Ships of the seven seas

by Hawthorne Daniel

The Norsemen went through a similar development. The seas their ships were called upon to sail were almost always boisterous. The principal use to which their ships were put was war. They had, then, need to be both seaworthy and fast. The early crude attempts of the Norsemen, therefore, grew slowly into those beautiful ships for which they are famous. To-day the seaworthy whaleboat is very similar to the finest examples of the old Norse “serpents.” These old ships were long, narrow, pointed at bow and stern, and had both ends raised, while amidships they were low. The sheer, that is, the line from the high bow to the low section amidships, and from there up again to the stern, was a beautiful sweeping curve. Such ships readily rode rough seas, while their low “freeboard” amidships permitted the oars to be used to good advantage, and their narrow hulls presented a minimum of resistance to the water. This refinement, however, can hardly be said to have resulted from thought so much as from experience. By that I mean that these ships at the highest stage of their development were not consciously designed, but were outgrowths from experience, and that the shipwrights, only after many generations, had learned that such a design combined the advantages they particularly desired.

It was with the Crusades, as I have said before, that ships began to improve more rapidly. This was due to the broadening spheres of travel of western European sailors. They visited the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and found in that part of the world ships that were strange to them. But in these strange ships they found characteristics that they deemed desirable, and, combining these desirable points with those of their own ships that were equally desirable, they produced improved types. Thus they profited by the experiences of others who, in their own little spheres of activity, had gradually developed ships that answered, at least to a considerable extent, the requirements of their own localities.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the British, who sailed the rough waters of the North and Irish seas and the English Channel, developed ships far different from those developed by the peoples of Mediterranean countries, where the distances sailed were shorter and the weather conditions were so radically different.

After the Crusades had introduced the peoples of western Europe to those of the Mediterranean, trade between the two increased, and, so far as ships were concerned, each learned from the other. Thus it was that by the time Columbus sailed on his famous voyage, the sea-going ships of all the European countries had grown somewhat similar in design and appearance.

A FLOATING DRY DOCK

And a ship undergoing repairs.

A few glimmerings of the complicated subject of naval architecture became evident in the years that included and followed “the age of discovery,” and ships, or at least some ships, were “designed” by men who made a study of them. The designs, however, were largely little more than the transfer of rule-of-thumb methods to paper, and a real understanding of the subject was still far distant. Phineas Pett, during the 17th Century, designed many ships for the British Navy, and from these designs the ponderous ships of later days developed. In France, however, naval architecture seems to have been a better-understood art than in England, for many times British designers improved their ships after studying captured French ships.

The designers in England for many years were guilty of one error in particular which, while later corrected, proved to be the cause of the loss of several of their very greatest ships. This fault was the placing of the lowest tier of gunports so close to the water that when the ships were under a press of sail the ports on one side or the other, and they were not watertight even when closed, were under water. During the reign of Henry VIII, a British ship named the Marie Rose heeled over when getting under way, and the ports, which were open and were only sixteen inches above the water when she was on an even keel, permitted the water to enter in such quantities that she sank. Years later Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that this defect was being corrected, yet later still the Royal George was lost because of the same fault.

It is interesting to quote a few lines of Raleigh’s writings on ship design. Commenting on improvements in lines he said that ships with these improvements “never fall into the sea after the head and shake the whole body, nor sinck a sterne, nor stoope upon a wind.” He also suggested that the lowest tier of gunports should not be less than four feet above the water. Furthermore, he objected to the high sterncastles which made the ships of the time both unseaworthy and ridiculous.