Mary Rose 1511 — the epitome of the Northern tradition

[Kenchington]

5 hours ago, Waldemar said:

Thank you Trevor. The shortest answer is that both.

And thank you, Waldemar. That helps a lot.

 

I'm not as familiar with 16th-Century ship design as I would like to be, so it is good to see your explorations.

 

One point though:

 

5 hours ago, Waldemar said:

in those days design on paper, at least complete design, was not yet practised

That is certainly very true, as regards paper or scale drawing any other two-dimensional surface. But did English shipwrights of the early 16th Century not make much use of battens and ribbands to complete a faired design full-scale in 3-D? That had been the late-Medieval practice in the Venice Arsenal and it was still relied on in vernacular shipbuilding in 18th-Century New England. With the (Old) English familiarity with clencher construction through to 1500 and beyond, running a board across the futtocks to determine a fair curve to stem and stern would seem a natural choice.

 

If they did "design" parts of the hull as it grew on the building ways, it may be impossible to match the finished shape using only the very simple graphical methods that I would expect so early in the adoption of carvel construction. Your curve of the maximum breadth forward of the main bend, for example, is not an arc of a circle. Either the original shipwright used a more complex curve or he did not draw that at all.

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

9 hours ago, Kenchington said:

That is certainly very true, as regards paper or scale drawing any other two-dimensional surface. But did English shipwrights of the early 16th Century not make much use of battens and ribbands to complete a faired design full-scale in 3-D? That had been the late-Medieval practice in the Venice Arsenal and it was still relied on in vernacular shipbuilding in 18th-Century New England. With the (Old) English familiarity with clencher construction through to 1500 and beyond, running a board across the futtocks to determine a fair curve to stem and stern would seem a natural choice.

 

If they did "design" parts of the hull as it grew on the building ways, it may be impossible to match the finished shape using only the very simple graphical methods that I would expect so early in the adoption of carvel construction.

 

In general, I think it can be said that during the actual assembly of the frame structure on the building ways, the procedure was just as you explained. However, there is not at all any contradiction in this with the necessity of some frame pre-designing, because in order to use aligning battens or ribbands at all, first the shape of at least a few frames, erected in the first place even before the ribbands could be fitted, had to be defined. Only then could all the rest of the frames be erected (or even shaped according to these temporary ribbands). Similarly, in cases, when the shape of all the frames is predefined, not merely the conceptual ones, these alignment ribbands are still needed to guide the next, gradually inserted elements into the skeleton structure. Especially since at that early period the frames were not yet a unified whole, but their individual elements (floors, naval timbers, 1st futtock, 2nd futtocks, ..., toptimbers) were not connected to each other at all (so-called ‘floating’ frame components, precisely as in Mary Rose's case). This circumstance, in turn, meant that matching such separate components to the guiding ribbands, even if they had been not overly precisely cut beforehand, was almost always (better or worse) possible.

 

However, the more precisely the whole process was carried out beforehand (i.e. designing, tracing, cutting out timbers), the less work there was with the subsequent dubbing of the resulting hull surface. In this context, it is telling and interesting to note that in Russian shipyards in the 18th century (i.e. at a time when full design on paper was employed), whole teams of carpenters were permanently employed to do nothing but dubbing, although such a peculiar “extravagance” could probably only be possible in state-sponsored ventures. But this is a familiar problem in England itself as well — William Sutherland, in his 1711 work, even strongly advocated a return to simpler design practices, essentially inherited from the Middle Ages, allowing or facilitating greater precision in all preceding stages, precisely to avoid or at least reduce this essentially rather ‘idle’ in the production sense and also economically damaging process of dubbing.

 

To put it yet another way, these first ‘futtocks’, to which guiding ribbands or battens could be later attached, also had to be designed in a meaningful/regular geometrical way, because some random shape of these initial ‘futtocks’ would not have ensured a run of the required shape and at the same time fairness of these guiding ribbands or battens. This is precisely what this reconstruction shows — the design process of these first ‘futtocks’, only here they are called ‘conceptual frames’. Building models using the plank-on bulkhead technique is also a very good analogy. On sloppily designed bulkheads, i.e. sporting rather random shapes, it is virtually impossible to lay the planking in a smooth way.

