Mary Rose 1511 — the epitome of the Northern tradition

[Waldemar]

 

Anticipating the end of this thread, I would once again like to thank all those involved, especially Martes, whose comprehensive assistance and on a variety of detailed issues proved invaluable.

 

Waldemar Gurgul

 

[Kenchington]

Thank you for posting all of this great information, Waldemar!

 

If you are coming to an end, I must start over and try to assimilate everything you have offered. However, I still get the feeling that I am missing the foundations of your conclusions. Are there earlier threads in which you developed your arguments?

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

1 hour ago, Kenchington said:

Are there earlier threads in which you developed your arguments?

 

Thank you very much, Trevor. Yes, a whole series of threads in this area have already been created. The majority of the most mature, and also the most closely related to Mary Rose's case, as they concern the Northern European tradition, are on the sister nautical-modelling forum (easy to find, I believe). All in all, it has been quite a long and difficult road allowing for the eventual breaking free of the overly speculative and yet universally uncritically accepted doctrines of today on this issue.

 

 

 

Edited June 1 by Waldemar

[Waldemar]

 

18 hours ago, Kenchington said:

However, I still get the feeling that I am missing the foundations of your conclusions.

 

I would also like to add, for the sake of greater clarity, that this very issue, in its historical terms and significance, is indeed very closely related precisely to Mary Rose herself, and more specifically to her incomplete, haphazard and simply wrong conceptual interpretation (or rather only a residual attempt at such an interpretation, limited to ‘forceful’ matching of a more or less random arcs to the contours of Mary Rose's frames), published in one of the chapters of Mary Rose's archaeological monograph. Archaeologists themselves, or at least some of them, are nowadays drawing attention to this fatal circumstance, it is just that no one has so far been able to offer a complete yet convincing solution.

 

In addition, this disastrous state of affairs has also been largely contributed to by the failure so far to offer a proper study and publication of Mathew Baker's manuscript, which essentially, as it seems, describes the Venetian methods he learned there. In fact, even the availability of the manuscript itself is so far strictly restricted to only a small circle of interested parties, maybe not without reason. As a result, in today's historiography and consciousness, “classical Venetian methods” are taken for “classical English methods”, and — quite ironically and also misleadingly — the Baker's manuscript itself is even called the Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry.

 

I am attaching below a file with published conference materials from 2003, from which one can see just how weak premises today's doctrine on this issue has been based on (apart from the general historical ones, which by the way you cited earlier, the catastrophically wrong conceptual interpretation of the Mary Rose case and a handful of rather naive explanations, or rather speculations, of a conceptual nature). Sadly, this is the result when technical issues are looked at and explained in, shall we say, a predominantly “humanistic” way.

 

In fact, it may be even surprising that nobody has done anything about it so far, at least not in an effective way, but this, I guess, may have been influenced by more than just substantive considerations.

 

 

Nowacki Horst, Valleriani Matteo - Shipbuilding Practice and Ship Design Methods From the Renaissance to the 18th Century - 2003.pdf

 

[Waldemar]

 

As a kind of epilogue to this thread, I am also including here a case from another, rather distant part of Europe, nevertheless thematically and chronologically highly relevant to the issue.

 

In 1570, the Polish ruler Sigismund Augustus, intending to build a royal fleet practically from scratch, instead of turning to Gdańsk/Danzig, which, after all, was at the time one of the largest, if not the largest builder and exporter of ships in Europe, but over which he had almost no political control, asked none other than the Venetian doge to send an expert (granted) who could design and build ships. Most telling, however, is the expressed rationale for this request, clearly stating that Venice was second to none when it came to the ability to build the best ships in the entire known world of the time. Or at least that is what was thought at the time.

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

On 6/1/2025 at 1:33 PM, Kenchington said:

However, I still get the feeling that I am missing the foundations of your conclusions.

 

Nevertheless, I would still like to show a quite fresh paper (a 2023 publication on the very important shipwreck of the Lomellina of 1516), which exemplifies the way in which archaeologists up to now actually evaluate shipwrecks in an attempt to reconstruct their shapes. In the shortest terms, missing conceptual elements, such as the rake of the posts or the rise of the decks, are borrowed from some manuscript of the period that is deemed adequate (which may still be appropriate in itself, albeit under certain conditions), yet further on this attempt is reduced to merely manipulating the cross sections to just get the hull shapes as smooth as possible, and by the modern method of synchronising hull lines, which has little in common with the methods of the era. And nothing more, no effort to deduce the true design method that was actually used by the ship's builders.

