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Mahogany: From Jamaica With Love. Season 2, Episode 7.
44 Plays4 years ago
Mahogany. We all know it for it's beauty and workability. On this episode we cover all things mahogany and how it relates to the Colonial period of American furniture.
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Transcript
Introduction and Partnership Announcement
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Podcast Casuals and Mahogany Introduction
00:01:06
Speaker
All right, here we are.
00:01:09
Speaker
Number three for the day. Yeah. Series two. Episode seven. That's right. Moved on to tea from coffee. I got water. Still in the, uh, I know a Guy Viz cup. I K A G V I Z on Instagram. It's an awesome cup. Got a little celestial seasonings peppermint. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, not bad.
00:01:36
Speaker
What are we talking about today? Mahogany.
History and Types of Mahogany
00:01:40
Speaker
And I don't mean the song by Diana Ross. Only people from a certain age group will even understand that reference.
00:01:53
Speaker
But yes, that was a movie, I believe, and that was the theme song sung by Diana Ross, starring Diana Ross. If I heard it, I'd probably know it. Miss Ross, I don't know if I'd know it if I heard it. Well, I take it back then. So.
00:02:13
Speaker
The third episode in the in the series of, you know, like we do them in these blocks of four plus the Patreon was sort of like dealt with materials and techniques and everything like that. And I wasn't sure what to do, you know, it wasn't an extreme progression in techniques. There was a refinement in what they were producing. Right.
00:02:40
Speaker
Still mortis and tenon and dovetail and yeah, yeah a lot of that stuff is pretty much Still true to this day. Mm-hmm
00:02:49
Speaker
But something that stuck out to me was the, I'll put in air quotes, the discovery by Europeans of mahogany. Talking about the same way Columbus discovered the new world. That's exactly, that's exactly it. And it was just Columbus day the other day. So that is an appropriate comparison.
00:03:18
Speaker
Excuse me. And if you're a modern cabinet maker, you'll know there's quite a bit of confusion as to what mahogany really is. Oh, yeah. So let's start out with these are the questions I ask. What is it? Where does it come from?
00:03:38
Speaker
Nowadays, a lot of lumber is sold as, air quote, mahogany. Or mahigany or something. Yeah, that's mahigany.
Botanical and Historical Context of Mahogany
00:03:50
Speaker
Some dumbasses. Right now Lou is doing a spit take.
00:03:57
Speaker
Or similar to mahogany. You have Kaya, which is the real name for African mahogany. Okay. Sapele. Yep. I'm not sure if you say this. Utile. Utile. Utile. Have you ever seen that? I'm not sure. But that's more commonly known as Sipo. Sipo.
00:04:22
Speaker
That's another one. I always called it Sippo. And then I heard Cory and Rob this weekend saying, were they saying Sippo? So that's another mahogany lookalike. McCore.
Mahogany in Woodworking and Historical Significance
00:04:41
Speaker
And Luon, which is Philippine mahogany.
00:04:46
Speaker
But there there's really two types of mahogany real mahogany and we're gonna we're gonna Excuse me I Have to go to biology if we go back to biology class in high school, which I skipped quite regularly You thought we butchered those names before
00:05:05
Speaker
Hold on to your pain. A genus is a term used on biology to describe relationships between several organisms that share enough similarities to be part of the same family, but are still distinct species.
00:05:27
Speaker
Again, on the discovery of mahogany, the Europeans had to come in and name it. Is that that white privilege that we're talking about? Yes, and classify it. So we have the kind that comes from the Northern Caribbean. That includes even Florida. Could you imagine it was mahogany in Florida?
00:05:51
Speaker
Jamaica, Cuba, you know, we've heard of Cuban mahogany, Hispaniola and the Bahamas. That's the short-leafed West Indian mahogany. And for you geographically inept, Hispaniola is the island where Dominican Republic and Haiti are.
00:06:15
Speaker
I'm sure his banyola never even heard of that. I'm sure you vacationed there And didn't even know I'll be heading there in April. Yeah, so that's the sweet a ten year mahogany Shortleaf West Indian mahogany
00:06:33
Speaker
And then there's the more prevalent Swiatenya macrophila. That's big leafed Honduran mahogany. Oh, yeah. That literally means, yeah. That's, yeah. Indigenous to Central and South America, ranging from the Yucatan, which is that eastern peninsula of Mexico. Yucatan. Yucatan. The Yucatan Peninsula.
00:06:59
Speaker
I don't know. It's going to be a tough season for pronunciation. Lack of education or you know, when you grow up with these regional dialects like, uh, well anyway, that goes from the Yucatan to Northern Brazil.
00:07:14
Speaker
Like, how do you say the state that's between California and Washington? Oregon. Oregon. Now I always grew up saying Oregon. How do you say the one that's like shaped like a square with a lot of mountains and snowboarding? New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado. Colorado.
00:07:36
Speaker
Colorado, Colorado, Colorado, and the fruit. Which one? The fruit. Apple. The one that you can't compare to apples. Oranges? Yeah, orange. Some people say like orange. Orange. Orange. Yeah. Yeah. The region, the regionalities they call them.
00:07:59
Speaker
Yeah. So we're going to we're going to destroy all kinds of words. If you're offended, take to the comments as we know who to block. We're doing our best. We really are. So.
