SOURCES FOR LUSITANIAN SHIPBUILDING
Richard Barker
Lisbon Round Table, September 1998: Archaeology of Medieval and Modern Ships of Iberian-Atlantic Tradition.
Introduction
? ?".....Still there is more. In the ancient archives of the kingdom, at whose head I found myself, there exists a most ancient manuscript that is a contract between the king D.Afonso III and the Master of the Knights of Santiago, Paio Peres. In that document it is determined that the tribute of mermaids and other animals fished on the beaches of the same Order ought to be paid not to the Master but to the Kings. From which it is easy to collect that mermaids were frequent in our waters, seeing that a law had been promulgated about them. Enough: it is not worth continuing to speak of tritons, sea-nymphs and mermaids, and we renew the thread of the discourse".
Dami?o de Gois, Lisboa de Quinhentos, 15541 , offers this sad tale of over-fishing in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. The same might have been said of the wrecks of Portuguese ships, whose absence had been the source of some woe to scholars such as Jo?o da Gama Pimentel Barata and Oct?vio Lixa Filgueiras. After all, it was Portuguese ships that really opened up the world in the fifteenth century, and even much of the so-called Spanish Armada had actually been seized from the Portuguese arsenals. Happily, the sirens have finally led our Portuguese colleagues to the true fishing grounds. Perhaps the mermaids will follow.
Portugal has a maritime history out of all proportion to its size, but after a brief survey, towards the overall theme of the conference, this paper will concentrate on three aspects of nautical archaeology that have been illuminated by the contents of Portuguese libraries. The implications go far beyond the interpretation of the present Portuguese wrecks, of roughly the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The three inter-linked strands are:
- the practical shipbuilding processes of hull form and frame moulding
- the timbers that were used in shipbuilding, and particularly the issue of cork-oak, which is so prominent in the Portuguese writings of our period, and even leads to a review of the management of all oak forests in areas supplying shipbuilders.
- the different midship frame shapes that we have in the archives for European ships, and how and why they changed.
The writer?s enquiries started in this last area thirty years ago. Consideration of the Portuguese case and evidence has brought them almost full circle: who would have thought that forest oak trees were systematically pruned ?
However, the archaeology remains crucial to all these.
Brief historical survey
In antiquity, Lusitania shared the celtic heritage of the west of Europe: rafts and primitive types have been recorded2, skin boats are referred to (and even reconstructed)3; dug-outs too4. We then have notice of Phoenician influence. Not only was the coast part of an ancient sea route from the Mediterranean to, for example, Cornish tin5, but the Tejo was a recognised harbour, under the Roman name Olisipo(nis), when the present Baixa was still a marshy inlet6. The shoreline seen today has indeed been steadily reclaimed, with the sixteenth century waterfront, the old Ribeira das Naus and the eighteenth century dry-dock7 all buried, but the major extensions were made in the early twentieth century. Indications of this process exist in both the half-buried state of the Chafariz del Rey8, and in the succession of ship-timbers found in the recent works for the Metro extensions, in the general area of the old Ribeira.
The traces of some of this history can be seen in Portugal?s inshore fishing craft, some of which are considered to be of Sumerian or Phoenician origin, iconographically, and from the known trade routes9.
The earliest texts we have for shipbuilding are from 1115, in fragmentary accounts of how Genoese experts in galley warfare were invited by Bishop Gelmirez to construct galleys to clear the coast of pirates, Normans and Muslims alike10. In 1317 Manuel Pessanha took up the post of Admiral after a similar invitation from D.Diniz. It is sometimes suggested that the latter group were the first navigators in Portugal, but the probability is that they were military commanders who brought specialist shipbuilders with them, and who had no need of navigation: galleys were essentially limited to coasting voyages, both for reasons of sea-keeping capability and autonomy of operation. The planting of the forest of Leiria, explicitly pines for shipbuilding timber, is said to date from this period.
It would be wrong to suppose that there were no significant ships in Portuguese hands before the arrival of the Genoese in 1317: Afonso III for example had a fleet of navios grossos at the siege of Faro in 1270, and used these and galleys to harry the African Moors in the third quarter of the thirteenth century11. (Lisbon had been recaptured with the aid of crusaders en route to the Mediterranean in 1147).
As for the form of shipbuilding, we may note that the earliest Italian manuscripts, of roughly this period, clearly use terms that show that elaborate geometrical hull moulding techniques were already in place12. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the recorded units of shipbuilding measurement in Portugal - the palmo and goa (256 and 768mm) - derive from the early Genoese connection; just as Portuguese methods appear to have remained differentiated from the recorded methods of Venice. At the same time, there are other units of less certain origin, and many terms are of Arabic origin, probably related to the fishing vessels of the Muslim period. The caravela was a fishing vessel in Portuguese records from the thirteenth century, though in the form q?rib the term at least may be traced to older Mediterranean trades that are recorded as far as Spain by Goitein, from the Cairo Genizah material13.
