****but the very wood that he had available to make them with****
A very good point. This reminds me of the Gibson wood importing brouhaha. There are only so many sources of the best woods, and we don’t have the true best woods around anymore.
yah... And more to the point: to find that sort of wood means going back in time.
India isn’t lacking any of the rosewood that Gibson uses, and doesn’t expect to run out. Rosewood grows wonderfully in India. The fuss originated from some overly pointy headed US bureaucrat who decided that India’s law for monitoring the export of rosewood was tighter than India itself was regarding it to be, and invoked the Lacey Act. Gibson was having fingerboard blanks made of rosewood in India then machining them to exact dimensions in the USA. India’s inspectors were giving the export of these blanks the nod. The screechy US bureaucrat said they took exception to this, that the fingerboard should be machined to exact dimensions in India. And nobody in India was complaining about the status quo! This is an utterly political problem, not a problem of natural resources.