La Lomellina by Louie da fly - scale 1:100 - Theoretical Reconstruction of a Genoese carrack sunk in 1516

[Louie da fly]

Well, I'm very chuffed. In response to a request from me for a bit more information and a clear photo of an 'arquebus' (precursor of the musket) found on the Lomellina, Max Guérout sent me a thoroughly researched and incredibly comprehensive paper he'd written, covering not only the guns found on the wreck, but every type of gun in common use at the time, with photos, technical drawings, construction analyses, you name it.  108 pages long. But all in French. Fortunately, Google Translate has come a long way since I first started using it, and despite the occasional howler of a translation, that plus my own schoolboy french was very useful in getting the full sense of the paper. Wonderful.

 

One thing I found fascinating was the fact that as gunports had only just come into use -before this all guns were supported on the gunwales (which is why they have that name)  - they were so new that the problems hadn't yet been worked out (keeping water out was an issue, muzzles only barely stuck out past the front of the carriage - they were actually within the hull itself when the gun went off - so there was a considerable danger of fire, there were structural issues with putting holes in the side of the ship, as well as supporting the weight of ever bigger and heavier guns). So they weren't very trusting of this new development and initially ships were pierced with very few gunports - possibly only one or two per side, as in the pictures below, with other guns (even big ones) being still on the upper deck and fired over the gunwale.

   

     The French ship Loyse (Louise) - c. 1486-1508                               From the manuscript of Rochechouart c. 1502.

 

Among the finds on the Lomellina were a number of large wheels, much larger than those of the usual carriage found on shipboard guns of this time (though note the Mary Rose had them too) - about the size you'd expect for field guns. Except that some of these didn't have iron tyres, or even the rusted remnants of them (which are usually very obvious because they make a huge swollen mass). No good for wheels that had to stand up to travelling along the dreadful roads of the time (or, worse still, off-road). Which indicates they were intended to be used, not on land, but on board ship, as shown in the picture.

 

There's a good chance that despite a dozen gun barrels having been found in the wreck, the gunport and portlid found on the Lomellina were the only ones on that side of the ship, and the other guns were on the upper deck.

 

Loving this.

 

Steven  

 

[firdajan]

I´m still sitting in a front row, Steven, and I´m still absorbing all of informations👍

When I built Sao Gabriel ( Seahorse ), I also eliminated the side gunports. In those days, there was a different battle tactic ( remember the Mary Rose, how many longbows vere foud....and this was several decades later than Lomelina´s days )

 

Jan

 

[Tony Hunt]

You're not the only one loving this Steven. Your research is fascinating, as always, and the info on the early ships guns is so interesting!

[MikkiC]

That's phenomenal information. Thanks for sharing it. 

[Louie da fly]

Thanks everybody for the likes and comments.

 

Firdajan, yes archery was still an important part of the armament of the Mary Rose - in fact I've seen some of the bows in the museum where she's held - along with all kinds of other interesting artefacts including a beautiful parrel truck and a complete fighting top. Back then they were still thinking more in terms of hand-to-hand combat than gunfire, which is why the Mary Rose had such a tall forecastle and aftercastle - to make boarding difficult for the enemy.

 

Tony, thanks. Yes, I'd had no idea that there was this period where they were very wary about installing gunports - I thought artillery went straight from gunwale-mounted to long ranks of gunports. But it's very understandable when you consider the problems that had to be overcome before they could become an integral and usual part of a ship's armament.

 

Mikki, I'm glad you liked it. I do enjoy sharing these discoveries with my fellow enthusiasts.

 

Steven 

[Doreltomin]

Hi Steven, just came across your build log here. Somehow I had missed it although when I received #310/june 2023 of "Neptunia" - the magazine of the Friends of the Maritime Museum in Paris, which features a paper on "La Lomellina" my first thought was "Let's see how much time it takes until someone on MSW takes on this one" - and there's just a handful of gentlemen here trying their teeth on such a hard thing as an early ship, so certainly you were on that short list! So here you are, struggling with incomplete information and struggling to understand a text in French language!

 

Let me tell you that I hadn't liked too much the restitution of the shape of the ship as done by Beatrice Frabetti, it looks too pointed at the fore end to my eyes so yours is certainly better. And also, about the wooden wheels, it looked to me as if these were indeed part of the cargo and were transported without their steel rims and the fact that they really found a gunport may point that they were certainly more!

 

Also, the paper cites a contemporary account of Antonio de Beatis which writes in 1517 in his account of the travel of the Cardinal of Aragon about the loss of the Lomellina two years before "a big Genoese ship, very well armed, with more than three hundred people aboard which sank in the said point (Villefranche harbour) and the main mast of the said ship can still be seen protuding from the water for about two canes" (a cana being an Aragonese unit of measure of roughly 1,5 meters). This "very well armed" may be taken seriously and may mean she had indeed several guns in gunports - my two cents so far!