 

It is also worth adding that the pre-definition of the frames did not necessarily start as late as the implementation of carvel construction. For example, I am now looking at the lines of the so-called Newport ship of the 15th century, sporting clinker planking, and it tentatively looks to have been designed using exactly the same method as was employed for Mary Rose 1511. But indeed here too it is worth doing a proper survey for verification.

 

 

9 hours ago, Kenchington said:

Your curve of the maximum breadth forward of the main bend, for example, is not an arc of a circle. Either the original shipwright used a more complex curve or he did not draw that at all.

 

Yes indeed, it is not a single-arc curve, but in this case it is a curve composed of two arcs of a circle (in the top projection), as is its part for the aft half of the hull. It is interesting, and probably usually surprising to today's readers, that in fact this line did not even have to be drawn beforehand on the longitudinal projections, but its coordinates could immediately be approximated on the body plan in actual size on the mould loft, especially with the help of various geometrical devices of the mezzaluna type. This was possible and at the same time particularly easy for the central segments of this line (indicated in the reconstruction diagrams above), which are already just single arcs of circles, because these central segments, i.e. between quarter frames, are tangent to the longitudinal line parallel to the ship's axis. This is a broader and interesting issue in itself, but I think I have just produced an excessively long elaboration anyway... 

 

 

Edited May 24 by Waldemar

[Waldemar]

9 hours ago, Alvb said:

Thank you for your detailed explanations. I consider your work extremely valuable. The constructions are understandable and easy to follow. The only thing that wasn't entirely clear to me was how the regression curves were determined.

 

Thanks. I have tried to formulate the explanations as clearly as possible, even avoiding unnecessary additions that only obscure the whole picture. If there is something specific that needs more attention, just please point it out.

 

 

 

Edited May 24 by Waldemar

[Martes]

On 5/22/2025 at 10:39 PM, Waldemar said:

there is an interesting juxtaposition of cross-sections of two important wrecks dating from the “pre-Mediterranean” period in England on an equal scale — the Mary Rose 1511 and the so-called Woolwich ship (possibly Sovereign 1487).

It should be noted that the design of the Mary Rose was not borne in vacuum.

 

Apart from an inventory which gives the numbers of her masts and yards, there are only two clues to the Regent’s design, a building warrant which states that she is to be made “like unto a ship called the Columbe of France” (of which nothing is known either) and a note that she was made by a “novel construction … with ordnance and fittings”. For the Sovereign we know even less. Apart from an inventory which lists the number of masts and yards,[2] there is only a mention in 1525 that she is in bad condition but worth repair because “the form of which ship is so marvellously goodly that great pity it were that she should die”.

 

The “novel construction” of the Regent could refer to a change from clinker building to carvel or to the introduction of the square stern which occurred generally about this time. Perhaps it was the answer to the mounting of high-velocity, long-range guns in the bows of galleys, which in a calm could manoeuvre to fire into the weak and unprotected sterns of the great sailing ships. The obvious defensive answer was to mount heavy guns in the sterns of the carracks, and more of them; and the only way to provide space for a rearward-firing battery was to make the stern square.

 

...

 

The best, he thought, was his own command, the Mary Rose. “Sir, she is the noblest shipp of sayle and grett shipp at this hour that I trow be in Christendom. A shipp of 100 tone wyl not be soner at her … abowt then she.”

 

With these qualities, plus proven success in battle, it is not surprising that the design was continued. As replacement for the burnt Regent, a scaled-up version of the Mary Rose was ordered to be built. Called at first the “Gret carrik” Imperyall, she was later named the Henry Grace de Dieu, but nowadays is more commonly referred to as the Henry Grace à Dieu or Great Harry.

 

Alexander McKee - King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose (1973)

 

There is a clear succession of design evaluation here, from the French original (the carrack Columbe) through the Regent and larger Sovereign (the parts of which are known as the Woolwich ship), the Mary Rose and ultimately the Great Harry.

 

McKee - who is responsible for the finding of the ship and raising her - made an unparalleled search in contemporary documents in order to locate and identify the wreck.

 

Edited May 24 by Martes

[Waldemar]

 

Thank you, Martes, for this information.

 

Somewhat spontaneously — there is a bit of irony in the fact that, for interpreting this particular case, it is the French sources that have proved so pertinent (mentioned above carrack Columbe c. 1500, Fournier's remarks of 1643, the design of l'Aurore 1697 and other French ships of the era, Duhamel du Monceau's treatise of 1752) . It should be noted that these are strictly technical issues. Up to now, as far as I am aware, attempts have been made to create such a conceptual reconstruction of the Mary Rose, however, they were based rather on English shipbuilding textbooks 100 years and more later, which describe issues that were already specific to a period when Mediterranean methods had already been adopted in England for good and developed further. Consequently, these attempts could not and indeed did not produce any meaningful results.

 

 

 

Edited May 25 by Waldemar

[Martes]

 

5 hours ago, Martes said:

Alexander McKee - King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose (1973)

Those quotes also underline the careful attention given to the forms of the ship hulls already at this time, with navies watching each other's designs and wide exploitation of proven and successful variants.

[Waldemar]

 

Refinement

 

Already during the work in progress, a 3D scan of the Mary Rose wreck was accessed (many thanks to the Mary Rose Trust, and especially to Alexzandra Hildred), and although just of the ship's interior, with only a residual surfaces of the exterior planking, the scan nevertheless allowed an additional verification to be effected and even some refinement of the results already obtained as well.

 

First of all, the scan itself had to be corrected, which proved to be quite difficult in itself due to the particularly severe and at the same time extremely complicated nature of the distortions of the original (wreckage). Overall, this verification went happily well, except that it sparked an additional local correction of the bow shape, consisting of a slight increase in hull volume at this area. Most importantly, however, the previously found design concept of the ship could have remained unchanged, and even the correction of the bow shape itself could have been done precisely in a way that made use of this previously found design method, specifically by reducing the initial radius of the arc of the bottom in the forward quarter frame from 10 to 6 feet. All the rest of the geometric components followed ‘automatically’ the existing geometric procedures of the design, generating, in effect, a more full bow shape. It could be said here that this is one of the main advantages of this particular approach or way of interpreting finds of this kind.

 

The graphics below show, among other things, pairs of corresponding contours for each station being compared, the outer lines representing reconstructed lines and the inner lines being cross-sections of the interior of the hull (thick yellow lines). The distance between these contours is, of course, due to the thickness of the frame timbers and also, in a rather irregular manner, to the thickness of the ceiling planking, riders, braces and knees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

The final (or refined), reconstructed body plan of the Mary Rose 1511 is as follows, and the alterations, compared to the previous variant, affects only the fore part of the hull. All of the earlier explanations on the design concept, or geometric construction, apart from the change in the value of one radius mentioned above, remain valid:

 

 

 

Edited May 26 by Waldemar

[Martes]

Can you describe a format that could have been used to transfer the design from one place to another, if it was not done graphically? 

 

What would have to be written on that piece of paper that an English agent brought from France describing the Colombe, so that English shipbuilders could unpack into a hull shape and be confident that the result matches the original?

[Alvb]

I'm currently building a small model from roughly this era. I realized that the bow area doesn't match the visual impression Brueghel creates in his depiction of "Icarus." The design presented here, with its strongly curved breadth sweeps in the bow, comes closer to that.

Therefore, I've taken the liberty of applying the presented method to my design.

Thanks to your clear description, it's easy to transfer.

Only the reconciling sweeps—circular segments that connect tangentially to given arcs—should be easy to find using graphical methods, but no!

Could you perhaps briefly explain to me how to find these sweeps?

Thank you very much.

[Waldemar]

 

2 hours ago, Alvb said:

Could you perhaps briefly explain to me how to find these sweeps?

 

Thanks, yes that is an otherwise pertinent question. Admittedly, there is a corresponding specialised function in CAD software and everything is done in a flash, however, in actual size, or even drawing manually to scale, it is also or can be trivially easy.

 

Please see the diagram below. I have drawn a simple instrument there, for example a wooden or plastic one. Basically it's a flexible strip, and it has two segments. The wide, unbending segment of it is applied to the straight lines of the bottom (or to the straight dashed lines in the diagram if the curves of the bottom are arcs), and the remaining thin and flexible part of it is then bent until it reaches the lower breadth sweep. Ideally, the bending force should be applied roughly at the spot of the expected touch point with the lower breadth sweep.

 

If you still have any issues, please go ahead.