Before that, lasting northern influence had reached the Douro in the fifth century: Filgueiras has demonstrated that the boats and ploughs alike of the Douro region match those of the Suevi, from the southern Baltic area14. The traditional local boats of the Douro and north of this line are still clinker, and to the south they are carvel (though we may note a strange outcrop on the statue of Pombal at the Rotunda in Lisbon). Clench-built vessels continued to be used for shipping at least to the end of the fifteenth century. Three ships were even purchased from Holland for the India voyage in 150615, whose construction was presumably shell-built, if not clinker. Thereafter a polemic arose as to the merits of different ship types, timbers and hull fastenings suitable for Portuguese voyages.
Thus Portugal was a meeting point for many traditions, and a springboard for greater things.
Early records
Even though extant written records commence from the twelfth century, they are sparse (and often ambiguous) until the second half of the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century records are of three basic kinds for our purposes. The chronicles speak mostly of people and events, and maritime information is mostly incidental and imprecise. However, we know that until about 1436 Portuguese voyages utilised only barcas and barineis, both square-sailed, the latter clinker built. It may be noted, then, that the open-ocean islands of Madeira and the Azores were (re-) discovered and settled with such vessels. The caravela only appears as more than a fishing boat from the 1430?s16. That is, it came into use as the volta, the wide oceanic sweep of the return journey, eventually via the Azores, necessitated by prevailing winds and currents, became progressively longer as the exploration of the African coast advanced. The critical factors were probably speed, and the ability to make some headway against headwinds if the prevailing winds failed, and thus to get back before water ran out. The caravela was otherwise far from an ideal choice. Its large lateen sail needed a large crew, and even then was dangerous; and the hull was too slight to carry stores and water for long periods. Dias, the first to pass the Cape, in 1487, called for different ships for the open Atlantic: he wanted higher sides, specifically; and was himself lost in the voyage of 1502. Indeed from about that time, caravelas often went out to India under square rig, just as they did to the West Indies. Columbus? opinion expressed in 1503 makes their limitations even under lateen rig perfectly plain17. Columbus was not one of the caravelas? most skilful proponents: his trail of abandoned ships has been a mainstay of recent archaeological searches.
We should not forget that the caravela was a warship for most of our period. In 1501 there were 35 of them assigned to a pan-European fleet18, in addition to large numbers on the India traffic. The chronicle of Jo?o II suggests that serious naval ordnance developments began in caravelas19. Not only were caravelas carrying very heavy guns on 2-wheeled carriages, firing forward or to the side20, in the manner described by Cleves for about 1500, and incidentally as found on the half deck of the Mary Rose, but they had perfected the practices of ricochet firing, and stand-off artillery fire from line-ahead by 1501 at latest21.
As an aside, by the seventeenth century the situation had changed. Large numbers of caravelas continued to be built by merchants for the Brasil trade, and were lost also in large numbers to the Dutch with their cargoes, largely of sugar. It is an interesting question as to what became of the hulls: few resisted or are otherwise recorded as sunk. Neither hull form nor rig were suitable for Dutch use.
Gois records a standing fleet of two hundred vessels in 1554, equipped from what must indeed have been one of the greatest arsenals of naval ordnance and stores. There are records of astonishing ships in the Portuguese service throughout our period. While the vast Madre de Deus is well known22, and visually at least the Sancta Caterina de Monte Sinai, 800 tons, built in Cochin in 1512, and armed to the teeth for a voyage in 151623, some are less well known. The 1,000-ton nau of about 1490 for example, guardship of the Tejo, though it also went to the Mediterranean24. Or the S?o Jo?o (popularly the "Botafogo": Spitfire) of 1533/4, one and a half times the length of the largest India ships, with an exaggerated but clearly exceptional armament25. Or in the 17th century the largest ship in the world, the Padre Eterno, built in Brasil, but whose remains are now rotting quietly somewhere off Montijo in the Tejo - a virtual site in the database. She carried home cargoes of 2,000 tons of sugar alone26.
Another area of interest is tonnage measurement, for fiscal and construction purposes. There are records from around 1500 that describe a fully developed administrative and technical procedure for gauging a ship, using the regulated hoops of standardised barrels, to determine actual capacity in tuns and fractions of tuns at stations along the hull, defined by the length of the tun. While the accounts beg a few questions about the use of the largest barrels as the basic measure, and how they were nested, the standard unit of keel length, the rumo, is related to the Lisbon tun of that period. Tonnage, as capacity in tuns, was clearly a reasonably precise measure long before the simplified (but probably less accurate) procedures of tonnage formulae emerged during the sixteenth century. Relating the cargo-space dimensions of archaeological finds to barrel sizes is clearly a pre-requisite27.