 

Personally, I have no objection if someone is satisfied with such archaeological evaluations, however limited in their aims, scope and methods. But by being carried out in such an unambitious manner, they certainly cannot clarify perhaps the most important issues, namely those related to ancient ship design methods. On the other hand, such a state of affairs is also the result of a generally poor level of knowledge in this area, and this, in turn, precisely of the pernicious influence of today's doctrines which, through their misguidedness, have in fact only led to practical impotence or stagnation and a consequent lack of progress in this kind of research. I am thinking in particular of the today's doctrine of shipbuilding by ‘feel’ or by ‘eye’, i.e. with virtually no conception whatsoever (yet so convenient for humanistically profiled scholarship), and the doctrine of the ‘spontaneously or independently born English school of design’ (yet having just been virtually stripped of its alleged ‘evidence’), and this still conceived in a frighteningly orthodox manner.

 

However, just to repeat — if someone is nevertheless satisfied with such a take, there you go.

 

 

Max Guérout, Beatrice Frabetti, Filipe Castro, Revisiting Lomellina,  1516: The Hull Shape, 2023:

 

Guérout Max, Frabetti Beatrice, Castro Filipe - Revisiting Lomellina, 1516 - The Hull Shape - 2023.pdf

 

 

[Kenchington]

Waldemar,

 

When I got drawn into nautical archaeology (as an amateur in the field), 40 years and more ago now, most professionals working on Post-Medieval sites did not look at the ship-structures under their eyes any more carefully than to (mis)interpret the material in terms of a supposed (but largely erroneous) notion of 19th-Century practice. To read the reports of that era, you would have supposed that the approaches used in the last English shipyards that built in wood had somehow been adopted, fully-formed, when carvel construction reached Northern Europe from the Mediterranean. Some actually declared that there had been no change at all though those centuries. Archaeologists trained in the typology of potsherds did not readily grapple with the subtleties of shipwrightry and preferred to ignore the principal artefacts lying on their sites. I'm glad to say that that has changed over time.

 

Study of the shape of ships has evolved along a similar but somewhat different course. It's not something that can be easily approached through surviving wreck structure, because of the distortions in the available material as well as the difficulty of gathering precise data while working underwater. So it is more in the province of the historian than the archaeologist, though each should learn from the other, if they could but bridge the disciplinary divides. And yet historians struggle with the subject too. We have only obscure writings, in older forms of (modern) languages, using archaic mathematical concepts and notation, which would challenging a modern engineer. Yet understanding those writings needs skills (and patterns of thought) more associated with engineering than with the humanities.

 

In short, recovering knowledge of "ancient shipwrightry" (to borrow Pepys' term!) needs a collaborative approach, spanning disciplines, with flexibility of thought and a willingness to learn -- none of which comes easily to academics, who are necessarily immersed in their own disciplines. I like to think that amateurs, able to dip a toe into each discipline equally, have something to contribute, though they (we: for I am one) have to have the humility to listen to specialist experts, and that's a rare gift too. Doubly rare in a world where books and television "documentaries" get promoted by the notion that an outsider can see what the insiders have missed (reassuring the lazy reader or viewer that they themselves need not study, as everything taught by school or university is wrong anyway, while the "truth" is excitingly different).

 

I no longer have time to keep up with the literature on nautical archaeology, but I think we are all moving forward together and slowly recovering understanding of secrets long lost. I'm no longer making active contributions but, from what I have seen through this thread, your work is making a valuable contribution to the progress!

 

 

Trevor

[Alvb]

If only these texts were available in a precise German translation, how I would love to delve into them...

[Kenchington]

19 minutes ago, Alvb said:

If only these texts were available in a precise German translation

I'm in the same boat, though I my case I wish for translations into English.

 

However, before anyone could translate them, somebody would need to understand them well enough to bring them into modern Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish or whatever, with accompanying explanations of the meaning meaning. Then someone else would need sufficient understanding of modern technical German, English or whichever language is wanted, on order to make the translation. However by that point, we are left delving into somebody's modern interpretation and not the original at all.

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

1 hour ago, Kenchington said:

When I got drawn into nautical archaeology [...].

 

I'll say frankly that I enjoyed the spirit of that post, especially the observation (if I understood it correctly) that for effective puzzle solving in this particular field, even the closest interdisciplinary cooperation, which can work so well in most other fields, may not be enough. The way I see it in practice is that, to oversimplify somewhat, historians usually have no idea about engineering, engineers usually have no idea about history (including the history of shipbuilding), on top of that one still has to know several languages (written period sources!), geometry, know CAD software for the necessarily personally conducted tests, be critical, persistent and enthusiastic, and so on. Ideally, it all just should be in the same head, if possible.

