Louie da fly

I love these things. So beautifully ugly. Not so much a swan as a pelican . . or perhaps a dugong. For an absolute feast of these ungainly beauties, see https://www.google.com.au/search?q=french+battleship+carnot&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=685&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwigu7mnpLrJAhXk26YKHc8_CZUQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=_ Which confirms me in my original impression - one of Carnot's funnels was square!

It would be interesting to see an analysis of amphibious operations from earlier centuries. There's no lack of examples to work with, from Nelson right back to antiquity! Steven

I hadn't head of the Mars discovery. This is very exciting! I can see the mizzen mast, the capstan, some of the chains, as well as a beautifully preserved after part of the hull. Arched gunports on the upper gundeck, a couple of rubbing strakes . . . oh, glory! Steven

The Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme says the Ancient Greeks took down the masts and railings before battle (in the paragraph entitled Tactics. I read somewhere recently that they actually threw the masts overboard before going into battle and retrieved them afterwards. Certainly most battles were fought near land, so it's not unlikely they sent the ashore if they knew they were in for a fight. In Byzantine times the same thing applied - masts were lowered before battle. They were nothing but an impediment and could actually be a danger if, say the enemy managed to cut the shrouds and make the mast fall. Furling a sail by climbing out onto the yard was the common way to go until the development of footropes in the 17th or 18th century. Pictures of of 15th and early-mid 16th century ships show this, and there's no reason to suppose it wasn't done this way throughout history. Steven

A beautiful ram, certainly, but perhaps not the first discovered. There's another at Piraeus museum which I saw when I visited Athens in 2000. As far as I know it had been there for quite some time. It's at http://greeklandscapes.com/greece/piraeus/pictures/pages/dsc00158_jpg.htm I have my own photo of it somewhere among my holiday snaps.

Looking very good. Steven

I thought she was loaded up with breadfruit on her mutiny voyage, and the space that had to be made over to the plants was one of the causes of dissatisfaction on board. (Along with Bligh's personality - although a relatively humanitarian captain and a superior seaman, he seems to have very few people skills. Some years later, when the governor of New South Wales, he suffered another mutiny, known as the Rum Rebellion, this time by the New South Wales Corps, who were supposed to keep order in the colony but had let power go to their heads). Steven

Dick, you're a mine of information. Following your post I did a google search and found this article available on-line which deals, among others, with the Woolwich ship, including diagrams showing the mast in cross section and in side view, as well as the remnants of the surviving frames up to about the turn of the bilge. Thanks very much for this. It's really useful and very much appreciated. Steven

Dick, you just keep on coming up with the most amazing stuff. I'd never heard of the Woolwich ship. Does the Mariner's Mirror article show the make up of the mast? If so, it's an invaluable resource for us 15th-16th century junkies. Steven

You might be interested in the blog of the guy who first proposed that the remains of the Holigost might be in the Hamble. It's currently the top entry of the blog, but will presumably go down the list as other items get added. Anyhow, it's dated October 15, 2015. The other entries are pretty cool, too. Steven

Yep. Same as ours. It's regarded as a bit of a weed nowadays, though it was used by the early settlers for hedging paddocks (presumably to keep animals from straying) and we still have many hawthorn hedges on the roadsides at the edge of paddocks near Ballarat where I live, where they probably still do good service.

Found another one - this is described simply as "school of Du"rer, c.1500". So it's presumably a German vessel - but not necessarily. Quite similar to W.A's Kraek, but with some interesting variations. Oh, and I've managed to chase down the pictures I thought were of Portuguese carracks (on a much earlier page of this thread). They turn out to be Spanish, from a painted church panel celebrating a naval victory in 1475, and one of the ships is actually a named vessel, the Zumaia, the flagship of the Spanish admiral. Steven

Well, usually I just stumble across them while looking for something else. It all depends on the wording you put into the google image search. I agree they look like they're done from models, but I think the artist has also added to the decoration on his own account just to make a better picture. And are the scuppers aligned to the projecting deck beams? It's hard to make out . . . And here's another one I came across yesterday. It looks like others I've seen, but I don't think I've come across it before. Some very interesting details. Look at the shape of the blocks and deadeyes! And is that wattling (basketweaving with willow twigs) on the aftercastle? It'd make sense - very lightweight construction. Steven

Just discovered some more (Italian) pictures of the hulls of carracks (or "proto-carracks" - no masts are shown, so they may be single-masted). They're from the Codex Vallardi, a book of sketches and life studies by Pisanello, who died in about 1455. Some really good details. Hope you enjoy these as much as I did. Steven PS: The dragons may not have been drawn from life . . .

