Sculpture endeavour

WE ARE SAILING: The White Pointer Boats team have crafted, out of aluminium, two model Endeavours based on the original designs created for the 1969 bicentenary of explorer James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand. “We’re putting a modern twist on it,” says the boat-building business’s owner, Rex Briant.

A silver ship sails on a silver sea on New Zealand’s 50 cent coin, and while the hull design of the “square-stern bark”, HMS Endeavour, is baffling to boat-builder Rex Briant, he and his team have created two silvery models of the repurposed collier that brought explorer James Cook to New Zealand.

Crafted in aluminium, the sculptural, skeletal forms of the two Endeavour models built at White Pointer Boats are based on the timber originals that were mounted on poles at the Grey Street and Peel Street intersections on the main road for the 1969 bicentenary of Cook’s 1769 landfall in Turanganui-a-Kiwa.

The now contentious models — not replicas — have been recreated in lightweight alloy and are all brightwork.

Up close, the forms are sculptural but engineered to withstand storms, high winds and vandals.

The wooden boards of the original models have been supplanted by flat, aluminium bands that allow a view into the interior of the hull and its series of U-shaped ribs.

Some components of the see-through models were curved by hand around rigid parts. The new models’ three masts are made from three tubular sections each and have been fitted with furled sails made from thin sheets of beaten aluminium.

“We’re putting a modern twist on it,” says Briant, owner of White Pointer Boats.

“I don’t think the models are far from the silhouette of the boat. The shapes and curves that have to be cut to develop the shape is a fluid process around a rigid material. The construction is consistent with alloy boat-building.”

To start the process, Briant took several photographs of the original models, examined online the Endeavour’s outline, its silhouette, then sketched the main components that would make up the hull and sent them to a CAD (computer aided design) contractor to render the whole in a digitalised 3D image.

“That’s how I develop all my boat designs,” says Briant.

“All the boats have come off my sketch pad and this was the same, except it’s a totally different topic from another era.”

Voyaging in a stumpy, flat-bottomed, 368 tonne, Whitby coal carrier converted into a scientific vessel that would sail to the other side of the planet must have been horrific, he says.

Although White Pointer boats are built with a non-pounding hull, not made of flat plates, but curves, as if laid on a sphere, so the surface tension of the six to eight millimetre plates is outward and rigid and able to handle rough seas, Briant struggles to get his head around the design of Cook’s voyaging vessel.

“I don’t understand the hull shape,” he says.

“It’s not in my conversations about boats. A fishing crew wouldn’t last on a boat like that. They’d get seriously sea-sick.”

Welding techniques used in the construction of the Endeavour models are the same as those used in a White Pointer build but since the boats are intended to be mounted on poles, some of the workmanship might be missed once the models are raised up.

Crafted for the city by people of various ethnicities, the team is proud of its work, says Briant, who sees a metaphor for the community in the Endeavour models’ construction.

“Each rib on its own is very flimsy,” he says.

“They are interlocked with bulkheads, and keel, and when the deck is fitted the boat becomes strong.”