 

Good luck with your reconstruction, which I will follow with much interest, and if you stumble upon some hard to translate French bits, just drop me a line! I may not understand it as well as a true born Frenchman, yet since my own language is also a Romance language and I started learning French quite a long time ago, I may be of some help! 

[Louie da fly]

I've planned to make a model of the Lomellina for over 6 years now, since I found out about her. But she was discovered in (I think) 1979 and the excavation was done over the following decade.

 

Yes, there's just not enough of the ship left to know the bow shape - at the bow only the keel survives. So it has to be done by educated guesswork - extrapolated from what does survive. And extrapolation of this magnitude is risky - it's impossible to know for sure whether or not you've selected the correct curve. Though I don't have access to the contemporary text the author quotes, I have spent a lot of time looking at many many contemporary representations of carracks, and I believe I have a pretty good idea of what the bow shape should be. 

 

You make a good point regarding the guns and the wheels, but I believe Max Guérout is correct. Apart from anything else, why would they make wheels for field guns but leave them incomplete, without iron tyres? If they were needed in a hurry they would have had to wait till the tyres were made and fitted, which seems unlikely to me.

 

Regarding spaces for gunports, the bottom of the gunport that was discovered was level with the top of a stringer which they have marked as S1, and though the ship had come to rest at an angle of 45 degrees, with the mud above it preserving much of the starboard side, unfortunately there was not a lot surviving above S1. On examining the drawings I thought I'd found another gunport in the region of the master frame, as the frames and planking seemed to be cut off in a straight line there, which argued for an opening - though it was one frame (about 500mm) narrower than the gunport that was found. However, Max Guérout sent me a photo of the relevant part of the ship and unfortunately I had to come to the conclusion that I'd been wrong. And most of the rest of the surviving hull is preserved far enough above S1 that there seems to be hardly anywhere for any other gunports to be.

 

I believe the statement 'very well armed' has to be taken in context. Up till the very end of the 15th century, guns were light, as they had to be mounted on the gunwales. So at this time, a dozen guns would have made the ship 'very well armed'. Her predecessor (also called Lomellina) sank in 1503 and I'm of the opinion that the owners would have had a replacement built as soon as possible, so I should think she was probably built in 1503 or maybe 1504. And gunports were so new at this time that I'm quite prepared to believe that they were very wary of them, and that it's very likely that they only had one per side (as shown in the illustration above of the fleet outside Genoa) and that the other guns were located on the upper deck, pointing over the gunwales.

 

Which necessitated larger wheels to lift them high enough to do so. This seems to have been the case with the Mary Rose - each gun had its wheels individually tailored to raise the muzzle high enough for use. 

 

That information about the mast protruding from the water 2 canes is useful to me. The water is 18 metres deep, so the height of the masthead (assuming the mast remained complete) above the seabed there would be 21 metres. But she came to rest at 45 degrees, so we would have to multiply the mast height above the seabed by 1.414 (the tangent of 45 degrees) and then allow for the depth of the hull as well. Taking into account all the uncertainties built into this assumption, this might still give a fairly good estimate of the height of the mainmast. I've worked it out by proportion from contemporary pictures, and it will be interesting to see whether the two figures agree.

 

Thanks for the good wishes, and the offer of translation help. Interestingly, I recently joined a French conversation group here in Ballarat, and for the first time about a week ago I was able to read a full paper in the original French (with occasional journeys to Google Translate for words I didn't know). But if I find myself at a loss, I'll keep you in mind.

 

And now, enfin, I've started making sawdust. Here's the stempost (not recovered by the archaeologists), and the piece of wood from which the keel and stempost will be made.

As  all the segments of the keel except one were found  (and they know the length of the gap where that segment used to be), I think I will be making my keel out of four pieces copying the real ones. The sternpost wasn't found either, but they have a good idea of its size and angle.

 

Best wishes,

 

Steven  

 

 

Edited December 2 by Louie da fly

[Louie da fly]

I changed my mind about making the keel of four pieces. Based on previous attempts, I'm not all that confident of making the scarph joints well enough to get a good fit, so instead I've made the keel from a single piece and faked the scarph joints by inscribing lines on the wood.

 

I'm using oak for the keel, stempost and sternpost and I only have a limited amount of it, so I have to be careful about wastage. These three elements are to be 3mm (1/8") thick, though the keel and sternpost are slightly thicker than the stempost and I'll have to sand them down so everything's the same. I'm contemplating putting thin wooden pegs between these pieces to strengthen the joints. Here it is dry fitted against the drawing.

Gluing them in place I wanted to make sure the angles followed the drawing exactly, but didn't want to stick the wood to the paper. So after a bit of thought, I cut up the transparent plastic lid of a yoghurt container and placed the plastic between the wood and the paper. Voila! (and it worked!)

