In 1606 the small Dutch ship Duyfken made a voyage of exploration from
present-day Indonesia to the shores of the Cape York Peninsula of
north-eastern Australia. It is the first voyage to Australia recorded in
history and begins the engagement of Australia in World History.
A replica of the Duyfken is being built by the Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation jointly with the Maritime Museum of Western Australia in the Lotteries Duyfken Village Shipyard, within the grounds of the Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
The Duyfken will be a replica of maximum practicable authenticity. Traditional materials and shipbuilding techniques are used. European oak planks from Latvia are assembled using fire-bending and plank-first technology. Duyfken will not have an engine but is intended to sail.
No original plans of any ship from the Age of Discovery exist because shipwrights did not use plans drawn on paper or parchment. The only plans were in the master-shipwright's head and ships were built by eye. Replicas or reconstructions of several Age of Discovery ships have been built in recent times. They look fine and romantic, but very few, if any, can sail anything like as well as the original ships did. Or they require so much ballast that they would be useless as general cargo carriers. There is apparently something wrong with the way we understand the design of these ships.
From the outset, one of the stated objectives of the Duyfken Replica Project has been to produce a reconstruction that sails well enough to emulate the achievements of the original Duyfken.
Research to reconstruct the design of Duyfken, a Dutch jacht built at theend of the 16th-century and used for exploratory voyages, has drawn on five major types of data.
The first objective in the research was to learn to draw ships with the right external style and appearance. An extensive catalogue of reproductions of Dutch marine art from the time of Duyfken was compiled. Mathematical and statistical analysis was used to describe and find typical forms and ratios of proportions. (This goes by the rather grand name of "Morphometric Analysis of the Iconography".)
Although this analysis was aimed primarily at learning the style rather than the technical design of the ships, it was noticed that some proportions shown in the iconography consistently indicated a hull-form very different from ships of half-a-century later.
In the absence of any plans for a Dutch ship of Duyfken's time there have been a number of theoretical (on paper) reconstructions designed by using the relatively narrow and box-like hull-form of the late 17th-century, whence plans are available, and combining this with the high-stern and large billowing sails of the 16th-century galleon. The results could be disastrous if tried at full-size.
Following clues in the iconography, tentative steps towards a design with more beam, and with longer and sharper bow and stern were made; but without questioning the flat-bottomed boxy cross-sectional shape that was assumed to be a Dutch tradition.
At each phase, reports on the research were sent to experts in the Netherlands for comments and criticism. A very positive response came from Thijs Maarleveld, Head of Underwater Archaeology in the Netherlands, in the form of confidential information about the on-going under-sea investigation of a circa 1590 shipwreck in Dutch waters. This showed very strongly the long and relatively sharp bow and stern that had been inferred from the iconography. Furthermore it provided evidence for an unexpectedly sharp cross-section shape (hollow garboards). Other evidence has supported this interpretation. It is the solid evidence of archaeology that has shown what other evidence hints at, if you are looking for it.
A proposed design, a broad-beamed but relatively sleek design, has been tested by computer modelling (using the Western Australian developed Maxsurf program) and the results are encouraging, showing a design with good stability and able to maintain good average speeds even in light conditions, in keeping with the historical evidence.
Meanwhile the original Duyfken keeps trying to sail ahead of us -- we have a design that should sail well, but archival research increasingly shows that the original ship was exceptional-often out-sailing much larger ships, and manoeuvrable enough to be taken close to unexplored lee-shores even during the stormy monsoon.