We can also find inventories of the barrels carried in specific ships from this period, notably the first two voyages of Vasco da Gama in 1497 and 1502; by no means all were iron-bound, and this history has also to be unravelled.
A further aspect of the textual sources concerns timber for shipbuilding. One particular point is incidental to the development of Madeira: an infinite source of high quality timber from about 1420, excluding oaks, and pines (planted only from 1515). Dias Leite (publishing in 1589) speaks of the introduction of water-powered saw mills producing plank for the mainland, but also some more exotic species for furniture, and possibly ship-timbers. The issues are ambiguous in almost all the texts, and Dias Leite himself has a curious passage:
".... there was such quantity of such beautiful and hard wood that they carried supplies of planks, beams, and masts to many parts, which was all sawn with water-mills... And at this time, because of the great quantity of timber that they carried from here to the Kingdom, they began to make with it ships with top[-mast]s and fore castle, because before they did not have them in the Kingdom, nor anywhere to sail to, nor did they have more ships than caravelas of the Algarve, and barineis in Lisbon and in Porto"28.
This has been interpreted literally as meaning that previously the Portuguese could not build larger ships - defined as having topmasts, which is after all only 50 tons. However, authors of his own period claim that Portuguese shipbuilding was founded on cork oak and pinhos bravo and manso, all ideal for their ships (up to more than 1,000 tons). None of these timbers were available from Madeira. The interpretation is simply incompatible with the specialised shipbuilding texts of Oliveira and Lavanha. We could also note that the previously inadequate shipping had in fact reached Madeira; and that saw-mills are of limited use for ship-timber.
An alternative interpretation might be that the larger ships were soon built precisely to transport the quantity of great timbers of Madeira.
We may insert at this point the interpretation of Pimentel Barata29 that the Portuguese used cork oak, exclusively (excepting only Indian and Brasilian timbers), for ship-timber. This is apparently an act of faith based on the preferences of Oliveira and Lavanha, though it is impossible to wholly reconcile these quasi-classical commentaries with the facts of economic history. The reality is that ships were built with what was available, and European oak was imported into Lisbon in the sixteenth century30. Some of this was planking: more vulnerable to ship-worm than frame timbers (though Lavanha speaks of teredo following the grain of treenails into framing). We need some archaeology.
Iconography is sparse too. There are occasional views of the Ribeira, and about 1535 the spectacular panorama of Lisbon, now in Leiden. However, many views of Lisbon showing ship-building are Dutch prints with the features of Lisbon, copied from one original or another, but clearly illustrating Dutch ship-building methods. Just such a one adorns the Academia de Marinha. Most of the iconography of the period of the discoveries was actually made in the second half of the sixteenth century, notably the Mem?rias das Armadas and Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu.
There are interesting questions arising from the launching of ships in Portugal31. A group of large vessels seen ashore in the Ribeira about 1520 in a Book of Hours32 are variously bow, stern and broadside to the water. Fernandes alone of the technical sources provides even sketchy details, a cradle and groundways for a large nau, apparently bow-launched. An engraving of 1707 shows a ship under construction in just such a way33. It is a problem exemplified by the statement of Saverien, 1758: "the Portuguese... consider it better that the vessel enter the water by the stern than by the bow. They no doubt have their reasons, but it is not easy to discover them"34. An archaic sledge-cradle based on keel and bilgeways can be seen on Madeira: all these topics will hopefully be the subject of archaeology one day, both as infrastructure and for the permanent results that cradles and other aspects of launching and careening will leave in ships.
Books and quasi-technical manuscripts
The first published work is Oliveira?s Arte da Guerra do Mar (a single copy extant from 1555)35, but as regards the ships themselves this is a poor source, compared with Oliveira?s later works, from 1570 or so. The Ars Nautica contains the first drawing approximating to the later body plan, a hundred years before its time; but awaits full publication.
Between 1570 and 1625 we have a number of major manuscript sources, first studied at an acceptable level by Pimentel Barata, though several were known or had been published from the late nineteenth century. Oliveira?s Livro da F?brica das Naus, Lavanha?s Livro Primeiro da Architectura Naval, and Fernandes? Livro de Tra?as de Carpintaria have all been published, from the period (1580-1640) when Portugual was ruled by Spain, and in the early part of which Portuguese shipbuilding was highly developed. Lavanha for example held senior positions in the Spanish administration.
There is a mass of little-used archive material for the later part of our period - Livro N?utico, Palha MSS, and collections in the major archives, all slowly emerging.