 

 

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

3 hours ago, Alvb said:

I'm currently building a small model from roughly this era. I realized that the bow area doesn't match the visual impression Brueghel creates in his depiction of "Icarus." The design presented here, with its strongly curved breadth sweeps in the bow, comes closer to that.

Therefore, I've taken the liberty of applying the presented method to my design.

 

Thanks a lot, that's one of the very reasons of this presentation .

 

It is also worth remembering that seagoing ships sporting short hulls must have sharp underwater hull lines.

 

 

 

Edited May 27 by Waldemar

[Martes]

The Woolwich ship, the Sovereign of 1487, demonstrates a similar sharp turn of the hull near the gripe forward as evident from this photograph of the wreck:

 

 

The photo is taken from Sovereign of the seas : the seventeenth-century warship, 2011 by James Sephton.

 

Together with the comparison of the midship section of Sovereign with the Mary Rose, this reinforces the similarity of the design of both ships.

 

For the tragic history of the wreck see here:

 

https://thewreckoftheweek.com/tag/sovereign-1487/

 

 

Edited May 27 by Martes

[Waldemar]

 

12 hours ago, Martes said:

Can you describe a format that could have been used to transfer the design from one place to another, if it was not done graphically? 

 

What would have to be written on that piece of paper that an English agent brought from France describing the Colombe, so that English shipbuilders could unpack into a hull shape and be confident that the result matches the original?

 

It is quite possible that in this way we are entering the realm of speculation as to events that may have actually taken place, but the idea itself is most pertinent, because this is exactly how things were done, that is, a set of values defining the geometry of a ship was written down numerically, which in effect quite unambiguously recorded the features of a particular design and later made it possible to reproduce it faithfully. Provided, however, that the design paradigms, i.e. the design methods with their specific handling procedures, were identical. This is also a good opportunity to complete such a basic list found at the beginning of the thread (entry #4) and to group together in one place all, hitherto somewhat scattered data of this kind.

 

Slightly reiterating here, assuming that the English shipbuilders followed exactly the same design methods as their French counterparts, and that these were as interpreted above, for a faithful reproduction of the underwater part of the hull they would have needed the following set of data from this alleged agent:

 

 

Mary Rose (1511) – dimension set
General dimensions
Breadth outside planking		40 feet
Breadth inside planking		39 feet 4 inches
Length between posts (at 3rd deck level)	3.5 x breadth outside planking	140 feet
Length between rabbets (at 3rd deck level)	3.5 x breadth inside planking	137 feet 8 inches
Draught at midship (without keel)	1/10 x length between posts	14 feet
Keel assembly & lengthwise division
Forward rake	2/13 x length between posts	21 feet 6½ inches (21.54 feet)
Radius of the stempost	3/4 x breadth	30 feet
Aft rake	1/13 x length between posts	10 feet 9 inches (10.77 feet)
Height of sternpost	height of 1st deck at midship (10 feet) + height of 2nd deck at midship (7 feet) + height of 3rd deck at midship (8 feet) + rising of 3rd deck aft (6 feet)	31 feet
Keel length	10/13 length between posts	107 feet 8 inches (107.69 feet)
Placement of double master frame	6/13 of the hull length (fwd) 7/13 of the hull length (aft)
Placement of quarter frames	3/13 of the hull length (fwd)  10/13 of the hull length (aft)
Risings and narrowings
— Line of the floor
Deadrise at midship		6 inches
Rise forward		6 feet
Rise aft (height of tuck)		12 feet
Breadth of the bottom at midship	1/4 x hull breadth	10 feet
— Line of the breadth
Height above waterline at midship		3 feet
Rise forward		5 feet
Rise aft		7 feet
Reduction of the breadth at quarter frames	1/6 (fwd) 1/5 (aft)
Transom length	4/9 x breadth	ca. 18 feet
Quarter frames
Radius of sweeps of the bottom		6 feet (fwd) 10 feet (aft)
Radius of lower breadth sweeps		12 feet (fwd) 12 feet (aft)
Mainmast position	1/2 x length between posts

 

 

 

 

Edited May 27 by Waldemar

[Waldemar]

 

I will also take this opportunity to attach the paper by R. C. Anderson dated 1960 and published in The Mariner's Mirror, which indeed cites an extant document of this nature and from this very period. It concerns the ship Mary of the early 16th century. The set of figures is admittedly somewhat different from the list above, and the values given are absolute (as opposed to relative proportions), nevertheless a number of the items recorded relate specifically to hull shapes and not just the size of the ship and its components.