My comments that Age of Discovery replicas or reconstructions do not sail adequately is likely to be controversial. I propose that, in general, reconstructions of ships from the "Age of Discovery" have sailed poorly by comparison with the original vessels, or have needed so much ballast as to render them unlikely general cargo-carriers. This is not often explicitly stated in the literature, presumably for legal reasons, although there are general comments such as "yet another bad replica of a Columbus ship" (Carrell & Keith 1992:293). Dor-Nor (1992:112-3) is explicit about the problems with one Colombus ship replica:
The new Santa Maria was built in Barcelona. Her structure reflects tremendous strength of construction, undoubtedly the result of the anxiety of her modern Spanish designers as well as the traditions of her builders. Her design was the most problematic to achieve, and the results are less than perfect. A combination of relatively light displacement, high superstructure, and heavy rig made sailing the Santa Maria replica not only uncomfortable but outright dangerous. After sea trials her ballast was drastically increased, but without an accompanying expansion of sail area. The result was a more stable but decidedly slow ship, clearly incapable of reaching the speeds Columbus described for the original. The first Santa Maria was not highly manoeuvrable, but this one was worse: She can sail only in a following wind ...
Carrell & Keith (1992:283) suggest that the designers of most reconstructions start with the basic idea that the type of ship they attempt to reconstruct was never seaworthy. In some reconstructions there has apparently been a requirement that height between decks be adequate to give standing headroom for members of the public who pay to visit the ship. This would appear to have been the case with both the Mayflower and Susan Constant reconstructions which are small ships but have six feet (1.8m) between decks.
It is proposed that, in general, the historical data giving information about the ships' performance has probably not been adequately weighted as evidence of design in the reconstruction process.
Carrell, T. L. & Keith, D. H., 1992. Replicating a ship of discovery: Santa Clara. IJNA 21(4):281-94.
Dor-Nor, Z., 1992 Columbus and the Age of Discovery. William Morrow & Co., New York
Nick Burningham
Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation
Western Australian Maritime Museum
Cliff St. Fremantle, WA 6160,
Australia.
Tel 61 (0)8 9336 1606
Fax 61 (0)8 9336 4688
See us on:
http://www.riobay.com.au/duyf.html
http://www.mm.wa.gov.au/Museum.html
and on
http://www.yangebup.wa.edu.au
if any of them are working.
Nick Burningham has opened a very important and interesting discussion about a 'workable' reconstruction of historic ships. Over the years 'replicas' were made with different intentions and from different starting points of design. In the case of the Duyfken the general question is: how to build a replica of a ship from a period when no 'modern' design techniques were used?
Between 1985 and 1995 I was involved in the reconstruction of the Batavia (1628) Lelystad (Netherlands). Our approach (shipwright Willem Vos and author as historian) was to reconstruct the contemporary process of designing and building a ship. This reconstruction was based on several sources. In general the reconstruction of this process was as follows: see also the article on this subject: Robert Parthesius: The Batavia Project. An experimental reconstruction of a 17th century East Indiaman.
With this reconstruction we were able to design the general shape of the hull. Instead of testing this reconstructed design we decided to start off building. Partly because testing in those days was not so simple and cheap as it is now, but also because we considered the reconstruction of the historical process as our main objective. We considered it a risk that the outcome of the testing would influence this process. The trails afterwards would be our test of authenticity.
From this reconstructed design our building started in which a lot of details had to be filled in during the process. Main principal during this process was the use of authentic materials and the consciousness of the limitations of 17th century building practise. When the hull was ready we asked the MARIN in the Netherlands to test a model of the hull in a tank. The results were: the ship was stable (on ballast) and the ship was reasonable fast. After the ship was launched in 1995 no trails were conducted so far due to a lack of money to operate a ship without modern equipment, so a judgement about the historical quality of the Batavia can still not be made.
Nick's approach is a new and interesting one. Although the Duyfken sailed also for the Dutch Eastindian Company (VOC) no exact data are available about the building of the ship (the ship was bought from a ship broker in 1602).
In the case of the reconstruction of the Batavia the reconstruction of the building practice was the frame work. In Duyfken case the frame work is the reconstruction of the performances. This is an intelligent approach since it reflects also the intentions of the directors of the VOC to buy a certain ship.
