Sovereign of the Seas by 72Nova - Airfix - PLASTIC

[Ian_Grant]

Michael, obviously your idea of fun differs from mine. 😁 What was it Andersen said?......"The sprit topmast backstay was one of the places where the early 17th century rigger let himself go." 

 

Just kidding; I look forward to seeing it in the "flesh".

 

Ian

[Kenchington]

2 hours ago, 72Nova said:

the sprit topmast backstay

Before you go too far ahead with that, I'm going to offer a thought on an associated detail.

 

We have two contemporary images of the rigging around the inboard end of Sovereign's bowsprit, one in the drawing that was long in the Pierpont Morgan collection (too often ascribed to one of the van de Veldes, though almost certainly prepared in 1638 -- just possibly by Peter Pett himself) and the other in the Payne engraving. Those two images are very obviously closely related, the one copied from the other. I won't repeat my reasons here but I am confident that the Morgan drawing was one of the sources from which the engraving was prepared, rather than the other way about.

 

The beakhead shown in the Morgan is:

Note the mainstay collar, the gammonings and the pairs of deadeyes tensioning six lines that lead upwards and forwards immediately abaft the tail of King Edgar's horse -- their extent cut off as the drawing does not show the rig beyond stumps of masts and bowsprit.  Note also that those six lines (whatever they were) have no ratlines shown. And finally I will point out that, as was universal at the time, the bowsprit is set to starboard of the stemhead (identifiable by the cupid astride a lion set atop the stem). That offset meant that the six lines could be on the ship's centreline and yet pass clear of the bowsprit, without chafing against it.

 

As for Payne's representation of the same thing:

The mainstay collar has been reduced to a loose loop that looks more like handrails for men descending the steps into the beakhead. The gammonings are still there if less realistically shown. So are the six lines abaft the horse, though they have been reduced to five and each doubled (as though there are two ends, one to starboard and the other to larboard). They are shown reaching to the underside of the bowsprit and no further, while there is just a hint of ratlines on them.

 

Most (maybe all) modern reconstructions, whether in 2D or as 3-dimensional models, interpret those lines much as Payne showed them, though each passes over the top of the bowsprit, while the ratlines provide a sort of ladder for men to climb from the beakhead to the bowsprit. Yet that makes no sense. The bowsprit was held down by the gammonings (and the rigging of the spritsail yard) and did not need extra shrouds. Men going out to the spritsail or spritsail topsail yards will have climbed along the bowsprit (as Payne showed one man doing), not walked out along the narrow, wet and dangerous beakhead before climbing a "ladder".

 

I suggest that the engraving misrepresents what was on the ship and that what the Morgan drawing portrayed was the lower ends of six stays that held the forestay down and back against the forward pull of the sprit topmast backstays. I further suggest that, when someone (I'm inclined to blame Heywood, designer of Soveregn's decorations) combined the details of the drawing with a different source that showed the rig, in preparation for Payne to engrave his image, he didn't know what to do with those six lines and so ended them at the bowsprit. Seeing no obvious purpose for them there, they were given ratlines. The outcome was just one of the multiple technical errors in the engraving.

 

There's no basis for any definite conclusions but Payne's version, as so often realized in model form, just doesn't seem sensible. I think that alternative arrangements merit some thought and, if not stays to take the pull of the sprit topmast backstays, some other hypothesis should be considered!

 

 

Trevor

[72Nova]

This is an interesting take as an alternative and something I'd consider, but there is no evidence on how this would actually be rigged?, my main sources James Lee and Anderson make no mention of any rigging  to counter react the pull of the sprit topmast backstays. Regarding the "wet and dangerous beakhead" the men would have to navigate out there anyways to reach the range pin rail and you make a valid point about the ratlines, but we really don't know as we only have images/paintings to go by in certain instances and even they differ.

My take is their purpose is to help counter react the pull of the lower and upper stays would have on the bowsprit much like bobstays did at a later date. Here's an image that definitely shows some sort of shrouds forward of the gammoning, food for thought.

Thank you Trevor for stopping by and offering up different possibilities, intriguing to say the least.

 

Michael D.

 

[Kenchington]

@72Nova, I too would look first to Lees book for the rigging of English warships. If it was a ship of a later period, with abundant information on practices of the era, I would be cautious in stepping away from his conclusions. For the 1630s, in contrast, there is very little data and still less that could be considered reliable. Most (maybe all) that exists can now be found on-line, so we can reasonably examine the evidence for ourselves and question what others have concluded. Moreover, with the limited firm knowledge, I think we sometimes need to bridge gaps by asking what seems to make sense.

 

Besides, unless I am missing it somewhere, Lees made no mention of the lines that we are considering. I might guess that he discretely steered clear of the topic, but that would only be a guess.

 

You are right, of course, that later ships had bobstays to supplement the effect of the gammonings. But bobstays pull much further forward, hence with much more leverage (albeit pulling at a much less advantageous angle). I don't see the limited pull of deadeyes and lanyards doing much to supplement the gammonings, when placed so close -- as both versions of Sovereign's portrait show them.

