Final Project: My Boston Tea Party Ship

For this assignment, I had to enter the Freedom Trail minecraft server which we use for class and build a replica of one of the ships from the Boston Tea Party. I am in another class with Prof. Walsh this semester, and in that class one of our assignments was to build a Boston Tea Party ship exactly to scale. So, for this assignment I built a second ship right next to the one that I helped build for my Collaborative Computing course, using it for scale because I know the first one is representative of the dimensions of the real ship to scale.

I added much more detail to this new ship, including a top deck and also a staircase going down to a lower deck below. Hope you guys like it! Here are some process screenshots, followed by a virtual tour of the boat.

*side note* - In some of my screenshots you will see what appears to be blue circles on the screen which get in the way sometimes. This is because on a multiplayer game server in minecraft, players are not able to use a bed and sleep through nighttime when vision is reduced, so instead I used a "potion of night vision" which lights up the screen but also causes blue potion bubbles to float all over the place. My apologies if they are at all in the way in my screenshots.

 I began by building the base outline of a ship right next to the other ship I built for my Collaborative Computing course, the dimensions are the same. I used a slightly lighter wood for the second boat so it is easier to tell which one is which.

 After building the wooden walls upward, I added the green and gold highlights which are seen on the actual "Eleanor" ship that was a part of the Boston Tea Party.

 I then added masts for the sails, which sadly is somewhat blocked by the annoying blue orb in the above picture.

 After this I added some detail below deck, including a statue of a man, which in this case we will say was a famous past captain of the ship, or maybe a statue of the King, since these were British ships in reality.

 Last was a staircase and then I began working on the top deck of the boat.

 Last, I added the sails (black on my new boat) to show some uniqueness between the two. This paragraph is the last of my process screenshots (above), below, I will start the virtual walk-through of my finished boat.

 Here we have a few pictures of the boat from the air, showing all four sides and what the boat looks like from each angle.

 Next we move to the top deck of the boat, I used the blocks that have red lines running through them to represent crates of tea cargo sitting on the deck of the ship. I placed a bunch of these in different places on the top deck

 It may be hard to see with how small the pictures in this post are, but the metal looking thing with a fence around it in the picture above represents the anchor of the ship. I used an anvil for this because it was the closest looking thing I could find to an anchor.

 Walk to the front of the ship and we see more tea cargo (above), and a staircase leading down to the lower deck of the ship (below).

 Go down the stairs and the first thing you'll see is the statue that may either represent a past Captain of the ship, or maybe a past King of England.

 Walk further toward the back of the ship and you'll see a blocked off area with a chest sitting behind it, only the Captain knows what is in this chest, but there must be a reason it is blocked off ;-)

 Walk back the other way and at the front of the ship you'll see a huge crucifix on the wall with a small area to kneel in front of it, this is where sailors could pray on their long journeys across the Atlantic that they will someday make it home safely.

 A final shot of the lower deck can be seen above, and some last pictures of the whole ship can be seen below from a few angles!

That's all, hope you guys like it!



This is a final project using Minecraft to build a replica of the Eleanor ship from the Boston Tea Party. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc