Lashenden

I've joined just to contribute to this thread, lol. I'm an art historian and also have some historic ship experience and therefore have a couple of observations (which may already have been made elsewhere in the thread). On the question of overscale figures in fifteenth century paintings - yes, but also no. I used to run the replica Golden Hinde in London (of which more below) but I can tell you that the stern castle on that replica is vertiginous (I would estimate 20'+ from the top of the stern rail to the waterline) and the poop deck is both tiny (about 10' x 6') and slopes at a severe angle. The whole structure looks far more imposing from the quayside than it actually is. You can see much the same effect in Van de Velde drawings from the 1660s; the design of stern castles are meant to look monumental but actually they're quite underscale, almost 'toy' architecture. While the medieval convention of oversized figures goes back hundreds of years before the Renaissance, adults standing on quarter galleries or the poop of a ship with high castles would indeed look oddly over-scale. Further to that point, I'm always cautious about the degree to which we should discount contemporary representations of anything, including ships, as uninformed or inaccurate. In my experience artists have generally tried to give what they considered a convincing or 'characteristic' representation of objects in the world. I would take the fifteenth century depictions of carracks at face value unless there's clear evidence to the contrary. This is especially the case concerning the exaggerated profile of the bow that bends back on itself producing that extraordinary 'bow-curve' profile. That feature is pretty much universal in contemporary depictions - it might be counter-intuitive to a twenty-first century eye but to diminish that feature is a perfect example of the 'condescension of posterity'. A useful example of the benefit of taking this period at it's own estimation is provided by Tobias Capwell's study of armour from the early fifteenth century - he's done amazing work by assuming that contemporaries knew exactly what they were looking at. During my time on the Golden Hinde I had several conversations with Brian Lavery about the errors built into the 1977 replica. One of that ship's most glaring mistakes was the degree to which its beam was underestimated in the twentieth century design - as many of you will know, the resulting instability and poor handling had to be corrected with foam-filled sponsons bolted either side the hull. Lavery always thought that in early modern ships the widest part of the beam was below the waterline, which would give the ship the kind of stability later achieved with a deep keel. Some decades later the Duyfken replica benefitted from computer-aided modelling of its handling characteristics and featured much more convincing and historically-accurate hull dimensions.