I'm currently conducting a research about the shipbuilding policy in the first years of the Dutch-Asian Shipping. In 1595 the Dutch sailed for the first time to Asia. For this new routing they needed new kind of ships. Especially in the first years the VOC needed apart from large cargo vessels to make trips back en forwards to Asia in one go, also fast ships for survey and communication: Duyfken is clearly such a vessel.
Robert Parthesius
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 134
1012 VB Amsterdam
tel: +31 20 5254489
HOME:
Pieter Borstraat 32
1065 AG Amsterdam
tel: +31 20 6692405
fax:+31 20 6697715
email: mailto:parthesi@xs4all.nl
Robert Parthesius wrote a response to my posting re Duyfken that reflects Robert's tremendous expertise in the reconstruction of early-modern Dutch ship design. He raised questions about several aspects of our research which I had not mentioned or touched only briefly. To reply fully would take several pages of text. I'll try to be relatively brief and give examples of our thinking and approach rather than a full explanation. A fuller account of aspects of the research should appear in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Robert has taken an important part in the research to reconstruct Duyfken. Here in Fremantle my colleagues Adriaan de Jong and Marit van Huystee have done much of the work. The questionable interpretation and sweeping generalisations are largely mine.
Before the Duyfken project had really started to look like becoming reality it was Robert who provided much of the knowledge and data to initiate the research. Three contracts for the construction of smallish armed vessels from about 1600, provided by Robert's archival research, remain central to our research though they probably show more about construction sequence and relative scantlings than they do about hull form.
Robert and Ab Hoving from the Rijksmuseum also provided from archival research a list of basic dimensions LxBxDepth in hold and 'lastmaat' (cargo capacity) for Dutch ships circa 1600. All of this data seemed to suggest that application of ratios from the Grebber tables (1630-40's) would be anachronistic and produce an atypical ship if applied to our problem. As Robert says "This period 1585-1630 was a period of technical change both in construction and rigging of ships." It seems to have also been a period of dramatic change in the basic ratios of proportions and shape of ships. In general, Dutch ships circa 1600 seem to have been broader and deeper in the hold (however there are terrible problems with knowing how ships were measured and what the registered dimensions actually mean -- this is a large and fascinating topic in itself).
I should explain that in building our replica/reconstruction (delete or substitute as you think applicable) we are trying to replicate circa 1600 building techniques. Our shipwrights, led by Bill Leonard who was master shipwright on the Endeavour replica project, are building plank-first, using european oak planks bent to shape over open fires. To some extent the timber dictates the design -- the shape of the stem was not set until the grown timber arrived from Latvia. We had long discussions about how to shape it; in the end Bill and I took a piece of chalk on the end of a long piece of string and eye-balled two arcs that best resolved and fitted the shape of timber, a process that took about ten minutes and worked fine. The shape of the hull created by fire-bending and plank-first assembly is not working out precisely as designed on paper, and that is what we want. Interestingly the shape built so far (we are out to the turn of the bilge) is hollower in the ends but carries the midbody slightly more towards the ends -- slightly shorter and sharper ends -- what I would have thought was a more 'difficult' shape but actually seems to derive from the process and the moderate rake of the stem.
Robert raises a very good question about the design fitting with the intended role in terms of crew accommodation, food, stowage, etc. (I'm very interested to see your data Robert and will contact you privately.) It's something we've been debating again recently. We haven't finalised the internal layout. We don't have to decide where the decks go until we get up to that part of the ship. Our current design has two decks through the waist (gun deck and upper deck) but some recently acquired data have led us to reconsider. There are three tiny sketches of Duyfken done by a seaman in the journal of the ship Gelderlandt, the clearest of these SEEMS to show Duyfken with guns on deck in the waist suggesting a single deck through the waist. This would be unusual circa 1600 but there is some evidence for it in the iconography including a splendid panel painting in the collection of the Swedish National Maritime Museum. Such an arrangement would reduce space for crew accommodation, but no one seemed to worry much about crew comfort later in history and Duyfken's crew only numbered twenty. It creates a real problem for stowwing the ship's boat if there is a requirement for it to be stowed below decks as seems to have been usual in the 16th century.
