It is interesting to see how you get caught up with the challenges that the scheerstrook poses in your build. The same goes for
@Maarten with the shape of the bilge plank in his Fluyt build. Maybe you can understand now the frustration that research can sometime cause and can see why my log is 300+ pages. As soon as you focus one aspect and think you have the answer, another issue crops up which throws everything out again. Also, be careful of applying certain "rules" on certain Dutch ships' builds to all Dutch ships. That can simply not be done. Lastly, you are assuming that Witsen was correct. Are you sure?
Thank you Heinrich, it was a journey I'll do not forget quick, a good lesson to understand a huge part in how these ship where build. Do I trust Cornelis and Nicolaes? Yes their books are a high value to us. Together with pictures of v/d Velde for example or Models that come from that era. You talk about first and second party information. There are facts you can doubt about. But next to that you can trust them because there is not a lot of evidence they don't. Maybe in the next decades we learn more from archaeology, or other findings. But in this time this is all we got. Then there are third party books, writers, opinions, etc.... I used them to understand the material, even discuss with them in a respectful way to understand. You can share the same opinion or not, but to say that someone is wrong or incorrect?
I always go back to Cornelis and Nicolaes what they say about the subject to form my opinion in the subject. That's why I tried to explain, hopefully in a easy way to understand, what my findings are. If Witse is fully correct? Sometimes I think, he makes mistakes but on the other way, I think: Do we understand 100% the method he describes to say he's wrong? Besides of mistakes in the writing, I found some of them in the book of Cornelis too. Fully understandable, it happens even in these days when you write a book.
About certain rules, your right. I don't depend on them, because I believe these rules are just guidelines in the Dutch shipbuilding. I took a conclusion about how these carpenters work on these shipyards. The Dutch way of handling cost. To be effective and fast builders.
For example:
I grew up in a family with just one parent, my mother. We weren't rich, but we could manage things with what we got. I love to play with Lego blocks as a child. But in my case I didn't had a big box with blocks, I got just a small one. So when I want to build the Enterprise of Star Trek, it didn't look exactly like the Enterprise, but it got the shape. That was because I only had that amount of blocks to build it. I needed a lot of imagination to get it done. And a lot of imagination was needed to recognize the Enterprise.
That's how I look to the build of a ship on a 17th century Dutch shipyard. They got an order to build a ship, with as less of possible materials, as cheap as possible and as quick as possible. With a big stack of wood they could use. So sometimes they had to make decisions in their build to fit in the material they had. So tiny imperfections where allowed.
, I am happy that your 'backpack transport' went well. It was nice to see your progress next to Maarten's.