 

And well, yes, I have read somewhere that the term "Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry" for Baker's manuscript has been in reality coined by Samuel Pepys a couple of decades later .

 

 

1 hour ago, Alvb said:

If only these texts were available in a precise German translation, how I would love to delve into them...

 

Indeed, today's translators do particularly badly with Germanic languages for some reason. I don't think I can help much, except that, if necessary, I can sometimes try to describe something in other words, in the hope of a better automatic translation. But that's also one of the main reasons why I generally reduce the volume of text in favour of graphics.

 

 

[Waldemar]

 

Oh, also a mention that I am familiar with one of your publication, indeed already decades old, yet still relevant and I actually use it as well. Attached below for convenient access for possible readers.

 

Trevor Kenchington, The Structures of English Wooden Ships: William Sutherland's Ship, circa 1710, 1993:

 

Kenchington Trevor - The Structures of English Wooden Ships - William Sutherland's Ship, circa 1710 - 1993.pdf

 

 

[Alvb]

I meant the texts you and others have linked from time to time, not the posts in this forum.

[Kenchington]

31 minutes ago, Waldemar said:

The Structures of English Wooden Ships:

There's an embarrassing story to that one.

 

For one thing, it was supposed to be the first of a series, each exploring one of the English texts. Then I found paying work in my own field and never did get the second paper finished.

 

The one manuscript that I did submit was a complex tangle, as any account of shipwrightry must be. I was expecting to get an amended typescript back from the editor, after which I could find a third set of words that would express my meaning, while accepting his amendments to my poor expression. Instead, he went straight to typesetting and sent me proofs of a paper, with all of his amendments incorporated -- amendments which made the text much easier to read but introduced many, many technical errors. I had to scribble suggested changes into the margins. I was so disappointed that I have never been able to face reading through the published version to see what was finally produced, whether unreadable, wrong or both!

 

I'd like to be able to offer copies of my original submitted text but I doubt that anything of that vintage is readable with modern software versions.

 

 

As for Pepys:

 

You are probably familiar with the published version of the so-called "Admiralty Manuscript" from the 1620s. When Salisbury edited that for publication, he was confronted with a difficult manuscript and made an excellent job of correcting problems and inserting missing words.

 

Back in the 1990s, I was in regular contact with David Roberts (translator and publisher of Boudriot's books). Around that time, he was looking through the library at a large country house in England (a still-private collection) and came across what at first seemed to be two unknown manuscripts of shipwrightry. On closer inspection, he saw that they were versions of the "Admiralty Manuscript", so he photocopied them and was kind enough to send me copies. I never completed the task but I started on a three-way comparison of the versions. It was immediately clear that the problems confronting Salisbury resulted from phonetic spellings by clerks who did not understand the technicalities. I could not be sure whether all three versions were produced at the same time but they were very obviously created by one person reading an original (perhaps the now-lost 1620s manuscript), while another (or others) wrote out copies of the dictated words. I forget the details now but at least one version had the initials of the man who wrote it out and they corresponded to one of Pepys known assistants.

 

My guess is that Pepys (who took his position on the Navy Board much more seriously than many another did) gathered what old manuscripts he could get his hands on, while also persuading Deane to write out the then-modern design methods, the better to understand ships and shipbuilding. I like to think of the man himself reading a borrowed anonymous manuscript aloud, while his clerks made a copy for Pepys own collection and perhaps others for presentation to patrons.

 

In contrast, Pepys seems to have acquired Baker's papers, so the originals survive amongst his other material (now in Cambridge), rather than copies.

 

All that was likely in the 1670s (late '60s to mid '80s, anyway), when Baker's work was already nearly a century old -- hence "ancient" to Pepys, though to us innovative new ideas of the very late 16th Century!

 

 

Trevor

[Waldemar]

 

2 hours ago, Kenchington said:

There's an embarrassing story to that one.

 

Thank you also for that last entry, Trevor. Some interesting, previously unknown details, giving useful context and enriching the overall picture.

As for your reservations about your text, well, that's my personal experience too, as well as probably that of many authors in the world. I've even accumulated quite a few things that I myself would like to improve on in my past publications, be it paper or on-line, nonetheless one usually doesn't go back to it anymore, just creates new things... There is simply no such thing as absolute perfection and this has to be taken into account. But that's still not at all bad, like completely abandoning further attempts or research.

I'm also glad to hear that you've remained a fan of the field despite the different paths your career has taken .