How it might effect performance is another difficult question. It gets the water shedding deck higher above the waterline which is good in modern conception of seaworthiness. Stability is adversely effected if the guns are kept up on deck rather than stowed when on passage. I'm advised that estimating the height of the vertical centre of gravity is the big problem in modelling the performance of traditional sailing vessels. It is difficult to do it with any attempt at precision and results are often quite inaccurate.
Interpretation of the iconography is another big topic. As Robert says, even large and famous ships are not the same in portrayals by different artists. The accuracy of any single representation should not be relied on, yet any mix-and-match approach is likely to be highly subjective or ridiculously random.
Morphometric analysis is essentially a statistical approach and it's borrowed from biological taxonomy, but it can't be applied uncritically to circa 1600 marine art. To give one simple example, a study of the ratio of freeboard (to the rail in the waist) to length, from the unfortunately small sample that shows profile views of ships, produces two statistical clusters, one with the ratio 7.1:1 the other 10:1. (There are also higher-sided ships but Duyfken clearly wasn't of that type.) Nearly all of the cluster giving the relatively high freeboard are ships drawn in the foreground or mid-ground. The lower ratio comes from ships in the distance where the artist might be sketching more casually and less concerned to emphasis the grandeur of the ship -- that's one possible interpretation anyway.
Our Morphometric analysis has been considerably aided by Dr Willem de Winter from the University of Western Australia who has applied multivariate analysis to our data. How it works is beyond me, it involves computers "thinking" in several dimensions, but the results are interesting. For example pictures that we identified as representing vessels that might be classed as jachts are significantly distinguished in the multivariate space -- this doesn't mean that we're right but it does mean that it's not a random or stochastic selection.
Finally, for this posting, the question of the (relatively) sharp bow and it's apparent disappearance in the 17th century. It is not clear that a relatively sharp bow was standard on Dutch ships of the 16th century. There was probably a range of design. What does seem very likely from the morphometric analysis is that narrow bows (and sterns) were standard. Whereas ships of the mid-17th century and later carried their beam well forward, ships of the late 16th century were normally quite narrow across the bow. To some extent this might be seen in terms of a change from Medieval shape to "modern". Why that change to a shape which was more box-like in plan view? I don't know. Taxes and levies are good candidates for this unwholesome influence. Ships started to be built so as to maximise capacity relative to registered (taxed) dimensions (LxB) rather than relative to surface area of the hull. The requirement for shallow draft might have been another factor -- (mutis mutandis) a long narrow vessel with parallel midbody probably has better lateral resistance relative to resistance to forward motion than a shallow and beamy vessel.
Bows below the waterline do seem to have been fairly sharp in the 16th century. There is very little data aside from the tiny sample so far provided by archaeology. There are a number of ship models. These church models are grossly distorted in terms of their relative proportions but they all exhibit considerable deadrise and sharp hollow bows below the waterline -- while they obviously are not an accurate reflection of hull form it seems unlikely that they reflect a completely different type of hull form from what was normal.
Was knowledge of a relatively sharp bow lost? Perhaps some vessels designed for particular purposes continued to be built with sharp lines (we're not talking clipper sharp, just relatively sharp). Ab Hoving showed me a very fine 18th century model of a Dutch polacca-rigged sloop of war with very sharp and deep lines.
Fortunately for me, we are extremely unlikely to ever get any firm data on the hull form of Duyfken. The design is a reconstruction which will never be more than a possible interpretation. My hope is that we help to advance the understanding of ship design through designing and building reconstructions such as Duyfken. I'm very gratefully for the opportunity to discuss these issues through MARHST-L. Let's keep it going if anyone managed to read this far!