 

 

Anderson R. C. - The Mary Gonson - Mariner's Mirror 46, 1960-3.pdf

 

[Martes]

1 hour ago, Waldemar said:

I will also take this opportunity to attach the paper by R. C. Anderson dated 1960

 

👀

[Martes]

I see at least two English ships on the Cowdray engraving with apparent additional side timbering:

 

  

 

But the Great Harry is not one of them.

 

 

Edited May 27 by Martes

[Martes]

1 hour ago, Waldemar said:

for a faithful reproduction of the underwater part of the hull they would have needed the following set of data from this alleged agent

 

1 hour ago, Waldemar said:

cites an extant document of this nature and from this very period.

 

Many thanks for compiling this detailed list, especially in comparison with contemporary document.

 

It shows the relative ease with which a ship design could have been transferred - a scrap of paper with innocuous numbers would suffice, as opposed to large and cumbersome scale drawings - and, I suppose, it is possible to assume there would have been some code or indicator as to which design method was used by the builder of the original ship.

[Waldemar]

 

16 minutes ago, Martes said:

But the Great Harry is not one of them.

 

Yeah, as we've discussed before, those round hull cross-sections ‘screamed’ to be corrected as soon as heavy artillery started to be installed on the ships. However, the Mary Rose was not one of them neither. It even occurred to me that until the adoption of the Mediterranean three-arc master frame design, the ships were built as before, i.e. sporting single-arc master frame, and immediately “upgraded” to the new standards and needs by those side “blisters”. Perhaps they simply could not design any differently than before. And this is why there was such widespread and rapid adoption of this Mediterranean specificity in Mathew Baker's time.

 

 

[Martes]

7 hours ago, Waldemar said:

And this is why there was such widespread and rapid adoption of this Mediterranean specificity in Mathew Baker's time.

English kings, including Henry VII and Henry VIII traditionally relied, besides the local shipwrights, on Portuguese masters. IIRC, most Portuguese designs into the 18-th/19th centuries are closer to "northern" tradition, but during the reign of the Queen Mary London was full of Spanish retinue of Philip Habsburg, and I was extremely surprised to realize at some point that for long five years it was he and his administration who managed most of England's affairs. This - at least partly - could explain the technological pivot.

 

 

Edited May 28 by Martes

[Waldemar]

 

1 hour ago, Martes said:

English kings, including Henry VII and Henry VIII traditionally relied, besides the local shipwrights, on Portuguese masters. IIRC, most Portuguese designs into the 18-th/19th centuries are closer to "northern" tradition [...].

 

To be honest, I am not sure that the widespread dissemination of ideas and methods in this later period does not already make such very late Portuguese examples not very authoritative, however, when one looks, for example, at the designs of the master frame by Portuguese Fernando Oliveira from around 1570–1580, such a view already takes on the characteristics of plausibility. They are round, and have a quite narrow bottom. As do most of the designs for seagoing ships in Livro de Traças de Carpintaria, 1616 by Manoel Fernandes, a Portuguese too, which also demonstrate essentially quite circular sections and narrow bottoms.

Below are master frame designs from the manuscript O livro da fábrica das naus by Fernando Oliveira, all sporting a single-arc contour and relatively narrow bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

12 hours ago, Martes said:

[...] during the reign of the Queen Mary London was full of Spanish retinue of Philip Habsburg, and I was extremely surprised to realize at some point that for long five years it was he and his administration who managed most of England's affairs. This - at least partly - could explain the technological pivot.

 

Personally, I associate the implementation of the three-arc master frame design in England with Mathew Baker's educational trip to Italy in the early 3rd decade of the 16th century, precisely to learn Venetian ship design techniques. However, your suggestion that Spanish involvement during Queen Mary's reign may have influenced this transformation also seems plausible, given that the Basque whaler San Juan, dating from around 1550, also exhibits just such three-arc master frame configuration. And, after all, the two supposed causes or stimuli need not be at all mutually exclusive, quite the contrary...

