Page 11 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Foreword
Whoever tries to master the text of Witsen’s Aeloude en He dendaegsche Scheeps-bouw en Bestier (Ancient and Modern Shipbuilding and Management) soon discovers that the task is akin to finding one’s way in a decayed labyrinth, even if he or she re ads seventeenth-century Dutch without difficulty. The fre- quent, rather pointless elaborations in which Witsen indulges resemble shrub- bery that has overgrown the paths, and some of the walls seem partly collapsed because Witsen has the disturbing habit of not furnishing the explanations that he has announced. In spite of these shortcomings, since its publication in 1671, Witsen’s book has been a most valuable source for our knowledge of shipbuild- ing in the seventeenth century, even if very few of the many authors quoting the work had really read it from cover to cover.
It is not surprising that it took Ab Hoving fourteen years to arrange that part of Witsen’s work which directly bears on the history of shipbuilding in a logically coherent manner, to supplement and elucidate where necessary, and to provide helpful commentary. Of course, these fourteen years were not spent in continu- ous labor on this task. In this type of research—the work may surely be called such—it is of the utmost importance to pause between the steps of what cannot be anything else but a stepwise approach. These pauses allow one to consider the previous steps critically and to plan the next steps carefully.
Hoving’s presentation of this large part of Witsen’s work has not only cleared out the labyrinth but also laid out a path with clear signposts that readers can follow to arrive at an u nderstanding of Witsen’s construction principles. The most important part of the book is the description of the building of a pinas, which Witsen intended to present in 122 consecutive steps.
From Witsen’s description, it is apparent that the construction method for this ship was fundamentally different from that described in the other well- known seventeenth-century work on Dutch shipbuilding, De Nederlandse Scheeps- bouw-konst Open Ges telt (Dutch Naval Architecture Unveiled), written b y the naval architect Cornelis van Yk of Delfshaven (today part of Rotterdam) and published in Amsterdam in 1697. It should be noted that the first phase of con- struction—which consisted of laying down the keel timber on the stocks, erect- ing the stem and sternp ost, and adding the fi rst strakes on both s ides of the keel—was identical in both methods. .
The differences become manifest after this phase. The most salient of them comes to light when we compare the two works. Witsen describes how the shell was first built up to the level of the turn of the bilge, whereas in Van Yk’s text we find that the fi rst phase was foll owed by the erection of the fr ames. The plank
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