Nick Burningham
Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation
Western Australian Maritime Museum
Cliff St. Fremantle, WA 6160
Australia.
Nick Burningham wrote: I said in my previous posting on Duyfken and the "sharp bow" that the evidence was from a shipwreck and a number of models. From nearly a century earlier and across the North Sea there is the "Mary Rose" whose lines are now well-known. The "Mary Rose" exhibits the relative sharp and narrow kind of bow we are talking about, she also has no parallel midsection and has her centre of bouyancy significantly aft of midships; however her midsection shape is very different from the Dutch traditions.
Trevor Kenchington suggests that the relatively sharp bow proposed for Dutch 16th century ships would not help performance because it would increase wetted area relative to displacement and it was skin friction rather than form resistance or wave-making drag that determined speed for pre-clipper ships.
I suggested nothing of the kind. I did suggest, subject to the comments of those better versed in naval architecture than I am, that the fuller bow adopted in the _17th_ century may not have implied any increase in resistance (for constant displacement).
Mary Rose was known to sail well. I respectfully suggest that a theory which predicts that a perfectly hemispherical hull would out-pace "Mary Rose" when running before the wind probably doesn't model things quite perfectly.
I made no comment on the sailing speed of a hemispherical hull. With respect, I am not that stupid. (For one thing, just about anything that floats will go downwind at the same speed in light airs, the common speed being slightly less than that of the wind.) I did suggest that, under conditions where skin friction predominates over wave-making drag, a theoretical hemispherical hull would have less resistance -- a fundamentally different thing from a higher speed.
Skin friction and form resistance are not mutually exclusive. They both operate at most sailing speeds with skin friction being predominant at the low speeds that all traditional sailing craft, including clippers, make in light winds.
And that most sailing ships (as distinct from small craft) before 1800 made in moderate breezes too. Come to that, skin friction predominates at 20 knots for exceptionally large modern hulls such as ULCCs.
Comments from any naval architects who subscribe to MARHST-L would be most welcome.
The Duyfken project does have the assistance of naval architect Len Randell who designed the Sail Training Ship Leeuwin; Eric de Brey helped me put the lines into "Maxsurf", and Jenny Knox has offered some informal comment.
Once again, the discussion was not over the lines of a vessel of the "Duyfken's" era but over those of later, and less fine-bowed, hulls.
Returning to Trevor Kenchington's comments: foremasts were indeed very far forward, worryingly so if you're building a replica. However, the iconography shows that small Dutch ships such as Duyfken were unlikely to have a cannon positioned right up in the bow.
The bluff bows under discussion, however, appeared at much the same time as full broadsides of heavy guns were coming into use.
Perhaps having the centre of bouyancy well aft means that most of the heavy cargo and ballast can be carried aft which might reduce pitching -- I hope so.
The point about hogging is a good one. 16th C ships with no parallel midsection and fairly broad beam would be relatively resistant to hogging, but ships with the parallel midsection and narrower beam that developed in the 17th century would be more likely to hog if they also had a bow with little bouyancy. Perhaps a change of bow shape was a necesssary modification along with the long and more boxy design?
I fail to see why a hull with a broad beam and no parallel mid-section should be any less liable to hog than one of the same length and displacement but narrower beam and an extended dead flat. (Besides, many bluff-bowed ships of the 17th and 18th centuries had little or no dead flat. In English design, it extended perhaps one frame fore and aft of the main bend but not normally any more.) Hulls hog in calm water when the weights in their ends exceed the bouyancy in those ends (and vice versa amidships), if the imbalance is more than the structure of the hull can support. (In a seaway, there are dynamic forces which complicate the process.) Since any practical ship has some imbalance, hogging is a perennial problem. Increasing the weights right forward (as by fitting a raised forecastle, enlarged forward rigging or armament near the bow) will worsen the problem unless the entrance is filled out to give more bouyancy, the shape of the topsides is altered (wall-sided ships hog less than those with pronounced tumblehome) or the structure is made more rigid. Of these, the only option that seems to have been much available to 17th century shipwrights was to fill out the entrance somewhat.
