Page 252 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Chapter Four
indeed, for most shipwrights of those days were hardly convinced of the necessity to change their ways (and were not enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge with commissioners, either). It is therefore no surprise th at when the drawing board was introduced at the yards of the Dutch Admiralties and (partly) of the EastIndiaCompany,theoldbuildingmethoddidnot entirelydisappearfrom the Netherlands. At smaller yards the building and design process remained in- tegrated until the end of the wooden shipbuilding era, and shipbuilders contin- ued working with the traditional shell-first method. As André Wegener Sleeswyk rightly remarks in the introduction, even today this method is still practiced on some yards in Friesland.
A second remark concerns Witsen’s credibility. I hope this book has c on- vincingly proved that Witsen’s treatise is indeed a m ajor historical source. As demonstrated in chapter 2, his pinas data unfailingly provide all the information required to build the entire ship, just as Witsen claimed. The model of the pinas can therefore be c onsidered an archaeological find—albeit not excavated from the ground or raised from the sea, but recovered from a textual source. In com- bination with archaeological finds in the true sen se and other text ual informa- tion provided by Witsen, Van Yk, Van Dam, and other written sources, the pinas model represents a massive contribution to our u nderstanding of seventeenth- century shipbuilding.
What began as an experiment in constructing a ship model evolved into an effort to “u nveil” Witsen’s book for other cr aftsmen like myself as well as for scholars. What use either of these w ill make of this book, on ly the fut ure can tell.
Regarding my own approach, I will venture a final remark. The only way Wit- sen’s book could be cracked was with my hands as well as my head. Only af ter isolating the pinas data from Witsen’s more general observations did the rest of the treatise become comprehensible. Many obscure p assages, for the pi nas as well, became clearer after I tested them through pr actical application. For the stern and quarter galleries, for instance, there was no other way to comprehend their relationships except by doggedly executing in wood al l the par ts enumer- ated and described by Witsen. The construction emerged only after playing and puzzling with these parts. The fact that the quarter galleries for this pinas were open, cagelike structures came as a c omplete surprise to me —I did not even know such galleries had e xisted! It was much later that I observed in paintings and engravings that this kind of gallery was standard for all sm aller and me- dium vessels. Only on large vessels was there enough space for these galleries to house the privy of the captain or cabinets and thus be closed.
The naval arc hitecture described by Witsen was no sc ience in the modern sense, as the reader will clearly have observed: there were no st andard formu- las with which ship properties could be calculated and predictions made about those properties. Dutch seventeenth-century shipbuilding w as, in es sence, an empirical trade. Witsen’s book contains the sublimated experience of contem- porary shipwrights, l aid down in s imple rules of thumb. To understand how a ship was built in those days, you must simply do it yourself. To understand the implications of the terms of a written contract, you must simply try them out. This line of research is not easily reported.
Some scholars have made disparaging remarks about the use and validity of archaeological experiments, par ticularly those pertaining to prehi storic settle- ments as well as Thor Heyerdahl’s trials with his Kon-Tiki and Ra boats and con- temporary reconstructions of ancient craft such as the Greek trireme. As far as
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