Ship design and gunnery in England around 1600 according to „Dell’Arcano del Mare” by Robert Dudley

[-Waldemar-]

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Thanks, Roger. To be honest, already for the purposes of the translation itself, it was necessary to simultaneously study and understand Dudley's message in its entirety, otherwise it would not have been possible to produce a comprehensible and logical translation of that linguistically crazy text.

As it happens, the printed portion of the material provides only a general or partial overview of the subject, while in fact many interesting and previously unknown details can be already found in the unpublished portion of the entire material. This is precisely why it is so highly advisable to present at least an example of a conceptual reconstruction using all the design ‘tricks’, including those taken from the manuscript portion of Dudley's work.

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[AllanKP69]

Thank you for posting this.

Allan

 

[-Waldemar-]

Thank you for posting this.

Hi Allan,
That's exactly what I assumed, that especially for you, who is mostly focused on the British/English context, the information provided by Dudley will prove particularly interesting (with or without my accompanying comments ).

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[AllanKP69]

Genoese palms, three of which make two feet, and six English inches, which make one cubit,

I started reading a bit more of this treatise. I am not sure how practical it will be but it is a really interesting read for anyone interested in naval architecture especially for the era involved. One example.....

Genoese palms, three of which make two feet, and six English inches, which make one cubit,

I never heard of any vessel built using measurements in cubits except for building Noah's arc for his passengers during the great flood (of Mesopotamia?), and now I learned it was still used a for measurements for a "few" more years. And I dug deeper and found a cubit is the measurement being the distance from the human elbow (cubitum in Latin) to the tip of the extended middle finger. So when someone makes me angry I will calm myself by showing them what a cubit is.

Lots more to read....

Allan

 

[-Waldemar-]

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I never heard of any vessel built using measurements in cubits except for building Noah's arc for his passengers during the great flood (of Mesopotamia?), and now I learned it was still used a for measurements for a "few" more years. And I dug deeper and found a cubit is the measurement being the distance from the human elbow (cubitum in Latin) to the tip of the extended middle finger. So when someone makes me angry I will calm myself by showing them what a cubit is.

Yes, indeed, the early modern period was a time when the cubit was still a commonly used unit of measurement, now largely forgotten. For example, one can mention the dimensional specifications of Danish ships in contracts from the early 17th century (designed by British shipwrights!), or similar contracts of Basque origin, in which cubits are routinely used instead of feet (usually two local feet made one local cubit). One could even speak of the equivalence or even primacy of the cubit over the foot, as in the revolutionary method of determining cannon calibres invented by a German from Nürnberg, Georg Hartmann in 1560. It is characteristic that the base calibre of a 24-pound cannon was set at 1/4 of an cubit, and not at its equivalent of 1/2 of a foot. Other calibres were calculated using cubic powers (for larger calibres) or cubic roots (for smaller calibres).

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