The Portsmouth Navy Yard Copper Sheathing Scrap: Where Surplus Metal Went in the Civil War
Dr. Wilkins follows worn copper sheathing and bolts from the Portsmouth Navy Yard, which builds and refits Union warships, to the tinsmiths and stillmen of southern New Hampshire. Along the way he covers why the yard's ledgers never balanced, how scrap copper is melted, poled, annealed and tested for brass and lead, and what Barnaby did to a Manchester copper thief. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a crooked junkman's scale, a lightning-struck church roof, a hornet-nest still explosion and a tobacco-barn hiding place. In the Postcard Hour, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, you great stinking hearthrug, leave that sheet of copper alone. That's Navy metal. It's been to sea. It's been licked by the whole Atlantic Ocean and pissed on by three hundred sailors off the bow of a Union sloop, and it doesn't need your tongue on it too. Settle down. Settle. There's a ham bone in it for you if you hush.
♦ Bear grunt, chain drags across frozen ground, then quiet
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of fur and bad manners, and he's bought for a bone. He's cheaper than a county commissioner, and better company.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and then fading under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins. I'm broadcasting to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. The fire's banked, the river's running black under its ice, and tonight we're talking about stolen sea-copper. I mean the worn sheathing and bolts that came off Union warships at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, and how a good deal of it ended up in the tin shops and still-houses of southern New Hampshire without anybody's ledger ever owning up to it. Before we start, my pitchman has a word. He's been hopping around like a man with a hornet in his drawers, so let him out.
Announcer: Just a quick word, friends! The genuine Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is hand-built from pure electrolytic copper, with no mystery metal and no ship's-bottom leftovers. See it at moonshinestill.com, or come by the showroom here at Fort Wilkins!
Wilkins: No ship's-bottom leftovers. He's been at the cider again. Let's begin.
♪ Short fiddle sting
The Yard On The Piscataqua
Wilkins: The Portsmouth Navy Yard. Every man in this state says 'Portsmouth' about it like it's ours. It's a federal yard, set up in the year 1800, and it doesn't sit in Portsmouth at all. It sits on islands on the Kittery side of the Piscataqua, which is Maine. So the first lie on the Navy's ledger is the name on the front cover, and I'll tell you right now it isn't the last.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settles in the stove
Wilkins: Since the war started that yard has been roaring like a smithy in hell's own basement. Ship carpenters, caulkers, riggers, sawyers and coppersmiths have come down from every hill town in New England for Navy wages. Pittsfield sent a few. The Suncook mills lost some good hands to the shipwrights, and the mill owners haven't stopped whining since. In 1861 that yard launched the steam sloop Kearsarge, named for our own Mount Kearsarge up in Warner, right here in Merrimack County. And last June, in 1864, off Cherbourg in France, the Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama. Sent her to the bottom of the Channel in about an hour of shooting.
Wilkins: Here's the part I love. Before that fight, the Kearsarge's crew hung heavy anchor chain down her sides amidships and boxed it in with planking so nobody could see it. Iron underwear, you might say. The Alabama's shells hit that chain and bounced off, and afterward the Confederate officers howled that it wasn't a fair fight. Boys, that's what a Yankee calls a fair fight. You show up wearing chain mail under your Sunday coat, you let the other fellow swing first, and then you sink him.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside, approving
Wilkins: Barnaby approves. He fights the same way, except his armor is fat.
Wilkins: Now, copper. Why does a wooden warship wear a copper skirt? There's a creature in warm salt water called the shipworm. It's no worm, it's a little clam with a drill bit for a face, and it bores into oak planking and eats it from the inside out until a ship's bottom is like a honeycomb. Weed and barnacles grow on a bare hull too and slow her down like a Concord matron wading through a church picnic. So the shipwrights cover everything below the waterline in thin copper sheet, nailed on in overlapping courses with copper nails. The sea dissolves the copper very slowly, and the copper coming off poisons the clams and the weed.