00:08:18
Speaker
To kind of summarize that, there's tons of stuff sold as mahogany and there's two kinds botanically. Right. Yeah. Genuine. Right. Cuban mahogany, Jamaican mahogany, that's all the same stuff. And then there's the Honduran mahogany. So African mahogany is not even a thing. These are, these are,
00:08:47
Speaker
Was it a disambiguation? Yeah, these are trees that aren't related botanically, but they just happen to pass off in appearance. Like sapele, that kind of came out as mahogany cousin or whatever, but it's a nice wood on its own.
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. We don't use it in an attempt to mimic mahogany at all. We just use it because it looks nice. Yeah. Definitely a different sort of color. Yes. Although you get different different
Sustainability and Modern Perceptions of Mahogany
00:09:22
Speaker
colors depending on the region of Africa that it comes from. Right. So from Ghana, I think is some of the best. So the mahogany tree discovered in the Americas was given the genus Swatinia. And only this genus is classified officially as genuine mahogany.
00:09:41
Speaker
Um, so there you go. I bet that a lot of people didn't know that because I didn't know it. You know, we all think that. You know, it's related somehow. Yeah, it's marketing wank. Yeah, it makes me think of fish, right? Patagonian toothfish. When they give like the orange roughy, you know, they come up with all these marketing names. Yeah. You know what the Patagonian toothfish is? Seabass? Chilean Seabass. Yeah.
00:10:13
Speaker
They aren't selling that at the fine restaurant, are they? Yeah, we can't sell this as Patagonian toothfish.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, there's a ton of that going on in the fish trade. And just as much in the lumber trade, it seems. Yeah. Because as we deplete the supplies, we got to come up with, you know. Yeah, and the price goes up. Then you need to offer something at a lower price that is, you know, similar. You need to market it somehow. So the next thing I write in ball print from my notes, what's so great about mahogany?
00:10:52
Speaker
Well, excellent workability. And it's really got a great balance between its density and its workability. You know, it's just hard and they use that Goldilocks term. It's just hard enough, not too hard. Yeah, like tight grains, but not hard. Right. Excellent stability.
00:11:22
Speaker
So, you know, flat pieces stay flat. Unlike a lot of the knockoff mahogany. Right, even, I mean, we got a couple of pieces of sapele in the shed that are useless. Yeah, the ones that came flats on or yeah. Sippo, Sippo, whatever, supposed to move a lot.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah. I know Rob and I'm sorry. CT was working with a lot of that. Yeah. Making a couple of screen doors and stuff. Yep. Yep. We used severely for our similar project. Yeah, I'm not sure. Our lumber suppliers sell something that's called African mahogany. I'm not sure if it's CIPO or if it's the the Kaya. Kaya. Yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
The Kai, if I remember, it's more brown. Okay. Especially compared to Sapele and Mahogany, which is like it does have, although what I did learn was that even true Mahogany varies greatly its color palette.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I did like some reading on on the mahoganese on the African mahoganese recently because I was curious and I think they said that CPO is like the closest color wise typically to authentic mahogany. But that's something we run into all the time and
00:12:50
Speaker
Nothing wrong with this stupid thing back here. That top and face frame is severely. That's right. It doesn't look, I mean, it doesn't look anything like the sapele that we're used to. I mean, super light. Because we usually get cortisol and it's usually like a deep burgundy almost. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, after you cut it, it's like cherry where it starts to darken. But this, I mean, it's been down here for a month now. Yeah, easy.
00:13:20
Speaker
It almost looks like looks like cherry in the video. Yeah. So the stability and workability, that's those are probably the two main things we would look for. Call would, you know, really preferable. Yep.
00:13:42
Speaker
Um, it's got decent rot resistance. Okay. So it's not like a teak or, you know, the other, how do you like the way I misspell exotics on the note exotics, but respectable.
00:14:01
Speaker
And as you might imagine the new growth Mahogany isn't anything close to like the old I'm shocked Like everything they don't make it like they used to Especially yeah, I mean we were talking about this just yesterday in the shop about pine. Mm-hmm
00:14:21
Speaker
Like old growth pine, you can make furniture out of that. Oh, yeah. But get your hands on some. Yeah, that's the problem. It's got to pay through the nose. Yeah, so the new growth stuff isn't as durable as the old growth from a few hundred years ago. And this is
Fun Facts and Modern Use of Mahogany
00:14:39
Speaker
subjective, but in the what's so great about Mahogany category is it's grain. It's beautiful. It's a good looking wood. Oh, yeah.
00:14:47
Speaker
Especially if you get into some of that figured stuff if you like that kind of thing It's it's got great color and The last thing I got here is it's big. It's large clear lumber mahogany trees
00:15:08
Speaker
I don't know. Nowadays, we're huge. Yeah. It's like this appeal. You know, that's why it's such a sustainable tree because it grows so big and they, you know, they, and it grows fast and they plant them a lot.
00:15:20
Speaker
And by clear lumber, that means there's no branches. Like if you've ever gotten a board and then there's a knot in it, that knot meant there was a branch there, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you have black knots and red knots. You know, one was a, was one that died and one was one that was, you know, like alive. So you could get a mahogany tree that goes 80 feet up before you hit a branch.
