17th century Dutch Shipbuilding

[Music] hello and welcome back to the channel I am very grateful for your uh constant presence and for your support through your reviews today I will be talking about probably my favorite subject uh within seaf fairing history and ship building particularly and namely that is Dutch 17th century ship building I think that there are a lot of lessons for the modern world that can be learned from the way the Dutch approached seaf Fairing and she building in the 17th century it is widely known fact that they were the foremost Maritime power for most of the century and really started moving towards the second position only at the end with the Ascend of villain vanor becoming uh King William III there are a number of issues there we will not have time to discuss what and why forced the Dutch to uh second position by the 18th century but in the 17th century they really were the foremost ship Builders the foremost Merchants the foremost Traders and uh sea carriers really how was this accomplished what do you need to create the most formidable Merchant or naal Marine in the world in the age of sale you need Timber what is that the Netherlands do not possess uh forests you need iron you guessed it the Netherlands do not possess large quantities of iron you require hemp and not the smoking kind by the way they do not possess camp that is all imported from the Baltic area so essentially they had absolutely none of the resources that were needed to build up a Navy to build up a Merchant Marine none whatsoever and yet from the end of the 16th century through the never ending 8-year war with Spain through the so-called conflicts uh the conflict so-called 30 years's war in Europe throughout the Anglo Dutch Wars the Netherlands built up a formidable Maritime Force how did they do it well through Superior organization and I think that this is really the key lesson to learn that it is not required for you to be rich it you do not have to have the resources you do not have to have uh any privilege status and this is the lesson that third world countries or underdeveloped countries nowadays ought to learn that it is a question of organization and determination and it is possible that the Calvinism helped in this also but it also was of great help that they were the most open-minded nation in the world Road everyone was allowed to live free there basically and that of course attracted Capital that attracted uh the great brains but most and foremost this was their own achievement the other thing that you need for a large saling Navy of course is Manpower these ships required large Crews to operate and to fight effectively and yet the other thing that the Netherlands did not possess in very large quantities would be Manpower they had about a ground total force uh ground total population of around 3 million people throughout the 17th century of that million and a half lived in Holland alone the rest in the other uh six provinces I believe that one of the key factors to this dominance in seaf fairing was besides organization was actually ship building or to be more specific the way they were building ships they supplied ships to the entire world including to the Spaniard with whom they were at War at the time they were uh most of the carrying trade was in their hands including fish supplies to the Spanish army with whom they were at war after all we shouldn't allow uh such minor things like Wars get in the way of good business during the fourth angu War War namely the otherwise known as the American Revolutionary War the Dutch were building and selling privateering ships to the English knowing perfectly well that these privateering ships are going to be used against Dutch seaf fairing so let us talk a little bit about the actual techniques of ship building and how they represented in models nowadays that have survived from this period and what we can learn from them of course as usual we can most learn from nautical archaeology sorry historians but that is a fact for many years one of the challenges was um understanding how exactly the Dutch managed to put it let me give you a simple statistic to just compare the speed and efficiency of the Dutch versus others in the time in 1664 when when it became clear that no matter how much Charles II did not want to go to war his Parliament his Merchants were pushing him to go to war it was becoming clear that this is unavoidable and the two countries will be fighting again so both countries naturally set about preparing for war the English intended to order 10 new warships of these 10 very quickly they realized that they cannot do it they don't have the money so it was dropped to four but actually before the end of the war only two ships were ready and took play part in the actions in the same period the Dutch no fools them recognized what is inevitable and recognized that they need to prepare they had learned their lessons from the first Anglo Dutch War they recognized that they needed larger and more heavily AR armed ships if they were to challenge the English which is what they did they ordered 25 new ships of between 60 and 80 guns the two English that were actually completed were both for trits of less than 50 guns I should add one of them being St David at the same time their Ally King Louis the 14th had ordered nine warships to be built in the Netherlands and Genoa and Venice between them had ordered also another seven ships if my mathematics are correct this makes 42 warships between 60 and 80 guns built simultaneously within 9 months all 42 ships were completed they were launched armed and ready for battle I arest my case 42 vers versus uh oh2 so why and how did this happen I'm hoping through the rest of this video to be able to give you at least some idea of how this may have happened let's back track and look at what resources we have on Dutch sh building in the 17th century unlike the English archives the Dutch are less clear or easy to follow for the English we have a number of treatises that tell you how to take your compass how to draw the arcs how to bring in or to raise or lower the fotex etc etc etc this will be a subject perhaps of a different video the