Page 25 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

(see “Sailing Square-Rigged Ships” later in this chapter); pages 234 to 249 (Mathematical treatise, on how much water rests against the Ship’s side) and pages 250 to 279 (Explanation of the shape of many parts of the Ship) have likewise been incorporated only partly or in summ ary. In these instances Witsen tends to lose himself in theoreti- cal speculations and arguments, which might be of inter- est to Witsen researchers but do not add anything to our knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch shipbuilding. It also happens that Witsen states the s ame thing two or three times in different places but with different phrasing; for the s ake of completeness I h ave provided all these passages in full.
How to Use this Book
Chapter 2 includes two kinds of text: (1) Witsen’s trans- lated text about every constructional part of the ship or building stage; and (2) briefremarks, germane references to other sources (mainly Van Yk), and accounts of the au- thor’s experiences in building the pinas model. Witsen’s text is printed in a hi storical seventeenth- century font, equal to the origin al book and the modern text in c or- responding sections has a modern font. Moreover, Wit- sen’s text is divided into two c ategories: (1) g eneral information about shipbuilding techniques and c onsid- erations relevant to each construction part of the ship; and (2) quotes that explicitly refer to the pinas ship that is used as an example for the shipbuilding method. The latter is placed in boxes, to differentiate from the general text and help model bu ilders easily fi nd the nec essary data.
For example, the section ‘First: One m akes the k eel’ contains not only the specifics about the construction of a keel in gener al, the formu las used to calculate its siz e, and also the way in whic h it was as sembled, but also presents the data about the keel of the pinas, placed in a box. In a different font the author’s notes and explications follow under the same section name.
Each subsequent section tr aces the building proc ess, stage by stage, as defined in Witsen’s book and with all re- lated details grouped together for easy reference. Follow- ing the section s devoted to Witsen’s 122 step s or st ages for building the pinas, the author has added 16 additional sections at the end, containing miscellaneous information such as ladders, bolts and nails, anchors; details Witsen must have overlooked in his 122 building stages.
Original illustrations are placed along the relevant sec- tions, with Witsen’s labels and keys translated in the cap- tion, while modern il lustrations show a referenc e to their sources.
The author’s reconstruction drafts of the pinas (drawings 1 through 5) c an be fou nd in the appendi x; keys to these drawings can be found in table 4, preceding the drawings. Portable document format (pdf ) files of these dr awings and keys can also be ac cessed from the C entre for Mari- time Archaeology and Conservation-J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory website located at Texas A&M University—http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/AbHoving .htm. A glossary of technical terms is provided at the end of the book.
Although this book cannot be read with the ease of a novel, I do not feel particularly apologetic since the origi- nal work did not meet this standard, either.
In translating the Dut ch text into Engli sh, we lost some interesting phenomena. In the seventeenth century Dutch orthography had not yet become fixed, unlike mod- ern Dutch. For example, in Witsen’s original text I counted as many as seven different spellings for the s ame word, with some words spelled differently within the s ame sentence. All this colorful orthography is lost in the En- glish translation, which uses standard modern spellings throughout. On the other h and, Alan Lemmer’s transla- tion solved m any problems in the diffi cult phrasing and vocabulary and in the mi sty formulations, which have become clearer in tr anslation, despite the los s result- ing from the need to c hoose a single interpretation over other possibilities. This means the translation of Witsen’s text requires much less explanation than the Dutch edi- tion of this book did. In some c ases, however, there i s no suitable English equivalent for a term used by Witsen, and the original Dutch word is retained. Whereas Witsen frequently states dimensions with units of measure in singular form—for example, “115 voet” (foot) in stead of “115 voeten” (feet)—the translation adopts standard us- age with numerical agreement. To give readers the flavor of the original, much of Witsen’s unpredictable and some- times startling use of punctuation and c apitalization, another feature of his te xt, has been retained wherever clarity was not compromised.
Shipbuilding Methods in the Seventeenth Century
A comparison of the shipbuil ding process as discussed in the treatises of Witsen and Van Yk reveals that method in the region known as the “Zaankant” (on the Zaan River and in Amsterd am) was quite different fr om that in “de Maze” (the are a around the Me use River, i.e., Rotterdam and the South). It was only natural th at Witsen, writing in Amsterdam, would describe local practices, just as Van Yk in Delfshaven was focused on the shipbuilding industr y centered in Rotterdam.
Introduction
7