USS Constitution: Why Old Ironsides Did Not Burn

She was launched from a Boston shipyard in October of seventeen ninety-seven, a forty-four-gun frigate built from live oak, a hardwood so dense it was almost impractical to work with hand tools. The Navy had ordered her built partly as a response to the Barbary Coast pirates preying on American merchant ships, and she spent her early years in the Mediterranean making the point that the new republic's trade routes were not undefended.

Her nickname came from the War of eighteen twelve. In a single-ship engagement against the British frigate HMS Guerriere, British cannon shot struck her sides and was seen to deflect and fall into the sea. A sailor watching from the deck reportedly shouted that the ship's sides were made of iron, and the name Old Ironsides stuck. The hull was not actually iron. It was live oak and southern yellow pine, layered in a way that made her exceptionally resistant to the cannon technology of the period.

In eighteen thirty, the United States Navy published an estimate concluding that the ship was too expensive to repair and should be scrapped. A law student at Harvard named Oliver Wendell Holmes read the notice and wrote a poem in response. It was published in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and by the standards of eighteen thirty it went viral, reprinted in newspapers from Massachusetts to the Ohio frontier. The public outcry was immediate and overwhelming. The Navy reversed course.

The Constitution has been in continuous commission ever since. She is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world. The specific details of exactly how her hull resisted the British shot, which types of wood in which configuration at which thickness, are not documented in the sources available to this project with the precision that a naval architect would want. What is documented is the result: the shot bounced, the ship survived, and two centuries later she is still here.