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 Ship in a Bottle

Article by Walt R. Eader

A typical souvenir shop article, but what is the art behind it?

As a teenager in California in the 1960's, I well remember roaming the beaches of Santa Cruz, collecting memorabilia of the sea, in the form of driftwood and seashells. Body surfing was a popular occupation of the young. With waves not forthcoming, we spent our weekends roaming the sands.

At the time, Ron seemed to be the old man of the sea. Day after day, he built his ship in a bottle with painstaking care and unflagging patience. We thought him a fascinating person, simply because his attention was so clearly focused.

We'd sometimes try to approach this old man of the sea, hoping to wheedle some of his secrets. He couldn't have been more than forty at the time, but he was like an old man to us, lost in his private world of ships at sea, getting that three-masted sailing schooner into the gallon-sized bottle.

Ron acknowledged our presence in a friendly way, while fitting tiny pieces into his bottle with strange home made tools. Ron was a man of few words, passionate about his craft.

All these years later, it's comforting to know the art of the ship in a bottle is still alive. We imagined Ron a former seaman, now disengaged from his seafaring life. We never knew. His creations spoke for themselves, beautiful recreations of life at some point in time, far away and unreachable for those who hadn't been there.

The art of creating a ship in a bottle is in danger of becoming a lost art. There are just a few artisans left, with the passion of the art, recreating the ship on the open sea, painstakingly miniaturized in the bottle.

The bottle containing the ship is an essential part of the art. Once you have your bottle and the ship, you've only just begun. Detailed measurements of both ship and bottle are taken. The hull, masts and sails are designed and built outside of the bottle.

You can find out here how to get a ship in a bottle.

A typical ship in a bottle requires assembly outside of the bottle and then disassembling the parts in a collapsible form for reconstruction within the bottle. How do they do it?

The art of building a ship in a bottle requires patience and love of the craft. The ship in a bottle artisan builds his own tools, not commercially available. Each artisan is a truth unto himself, not beholden to an assembly line mentality, lost in thought to past times when a ship in a bottle was magic.

Although there are cheaters, drilling a hole in the bottom of a bottle to insert the ship in one punch, there are a few artisans who take pride in their work of creating a ship in a bottle that defies imagination.

If you're intrigued by the ship in a bottle, look for artisans lost in their craft, crafting their own tools to make the ship in a bottle a living memory of pirates and other romantic notions.

Get a ship in a bottle tip: The first step in building a ship in a bottle is to lay the sea.