process of whole moding we have a number of treatises there very interesting we'll talk about them some other time for the Dutch we have nothing of the sort we had well there is the archival material of course but there are two major sources of information the one is is uh cores van ik's book published in 1691 which is fairly straightforward to follow vanike was a ship Builder after all and his book was understandable you raise a few frames you put buttons on and on the process goes it's straightforward limited to ship building easy to understand Nicholas Von's book however is a little bit more complicated put in it mou first of all vson himself was burgo Master of Amsterdam he was not a professional ship so most Scholars immediately dismissed him as a source of information what would he know actually it proves that he knew quite a lot for one thing he owned a lot of ships his family were Merchants owned and ordered and had ships built second he accumulated an incredible quantity of specifications or charters for building ships in the first half of the 17th century his book was first published in 1671 with a later Edition in the 1690s again the one that is usually quoted the problem with this book is that um it is dealing with everything under the mother earth it uh begins with reconstruction the inevitable 17th century reconstruction of what Noah Arc must have looked like then he jumps and discusses um Roman an ancient Greek trim reconstructions well let me tell you his is no less likely than most modern reconstructions it's right up in the same Ball Park then he jumps and discusses prows of the East Indies uh he discusses all sorts of other extraneous information and for this reason also the the process that he described at no point does he draw arcs at no point does he draw plans for his sh ships so most scholar dismissed him as not particularly valuable source of ship building one scholar known to pretty much all ship modelers I would imagine who are interested in the period namely Mr AB hoffing however took him quite seriously he recognized that he's describing a different style of ship building he approached the study in a very systematic and interesting way he xeroxed the whole book picked up a pair of scissors cut up the Xerox copy and put aside all the paragraphs that were describing the process of building uh about 400 ton penas or square stern merchant ship in this period in first it the first stages of his reconstruction he actually did draw from these instructions he drew a set of plans it was only gradually as he was building his first model of this penas following vson that he recognized that drawings were not part of the process at all that they not even needed for the process this process begins in a very interesting way it be begins just the way uh New England fishing dories are built you assemble first the bottom and having understood different approach this really revolutionized our understanding of Dutch shur in the 17th century this coincided of course with uh significant optic of Dutch 17th century Rex found excavated studied documented in detail Etc and ultimately uh up hoffing and I'm very grateful to him for his friendship for uh having answered many of my early questions and for his work and of of course for his uh books and articles I had the privilege of reading an early draft once it was translated into English uh Texas A&M University press published AB hoffing Nicholas vson and the ship building in the Dutch Golden Age this book essentially contains his notes and pars from the vson book that deal directly with ship building in the specific vessel plus of course a collection of charts in and specifications inside the vessel it turns out that contrary to what most people thought Nicolas vson gives you a perfectly decent perfectly practical stepbystep approach to how do you build a ship without drawings and uh without actually eyeballing it this is not Grandpa Johnny decided to put together a boat and knock together a couple of frames then stretched strings or B patterns and started planking not at all these are very carefully designed very carefully thought through um from engineering point of view vessels they are not built by eye they're built with control methods they are built with by proportions it just is different from what we are normally used to but this does not make them any more or any less sophisticated than the ship building in the treis so how do you you begin building this uh ab and his colleagues have and thank you AB for all this data and knowledge that you have provided me over the years but this is essentially showing you the sequence of how such a vessel is built you raise the stem onto the Kio you fasten the stern with the fashion Timbers with the transoms and the stern post you raise it and you fasten it to the queue and after that you start assembling the planking of the bottom as you see from this illustration the planks are held together with cleats that are nailed across the seams of the planks so in other words you're designing the shape of the bottom without frames you're assembling you're forming the bottom without having used pretty much any frames at all and only once you have reached the maximum part of the bottom which the proportions tell you should be such and such proportion of the maximum being of the ship depending what sort of a vessel You're Building depending on what your needs are you also determine the dead rise how sharp should be the bottom how flat should be the bottom yes the method is best adapted to fairly flat bottom vessel which of course is exactly what the Dutch needed the shows of their Coast are notorious and that is why they tended to build flat bottom vessels in parenthesis I should add that this in turn provided more stable gun Platforms in comparison with other vessels but this is neither here nor there for the purposes of our current conversation these cleats are temporary the moment you start adding the frames of the vessel inside and here I'm moving to another one of apps uh books this one is his reconstruction of a belas man's vessels I don't think it is available anymore but it is an excellent resource for ship modelers you