 

True also that men had to work in her beakhead, as the idea of leading the running rigging to the forecastle seems to have come later. But there shouldn't have been a need to be near its forward end while at sea. When Sovereign was modified for war service, in 1651-52, one of the changes was that her exaggerated head was “to bee made shorter and soe fitted for the sea”. It would be easy to concoct explanations for that recommendation but the obvious one is that experience during her 1638 cruise had revealed a tendency for her to dip King Edgar into the face of oncoming waves. He was bolted in place but woe betide a live human anywhere nearby!

 

7 hours ago, 72Nova said:

Here's an image that definitely shows some sort of shrouds forward of the gammoning

Can you say where that came from? If contemporary, it would certainly contain much of interest!

 

 

Trevor

[Martes]

23 hours ago, Kenchington said:

one in the drawing that was long in the Pierpont Morgan collection (too often ascribed to one of the van de Veldes, though almost certainly prepared in 1638

Frank Fox pointed out here to me in some other thread here that one should be careful with the Morgan drawing. The 1637 decorations are glued over the drawing of a ship, and he said the hull is depicted as it was after 1660 and following a major refit, with raised gun ports and other changes.

[Kenchington]

@Martes: Sadly, Frank Fox is no longer with us, to explain his conclusions. However, I see absolutely no prospect that the Morgan drawing represents the post-1660 Royal Sovereign. That was a very different ship with a very different shape above (and we now know also below) the waterline, as well as quite different decorations. Perhaps he meant the 1651-52 refit, though the Morgan is so similar to the Payne engraving (which we know was published in 1638), that I doubt he could have sustained an argument that the drawing represented the ship as she was any later than her one commission in her original form -- whatever the year in which some fingers applied charcoal to paper.

 

It is true that the Morgan is silhouetted (i.e. cut close around the drawing and mounted on backing paper). It is also true that the details are drawn on top of an orthogonal draught of the ship. (All of the athwartship lines are drawn parallel.) Most likely, some shipwright prepared a three-quarter view from the ship's draught and then either he or another artist added the details. Indeed, a comment in the 1638 edition of Heywood's book implies (but does not prove) that the fingers holding the charcoal were Peter Pett's own.

 

But none of that negates the probability that the drawing represents the ship as she lay off Gravesend, ready to receive King Charles, immediately before her departure for her one cruise in her original form. 

 

 

Trevor

[Martes]

Here are the posts concerning the Morgan drawing:

 

 

 

[Martes]

Also, see those:

 

 

 

 

You can check all Frank's posts on MSW, I think, the search engine allows that, and he told a lot of interesting details then.

Edited yesterday at 03:57 AM by Martes

[Kenchington]

Hi @Martes,

 

You have just dragged down my previous respect for Frank Fox's judgement by a whole big step!

 

1: There is not and never has been any reason to link the Morgan drawing with either van de Velde -- as Laird Clowes pointed out in the pages of Mariner's Mirror way back in 1931. Yet that fallacious connection goes on getting repeated again and again. If it were possible to date the paper on which it is drawn to post-1660, that date might support a van de Velde origin. The unsupported assumption that either father or son drew the Morgan can never provide us with a date for it. So scratch that suggestion.

 

2: The little bridge at Gillingham did not extend from ship to shore but from the shore to a boat landing, so that visitors could get into a boat without walking through riverside mud. (Read the original text. Its wording is very clear.) The boat would then take them out to the ship which was, of course, laid up at a mooring, not alongside a wharf.  Nobody would have laid the ship up against anything solid that she could have beaten herself against in a gale. So scratch that one too.

 

3: A glance at the two images confirms that the shape of the topsides of Sovereign shown in the Morgan is that of the ship shown by Payne, and quite different to that of the 1660 Royal Sovereign. If the Morgan was actually prepared after 1660, the decorations were drawn over a draught of the ship launched in 1637, not of the one afloat when the van de Veldes might have seen her. So scratch that also.

 

Sweep all of those myths aside and we can ask ourselves how come two so similar images of the same ship came to be. Did some artist take a copy of the Payne, fix its obvious mistakes (the third anchor, the absence of an entry port etc.), delete most of the human figures but keep three of them, drop the rig, then produce the lovely, lively Morgan drawing? Or did someone take the Morgan, combine it with information on the rig, delete the unique boarding ramp, add a whole lot more people plus some dramatic extras (third anchor about to be catted, the whale off the larboard bow etc.) and then rush to publication of an engraving (matched to the timing of the 2nd edition of Heywood's book, both being driven by the rising political crisis), without pausing to fix the obvious technical errors? I know which seems more plausible to me.

 

 

As to the second thread that you present: The 1660 ship was entirely new (aside, perhaps, from some timber re-used from the pile of scrap remaining from the broken-up Sovereign). It wasn't just a matter of sinking the hull deeper into the water while raising the sides and decks. (That would have played havoc with her stability, as the height of greatest breadth became deeply immersed.) On another thread, @Waldemar has produced a contemporary drawing of the midship bend of the Royal Sovereign that burned in the 1690s and we know (from the writings of the master shipwright who built that one) that she had the same lines as the 1660 ship. They both had much fuller sections than Sovereign of the Seas, hence more buoyancy -- which could have been inferred from their above-water appearance anyway, though nice to have confirmation.

 

 

Trevor