00:15:47
Speaker
I wonder if they drop their limbs like a poplar or if they just kind of grow up that way. That's interesting because I mean that's a good question. It's hard to think of a tree getting to be
00:16:03
Speaker
you know, 100 feet tall with a 60-foot trunk without having any branches, like, right? Yeah, well, yeah, like, how does that work? Well, the branch just goes, it grows, and the branch just keeps going. And the branches just push up, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it must push up from the bottom. Like, it starts like a little canopy, and then it goes, I don't know. Then it goes up. We're no, uh, arborists. No, not at all. So,
00:16:28
Speaker
That's what's so great about mahogany. Excellent workability, excellent stability. It's a good looker, and it comes in really nice, flat, big boards because the trees grow so large. Especially in the 1700s.
00:16:49
Speaker
All right. So when did your Europeans discover mahogany? You missed your fun fact. Oh, my fun fact. Oh, yeah, that's because I got the original version with the with the with the right. Can you read that over there? Oh, yeah, I got it. Fun fact. Number one, mahogany is the national tree of the Dominican Republic and Belize. And on the Belizean, the Belizean coat of arms.
00:17:19
Speaker
There are two woodcutters bearing an axe and the motto, under the shade I flourish. Well, they have woodpecker squares, those guys. Can you believe Chippendale didn't have a woodpecker? He might have.
00:17:37
Speaker
He might have invented it. Now that happened 20 minutes ago but for those listening now it happened a week ago. Yeah they probably had an ad in the back of the that book you put out. Yeah for Woodpecker squares. Right.
Conclusion and Acknowledgements
00:17:53
Speaker
I mean look at those plans that Chip and Dale had in that book and tell me how useful Woodpecker would be. Right.
00:18:02
Speaker
Right? Yeah, you got 12 woodpeckers. You're never going to build anything like that. Just saying. You know that we did meet a convert from the woodpecker family at the makers camp. Did we? Yeah. Didn't somebody come up to us and express that they're going just they're moving to star it because of the aluminum, uh, uh, Johnny. You don't remember that? Oh, it was Johnny. Yeah. Yeah. Well, take that with a grain of salt.
00:18:32
Speaker
Sorry, Johnny. Was he trying to, was he just trying to just kind of coddle up? Um, so thank you for, uh, sending me backwards there, but when did Europeans discover mahogany?
00:18:49
Speaker
Who do you think the first Europeans were, given the location? The Spanish? Yeah, very good, very good. You did well in high school. That's debatable. My test scores were good. There you go. The Spaniards were the first Europeans to see mahogany in use by the native population, and they were quick to note its outstanding properties.
00:19:16
Speaker
They were making canoes, basically working the wood by lighting it on fire and then hollowing it out. I don't even know if they had metal tools. They were probably digging it out with sharpened stone and things like that. Yeah, I don't know. Because we're talking about the 1500s.
00:19:40
Speaker
There were churches on Cuba with mahogany work dating back to the 1500s. But like they kept chocolate a secret, they kept this a secret, basically. And they declared mahogany a royal monopoly. And so, for the most part, all the mahogany stayed there in Cuba and in Havana, the capital city. And they didn't export it to Europe. Exclusive? Yeah.
00:20:12
Speaker
had some Spanish privilege. Yeah. I mean, they were the man. They did some messed up stuff. They were some bad mamajamas. The Spaniards took no prisoners. They were they were a ruthless bunch in their conquering. Yeah. I mean, a country now that, you know,
00:20:35
Speaker
You would think of as, you know, relatively benign and sort of, um, I don't say insignificant in to sound bad, but just sort of just larger world. They're just kind of just there. Like, yeah, man, back in the 15, 16, 1700, Spain was in, they were fucking stuff up. They got, they got a dirty, you think America's got a dirty past. Yeah.
00:21:04
Speaker
I wonder what the Spanish history books are like, you know. Yeah. In confronting, you know, all the carnage. Yeah. Well, the European countries are much more willing to tell the truth, it seems. Right. I mean, it's just starting to get some toehold here and there's a ton of pushback. People do not want to hear it. Yeah.
00:21:29
Speaker
I mean, the thing with Columbus Day and that not just passing what I think officially we call it like native people, indigenous people. I don't know. Yeah. I think some states have adopted. I'm not sure federally if it. I'm not. Yeah, positive. Now, in my studies.
00:21:49
Speaker
I came across Columbus and I'm willing to take one for the team. Columbus has been kind of the one Italian American that the figure that Italian Americans can kind of latch on to as like saying, all right, let's get recognized for something besides a mafiosa boss. What about Amerigo Vespucci?
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah. And people don't know about that. America was named incidentally a better. I'm not I'm not of the school that says like condemn everything Columbus did because he did a lot, especially for like cartography and navigation.
00:22:30
Speaker
Was he personally responsible for killing people and slave trade and stuff like that? Maybe a little bit, but probably not to the significance that people are attributing it to. But I don't think he has a lot of significance in American history, which is why it's confusing that we have a Columbus Day when it could be Amerigo Vespucci Day or whatever. I mean, he's more significant to the discovery of the Americas than
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'll tell you a little bit about that. Well, first, yeah, Columbus sailed for Spain, and so he had the Spanish cruise, and so a lot of that stuff is attributed to the cruise. Columbus Day was supposed to be a one-off, and I think you'll probably remember when... Was it LaGuardia?