Wilkins: That means the sheathing is wearing away the whole time she's afloat, like a bar of soap in a sailor's bunk. After a few years at sea it's thin, pitted, torn at the seams, and so crusted with barnacles and pitch you'd think it came out of a tannery. Then she comes into the yard for a refit, and the old copper gets stripped off her bottom by the cartload and new sheet goes on.
Wilkins: And then you have the bolts. Below the waterline a ship is fastened with copper or copper-alloy bolts as long as your arm. Iron won't do there, because iron touching copper in salt water rots like a Dover politician's promise. The two metals make a kind of battery between them, and the iron gets eaten. The old shipwrights didn't know the reason, but they knew the result. When a hull is opened up and rebuilt, some of those bolts come out bent, or wasted, or condemned, and that's good heavy copper sitting in a pile.
♦ Clink of a heavy copper bolt dropped on a plank table
Wilkins: That is one of them. I have it right here. It's thick as a horse's member and twice as useful, and it came out of a hull at that yard. I won't tell you which hull, because I promised the man who sold it to me.
Wilkins: Now here's why no Navy ledger ever matched what went out the gate. First, the honest reason. Sheathing is ordered by weight, so many ounces to the square foot. It goes on the hull weighing what the books say, and it comes off years later weighing a good deal less, because the Atlantic has eaten part of it. On top of that it's carrying nails, pitch, paint and a dead barnacle colony. So the clerk weighs a pile of old copper and gets a number that has nothing to do with anything, writes it down, and goes to dinner. The yard counted every ounce going onto that hull and then acted shocked when the ocean ate some of it. It's like a man weighing his pig before the wolf gets in and then wondering why the numbers are off.
Wilkins: Now the dishonest reasons, which are more fun. Condemned stores get sold at auction to dealers on the waterfront. Some of those dealers bid on a pile and somehow carry off a pile and a half. Teamsters haul scrap to the wharves, and a few pounds fall off the wagon at certain taverns. A sailor going ashore walks a little heavier than he did coming aboard. And that sheathing has been handled by more sailors than a Portsmouth widow on payday, and it came out of it about as worn.
♪ Banjo transition, a lively breakdown
Legends, Outlaws, And The Cod-Cart Run
Wilkins: Where did the stuff end up? In the tin shops of Exeter and Dover. With the coppersmiths in Concord. And with a certain dentist and blacksmith in Pittsfield, who never asked a junk dealer a question he didn't want answered.
Wilkins: In the spring of 1863 I hitched the oxen and went down to the coast the long way. That's the old First New Hampshire Turnpike, chartered in 1796, through Northwood and Nottingham, down to the Piscataqua Bridge at Durham, then on into Portsmouth. It's four days of mud the color of tobacco spit. There was a one-eyed junk dealer on the waterfront there. Don't ask me his name. He kept his good eye on your purse and his glass eye on the Lord, and neither one of them ever blinked. He sold me six hundredweight of condemned sheathing and a bundle of bent bolts for a price I will take to my grave, because I'm still ashamed of how low it was.
Wilkins: Now, a man can't drive a cart of Navy copper up the turnpike in plain sight with the war on and the Provost Marshal sniffing every crossroads. So I bought a load of salt cod off a Kittery schooner and laid it over the copper in a stack four feet deep. And I'll tell you, salt cod in a warm May sun is a smell that reaches into a man's soul and goes through his pockets while it's there. The Northwood dogs followed me for nine miles and proposed marriage at the town line. Every inn turned me away. A Barnstead deacon crossed the road, took one breath, and joined the Universalists. When I rolled into Fort Wilkins, Barnaby smelled me from a quarter mile off, stood up on his hind legs, and looked at me with plain pity. My beard smelled of cod until Independence Day.
♦ Barnaby huffs loudly
Wilkins: He remembers. He has never forgiven me for that fish.