can uh see a review of the book on the sister Channel above me but here you see the steps of the model going to the point where the first frame and the first fotex are added at the widest point of the bottom this is debatable part I will address it in just a moment based on our own research on Vasa subsequently you uh add some of the first fex and you continue planking the turn of the buge of the vessel to about 1/3 the depth in hold at that stage you start removing the cleats and substituting frame Timbers inside the vessel and that really is the key to This brilliant simple and very very effective way of building ships this is what made them cheaper this is what made them build much faster than anyone else because because you actually do not need high quality timber for this you do not need to convert the Timbers you do not need to spend time making sure that they're absolutely of even Dimensions Square to the center line of the ship that they are perfectly located because they are not shaping your ship the ship is already shaped these Timbers are there only and solely to support what you have already positioned then the second fotex are added a Timber that more or less corresponds to the point where the whale eventually will be hung is hung and the rest of the Timbers are filled in as I said there are some uh points I believe this book will show some over here you see this in Practical terms used on the Reconstruction of the yacht dkin which was built in the early 2000s as a quote unquote replica of the first Dutch vessel to record the coastline of Australia The Vessel was tested at Sea turned the Cape of Good Hope Saed extensively proved itself fantastic uh sea vessel there are a number of Articles out there dealing with it and here are a couple of photographs showing you the process of building her what I was just describing now and here is perhaps something that will be more clearly visible on the video essentially the sequence of building of the vessel here the bottom is assembled the first fots are added you continue filling up the Timbers inside the planking then you add the FL uh the second fotex you continue planking inside and out none of the Timbers are associated with each other so they only held together by the internal the ceiling planks and the outside planking until you at this stage once this is all planked up you're ready to launch the ship you launch the ship and now the slip is open for the next vessel and the construction continues a float this is what made it so quick so easy so cheap to build and yet it was more than adequately strong so this style of uh ship building is known as bottom based construction because bottom base it is well it is pretty much what it says on the tin really you assemble the bottom and everything is based on this bottom of the vessel none of the Timbers have to be parallel to each other none of the Timbers have to be at 90° and if they are inadequate in Dimensions or shape there is nothing stopping you from putting a shim under the floor Timber to fill up the space between the planking and the timber itself this is what brought the cost so far low this is what made it so much cheaper than other styles of construction and I believe this is what gave them the technological Edge to push others out of the market and to be supplying to be the main supplier of merchant and warships throughout the first half of the 17th century as long as warships were fairly small with fairly limited draft this was great this was working perfectly but as the century progressed warships began to be larger and larger here to some extent part of the demise of that ship building was actually the dominance of Amsterdam Amsterdam to maintain its uh dominance was constantly arguing strongly against larger ships because of the Zar where uh drafted ships could not enter that may have worked to the benefit of Amsterdam remaining the dominant ship building center in the Netherlands but it did not work out quite so well for the dominance of the Dutch Navy when they had against them ships like R Sovereign prince prince Ro and the other three Deckers of the English this was the one advantage the English retained throughout the wars their three Deckers so that's why the English would continue building three Deckers in the 18th century at the expense of dollars that was giving them Advantage this was based on their experience of the Anglo Dutch Wars more about this in a different video when we're talking about Naval Warfare in this period as far as Archaeology is concerned yes we do have excellent examples of exactly this sort of construction uh there is the morus of the early 17th century U which was excavated oh in the80s if I remember correctly there is B AA excavated by Jeremy green and the Western Australian Museum in the' 70s there are a number of other English uh I'm sorry Dutch East Indi Men by now who have been at least partially studied then there is a ship that practically is complete that was raised and is stored the last that I saw it in kle Haven in the Netherlands and of course then there is Vasa which some have suggested was built in a different method based on frames she's not she's built uh entirely based on bottom just as the principles that I described until now the one thing that Vasa differs from all the other vessels and from all the information that we have from written sources is that she has seven floor Timbers that are double the size of any others yes I said in previous videos that her Timbers vary dramatically in numbers in quantities in shape in uh Dimensions Etc but these seven Timbers five actually are so much larger than anything else we'll include an image over here you can see it uh they are so dramatically different from the others that that cannot be a coincidence especially when you see that they are positioned exactly the places where the bottom changes shape rapidly towards the bow towards the narrowing of the stern and of course to support the dead flat amid ships a few other things that I wanted to show you is uh this is a book called The Renaissance shipwrecks from Christian Haven it is based on archaeological studies of six shipwrecks accidentally found during