00:23:22
Speaker
No, the Sicilians were lynched down in Louisiana at the turn of the last century. And it was kind of like, you know, it was a it was an international incident. And Italy had pulled its representatives out of the country. It was a big deal.
00:23:43
Speaker
And America kind of threw Italy a bone and said, oh, we're going to have like a Columbus Day to commemorate, you know, the Italy's contributions. Yep. But just a little patronizing, a little patronizing play the Italians. But the Italian Americans wouldn't let it go. And so and that's how we got Columbus Day. Yeah, it was supposed to be a one off.
00:24:14
Speaker
A little diversion there, a little more history. The French, we'll get back to it, they also had Cali. You might know this because Haiti is, they were French speakers, so on the island of Hispaniola, they found mahogany there.
00:24:37
Speaker
they didn't really export a lot of it back to Europe. And so by the 1700s, Mahogany is still kind of an undiscovered thing as far as we're concerned in our for our topic. Right. I'm not sure if it's because, you know, France had all that walnut, too, you know, that they were growing. But anyway,
00:25:04
Speaker
1721 rolls around and Britain's not really down in the West Indies as we call it In this in the same way the Spanish are But they passed this act in 1721 and remove all import duties from their territories and they had Jamaica and the Bahamas and
00:25:30
Speaker
And that's when things took off. Because before that, there were there were tariffs on all this stuff going into Europe, into Britain, and of course, then going to the American colonies, which were under British control at that point. Right.
00:25:50
Speaker
To give you an idea in numbers in 1740 Britain imported 525 tons of mahogany. That's a good bit though 10 years later in 1750 they imported 3,688 tons. Well, so that's like seven times
00:26:13
Speaker
Now in 1788, that's when they peak 30,000 tons in just a year. I wonder what, uh, what that works out to board footage wise. Like what's the one board foot at mahogany way. It's pretty light. It's probably got to be. And you figure in its trees now and they're milling it in. Yeah. Yeah. Like just logs. Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:42
Speaker
So it's got to be, you know, let's say a board foot weighs a pound and that's, that's light. It's got to be more than that. Yeah. Is that like a, like a cubic, a cubic foot of oak, I think weighs like 40 something pounds. Wow, that's pretty heavy. So that's 12 board feet. Yeah. Or no, 36, 36 pounds.
00:27:05
Speaker
Well, anyway, I won't. Well, I'm not going to drag you. So it's got to be like like 30,000 times two times two thousand. That's what 60 million six hundred thousand times two thousand.
00:27:21
Speaker
Oh, no. Yeah. Wow. That's a lot of zeros. Yeah. So like 6 million board feet. 30,000 times 2,000. 60 million. 60 million. 60 million board feet. Yeah. That's assuming it's a pound for a board foot. Yeah. Wow. So this Jamaican
00:27:44
Speaker
the Hamian, mostly Jamaican mahogany, of course it gets over to the colonies. And that's what we're concerned with. So how did mahogany actually get all the way up to New England?
00:27:58
Speaker
Um, the first documented, uh, record I could find was in Rhode Island in 1730. And it was in a court document, of all things, because Sutton Grant, a Scottish born merchant, delivered a parcel of mahogany to Joiner William Robinson. Um, Robinson died before he
00:28:32
Speaker
And court documents from all those years ago survive and Grant sued. Isn't that crazy? I call, I call the doctor to try and get information on surgery. I had back in like 2005 gone. Meanwhile, 1720, they got a mahogany transaction.
00:28:53
Speaker
that we know the net. We know the guy's names. We know that. And then we have computers now and you just put it in there. It's there forever. They're like, no, we got rid of that. We have the premise of all this, you know, why it happens. Um, I didn't write it to, Oh, he sued. So the details of the transaction are that Robinson was supposed to build a bookcase and a desk for 25 pounds.
00:29:20
Speaker
Um, and I figured it out and hopefully this is accurate. That's $6,052 in 2021 currency. Wow.
00:29:32
Speaker
Again, it's got to be just ballpark because we're using these online calculators. We don't know. You guys say, like, what's a pound in 1730 worth. But remind you of anything. We're on the other end of that case. But yeah, people, you know, not getting paid. Except we finished the job. We didn't die.
00:30:00
Speaker
That's right. I wonder who he sued. I guess his estate. Yes, yes. So again, time and place. World events influence furniture design. Prior to the discovery of mahogany, English furniture makers preferred walnut. Much of it imported from France.
00:30:21
Speaker
And fashion in the colonies followed European trends. So colonial cabinet makers who had access to walnut, especially, used quite a bit of walnut for their better work. It's funny, we haven't seen a lot of examples of that. Right, we haven't. Most of the early American stuff was all oak. Yeah.
00:30:41
Speaker
And we kind of flashed through that walnut period. But they were using it for their better work, as opposed to cherry and maple. Those were a bit of lesser woods. So what happens? 1709, there's a brutal frost in France, and it kills a bunch of walnut.