Wilkins: Here's the other story you've been writing me about. Once word got around that I kept Navy copper in a pile behind the forge, I had a visitor. He was a junk-picker up from Manchester with a sack and a lantern, and he had the brains God gives a fence post that's been rained on. He came over my back fence at two in the morning. That's fine. What he didn't know was that Barnaby's chain reaches exactly to the copper pile and about a foot past it, because I measured it that way.
Wilkins: I woke up to a sound like a tomcat caught in a cider press, which is the poor bastard screaming, then a ripping like a sail splitting in a gale. By the time I got the lantern out, Barnaby had the man pinned on his belly on the copper pile and had peeled his trousers off him like bark off a birch log, seat first. The fellow had sat in a puddle of pine pitch on the way in, and Barnaby is a bear who loves anything sticky. So he was licking that pitch off the man's bare backside, slow and steady, with a tongue like a wet curry comb. Every lick took a little hair and a little dignity with it. The man was bleeding from four claw scratches across his hip where the bear had first taken hold, he was praying in two languages, and he'd wet himself so thoroughly that Barnaby stopped licking now and then to sneeze.
Wilkins: I let it go on a little longer than a Christian would. Then I traded Barnaby a ham bone for the man and sent him back over the fence with half the hair on his backside and none of his self-respect. Barnaby kept one of the boots. He's still got it. He sleeps with it. I count that boot as the man's receipt.
♦ Wax crackle, chain clinks
Wilkins: And now, friends, a guest. He's come a long way down a crooked road to sit at my table. He hails from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and he's handled more contraband copper and contraband corn than any man I ever shared a jug with. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Thank you, Doctor. Mighty kind. I have to say, that bear out your window looked at me like I was a side of bacon somebody'd forgot to salt.
Wilkins: He's looking you over. If he decides you're worth eating, he'll let you know. Now, Junior, tonight's about scrap copper, where it comes from and how a man gets cheated on it. Your mountain stillmen didn't have a Navy yard handy. Where did they get their metal?
Junior: Anywhere it was lying around and nobody was looking, Doctor. Mostly from junkmen. And there was one junkman in North Wilkesboro, I won't say his name 'cause his grandchildren are big, who sold me what he swore was forty pounds of copper sheet. I loaded it on my mule. And that mule, who'd complain about a sack of feathers, carried it off like it was a feather pillow. Never even flicked an ear.
Wilkins: The mule was the honest one in that deal.
Junior: The mule was the honest one, yessir. So I went back with a lantern after dark and looked up under that scale pan, and there was a lead fishing sinker the size of a hen's egg wired up underneath. Every pound he weighed for you was three-quarters of a pound. After that I carried my own steelyard on my saddle. I'd hang it off his porch rafter and weigh right there in front of him, and he'd smile at me like a possum eating briars.
Wilkins: Junior, a junkman's thumb on the scale is the heaviest metal in North Carolina, and it's never once been melted down. Now tell me the church story. I heard you bought a church.
Junior: Not the church, Doctor. Just the roof. Lightning came down on a little Baptist church out past Moravian Falls, struck the steeple, and the copper roof came down in a heap. The preacher needed money for a new roof, so he sold me the old one. Made me promise not to cuss while I loaded it. I didn't make it to the second wagonload.
Wilkins: A Baptist roof struck by lightning is the closest thing to a signed confession the Almighty ever issued. Go on.
Junior: Well, I got her home, and my granddaddy took one look and said, boy, half of that's lead. Sure enough, some tinsmith years back had soldered lead flashing into every seam around the steeple. Granddaddy said lead in a still will kill a man slow and ugly. Make his gums go blue and his hands shake like a wet dog. So he made me take a pocketknife to every seam. Lead's soft, see, gray, and the knife sinks right in like it's cheese. And any streak I wasn't sure of, I rubbed on a page out of the feed-store almanac. If it left a gray mark, it went in the reject pile. I went through about half that almanac. Lost the whole month of October.
