Quercus virginiana

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 78.

They were looking for live oak, Quercus virginiana, a tree unique to the seacoasts of the southeastern United States. The name “live” came from its evergreen habit, and it was a beautiful tree, growing 40 to 70 feet high with a magnificent spread, 150 feet or more at the crown, usually draped with Spanish moss; a single tree could shade half an acre. Its attraction to shipbuilders, though, lay in its incredible density and resistance to decay. At seventy-five pounds per cubic foot, it was 50 percent denser than white oak. And its large angled branches offered ready-made timbers whose strong grain would follow the curve of each finished section of the frame without any weakening cross-grain angle cuts.

British surveyors had identified live oak as a promising wood for ships back in the 1770s. To build a single seventy-four-gun ship of the line required three thousand loads of six hundred board feet of oak, the equivalent of sixty acres of mature wood, and the Royal Navy was already importing oak from as far away as Spain and the Baltic to meet its burgeoning needs. But live oak was a difficult wood to harvest