00:31:06
Speaker
And in the years following France decides they're gonna ban all exports of walnut
00:31:15
Speaker
Now there's this big void to fill. This is me writing, I'll read directly from my pondering. It's hard to say how these circumstances, if they had not occurred, if there was a normal walnut harvest and France had not banned exports, would have affected the transition from walnut to mahogany
00:31:38
Speaker
As the premier would for fine furniture. Yeah, like if there's no frost if if France still is pushing walnut out the door
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting, like I feel like, and now I haven't worked with genuine mahogany, but I feel like mahogany and walnut have a similar like workability, like they're similar. Obviously, they look a lot different, but they do work very similarly. Yeah. They have that sort of like, well, I guess walnuts maybe. Well, no, even they do have that same like amount of open grain and they're kind of, you know, hard, but not too hard.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, I love working with walnut. The times that I've had to use it are pretty spare. And it has always been kind of costly to get the better stuff. I mean, now the kind of stuff they pass off to us, it's really...
00:32:40
Speaker
yeah it's like firewood basically it is it is it's really disgusting you know grade it on a different scale all together than all the other hardwoods yeah so we're talking about you know mid 18th century 1750s 60s
00:32:56
Speaker
Colonial Americans become enamored with the rich colors and silky surfaces of mahogany. I mean, it's that European influence trickling back in, you know, everyone is still looking to Europe for all of the sort of
00:33:14
Speaker
cues of what is the hot, I mean it's the same thing now. We're not trendsetters here typically. The trends are happening in Europe and when you're talking about fashion and stuff like that, then it comes here.
00:33:30
Speaker
Right. Right. Exactly. And it was kind of it was exotic, you know, coming from the West Indies. We still look at things like that. Oh, it's imported. Look at this imported cheese. You know, they're drinking my Fiji water.
00:33:53
Speaker
came all the way from Fiji. I'm guilty of that with my Sam Pellegrino. But I mean look at how big Perrier has been in America for I think it got over here in the 70s maybe. That's Perrier is what French. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a big fan of Perrier when I've had it. So there is I wonder if
00:34:21
Speaker
If Europeans see it the same way, I mean, is there anything that we make over here that you could think of that over there? They say, well, it's made in the USA. I mean, I think there's definitely like novelty stuff. Like I watch a guy on YouTube who's British and he, you know, you see in the grocery store, they have like an American section and they have like all this stupid, you know, frosted flakes. Oh, yeah. Just dumb stuff like that.
00:34:50
Speaker
But we think of German tools, Swiss accuracy, Italian design. Do we have anything like that?
00:35:01
Speaker
anymore. Well, we have technology that we develop, but we don't produce it after that. Yes. It's built in China. Yeah. And even then the design team is an amalgamation of people from all different countries. I mean, that's the thing. Like you see, I mean, that's one of the great things about America, but
00:35:24
Speaker
Like if you see our Olympic team or our technology departments, there are people from India, people from Europe, from everywhere in the world coming together to make it happen here because we have the platform.
00:35:46
Speaker
So how did mahogany get to New England? Obviously on a boat. No.
00:35:56
Speaker
The British controlled Jamaica their their main trade with sugar. Mm-hmm And slaves I'll say that they're probably making a run with that sugar. That's right. And remember the triangle trade route from Was that the junior high school or high school? I don't remember. So this is how this is how it went and
00:36:20
Speaker
The ships from England go to Africa and they bring iron, products, cloth, beads, guns, ammunition, and they trade these goods to the Africans
00:36:35
Speaker
for slaves, for other Africans, gold and spices like pepper. So they load up the ship with slaves and they go down to, well, they take them to the American colonies for one. And they called that the Middle Passage.
00:36:56
Speaker
And from there they were exchanged for goods from the Americas that would head back up to Europe. They would take the raw materials back to England, and England would use the raw materials, make finished goods, and send them back to the colonies.
00:37:17
Speaker
In in this triangle, you had the sugar and the rum that were produced in tobacco. Yeah. Down in the Caribbean. Oh, yeah. I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah. Slays were there, too. Yeah. And then the discovery, quote unquote, discovery of mahogany. They're like, hey, we could pick this up while we're here.
00:37:45
Speaker
That's right, that's right. So mahogany becomes this integral part of this triangle now. You got the slaves there to do all the hard work and we can pick up something else to put on the boats.
00:38:02
Speaker
And Jamaican mahogany was really the most sought after. It was denser, more lustrous, and had more dramatic grain, they say. So these ships are going from England to Africa to South to the Caribbean, then they're hitting the coast as the Middle Passage and then going back to England? I guess so. I'm not sure if they were...
00:38:29
Speaker
They went. I have it here. They go from Africa to the American colonies straight with the slaves. Right. But then maybe they go south to the. Yeah. I'm not sure. I must have left that out. And this has been a long time since I studied this.
00:38:52
Speaker
but definitely there's a triangle. Yeah, because the sugar is going where? Sugar is the raw material. It goes back to England because it gets refined. So it must go from Africa to the colonies. That was the first place they dropped off slaves. Then they went down to the Caribbean, then back up to England. Yeah, because they're definitely dropping slaves off in the
00:39:19
Speaker
I don't want to call it the Southern colonies for some reason, but for to the Caribbean. Yeah, because they're the ones harvesting all the sugar. That's right. They're doing all that work. I mean, that's how, you know. Black people ended up in Jamaica. Yeah, because the Native people, you know, like the Taino. Yeah. Was that the name of the people that were in Jamaica? I know that's like Puerto Rico was a Taino. Yeah. And Haiti, everything.
00:39:47
Speaker
So, away from that gruesome subject a little bit, here's something I learned. There's really no such thing as a mahogany forest.
00:40:01
Speaker
not naturally occurring anyway. So essentially you have these rain forests in Jamaica and they would have these spotters, huntsmen they call them, that will go out into the jungles and spot all the best trees to be chopped down.
00:40:23
Speaker
It's just blue text. Oh, no link. Oh, damn. I can copy and paste it because it was a, it was a great drawing of two, I'll have to say it slaves chopping down this huge mahogany tree. Yeah. Yeah. They have a little scaffolding set up. Mm-hmm. Felling mahogany in Honduras.
00:40:56
Speaker
And those are small trees. Yeah. There's one already felled there in the middle. Yeah, this guy's cooking lunch. I didn't even see him until just now. That's an idyllic artist's representation of what's going on. Yeah, look, it wasn't that bad. Yeah, come on. So they had the spotters. And then they'd have slaves.
00:41:26
Speaker
chopping them down. Imagine a hundred foot tall, eight foot across mahogany tree in the forest. Now you're going to have to get that tree to the, to the port. Yeah. You got to cut it down first, which is crazy.
00:41:48
Speaker
So that's that's, you know, ruminate on that a little bit. Yeah. They used to try and do it during the rainy seasons and like slide them down, you know, in currents of water. Got no cryogenically, you know, treated blades, working with stuff that's just tempered, you know, in my old school way. Yeah, it was it was brutal. It was brutal. But get this.
00:42:17
Speaker
It was the favored position of a slave because working in the sugar cane fields and the boiling houses was so horrific that at least they got to be out.
00:42:32
Speaker
There was a certain, uh, compared to, to the sugar cane, um, fields, it was certain amount of autonomy. They felt every now and again, you could slip away into the jungle and disappear. Um,
00:42:51
Speaker
And it didn't go without note at the time. I mean, it's easy for us to look back. I mean, that's the danger when you are a historian is that you get forward in history and hopefully you've become more aware and educated, but you don't want to be totally judgmental of what happened in the past because people are living in their time. Right.
00:43:14
Speaker
But I thought this was a quote from one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens, who he's a contemporary of that time. And he was a big critic of the harshness of urban life in England. And he said, in the depths of its grain, he's speaking of mahogany, through all its polish, it reflects the hue of wretched slaves.
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah, he was a... Wait, is he... He's British. Yeah. When he says wretched slaves, is he calling the slaves wretched or the fact that they were slaves? No, that they were. Right, yeah. So he was, you know, he was ahead of his time.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah, he was, you know, he wrote all those books, you know, not Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times. And in it, you know, he's always, you know, illustrating, you know, kids working in factories, putting labels on when they're like six years old and stuff like that.
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah, how these urban lifestyles are basically destroying. Yeah, they black soot over London. Here was another shocker. So this is maybe 30 years into the mahogany rage, we'll call it. By 1760s, Jamaica Mahogany is basically
00:44:52
Speaker
gone. Yeah. Well, they're going up into the mountains where the trees aren't growing as big. They're not as nice. And so they're not selling. People are inspecting and go, this isn't as good as the last batch. I'm sorry. I don't want it. Jeez. It takes 30 years for a trend to sort of go out like that. It means we got about another another 22 years of river tables.
00:45:24
Speaker
28 years of charcuterie boards. Oh my god. I don't know if I can survive that Yeah, it's because they didn't replant you know, they didn't replant they just chopped they they weren't uh weren't thinking about the future yeah, and It's the quality quantity drops
00:45:52
Speaker
conditions and and all that that goes along with it drop too like because the people who are running these things are you know cruel and cold-hearted looking at the bottom line so you know what it's like you could imagine them just driving the slaves harder yep it's like the slash and burn mindset
00:46:13
Speaker
get all the resources we can out of this place because they don't care about, you know, you're from Spain. They could care less about, you know, Jamaica or, you know, well, that was British. The Brits didn't care about Jamaica. They wanted to suck all the resources out and move on to the next place. Right. So for the most part, for any kind of, you know, on any kind of scale, authentic mahogany from the Caribbean disappeared 250 years ago. Wow.
00:46:42
Speaker
I mean, of course trees have grown back and just like, you know, we lost a chestnut and we got it back. But it's few and far between. I write in my notes here, somewhat sarcastically, next stop Honduras.
00:47:02
Speaker
which that's the mahogany that we're all familiar with. You know, Honduran mahogany is a quintessential mahogany. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and the whole process repeats itself. Wash, rinse, repeat.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think by that time they had learned a little bit of a lesson and maybe either they were more natural resources, bigger place, you know, the islands had much less area where these trees could grow in optimum conditions. And in Honduras, there's probably a lot more there. Right.
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, as the infrastructure starts to be built on, let's say, Jamaica, that's less area for trees. Exactly. There has to be a port. There has to be, you know, housing and all the things that support all of the things that are going on. Could you imagine them building docks and everything out of big mahogany trees? Yeah, they probably did that on Oak Island.
00:48:04
Speaker
Hey, Oak Island is coming back. Is it? Yeah. It's going to be a new episode in a couple of weeks. Look at this. Freddy, if you're listening, he just sent me this Shaper Powermatic with a Maji feeder. Wow. That's worth just for the feeder. Look at all the cutters. Holy cow. Two walls worth. Thousand bucks. Amazing. Wish we had the space. Yeah.