This is very exciting indeed. I'd already heard of the Grace Dieu find and the Time Team excavation, but I knew nothing of the Holigost. I await developments with great interest. I have to say, however, that the artist's reconstruction has to be wrong - it shows a ship from the 1470's, of a type I like to call a 'proto-carrack' - very similar in form to a carrack but with a single mast. But according to the report here the Holigost was a Spanish ship captured by the English in 1413/14 and rebuilt in 1415. If she was leaking badly by 1423, with the mast and rigging removed by 1426, abandoned by 1430, and sunk by 1452, it's very unlikely she was new when she was first captured. Her date of building has to be no later than 1413 and very likely quite a few years - or even some decades - earlier. This puts her much closer in date to the Bremen cog, sunk while still under construction in 1380. And contemporary representations of ships from the first decades of the 15th century look much more like cogs than carracks - such as the ships in the second picture here and the attached picture from the above linked article, which though it's dated 1420-30 is still very much like cogs from 50 years earlier. The problem is that the great majority of commonly available mediaeval representations of ships from the Hundred Years War were done well after the events - the best known being from the Gruuthus version of Froissart's Chronicles, produced in the 1470s and 1480s, but portraying events of up to 100 years earlier. I'm hoping that as more is discovered a more accurate reconstruction drawing will be produced. Steven

You've got a very good eye for detail, Dick. I hadn't spotted that. I think your idea is very likely the right one, better than mine I think. Steven

Dick, A few more pics of carracks I came across. The Meister Der Ursulalegende one (I had to extract details from the main painting, otherwise the picture would have been too big to upload) backs up your ideas about the tumblehome at the bow, and the others are very interesting. The da Costa one appears to have been mostly copied from the Roberti (I'm pretty sure it's that way around because of the mistakes in the da Costa version, such as the square sail at the mizzen and the misinterpretation of the anti-boarding timbers at the bow). Best wishes, Steven

I've been giving the built up mast issue a little thought. As I'm sure you know, the masts of later, bigger ships were also built up, but with the individual pieces locking together so closely (a little like lego) that there would be very little chance of them coming apart, and the joins of individual pieces being all but invisible. And of course held together with the wooldings. The ships of the 15th century were probably the first to be big enough (especially with that enormous mainsail, with the ensuing huge forces) to need such large masts that they had to be built up (because single trees weren't big enough to supply the timber) - even before the advent of the carrack, when ships only had a single mast as in the ships in the second picture here (which are labelled as 14th century but are in fact 15th). However, it seems to me that the shipbuilders of the time would have been sophisticated and skilful enough not to just whack a bunch of poles together and hope the wooldings would keep them from coming apart. I think they'd likely have been made from triangular sections with the apexes converging at the centre of the mast, and rounded off to form a circular section. Later improvements as above would have made them more secure still, but this would have been a pretty good start. Opinion only, but might be helpful. Steven

Here’s the latest on the design process. I’ve changed the cross section in line with the discoveries at Yenikapi, and it’s made quite a difference in many areas. The underwater hull has a considerably flatter bottom than the previous reconstruction, and this means the underwater shape is different. Effectively, the ship sits lower in the water, and this affects the height of the lower bank of oars – from what I’ve been able to find out, a freeboard of about 1 metre (3 feet) was usual between the water and the lower bank of oarports. So the oarsmen are going to be sitting higher in the ship. And as you need about a metre between the heads of the lower oarsmen and the upper benches, the upper guys move up too. And then the floor structure of the midships castle, which needs to clear the heads of the upper oarsmen, has to be higher. Everything affects everything else . . . I’ve done about half the body plan - from the bow to midships (attached) showing the assumed position of the oarsmen. But of course, how low in the water the ship actually sat is an imponderable as well, depending on the weight of the ship itself, plus that of the crew and cargo and equipment etc etc. I can only guess and hope I’m about right. What appears to be the upper part of the hull is very lightweight - just a rail (pavesade) to carry the shields of the upper oarsmen. But the midships castle would weigh a fair bit, so how far down the ship would sit is rather uncertain. I’ve also changed a few details. The ship is “leaner” in sheer view, and I’ve altered the shape of the “tail” and that of the side rudders to be more in line with illustrations contemporary with a dromon of the period of the Macedonian Emperors of the 10th and 11th centuries AD. The spur at the bow is fixed higher and is horizontal rather than angled upward, to avoid the tendency to pivot around its point of attachment on impact, with the danger of damage to the bow of the ship. There’s more sheer, and the bow is wider and shallower to ride over the sea rather than cut through it, in line with the Yenikapi finds, as shown on the photo below of a 1:10 scale reconstruction done by TAMU . However, this is of a single-banked galea - no dromons were found at Yenikapi, so I've had to adapt this to a two-banked design and hope it's right. Generally, however, it’s still very close to Prof Pryor’s original concept. I’m still working at it, but it’s all rather slow.

