David Hayward 200 Year Old Leather Scribbler · Full Length

A 200 Year Old Gift from Under the Sea.

On 10th December 1786, a fierce gale in the English Channel forced the Danish brigantine Metta Catharina von Flensburg to seek shelter in Plymouth Sound. Carrying a cargo of leather and hemp from St Petersburg bound for Genoa, the vessel broke anchor in the storm, was swept ashore and sank on the Cornish side of the Sound. The crew survived, but the ship and its cargo were lost for more than two centuries.

In 1973, divers from the Plymouth branch of the British Sub-Aqua Club discovered a ship’s bell thirty metres below the surface, identifying the wreck. Further exploration revealed bundles of hides littering the seabed, remarkably preserved after two hundred years immersed in black mud. Analysis by the British Leather Manufacturers’ Research Association confirmed the leather as Russian reindeer, tanned in the traditional way using willow bark and birch tar oil, the method that gives it both its characteristic aroma and extraordinary resistance to water.

This is the full length Scribbler. Like its shorter companion it is machined from solid brass, polished by hand and nickel plated before being wrapped by hand in this extraordinary leather. The decades spent beneath the English Channel have given the leather a wonderful patina that no modern process could replicate.

The pencil is presented in a box with a Certificate of Authenticity.