00:48:32
Speaker
I mean, if we had the space, we could be collecting tools and machines. But that's another story. So how did a cabinet maker get mahogany? That was my next question, because you couldn't go down to the store. You probably didn't have the cash. You couldn't chop it down and dry it.
00:49:01
Speaker
So how did you get mahogany? I found that it was basically through the barter economy. Somebody who wanted something built will come and they say, Hey, Jeff, I want you to build these two desks for me out of mahogany. I'm going to give you a thousand board feet.
00:49:25
Speaker
And that's going to be your payment. So these are upper crust sort of people who are approaching a furniture maker for a commission. Right. Like they're dealing direct in the they're a mercantile. They're dealing with sugar coming up. They're sending it to England. They got some some mahogany that came in on the boat.
00:49:43
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of the original clients are the guys who are the buyers and sellers. They're bringing in a shipload of mahogany because they're the people with all the dispensable wealth to begin with. Yeah, the farmer isn't buying a Chippendale design to mahogany highboy.
00:50:05
Speaker
He's going for something built out of native woods. He's probably banging it together with nails at his house with big pine boards. And even somebody who's in the market to purchase a piece, chances are they're buying something native, you know, and made by one of the country cabinet makers.
00:50:27
Speaker
So I tried to, I did my damn just to get the prices of these things. We tried figuring out that mahogany was 18 cents a board foot. It was the most expensive of the woods, walnut being second and then maple. Can you imagine that? Well, I mean,
00:50:51
Speaker
So that was their doll was that their dollars 18 cents and their money I don't know but remember we had 1.4 shillings was $5. Yeah, so 5 divided by 1.4 That's three dollars and fifty cents per shilling. So let's just say it was 18 shillings That's 64 28 a board foot. Yeah, that's kind of sounds about right. Yeah Yeah, I don't know
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean imagine if if remember because we were saying that $5 seemed low Yeah, if you if that was $50 it'd be $600 a board foot. So yeah, that must be good must be must be right I wish we had some accurate conversions means things it because every every spot I went to gave me something drastically different. Yeah, it's tough. I
00:51:41
Speaker
A lot of them are like, you know, high school websites and things like that, you know. But can't verify my sources.
00:51:52
Speaker
But I did see a YouTube video. It was the most expensive. And if if we were in the market for a mahogany, we had to be hired to make something and probably didn't receive any cash. But then we'd have like 800 board feet of mahogany. Yeah. And now we could sell it.
00:52:13
Speaker
you know, sell a piece. I have in Newport, wealthy folks and merchants commissioning furniture would often pay for the work with the mahogany itself. A few examples. In 1760, cabinet maker John Cahoon, he built a desk, a three and a half foot table and a tea table in exchange for 243 board feet of mahogany.
00:52:39
Speaker
Not bad. That's like what, like 12 gram? Yeah. Well, you gotta use some of that to make the stuff. So depending on how big that desk was and how involved, you know, a tea table probably didn't take too much. Well, here's John Goddard again. There he is. He built a high chest of drawers, a desk and a bookcase.
00:53:02
Speaker
for 1,091 board feet of mahogany. And the pieces called for about 180 board feet, it says. Seems kind of slim, doesn't it? 180 board feet for three pieces? I mean, if that's right, he got paid like 50 grand to make those. Yeah. He was a bad ass. He was. Well, he was the dude. He was the man. Yeah. Except for Chippendale, who didn't live in the Americas.
00:53:32
Speaker
It was John Goddard. Yeah. Maybe it was some of that ratty, uh, Andorian mahogany. Not that nice Jamaican stuff. Merchants would bring in shipments as large as 44,000 board feet. So a ship load, a boat load of mahogany. Talking millions of dollars of mahogany. Yeah. That, that kind of makes sense as a translation. Yeah. Um, Christopher Townsend, uh, John's daddy or uncle,
00:54:02
Speaker
Actually would stock it up and he specified where it went in his will. That's how valuable it was. Yeah All right, all right, we're gonna end our mahogany with a few fun facts a Mahogany tree can grow as high as 200 feet 150 feet is not a big deal. Well, I mean we're talking about
00:54:29
Speaker
I guess, if we leave it. Yeah, I mean, how tall are the sequoias? 300 feet? Yeah, yeah. Those are the biggest ones, right? The sequoias. Yeah, yeah. They can live to be 350 years old. That's nothing. Wow. The fruit of the big leaf mahogany is called sky fruit. Sky fruit? I want to see what that looks like. Yeah, it kind of looks like a big nut.
00:55:00
Speaker
And mahogany produces both male and female flowers on the same tree. I don't know if flowers work that way. Yeah, that's with the pollination. Yeah, I thought they had both parts of all flowers. Yeah, I think the bees got to go in and
00:55:27
Speaker
Look, you buy it on eBay. Is this it? I only saw pictures of the, of the whole nut. Looks like a Brazil nut. Yeah. Looks like a wrinkled old orange slice. It does. I wonder if that's, um, there, that's what I saw. West Indian mahogany. And it points upward. Sweet Atenia mahogany. 10 seeds for $9. Look, we start planting our own trees.