 

 

Edited May 28 by Waldemar

[Kenchington]

Interesting speculations but I would question the existence of a supposed "Spanish" versus Portuguese distinction.

 

San Juan was, as Waldemar has said, Basque. Yes, her builders were (at the time) subjects of the Spanish king but they spoke a (very) different language and lived in a different culture from that of Castile. The Galicians were different again and, to this day, speak a language closer to Portuguese than to the official Spanish of Madrid. On the other coast, Catalan shipwrights were part of western Mediterranean maritime culture and spoke yet another language. In short, Iberia could boast of multiple shipbuilding cultures, not a simple break between Spanish and Portuguese -- while both of those fell under the same king in the time of Philip II, of course.

 

Further north, Henry VIII had a Mediterranean-style galley built and his French opponent went so far as to have a galley-building yard constructed on the Channel, complete with shipwrights brought from his other coast, so there was ample opportunity for design concepts to be exchanged. 

 

While invoking Henry, is there reason to doubt the oft-repeated tales of his personal interest in "race-built" ships? If he was, as so often claimed, encouraging experimentation in shipbuilding, then his shipwrights had incentive to gather ideas widely.

 

Trevor

[Martes]

It is all very entangled, because an origin of a method does not generally mean the origin of it's practitioners. Designs, methods and shipwrights were known to move from one country to another.

 

Spanish professionals, accompanying or arriving in the wake of prince Philip could have included people from any region that were under the rule of the Spanish crown, or any foreigners in Spanish service. Virtually almost anybody.

 

Sometimes a king tried to force foreign methods on his own shipbuilders - Ian Friel mentions an (unsuccessful) attempt by Henry V to force the English shipwrights to repair captured Genoese carracks; they took the money, but refused. McEvolgue writes that Edward IV imported Portuguese shipwrights and encouraged them to teach their craft to local shipbuilders.

 

Henry VII as we see ordered to copy a single French carrack in various sizes, and Henry VIII continued the practice - because until introduction of heavy broadside artillery this was a very successful design - and all of them purchased much ships abroad.

 

If indeed the stability problem had been perceived after the sinking of the Mary Rose and if there was a targeted effort to find a design solution to it (as opposed to girdling/furring a ship after building), the information may have been obtained from many different sources simultaneously, including professional migration, espionage operations, etc.

 

 

Edited May 29 by Martes

[Waldemar]

 

Thank you, gentlemen, interesting reading. My personal perception is that the very attempts to resolve quite specific technical issues solely on too high, shall we say, general cultural or humanistic level, which may in fact lead to virtually any conclusion, emphatically confirm the necessity of a relevant and routine study of the wrecks (preferably in the context of other artefacts from the period — iconography, written sources), precisely from the conceptual angle, and not primarily from the carpentry angle, to which it has so far usually been confined. Otherwise it will be a kind of chasing one's own tail, which is unlikely to lead to anything authoritative.

 

In fact, it is even worse than that, because a few decades ago such considerations, based mainly on general historical premises and only rather selectively and at the same time overly flexible to sources of a technical nature, led to voluntaristic or even fanciful hypotheses and theories which today do not stand up to confrontation with the results of analyses of a conceptual nature. Nevertheless, now these theories, unfortunately already well established in the popular consciousness, are naturally defended by their authors and proponents, including by attempts to discredit troublesome, later contributions in probably every possible way, and even by attempts at bribery, preferably for the cessation of relevant research in this area altogether (I know what I am writing about ).

 

Let me use an example. It has been hypothesised above that Henry VIII's shipwrights had an incentive to gather ideas widely, due to the ruler's inclinations on the matter. Maybe, but at the same time it is known that shipwrights are probably one of the most conservative professional groups because of the risk of paying too high a price for experiments with unknown consequences. Besides, it is known from sources that they were able indeed to refuse their rulers, such as the above-mentioned refusal to overhaul the Genoese carracks, or the refusal to rearrange the bow of one of the large ships (Great Harry or Mary Rose) to install additional heavy guns there. A rather apt summary of this issue is perhaps Duhamel du Monceau's comment, which makes it clear that the shipwrights stuck rather tightly to one design which they considered good enough, implementing it repeatedly in subsequent builds, and for this very reason encourages them to be more adventurous in their experimentation. With greater effect? Personally, I doubt it, in keeping with the paremia — tempora mutantur, sed homines manent eodem.

