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Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Difference between revisions
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Expect stories set in this world to be filled with hard, uncompromising men who are covered in grime, with awful teeth, wooden legs, and stringy dirty hair. [[The Drunken Sailor|They will be drunk much of the time]], usually off rum or grog (rum cut with water and lime juice).<ref>Unless officers in a nation's navy, then they will be drunk on port or brandy.</ref> They may [[Talk Like a Pirate]], and are quite likely to actually BE [[Pirates]] or, if not, fight them.
This trope generally involves a [[Used Future]] sort of vision of the age of sail, with dirt, grime, barnacles, scurvy, [[A Taste of the Lash|floggings]], and other unpleasant aspects of the real time period not glossed over. If a ship or its crew are suspiciously well-scrubbed and well-fed, it's not this trope - unless the protagonists are members of the British Navy, in which case failing to keep the ship spotless could lead to floggings. But tales of action and adventure abound, with swashbucklers, pirates, heroes and villains and damsels in distress all around.
Not to be confused with the [[Avalon Hill]] [[Board Game]] of the same name, which is is [[Trope Namer|where we got the trope name]], or with [[Schizo-Tech]] settings where wood ships coexist with [[Powered Armor]]. The phrase shows up at least as far back as the [http://books.google.com/books?id=8FACAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA14&dq=wooden+ships+and+iron+men late 19th century], making it [[Older Than Radio]].
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* ''[[wikipedia:Mr Midshipman Easy|Mr. Midshipman Easy]]'' by Frederick Marryat is a near-contemporary example, and probably set the tone for most of the later works in this vein.
* The sections concerning the people of the Iron Islands in [[A Song of Ice and Fire]], especially those that take place on boats, come across like this. Bonus points for them being called the Iron Men.
* Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet's poem "[https://web.archive.org/web/20140314134058/http://www.constitutional.net/099.html Clipper Ships and Captains]" is an ode to this period, even going so far as to include the lines:
{{quote|When the best ships still were wooden ships
But the men were iron men. }}
== Live
* ''[[The Onedin Line]]''.
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== Real Life ==
* This might not precisely qualify,{{verify}} but in the
** Jean de Valette was a [[Four-Star Badass]].
** The Knights of Malta probably fit quite well, actually
* Invoked by name by Austrian sailors after winning the Battle of Lissa, remarking that "Men of iron on wooden ships had defeated men of wood on ironclad ships" after doing exactly that (a division of Austrian wooden steam warships had caught by surprise the Italian ironclads. Various wooden vessels got disabled, two ironclads were sunk).
* Admiral David Farragut in the [[American Civil War]]. "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead."
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Settings]]
[[Category:Pirate Tropes]]
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[[Category:Vehicle Tropes]]
[[Category:Seaborne and Submersible Vehicles]]
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