00:55:57
Speaker
I did read that George Washington tried planting mahogany and they all failed. That wasn't a cherry tree cut down. And you know who he blamed? That was a mahogany tree. The slaves for not watering it enough. That's true. The father of our country. That lion cherry tree cutter. Yeah. Makes me want to get my hands on some mahogany.
00:56:27
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure, because I can't tell, but I have some somewhat old-growth mahogany. I had a couple of boards, thick boards, eight-quarter that an old guy who had actually quit cabinet making, let's say 20 years before, and he was selling off a bunch of stuff because his kids were going to take his house.
00:56:52
Speaker
These are sad stores, but you know what it's like when the old guy gets, you don't want to end up that way. You know, they're like, dad, you can't get around anymore. I want you to clean out all this crap in the garage.
00:57:07
Speaker
So I went over there one day. He was selling a bunch. That's where I got those brown mats, those original brown mats and a couple of things. And, you know, he was by the end of our conversation, he just wanted to give me a bunch of stuff. He's like, yeah, this guy's going to actually use it.
00:57:23
Speaker
And so he took me over to his wood pile and he gave me enough mahogany. I made two guitar bodies, actually one bass and one guitar. And that guitar body is that I made my daily player out of that mahogany. Nice. So it lives on his I'm sure he's passed away by now. It's been that's a great choice for a guitar buddy.
00:57:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's been a while, so I like to think that I'm honoring him by creating something that lives on and has a life being a musical instrument. And the other one is played by a good friend of mine who's a professional musician.
00:58:06
Speaker
And it is some special wood. So I don't know what type of mahogany it is. You have some end grain on there? Yeah, you can see the end grain like where the horn is. You could probably get in there with like a jeweler's loop.
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah, that would be cool. Um, but it's got the, it had the nice workability. It had the, you know, the nice color to it. Um, it is getting darker. Yeah.
00:58:40
Speaker
So when I started researching this, I had no idea that we would make a whole episode of Mahogany. Yeah. Mahogany is like cherry where when you think of Mahogany, because it's been used to think of this like really dark, like brown, dark brown. It's become a color. But yeah, it's it's really it's a much lighter
00:59:03
Speaker
Yeah. How many times have we showed mahogany to a client like unfinished? And they said, that's mahogany. Like that's cherry. Yeah. Well, I mean, I can never show it on mahogany because we don't have any. Yeah. I could think of a few times, I guess, um, because it has that sort of pinkish Brown to it. Yeah. Uh, and they're thinking of like the color of the coffee mug in a way. Yeah. Yeah. Like that dark bottom area.
00:59:32
Speaker
And a lot of, you know, a lot of the mahogany, real mahogany furniture you see is so patinaed that it is really, really dark. But yeah. Yeah, wow. So you had to be full-on nerd to make it through this far. Yeah. That or you really want to know about mahogany?
01:00:00
Speaker
And you know a lot of the stuff that I would look up because of the climate nowadays where we're trying to Expose and correct so to speak all the things we did in the past. You know a lot of the mahogany Information was about how
01:00:20
Speaker
cruel it was and what the cost in humanity was to getting mahogany into from trees to boards in Europe and America.
01:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a shame that it went down like that and that it was all depleted. Imagine if they remained untouched and now we had all these mahogany trees that could be managed and sustainably harvested. Because that's one of the things we like to consider when we're doing things. We go with native hardwoods, we try and limit it
01:00:56
Speaker
limit our pallet of wood to what's around the Northeast. And, you know, for our quote unquote exotic, we go with superiorly, which is the most part managed. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And that's important. You can see what will happen if if not. Yeah. 30 years time. Yeah. Holy cow. Crazy. That was a shocker. Yeah.
01:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, just now I think the Honduran mahogany is starting to become harvestable again. Wow. Yeah. Well, I don't know about you. I'm hungry. Yeah. Is it lunchtime? Yeah. It's 12.20.
01:01:39
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. I got a nice turkey sandwich with that with that mayo you get. Oh, yeah. Chili lime. Chili lime mayo. Yeah. I got to figure out how to make myself a little sandwich. We got to thank the Gold Tier patrons. Adam Podhas, Colin Lye, Corey Ty, David Murphy, David Shoemaker, Jerry Greenan, Keith Drennan and Manny Sirianni.
01:01:59
Speaker
also want to give a little plug to if you want to support the podcast go get yourself some vesting finishes we are an affiliate of theirs must disclose that according to the what is it FCC I think so TC big brother federal trade Commission yeah yeah
01:02:19
Speaker
can help support the podcast, use some of the finish that we use. We'll get a little slice of the pie if you buy something from them. RPMcodingsolutions.com. They make all kinds of
01:02:32
Speaker
Hard wax oil finishes, lacquer, and LED-cured finishes and stuff. Really nice stuff made in Holland. So you can check them out. Leave a review. If you feel so inclined, check us out on YouTube for the... Well, actually, we don't really have any photos for this one, but for all the other episodes, you get to see all the pictures and stuff.
01:02:58
Speaker
So yeah, that's all I got. My obligatory plugs at the end. Well, we're doing them all consecutively, but they're a week apart for the folks at home. Well, we appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Everybody take care. Catch you next week.
01:03:35
Speaker
Ain't no shame, but there's been a chain