I chose oak because - what the hey - that's what they made the ship out of, but even though the grain is finer than the usual oak you get, it's still a bit hard to work with. I'll be making the frames of oak as well (2mm thick), building them up out of futtocks as in the real thing. If I run out of it, I'll use another timber (probably walnut) for the remainder of the frames. They'll be hidden within the hull, after all. Mediterranean shipwrights of the time would put every fifth frame in place and then fill in between with the other frames. I'm going to do it every fourth frame - mainly because it's more convenient - the wreck's measurements were determined in relation to a grid of 1.0 metre squares, and the frames are 0.5 metres apart, so dividing by 4 is easier than  by 5.

 

The original was planked with oak and pine (depending on where it was on the hull) and I'll be using walnut (in place of oak) and pine.

 

Steven

[Baker]

Great start Steven 

[MikkiC]

11 hours ago, Baker said:

Great start Steven 

Agreed!

[Doreltomin]

So we are going to see some wood dust as well... good luck with the build! It seems the original Lomellina's outer "skin" was built with oak and pine boards, with the pine ones specifically hidden under the lead sheating, which may suggest a bit of  cheating intent from the shipbuilders - they put cheap wood in a place where it would be hard to notice!

[Waldemar]

 

1 hour ago, Doreltomin said:

It seems the original Lomellina's outer "skin" was built with oak and pine boards, with the pine ones specifically hidden under the lead sheating, which may suggest a bit of  cheating intent from the shipbuilders - they put cheap wood in a place where it would be hard to notice!

 

It depends on where the pine (coniferous wood) is used. If for the lower parts of the hull planking, then yes, it could have been a cheat. However, if for the upper parts of the hull (especially the planking of the upper decks, even the planking of the upper sides, or for the inner bulkheads, regardless of their location), then it is already a most correct and desirable practice, advised and described in the ship's handbooks of the period. It is particularly about the difference in weight of oak (or other heavy woods) from coniferous species. As a curiosity — at that time or so, in the north of the continent, there were in fact quite a few ships built entirely of coniferous wood. They were called fyrblasses (in Germanic languages fyr or similar, meaning precisely pine wood).

 

 

[Doreltomin]

Hi Waldemar, thanks for your comment! Actually the author of the archaeological report gives two possible different versions of using fir instead of the more common oak planks for the ship's skin: one is the cheating thing, but also he calculates that the total weight of the lead sheating would be about 7,2 tonnes, which all go outside the ship so it would act like a kind of ballast while not affecting at all the place of the cargo, which is an important point for a merchant ship. Also taking into the account that the sheating would protect the wood from the dangerous Teredo Navalis, the ship worm, they may have balanced the overall cost of the sheating with a lesser cost of the planks. Yes indeed the pine may have been a good choice for the upper parts of the ship as it is less dense so these parts would have been less heavy! 

[Waldemar]

 

26 minutes ago, Doreltomin said:

Actually the author of the archaeological report gives two possible different versions of using fir instead of the more common oak planks for the ship's skin: one is the cheating thing, but also he calculates that the total weight of the lead sheating would be about 7,2 tonnes, which all go outside the ship so it would act like a kind of ballast while not affecting at all the place of the cargo, which is an important point for a merchant ship.

 

Is there any regularity of application in this mix of two wood species or does it look more random? What is in the report about this? Because if it's a bit of a haphazard-looking mix, then repairs, necessarily done quite routinely and arguably at varying levels of cost and resulting quality, can probably also be added to these possibilities.

 

[Waldemar]

 

Eventually, out of curiosity, I had a look at the archaeological report myself. It turns out, quite logically, that the ordinary planking boards were of pine, while those of structural importance, where the individual timbers overlap (i.e. floor, bilge, futtock timbers) were of the more robust oak. The latter were also thicker than regular planking, in effect making them a sort of underwater wales. The report also points out that the use of coniferous wood in the Mediterranean for the planking of ship hulls was quite standard practice at the time.

 

 

Edited December 8 by Waldemar

[Mark Pearse]

Hi Steven, if you run short on White Oak, I have some small pieces doing nothing & could post to you. 

[Louie da fly]

Waldemar is correct. Oak planking was used where a strong timber was structurally preferable; the rest of the planking was of pine.

 

Mark, at the moment I probably have enough oak to get me by, so I won't ask you to go to all that trouble. But I might get back in touch with you later. We'll see how it goes . . .

 

Steven

[Louie da fly]

Reinforcing the joints between the keel and the stempost and sternpost. I drilled holes through the joints then inserted bamboo pegs. It made the joints much stronger - I don't have to worry now about snapping them off in a moment of inattention.

 

I've started carving the rabbet, but the oak grain is really not fine enough to do this well, and I'm considering starting again with a different timber, perhaps walnut or plum, which will take the rabbet better.

 

 

Steven

[Baker]

Wood from fruit trees (cherry, apple, pear, walnut) is very pleasant to work with. And it is also easy to bend (walnut a little less)
I have no experience with plum wood.

I was curious about your experience with oak wood, personally I don't like using it