 

 

[Kenchington]

1 hour ago, Waldemar said:

confirm the necessity of a relevant and routine study of the wrecks (preferably in the context of other artefacts from the period — iconography, written sources), precisely from the conceptual angle

Very true!

 

1 hour ago, Waldemar said:

Henry VIII's shipwrights had an incentive to gather ideas widely, due to the ruler's inclinations on the matter.

If Henry really was interested in improving ship design (and I have never seen citations of original evidence of that claim), then the key point would have been that a shipwright could afford to make a mistake, because his sponsor desired experimentation. As you say, shipwrights (in contrast to boatbuilders) usually could not afford to step very far outside established bounds, as the costs of failure were too high (and there was no realistic theoretical understanding on which to base advances before the late 19th Century). A king willing to spend in an attempt to leap ahead could have made a big difference.

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

7 hours ago, Martes said:

[...] because until introduction of heavy broadside artillery this was a very successful design [...].

 

Agreed. Overall, the hull shapes may be considered successful indeed, deserving the term ‘the noblest shippe’ — the lines of the hull seem to be sharp enough for the ship to move and keep to the wind well, yet not excessively, which would only make her prone to the pitching effect and to the rapid hogging as well (incidentally, as could be revealed from the wreck's scan, at the time of her demise, some 1.5–2 feet at the midship). Just that circular hull cross-section with the narrow bottom, and the resulting lateral stability problems...

 

 

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

Admittedly, It was still planned to make and present a regular line plan of the underwater part of the hull, possibly for use in model building, for example. Instead, until then, for a demonstration of the final shape of the underwater part of the hull, below are quick renders including waterlines, perhaps best illustrating the nature of the Mary Rose's hull shapes. As a reminder, the waterlines shown here are purely consequential, that is, they took no part in the formation of the shapes (i.e. on the basis of the cross-sections, waterlines and buttocks synchronization, procedure not applicable at the time). These were obtained in their entirety by the found design method shown earlier.

 

 

 

[Baker]

For the preparation of the upper deck, I have been in contact with the Mary Rose organization this week.
It appears that the anchors had just been lifted. As a result, they were still busy storing the anchor cables, so that they were still partly on the upper deck.

So they went to battle in a rather hasty and disorganized way, it seems.
In an area with little room to maneuver.
An overloaded ship.
etcetera...

 

And,
again, great study on the hull shape

[Waldemar]

 

48 minutes ago, Baker said:

So they went to battle in a rather hasty and disorganized way, it seems. In an area with little room to maneuver.

 

Thanks a lot, Patrick. That's interesting and new information you provide above regarding the unfinished process of clearing the ship. Also, this is probably a good time to say that your adventures or endeavours, especially those concerning the formation of the hull shapes of your impressive Mary Rose model, which you show in your thread, also influenced the very idea of dealing with this case .

 

[Waldemar]

 

Later design parallels

 

Ships of similar design concept to Mary Rose 1511, from different periods and different regions of northern Europe, have already been mentioned earlier in this thread. Below are a handful of such quite numerous, specific examples, ready at the same time to be shown graphically.

 

Among the cases studied in detail so far, mention should be made of the design of the French heavy frigate of 1686 by Pierre Chaillé (relevant presentation to be found in another forum), and the design of the French light frigate l'Aurore of 1697 by Philippe Cochois (awaiting a separate detailed presentation). Here a reconstruction of the body plan of the latter frigate superimposed on her original period plan. Among the fundamental features, decisively determining the similarity of the methods employed, attention should be drawn first and foremost to the order in which the contours of the conceptual frames were formed, as well as the specific geometrical procedures used for this purpose. Identical as in the Mary Rose case, the bottom (green) was formed first, followed by the lower breadth sweeps (blue), and only in the last step were the two sets joined by reconciling sweeps (red), tangentially at both ends. Among other things, it is still worth pointing out here not only the very fact of the use of quarter frames, but also the same specificity of their use as in the case of Mary Rose.