I suggest that these issues should be considered carefully before anyone suggests that knowledge of the "advantages" of a fine bow was somehow lost in the decades after 1600.
Trevor Kenchington
Robert Parthesius wrote a response to my posting re Duyfken that reflects Robert's tremendous expertise in the reconstruction of early-modern Dutch ship design. He raised questions about several aspects of our research which I had not mentioned or touched only briefly. To reply fully would take several pages of text. I'll try to be relatively brief and give examples of our thinking and approach rather than a full explanation. A fuller account of aspects of the research should appear in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Robert has taken an important part in the research to reconstruct Duyfken. Here in Fremantle my colleagues Adriaan de Jong and Marit van Huystee have done much of the work. The questionable interpretation and sweeping generalisations are largely mine.
Before the Duyfken project had really started to look like becoming reality it was Robert who provided much of the knowledge and data to initiate the research. Three contracts for the construction of smallish armed vessels from about 1600, provided by Robert's archival research, remain central to our research though they probably show more about construction sequence and relative scantlings than they do about hull form.
Robert and Ab Hoving from the Rijksmuseum also provided from archival research a list of basic dimensions LxBxDepth in hold and 'lastmaat' (cargo capacity) for Dutch ships circa 1600. All of this data seemed to suggest that application of ratios from the Grebber tables (1630-40's) would be anachronistic and produce an atypical ship if applied to our problem. As Robert says "This period 1585-1630 was a period of technical change both in construction and rigging of ships." It seems to have also been a period of dramatic change in the basic ratios of proportions and shape of ships. In general, Dutch ships circa 1600 seem to have been broader and deeper in the hold (however there are terrible problems with knowing how ships were measured and what the registered dimensions actually mean -- this is a large and fascinating topic in itself).
I should explain that in building our replica/reconstruction (delete or substitute as you think applicable) we are trying to replicate circa 1600 building techniques. Our shipwrights, led by Bill Leonard who was master shipwright on the Endeavour replica project, are building plank-first, using european oak planks bent to shape over open fires. To some extent the timber dictates the design -- the shape of the stem was not set until the grown timber arrived from Latvia. We had long discussions about how to shape it; in the end Bill and I took a piece of chalk on the end of a long piece of string and eye-balled two arcs that best resolved and fitted the shape of timber, a process that took about ten minutes and worked fine. The shape of the hull created by fire-bending and plank-first assembly is not working out precisely as designed on paper, and that is what we want. Interestingly the shape built so far (we are out to the turn of the bilge) is hollower in the ends but carries the midbody slightly more towards the ends -- slightly shorter and sharper ends -- what I would have thought was a more 'difficult' shape but actually seems to derive from the process and the moderate rake of the stem.
Robert raises a very good question about the design fitting with the intended role in terms of crew accommodation, food, stowage, etc. (I'm very interested to see your data Robert and will contact you privately.) It's something we've been debating again recently. We haven't finalised the internal layout. We don't have to decide where the decks go until we get up to that part of the ship. Our current design has two decks through the waist (gun deck and upper deck) but some recently acquired data have led us to reconsider. There are three tiny sketches of Duyfken done by a seaman in the journal of the ship Gelderlandt, the clearest of these SEEMS to show Duyfken with guns on deck in the waist suggesting a single deck through the waist. This would be unusual circa 1600 but there is some evidence for it in the iconography including a splendid panel painting in the collection of the Swedish National Maritime Museum. Such an arrangement would reduce space for crew accommodation, but no one seemed to worry much about crew comfort later in history and Duyfken's crew only numbered twenty. It creates a real problem for stowwing the ship's boat if there is a requirement for it to be stowed below decks as seems to have been usual in the 16th century.