Wilkins: That's good practice, and every man listening should mark it. Lead is soft, dull gray, cuts like cheese and writes on paper. It has no place in a still. Now, Junior, I hear one of your kin learned about pressure the hard way.
Junior: Lord, Doctor. My cousin Dewey. Dewey wanted to make himself a worm, the coil, you know, out of a length of copper pipe, and he didn't have a form. So he wrapped it around a locust fence post. Pulled too hard on one turn and put a kink in it, flat as a pressed flower. He didn't notice. He fired the still that night, the vapor couldn't get past the kink, and that pot sat there building up steam like a preacher building up to the collection.
Wilkins: And then she let go.
Junior: Blew that cap right off. Sounded like a mule kicking a barn door. The cap sailed up into the poplar tree over him and went right into a hornet nest the size of a bushel basket. Scalding mash all over the ground, and then here come the hornets. Dewey took more than forty stings on his face and neck. By morning his head was swelled up so you couldn't find his eyes. Looked like a boiled ham with ears. His own mama walked right past him at supper.
Wilkins: Junior, your cousin Dewey got stung so many times he could have rented himself out as a pincushion to the Ladies' Sewing Circle. But that's the truest lesson anybody will hear tonight. A still has to breathe. Never seal it, never kink the worm, never stop up the outlet. Pressure doesn't argue, it explodes, and it'll spray scalding mash and hot vapor all over you with an open fire right underneath.
Junior: Yessir. Dewey runs a straight worm now. He takes it real personal.
Wilkins: Last one, Junior. Hiding the metal. Where does a mountain man hide a load of copper with the law riding up the holler?
Junior: In tobacco, Doctor. We had a curing barn with racks of leaf hung all the way up to the roof. So I stood those copper sheets up between the tiers, behind the bundles, where you couldn't see nothing but brown leaf. A lawman came by one August asking questions. Hot as the hinges of perdition. He sat himself down on a bench at the end of the barn. That bench was a stack of copper sheets with a feed sack thrown over the top.
Wilkins: No.
Junior: Yessir. He sat on top of the whole load for an hour and questioned me up one side and down the other, and the whole time he kept shifting around and saying, Vance, this is the lumpiest bench I ever sat on in my life. I said, yessir, I been meaning to fix it. He rode off sweating and empty-handed, and he never once looked down.
Wilkins: That lawman sat on a fortune and complained it was lumpy, which is how every Merrimack County selectman treats the treasury. Junior Vance, stay right there. You've earned a drink of cold well water, and that's all I'm offering on the air, because this is a respectable program.
Junior: Respectable. Uh huh. That bear's got a man's boot, Doctor.
Wilkins: It's a respectable boot. Announcer, go ahead.
♪ Brisk patent-medicine fiddle vamp
Ad Break
Announcer: Friends! Neighbors! Lovers of honest metal! You've just heard what passes for copper out in this world: torn sheathing, church roofs full of lead, and junkmen with sinkers wired under the scale. Would you trust your craft to scrap like that? Of course you wouldn't! Step right up for the Flame-Flow Still, the flagship of Moonshine Stills, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further! The Flame-Flow is built from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper a refiner can make. There's no Navy scrap in it, no mystery seams and no lead! Every joint is fitted with precision CNC-machined brass unions, cut so true they'd make a Portsmouth shipwright weep in his grog! The design maximizes convective circulation and gives you unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations. It's handsome on the bench and honest all the way through! All this for eight hundred ninety-nine dollars! Go to moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com, slash products, slash flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see it with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Mind the bear! Order today at moonshinestill.com! Remember, friends, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, so use your Flame-Flow for oils, tinctures, and lawful demonstrations!
♪ Fiddle vamp ends with a flourish
Copper And The Craft
Wilkins: Mind the bear. He's right about that much. Now let's do some alchemy. Say you've got a cart of old sea-copper in your barn, never mind how it got there. What does a careful stillmaker do with it?
