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 9 hours ago 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 14 hours ago 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.

 

[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 de 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.

 

[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.