are made.
Gayle Teague, treasurer of Maine’s First Ship, watched through the lens of her Nikon camera as her husband, Tim, recently drove trunnels to assemble the ship’s frame.

“When we passed that 2007 mark, the board at the time didn’t feel the project was viable. Since then,” she said, “we’ve reformulated what we’re doing. I think we’re proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is viable.”

“We moved here in 2010 and started building with what money we had,” Hines said.

Since then, volunteers have donated everything from time to timber, completing the keel and stem and raising frames that will one day hold the planking.

When you think that builders of the original “Virginia” had no currency for construction at all, it’s not surprising that a little bit of resourcefulness goes a long way, even 400 years later.