Wilkins: Step one: find out what you've got. Not all ship's copper is copper. Back in 1832 an Englishman named George Muntz patented a yellow metal, a brass of about sixty parts copper to forty of zinc, and sold it to navies as cheaper sheathing. Mr. Muntz sold the Navy yellow metal and called it a bargain, and I've pulled gold-looking teeth out of Concord lawyers that were the same bargain. So take a file and cut a fresh corner on each piece. Real copper shows salmon-pink under the tarnish, the color of a healthy gum. Brass shows yellow, like a sick one. Keep the two apart.
♦ Rasp of a file on metal
Wilkins: Step two: find the lead, same as Junior did. Knife and paper. If a streak is soft and gray and marks paper, cut it out and throw it away. Don't melt it in with the rest.
Wilkins: Step three: clean it. Old sheathing is full of pitch, paint and barnacle crust. Pull every nail. Scrub it with sand and vinegar. Burn off the pitch out in the open air, with the wind at your back.
Wilkins: Step four, if you mean to melt it: copper runs at close to two thousand degrees on Mr. Fahrenheit's scale. That takes a good charcoal fire, a clay crucible and a bellows boy with strong arms and no plans for the evening. Here's the alchemist's secret. Melted copper drinks up air the way a deacon drinks communion wine when nobody's counting, and it cools brittle as an old maid's temper. The old refiners fixed that by poling. You thrust a stick of green wood into the melt, it boils and spits, and the gases out of the wood strip the oxygen back out. That's what they call tough pitch copper. Cast it in a flat mold and you've got a slab you can roll or hammer into sheet.
Wilkins: Step five: the hammer. Copper gets hard and cranky when you beat it too long without a warm rest, same as a husband, and the cure is about the same. Bring it up to a dull red in the forge and let it rest, and it goes soft and willing again. That's annealing. Copper doesn't care whether you quench it in the trough or let it cool slow, it comes out soft either way. Hammer, anneal, hammer, anneal, and you raise a pot. Rivet your seams and join with silver solder or tight mechanical unions. Never lead.
♦ Ringing hammer blows on copper, steady rhythm
Wilkins: Now, why bother with copper at all? Because copper does real work in the still. The sulfur stinks in a mash come up with the vapor, and the copper surface takes them and keeps them, so they don't end up in the jar. Fresh, bright copper does that job. Old crusted sheathing never cleaned up properly does it badly, and might shed green crud into the run besides. That's why the origin of your metal matters. The pot is part of the recipe.
Wilkins: So here's the craft as I learned it, step by step, for history's sake. Cook your grain, cool it, add yeast and ferment it to a low wash in a warm, airy room. Charge your clean pot no more than three-quarters full so it can't boil over into the head. Bring the heat up slow, and keep your fire low and steady with the flame shielded. Check every joint for leaks before the vapor rises, because alcohol vapor near an open flame will burn your still-house down around your ears. Make sure the worm runs open and free, with no kink and no plug and no sealed lid. Remember Dewey's ham face.
Wilkins: Then the cuts. The first drops are the foreshots, then the heads. Throw them out. Don't drink them, don't sell them, don't rub them on your gums. There's a reason they come first. Methanol, the wood spirit, boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit, and good grain spirit boils at about a hundred and seventy-three. So the poison and the sharp volatiles crowd to the front of the run like debtors at a funeral. If you run a fruit mash, apple pomace for instance, you'll get more of it, because the pectin in fruit breaks down into methanol. A careful apple-jack man takes a bigger head cut and doesn't argue. After the heads come the hearts, sweet and clean, and those you keep. Then the tails get oily and dull, and you set them aside to run again. You judge the cuts by smell, by taste on the back of the hand, and by watching the stream. You can't rush any of it.
♦ Slow drip into glass jar
Wilkins: And understand me. All of this is history and teaching. Making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law today, same as it was when they put me in the Merrimack lockup. Junior, anything to add?
