Want a virtual tour through a 17th century Dutch ship?

[Ab Hoving]

At previous occasions on this and other forums I explained that real trustworthy information about the shape and construction of Dutch 17^th century ships is scarce. (http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/ships-watercraft/35441-17th-century-dutch-fluit-14.html, ,

The Amsterdam diplomat, lawyer, collector and lord-mayor of Amsterdam Nicolaes Witsen (1641-1717) was the first to write a book on the subject of Dutch shipbuilding, Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheepsbouw en Bestier (Old and Modern Shipbuilding and Managing) 1671. To illustrate his story he described the building of an average ship of his days, an armed trader called a 'pinas'. Three masts, 134 feet long, 24 guns, sailed by a hundred man. It took me 6 years to process his data about the ship into working drawings and to build the model.

The knowledge I gained during the work opened the way for me to another career: head of the restoration department for navy models in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. In 2006, after having published about Witsen and his pinas I started to work the material around into 3D. I got help from a Belgian gentleman, called Rene Hendrickx, who proved to be an expert on the free downloadable shipbuilding program Delftship. Over three years we worked together to turn every single part of the ship Witsen mentioned into 3D shapes. In the end thousands of files formed together the unquestionable image of a 17^th century average ship.

The Cultural Heritage Agency, part of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science commissioned Tijdlab, a young firm that makes historical 3D representations, to use our results for a program that made the pinas accessible for the public on an internet site: https://witsenscheepsbouw.nl.

 

To say that it has grown into a heavy program is an understatement. It takes time to download the various parts. Therefore the (Microsoft)user gets the opportunity to download the entire program, both the Dutch and the English version, at once on to his own harddisk. That saves a lot of time if you want to access it more than once (which I warmly recommend). Mac users are for the time being convicted to use the online version, preferably through Chrome, which is just a little bit lower in quality, but still very worthwhile visiting.

After opening the site you get three choices:

1. Interactively you can watch 14 stages of construction of the ship. This is especially useful to watch the shell-first building method that was applied in those days in Holland, in which the outside planks are placed before any frame part.

2. Here you can 'walk' through the ship, using the w, a, s and d keys of your keyboard. In the next update you can ask the name of any part of the ship you see.

3. Those names can be looked up in the Encyclopedia, where the location of the part in the ship is shown, as well as all the data Witsen provided about that part in his book. Of course it can be viewed from close-by, moving and turning the part any way you want.

On a forum for ship modelers it would be an omission not to make available the construction plans of the ship, the only 17^th century avarage ship we know. There are also links to the online version of Witsen's book, together with another 17^th century author about the subject, Cornelis van Yk with his book De Nederlandse Scheeps-bouw-konst open-gestelt (Dutch Shipbuilding Unveiled) from 1697.

 

Because this is the beta version (we hope to update very soon with more info presented within the program) we invite anyone who has remarks or questions to react and share his thoughts so we can serve the user even better.

 

Please have a look there!

Ab

[flying_dutchman2]

Ab, 

Very nice. Will spent more time this weekend looking through the details. Thanks for the link. 

Marcus