 

 

 

And the draught of l'Aurore of 1697 in its entirety, including the body plan shown above (French archives):

 

 

 

Regarding the fundamental importance, in conceptual terms, of the hull bottom, which is in fact the design basis of ships built in the Northern tradition (in the literal sense, as opposed to the Mediterranean tradition), and the specific use of quarter frames, this is particularly very well illustrated on the surviving design proposals of French capital warships of late 17^th century. Below is a drawing of one such design for a first rate ship by Laurent and Étienne Hubacs from 1679 (French archives), and among the not very numerous design elements (but already unambiguous for obtaining the specific form of the hulls), there are in particular the two design elements mentioned earlier (that is, the bottom featuring its curves and both quarter frames). Notable are the much fuller shapes at the midship than those of the Mary Rose (providing in themselves better lateral stability and, of course, carrying capacity), required for a heavily armed vessel. In passing, only one of the two double master frames is drawn on the plan (the aft one is omitted), presumably because of the quasi-identity of this pair.

 

 

 

In fact, it can be said that the entire description of the Mary Rose's design concept so far, even including the comments on the specifics of the shapes and the resulting properties of ships, is also relevant to the above examples (which, of course, no longer applies to their proportions, individually selected for the intended, specific application of these vessels). Also, by the way, it is worth appreciating the overall flexibility of the Northern method, allowing a wide range of shapes to be obtained according to needs and requirements, which is probably why, among other things, it has been widely used for such a long period of time.

 

It is possible to point to more similar period sources, written and iconographic, as well as providing more detailed explanations, but I guess everything should have its limits 😊.

 

Nevertheless, leaving aside the almost unexplored archaeological finds from this conceptual angle, it is probably appropriate to point out, perhaps more as a curiosity, yet attractively much closer chronologically to Mary Rose 1511, the case of an intriguing votive model of a galleon, dated to the late 16th and early 17th centuries, now in the collection of the Historical Maritime Museum in Stockholm (Votive ship -Sjöhistoriska museet / DigitaltMuseum).

 

 

 

Although an attempt at a conceptual reconstruction of this model has already been made by Peter Kirsch and presented in his excellent publication The Galleon. The Great Ships of the Armada Era, published in 1990, but now, in the light of recent investigations in this area, it may raise objections due to it being essentially based on English shipbuilding manuscripts of the first half of the 17th century, closer to Mediterranean traditions, which in effect generated the trapezoidal hull cross-sections in this reconstruction, characteristic precisely of Mediterranean three-arc master frame designs.

 

However, the cross-sections reconstructed in this way are quite noticeably different from the round cross-sections featured by the original model, as can be judged from the following comparison graphic (as an aside, an identical treatment was attempted in the inevitably unfinished attempt at a conceptual reconstruction of the Mary Rose herself, published in one of the chapters of the ship's monograph). Naturally, it has to be taken into account that the hull of the original model is probably somewhat flattened in the manner typical of votive models; nevertheless, the specificity of the shapes in this model is quite telling and begs for the use of Northern, single-arc master frame design (plus reconciling sweep), precisely as in Mary Rose 1511. Admittedly, on the one hand, such a choice might be made easier by more confidently establishing the provenance of the model itself (essentially unknown) on criteria other than the shape of the hull, yet, conversely, this very feature might help to establish the place of origin and time of its creation.

 

 

 

As for the plausibility of the very specificity of the shapes of the Stockholm galleon model itself, at least in the light of the corresponding cross-section shapes of the wreck of the Swedish naval ship Bodekull, in service between 1661 and 1678, it does not raise any reasonable doubts, as can be compared with the sample graphic below. It is worth noting here that Bodekull was built in the period when English design methods were only just beginning to be implemented in Sweden.

 

 

 

The 3D scan of the wreck is made available on the Sketchfab website by Swedish Historical Maritime Museum (3D models by SWEDISH NATIONAL MARITIME AND TRANSPORT MUSEUMS (@maritima) - Sketchfab), and more about this wreck and the ship itself may be found in a paper by Niklas Eriksson, A New View of the ‘Edesö Wreck’: identifying the Swedish naval vessel Bodekull, built 1659–1661 and sunk 1678 from written sources, 2018, and attached below.

 

Eriksson Niklas - A New View of the ‘Edesö Wreck’ – identifying the Swedish naval vessel Bodekull, built 1659–1661 and sunk 1678 from written sources - IJNA 2018-47-2.pdf

 

 

 

Edited Monday at 08:47 AM by Waldemar