THE STRUCTURES OF ENGLISH WOODEN SHIPS: WILLIAM SUTHERLAND'S SHIP, CIRCA 17101 - Trevor Kenchington
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Introduction
Beginning early in the sixteenth century, English shipbuilding methods underwent a major revolution with the introduction of Mediterranean/Iberian carvel, or plank-on-frame, techniques in place of the earlier, northern European clinker or lapstrake approach. In the older method, the lower edge of each strake of the planking overlapped on the outside the upper part of the strake below, and clenches (turned over or riveted nails) were driven through this overlap. These fastenings provided much of the strength of the finished hull.2 The southern method, which had its roots in the late Roman era but was not fully developed until the Middle Ages, depended on a rigid framework to which planks were subsequently fastened, there being no direct fastenings between adjacent strakes. The strength and rigidity of the frame allowed larger ships to be built and, perhaps more importantly, permitted them to carry heavy guns.3
Some three and one-half centuries after this revolution, an even more profound change began in which wood was replaced as the primary material for ship construction by iron. The new material encouraged wholly new structural arrangements, such as watertight bulkheads and longitudinal framing, and thus led to fundamental change in every aspect of ship construction.
Between these two eras of rapid technological change there was relative stability. Indeed, there is an unfortunate tendency in the current literature to suppose that this era was characterized by absolute stability of ship structures; in effect, to suppose that the structures of late Tudor ships differed only in detail from those of nineteenth or early twentieth century wooden hulls. This was not so.
This misunderstanding probably has its origin in the widespread contemporary disinterest in technical matters. Artists' patrons were generally concerned with ships as finished objects and not in the means by which they were built, a bias reflected in surviving paintings and models. The shipwrights rarely felt a need to commit their knowledge to paper: many were illiterate while most who could have described their skills in writing preferred to preserve the secrets of their trade. The few senior shipwrights who did prepare technical treatises often did so in private manuscripts, and even then most confined their explanations to the geometrical methods used to lay down the lines of their creations, avoiding complex structural accounts.4 Historians of post-Medieval ships have understandably responded to this limited information by concerning themselves with shape, external appearance and rigging, for all of which they had useful sources, while largely leaving aside matters of hull structure and other internal detail.
The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du nord, III, No. 1 (January 1993),l-43.
1 2 The Northern Mariner When they have ventured into the latter topics, they have had to interpret unclear technical sources, such as construction contracts. It is neither surprising that many errors have become accepted "facts" nor that many writers have filled gaps in their knowledge by extrapolating backwards from later, better documented shipbuilding practices.
With the advent of nautical archaeology, the lack of contemporary information could have been remedied by direct examination of surviving ship structures. Archaeologists, however, are no more likely than historians to be trained in technical nautical matters. Those who have excavated post-Medieval sites frequently seem to have accepted the popular view that ship construction did not progress after 1600 and hence that the broken and worm-eaten timbers on their sites could be ignored in favour of the smaller (and more human-oriented) artifacts with which they were more familiar. Those few who have probed deeper to make critical examinations of ship timbers have often encountered a further problem: the lack of accessible and authoritative historical accounts have left them with insufficient understanding of how they could expect ships to be built. Given the equivocal nature of much evidence from wreck sites, this lack has resulted in some highly imaginative, if improbable, interpretations and hence further confusion.
To resolve this, it is essential to return to primary sources, both archaeological and historical, and to re-examine the interpretations that have been placed on them. By so doing, a new understanding of the ways ships were actually built at various times may be achieved. As a first step in this essay, I aim to apply this approach to the structures of English-built wooden ships about 1710. The topic of this article is not shipbuilding per se but rather ship structure. It is not concerned with the numbers of hulls produced, the techniques by which shipwrights reduced timber to the required forms, nor the detailed fittings that turn a bare hull into a working ship. The shapes of ships' hulls and their designs impinge upon this analysis only peripherally. Instead, the focus is on the arrangements of pieces of wood that comprised ships' hulls and on the fastenings between those pieces.
William Sutherland and the Sources on Early Eighteenth-Century Ships
The earliest surviving English manuscript concerning ship structure dates from the late Elizabethan period, but the first published work did not appear until 1664. Indeed, it was not until the third such book that an adequate explanation of English ship construction appeared. This was The Ship-builders Assistant, first published in 1711 and written after a career in the Royal dockyards, particularly at Portsmouth and Deptford, by William Sutherland.5
There is nothing comparable to this book and no earlier source that can serve as a foundation for a comprehensive description of an English ship structure. It is, therefore, a useful starting point for any re-examination of such structures. Like other shipwrights of his time who tried to explain their art in words, Sutherland was largely concerned with the shape of ships and a host of matters that interest naval architects but are of less immediate importance to nautical archaeologists. Nevertheless, scattered throughout his book Sutherland provided detailed explanations of the ship structures with which he was familiar. Moreover, his explanations were generally clear and well-illustrated. In this essay, I collate and interpret these descriptions. Since some of the confusion surrounding wooden ship structures has arisen from the careless use of terminology, where possible I use Sutherland's terms, though with modern spellings for those that have endured. When they are essential to the clarity of an explanation, I have used entirely modern or artificial terms but these are consistently italicized.6 The Structure of English Wooden Ships 3 What follows is based almost entirely on Sutherland's work but, in the few places where his text is unclear, I refer to other contemporary documents. One is an anonymous print, dating from 1712-1714 and dedicated to George St. Lo, that purports to show all the major timbers of a First Rate ship-of-the-line and is labelled with the names of those pieces, thus providing an illustrated key to some of Sutherland's terms.7 This is referred to here as the "St. Lo print". A second supplementary source is a model in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, of the frame of a fifty-gun Fourth Rate warship which is conventionally dated from 17L5.8 This not only shows the ship's skeleton in realistic detail (which no other known English model from before 1750 does) but also shows two different structures: the port side conforming closely to Sutherland's account while the starboard illustrates many features well known from later sources. Third, seme reference is made to the contract for the building of the Yarmouth, a seventy-gun Third Rate of 1059 tons, launched in 1695,9 and one of the few major English warships of the time built in a commercial yard (and hence one of the few for which a detailed builder's contract was prepared). Finally, some information from the archaeological survey of the thirty-six-gun Dartmouth, built in 1655, is used.10