Moving a workshop is a large operation. No wonder we haven't heard from you lately. The mast issue is certainly a bit of a puzzle. I looked at it when I was making my Great Harry many years ago, but ended up just making a single-piece mainmast. If I did it today I'd probably want to go with multi-piece, but I have no more idea than you of how to do it. The dromon design is going slowly. I've pretty much given up on the cross-section, and I'm working on redesigning the full vessel in accordance with the Yenikapi discoveries in Istanbul. The problem is when you change one thing, everything else is affected. Changing the shape of the section affects the height of the waterline, which affects the position of the lower bank of oarsmen, which in turn affects the height of the upper bank, which then affects the height of the midships castle . . . and I’ve recently got a new job which involves using AutoCad eight hours a day designing houses, so when I get home it’s a bit hard forcing myself to the computer to open up AutoCad to work on a ship design . . . I’ll get there eventually, but it does rather stretch things out. I’m going to add an update to my dromon thread to show how things are going. Steven

Dick, I realised I hadn't complimented you on the most recent pictures of the nave tonda. She looks magnificent. Haven't heard from you for awhile. Are you still working on the ship? I just came across a good picture showing a careened carrack in Carpaccio's Meeting of the betrothed from the St Ursula cycle. Zoomed up to full size it loses a bit of detail, but it's pretty damn good. It's at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Departure_of_the_Pilgrims_by_Carpaccio then you click on the picture for a huge copy of it. And I just noticed, at the bottom of the same page there are thumbnails of other details of the same picture showing not only a much better detail of the same carrack, but very good detailed pics of the other carracks in the same harbour, and two others I'd never seen, apparently in dry dock, from the left hand side of the painting. The careened carrack's rigging, and the way it's being held in place, are also very interesting. Right down the bottom of the page are links to the other paintings in the Ursula cycle, some of which have exceptionally detailed representations of ships. Best wishes, Steven

Interesting - the hawthorn trees in the above pictures have different shaped leaves from the ones we have here. Ours look like the ones at http://www.weeds.org.au/cgi-bin/weedident.cgi?tpl=plant.tpl&card=T16 Steven

We have lots of hawthorn hedgerows around Ballarat as well, and I'd been wondering whether the timber would be useful for modelling. Thanks for bringing up the subject, Brian.

Thanks, Dick. I'll try following up on these. I've got Landstrom's book and I've been looking at his illustrations and text. I'll see what I can do about the others. I think in general I've now got a reasonable understanding of how this rig worked and what it was made up of, which I certainly didn't have before. But I'll probably learn more as I start building. Steven

Some more mediaeval pictures of ships with lateen sails. The first is Catalan, thought to be from the mid-late 13th century (maybe about 1290) and shows quite a bit of detail - shrouds, halyards, braces and perhaps a fore-tackle, plus what may be a parrel truck fixing the yard to the mast - or perhaps just a loop of rope (sorry about the watermark - this is the biggest representation I could find on the net). The next is mid-14th century Italian and shows most of the ropes and blocks. The fore-tackle is particularly clear. The next is Byzantine, from about 1200 AD and again shows shrouds, tackles and braces. The detail's not as good, as the picture's so small. The fourth picture is 14th century Spanish. It shows a single brace and fore-tackle, and halyards, but no shrouds. The yard seems to be held to the mast with a double loop of rope. But a picture's emerging which should allow me to produce a rig which I'm confident is close to what was in use at the time. There seem to have been variations, as one would expect - the fixing of the shrouds to the mast, the suspension of the yard, either by a loop of rope, or two loops. I've also come across pictures of lateeners with parrels, but I don't seem to have taken copies (damn!). Though I'd expect larger ships to use parrels, I haven't got any hard evidence for them in the right period, so I probably won't have them on the model. There seems to be no sign of lifts for the yard at this time, and it's perhaps debatable whether they could have been used, as the yard seems almost always to have been hoisted all the way to the top of the mast. Also, a picture by a Byzantine artist of a galley which appears to me to have a horizontal spur at the bow, just as I proposed in my last post. Unfortunately I don't know the source, but it looks to be from some time in the 12th century AD. The artist seems to have got the direction of the oarsmen wrong - they should be facing the stern, which is where the steersman is. And finally, a Spanish picture from between 1270 and 1284 which shows a galley in the foreground with what appears to be a lowered mast (almost horizontal, in front of the soldiers). The ships in the background still have their masts vertical. The "wings" of the ship are at the stern, so the mast is leaning aftwards. If this really is a mast, I may have been wrong in thinking the masts were pulled out of the deck with sheers - I may have to go back to the idea of a pivoting mast. Of course, it's possible that what we see here is not a lowered mast but a broken one - the lower end does look like it may have been broken off. Aha! I've found the other picture of the tops of shrouds wrapped around the mast - it's early 15th century, a galley from Michael of Rhodes' treatise on shipbuilding. See the final picture. It's also got some very good details of rigging, though I have to say it's rather late - up to 400 years after the time I'm interested in, and a lot of evolution would have happened in ship design in the meantime. Steven