Junior: Just that the man who's in a hurry at the still ends up in a hurry to the doctor, Doctor.
Wilkins: And this doctor charges double after midnight.
♪ Banjo transition
The Postcard Hour, Myths And The Anvil
Wilkins: Now we've got a voice on the tape cylinder from down in Junior's country. The operator says he's a fellow from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear him.
♦ Click and hiss of the call-in tape cylinder
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller from Wilkesboro, North Carolina. My uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Tape hiss ends
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both. Let's take it apart like a bad molar, one root at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Hardwood ash is lye in waiting. It's where your grandmother got her potash to make soap. Throw a scoop of it in your thump keg and you might knock down a little sourness, and you'll certainly get a whiskey that tastes like Saturday washing day. The only thing it'll clean is the lining of your gut. What it won't do is touch the methanol. That comes over at the front of the run because it boils low, and you get rid of it by cutting the heads at the condenser. Ashes in a barrel don't do it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now red oak. Oak does real work on spirit, but in a barrel, over months, giving color and flavor. A handful of shavings in a hot thump keg might lend a little color and tannin. It won't cure a bad cut, any more than a pretty bonnet cures a sour wife. And here's the funny part. Red oak is the wrong oak for whiskey altogether. Its pores run open from end to end, so liquid seeps right through the wood. Ask any cooper. White oak holds whiskey because its pores are plugged up inside. Rabbit, a red oak barrel holds whiskey the way a deputy holds a secret: through every pore, all over your boots.
Junior: That's the truth, Rabbit. My granddaddy tried a red oak keg one time and the hogs got drunker than he did.
Wilkins: So your uncle has the ingredients, he's just mixed up their purposes. Thank you for calling, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro. Next time you're up north, there's a ham bone and a dry seat for you at Fort Wilkins, well clear of the bear.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now one more myth while I've got the punch in my hand. Down on the seacoast they'll tell you that ship's copper is the purest copper in the world because the Navy only buys the best. Bunk. You've heard tonight how a good deal of it was Muntz yellow metal with forty parts zinc. It comes off the hull eaten thin, stuck through with nails and slathered in pitch, and some of it's been patched by a tinker who thought lead was a fine idea. A man who builds a still out of it without filing, scraping and testing every piece is trusting his health to a junk dealer's eye, and the junk dealer I know only had the one.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing
Wilkins: Speaking of metal that isn't what it used to be, look at what I'm striking. The Mint changed the penny last year, in 1864. It used to be copper-nickel, and now it's bronze, mostly copper with a pinch of tin and zinc. Same year they brought out a two-cent piece, the first coin in this Republic stamped 'In God We Trust.' The Mint put 'In God We Trust' on a two-cent piece, which is the cheapest anybody's ever valued the Almighty in public. And here I am punching G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. across the face of it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I stamp my name on the Union's pennies so that when the revenue man spends them, he's advertising for me.
Junior: Doctor, that is the most Yankee thing I ever heard in my life.
Wilkins: Thank you, Junior. It's also the most Yankee thing I ever did with a hammer that didn't involve a tooth.
♪ Fiddle and banjo warm into the closing theme, played softly under
Sign-Off
Wilkins: That's our broadcast, neighbors. My thanks to Junior Vance of the Brushy Mountains. Go easy on that junkman's grandchildren, Junior, they're big. Thanks to Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller for his call, and to Barnaby for not eating anybody on the program tonight. If you want to learn the craft properly, the copper, the fire and the cuts, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You'll learn the right way to clean and care for copper, how to read a run, and how never to end up looking like Cousin Dewey. Particulars are at moonshinestill.com. My pitchman has the last word before I do, God help us.
Announcer: Just a quick word, friends! Want a still made of honest copper with no Navy scrap in it? The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, pure electrolytic copper. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins Showroom on Route 28!
Wilkins: Mind the bear. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle fades to silence