History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce, Volume 1 (of 4)

by W. S. Lindsay

There must, however, be various extraordinary inaccuracies in the dimensions of these vessels, as supplied by Steinitz and other historians. The cubit, as known to the Romans and Greeks, was about a foot and a half. It was divided by the Romans into six breadths, or palms, of three inches each; and such were, no doubt, the dimensions of the cubit and palm as known to the Italian republics, and as understood in our own time. If this be so, it follows that each of the larger vessels was seventy-five feet extreme length, and only ten feet beam; four and a half feet depth of hold, with a fore-mast seventy-seven feet in length, of three feet in circumference, and a yard no less than one hundred and fifty feet long. No doubt the yards of the vessels of that period were of enormous length, as may be seen in the “lateen” rigged craft of the present day, and far in excess of the yards of modern ships as compared to the size and length of these vessels; but it would be absurd to suppose that a vessel of only ten feet in width, and under five feet deep, could carry a mast seventy-seven feet long, much less a yard of double that length; nor could a vessel of the dimensions supplied have stabling for fifty horses, or room to hold the spare spars, sails, etc., named in the inventory. Nor is the matter mended if we suppose the palm to have been nine inches; for then the mast would be nine feet in circumference, or equal to that of a first-class modern line-of-battle ship.

However imperfect the drawings which have been preserved, the reader will by these form a more accurate idea of what the vessels were than can be obtained from the few records we have of their dimensions. If, therefore, the following representations, given by M. Jal, from the MS. Virgil in the Riccardi library are examined, and an allowance made for imperfection of the drawings, we may form a tolerable idea of the ships of that period.

Throughout the whole of the middle ages, and even until the seventeenth century, every vessel was provided with trumpets and bugles, which were played during fêtes and battles or used in foggy weather as signals: such instruments are very distinctly represented on the Corporation seal of Dover.

Napier’s description of a large Genoese ship of the fifteenth century.

Nor, indeed, do writers of nautical experience, who describe the vessels of the Genoese even so late as the fifteenth century, supply information on which reliance can be placed. For instance, Napier, in his “Florentine History,” furnishes[686] the following description of one of the largest vessels of the period. “The vessels built during this century for commercial purposes,” he remarks, “were large in size, but it would be difficult to ascertain their exact capacity; and by the description of one belonging to the Genoese family of Doria, which anchored at Porto Pisano in 1452, this was quite unequal to their outward dimensions. Her burden was said to be three hundred “botti,” or about two hundred and seventy English tons[687]; her length, on the upper deck, one hundred and seventy-nine feet; the mast, thirty-eight feet in circumference at the lowest and thickest part, and one hundred and eighty-four feet high; the height of her poop from the keel, seventy-seven feet nearly, without the after-castle; that of her bow nearly sixty-one, independent of the forecastle; her sail, and she seems to have carried but one, was more than a hundred and fifty-three feet broad, and ninety-six high. She was heavily rigged with so many shrouds, says Cambi, that they alone were worth a treasure; her anchors were numerous, and weighed about twenty-five hundred-weight each; she had seventy cabins; her cables were twenty-three inches round, and eighty fathoms long; she was fitted with ovens, cisterns, and stalls for horses; her long boat carried nearly seventy-two tons, and six hundred souls were embarked in her. This was the largest vessel that had been seen in a Florentine port for a long time, and no ordinary seamanship must have been necessary to manage so unwieldy a sail as she seems to have carried.”

Evident mistakes in the accounts.

We should rather have expected a Post-Captain in the British Navy to have remarked that no such sail could have been carried on the vessel he names, for its spread would have been equal to close upon fifteen thousand square feet of canvas; dimensions, compared with which the largest sail in the Great Eastern, of somewhere about twenty-four thousand tons register, would be insignificant, and whose mainmast is a walking stick in comparison with the mast of one hundred and eighty-four feet high, and thirty-eight feet in circumference, of which Captain Napier has furnished a description. Nor are we disposed to place any more confidence in the account of her height which he furnishes; and we are sure that he would not have considered it safe to have commanded in rough weather a ship of the height he describes in proportion to her length (the breadth is not given), much less would he have attempted to hoist upon her deck a “long boat” which carried “nearly seventy-two tons.”

There is no way of accounting for these numerous palpable mistakes than by supposing that they arose “from a mistake in copying the MSS., or from typographical errors;” but how they should have arisen in so many cases is perplexing. Moreover, it is wholly unaccountable why historians, especially men with the experience and practical knowledge of Napier, should not have directed special attention to errors so glaring.