construction in cenh Haven unfortunately there was not enough funding to preserve them so only sections of them were cut off and raised but Christian L and colleagues from Ros Museum had the time to properly document the RS before they were destroyed this book is the product and uh there is a review of the book upward that you can have a look at to discuss here is an illustration they use Toto station for the documentation um broadly similar to what we did with vas except they could and did dism of the Timbers we could not so we approached it in a different way rather Innovative way way but you can see here the documentation of the Timbers confirming exactly what I've been telling you over the past what three videos now uh these are the points recorded by the total station but here they are drawn already in the C program I don't remember whether he uh Christian L is an architect by education before he became an archaeologist and to the best of my knowledge no longer is in archaeology be this as it may the documentation is showing you exactly what I was talking about there are no Timbers that are the same dimensions and these are light these are smaller vessels these are not warships that are documented here but the process of construction here is now this is I'm including this for the photograph because the photograph is showing you exactly how such a vessel looks this one is actually much more systematic much more uh organized than the other recks are and then most of touch chicks look like this was one thing that we were looking for in Tobago unfortunately not one of the re survives to the point where we can record our structure that was very sad I'm including this page here because he used the traditional methods following up hoffing principles uh for the Reconstruction of the shape of the vessels he was much more interested in the Reconstruction of the uh shape of the vessels than in the construction I on the other hand my work is dedicated particularly to the construction but you can see the cleats and the cleats on the outside and on the inside they don't have to be only on the inside on vas we have traces on the other side also but the interesting part of this is that when you remove the cleats you have nail holes left it was considered good practice to fill these holes with small wooden dowels Spiker penon and of course any Dutch viewer if there is one such will start throwing Rotten Tomatoes at me for my Dutch pronunciation I read Dutch but I cannot speak it to save my life I'm afraid and that is one of my major shortcomings and failures be this as it may the fact that these traces are left on the planking are dead giveaway when you're analyzing the construction of a vessel this is the absolute final proof that you have a bottom based vessel so this was a brief overview of how and why that ship building was so exceptional and how it produced such a powerful Maritime economy without actually having the resources to do so and that is what is so incredible inedibly impressive about the Dutch golden age as the 17th century is known uh in Dutch history that is why I so deeply admire their achievements uh historical in this period The Logical question to ask in the final minutes of this video are well when and how did this practice emerge when did it end it emerged in ancient times as a matter of fact we have evidence of Bion since at least the first couple of centuries ad it is the so-called Romano Celtic tradition of uh ship building there again the bottoms are assembled first there you can see the Timbers that not really shape the vessel they're there to support the structure we have a number of such vessels the St Peter portre in G is of this type the B boat that was excavated and documented by Batar in Switzerland all of them I'm naming just two there are actually dozens of such vessels I will not go through all of them I will be merciful towards my viewers in this but they are very interesting it is interesting tradition that continued in the Netherlands later and it is best described of course in the Netherlands I should finish this by pointing out that the tradition did not really disappear until the end of Dutch wooden ship building for large Oceano vessels it is widely believed by the end of the 1720s the traditional Dutch way had given way to drawings and more uh style of building similar to English methods for smaller vessels this period continued all the way way into the 19th century why the change in truthfully because of bureaucracy it is extremely hard to keep track and to repeat something that is built from proportions and by the experience of Master ship rights should something go wrong you have no paper track you have no paper trail bureaucracy loves paper trail because the task of bureaucracy is simply to find whose fault it is when things go bad or rather to shove the fault onto somebody away from them and if you do not have a paper trail it is extremely poor chance of managing to shift blame somebody else it becomes of he said she said it said wow with a paper trail you can always say you signed off on this one I am in the clear it's your fault and with this ladies and gentlemen I wish you a most wonderful rest of your day a perfect Sunday I hope you enjoy yourself I hope you like the video please if you did give it a thumbs up give me a comment ask questions I'll be delighted to discuss this as I said this is one of my favorite periods and topics uh to teach ladies and gentlemen I wish you wonderful day thank you [Music] oh

Channel: Kroum Batchvarov - Underwater Ship Archaeologist

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Keywords: Kroum Batchvarov, dutch shipbuilding, library, Swedish warship, VASA, Fred Hocker, ship archaeology, shipwrecks, naval history, model ship building, Olha Batchvarov, wargaming, ship of the line, sloop, frigate, rigging, blueprints, carrack, caravel, pinta, nina, Victory, Black Pearl, Christopher Columbus, ship model, ship, sailboat, modeling, shipmodeling, shipbuilder, boat, antique, судомоделизм, судомоделирование, модель корабля, парусник, builder, scale modeling, tutorial, hobby

Id: c-FC3lJRKug

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023