How it might effect performance is another difficult question. It gets the water shedding deck higher above the waterline which is good in modern conception of seaworthiness. Stability is adversely effected if the guns are kept up on deck rather than stowed when on passage. I'm advised that estimating the height of the vertical centre of gravity is the big problem in modelling the performance of traditional sailing vessels. It is difficult to do it with any attempt at precision and results are often quite inaccurate.
Interpretation of the iconography is another big topic. As Robert says, even large and famous ships are not the same in portrayals by different artists. The accuracy of any single representation should not be relied on, yet any mix-and-match approach is likely to be highly subjective or ridiculously random.
Morphometric analysis is essentially a statistical approach and it's borrowed from biological taxonomy, but it can't be applied uncritically to circa 1600 marine art. To give one simple example, a study of the ratio of freeboard (to the rail in the waist) to length, from the unfortunately small sample that shows profile views of ships, produces two statistical clusters, one with the ratio 7.1:1 the other 10:1. (There are also higher-sided ships but Duyfken clearly wasn't of that type.) Nearly all of the cluster giving the relatively high freeboard are ships drawn in the foreground or mid-ground. The lower ratio comes from ships in the distance where the artist might be sketching more casually and less concerned to emphasis the grandeur of the ship -- that's one possible interpretation anyway.
Our Morphometric analysis has been considerably aided by Dr Willem de Winter from the University of Western Australia who has applied multivariate analysis to our data. How it works is beyond me, it involves computers "thinking" in several dimensions, but the results are interesting. For example pictures that we identified as representing vessels that might be classed as jachts are significantly distinguished in the multivariate space -- this doesn't mean that we're right but it does mean that it's not a random or stochastic selection.
Finally, for this posting, the question of the (relatively) sharp bow and it's apparent disappearance in the 17th century.
It is not clear that a relatively sharp bow was standard on Dutch ships of the 16th century. There was probably a range of design. What does seem very likely from the morphometric analysis is that narrow bows (and sterns) were standard. Whereas ships of the mid-17th century and later carried their beam well forward, ships of the late 16th century were normally quite narrow across the bow. To some extent this might be seen in terms of a change from Medieval shape to "modern".
Why that change to a shape which was more box-like in plan view? I don't know. Taxes and levies are good candidates for this unwholesome influence. Ships started to be built so as to maximise capacity relative to registered (taxed) dimensions (LxB) rather than relative to surface area of the hull. The requirement for shallow draft might have been another factor -- (mutis mutandis) a long narrow vessel with parallel midbody probably has better lateral resistance relative to resistance to forward motion than a shallow and beamy vessel.
Bows below the waterline do seem to have been fairly sharp in the 16th century. There is very little data aside from the tiny sample so far provided by archaeology. There are a number of ship models. These church models are grossly distorted in terms of their relative proportions but they all exhibit considerable deadrise and sharp hollow bows below the waterline -- while they obviously are not an accurate reflection of hull form it seems unlikely that they reflect a completely different type of hull form from what was normal.
Was knowledge of a relatively sharp bow lost? Perhaps some vessels designed for particular purposes continued to be built with sharp lines (we're not talking clipper sharp, just relatively sharp). Ab Hoving showed me a very fine 18th century model of a Dutch polacca-rigged sloop of war with very sharp and deep lines.
Fortunately for me, we are extremely unlikely to ever get any firm data on the hull form of Duyfken. The design is a reconstruction which will never be more than a possible interpretation. My hope is that we help to advance the understanding of ship design through designing and building reconstructions such as Duyfken. I'm very gratefully for the opportunity to discuss these issues through MARHST-L. Let's keep it going if anyone managed to read this far!
Nick Burningham
Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation
Western Australian Maritime Museum
Cliff St. Fremantle, WA 6160,
Australia.
Tel 61 (0)8 9336 1606
Fax 61 (0)8 9336 4688