Components of the manuscripts - timber and structural features
The major texts of Oliveira and Lavanha commence with classical introductions, establishing the credentials of the writers, and little more. There are long sections on timber for shipbuilding, which also rely heavily on classical authors, then only relatively recently recovered and published. These tend to suffer from being out of context for the Iberian scene; and also following the errors of the originals. Oliveira discovered that he had been misled by grammarians between writing Arte da Guerra da Mar and Livro da F?brica das Naus. The most conspicuous problem is with the mysterious lerez, presented as a Portuguese shipbuilding timber, while translated as larch in modern material, and confused by Oliveira and Lavanha with that Alpine timber, used in Italy and Germany. It may have been a black pine; but the first timber found that is not an oak, or pinhos bravo or manso, must be a candidate.
Oak is a favourite topic. The wonders of cork oak (Q.suber) for a ship?s skeleton (but not planking) are clearly already part of the mythology of Portuguese shipbuilding. The reality may be rather different. Conspicuously, frame timbers greater than one palmo square (256mm) are not mentioned in the Portuguese texts. Whether this reflects a continuing Mediterranean construction style, or simply the lack of larger ship-timber is not known, but it is a topic that needs to be pursued. Oddly, European oak is cited as used in masts, though Freire Costa qualifies this as for the madres, the cores of made-masts, as drawn by Fernandes.
Richard Barker
Lisbon Round Table, September 1998: Archaeology of Medieval and Modern Ships of Iberian-Atlantic Tradition.
Introduction
? ?".....Still there is more. In the ancient archives of the kingdom, at whose head I found myself, there exists a most ancient manuscript that is a contract between the king D.Afonso III and the Master of the Knights of Santiago, Paio Peres. In that document it is determined that the tribute of mermaids and other animals fished on the beaches of the same Order ought to be paid not to the Master but to the Kings. From which it is easy to collect that mermaids were frequent in our waters, seeing that a law had been promulgated about them. Enough: it is not worth continuing to speak of tritons, sea-nymphs and mermaids, and we renew the thread of the discourse".
Dami?o de Gois, Lisboa de Quinhentos, 15541 , offers this sad tale of over-fishing in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. The same might have been said of the wrecks of Portuguese ships, whose absence had been the source of some woe to scholars such as Jo?o da Gama Pimentel Barata and Oct?vio Lixa Filgueiras. After all, it was Portuguese ships that really opened up the world in the fifteenth century, and even much of the so-called Spanish Armada had actually been seized from the Portuguese arsenals. Happily, the sirens have finally led our Portuguese colleagues to the true fishing grounds. Perhaps the mermaids will follow.
Portugal has a maritime history out of all proportion to its size, but after a brief survey, towards the overall theme of the conference, this paper will concentrate on three aspects of nautical archaeology that have been illuminated by the contents of Portuguese libraries. The implications go far beyond the interpretation of the present Portuguese wrecks, of roughly the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The three inter-linked strands are:
- the practical shipbuilding processes of hull form and frame moulding
- the timbers that were used in shipbuilding, and particularly the issue of cork-oak, which is so prominent in the Portuguese writings of our period, and even leads to a review of the management of all oak forests in areas supplying shipbuilders.
- the different midship frame shapes that we have in the archives for European ships, and how and why they changed.
The writer?s enquiries started in this last area thirty years ago. Consideration of the Portuguese case and evidence has brought them almost full circle: who would have thought that forest oak trees were systematically pruned ?
However, the archaeology remains crucial to all these.
Brief historical survey
In antiquity, Lusitania shared the celtic heritage of the west of Europe: rafts and primitive types have been recorded2, skin boats are referred to (and even reconstructed)3; dug-outs too4. We then have notice of Phoenician influence. Not only was the coast part of an ancient sea route from the Mediterranean to, for example, Cornish tin5, but the Tejo was a recognised harbour, under the Roman name Olisipo(nis), when the present Baixa was still a marshy inlet6. The shoreline seen today has indeed been steadily reclaimed, with the sixteenth century waterfront, the old Ribeira das Naus and the eighteenth century dry-dock7 all buried, but the major extensions were made in the early twentieth century. Indications of this process exist in both the half-buried state of the Chafariz del Rey8, and in the succession of ship-timbers found in the recent works for the Metro extensions, in the general area of the old Ribeira.
The traces of some of this history can be seen in Portugal?s inshore fishing craft, some of which are considered to be of Sumerian or Phoenician origin, iconographically, and from the known trade routes9.
The earliest texts we have for shipbuilding are from 1115, in fragmentary accounts of how Genoese experts in galley warfare were invited by Bishop Gelmirez to construct galleys to clear the coast of pirates, Normans and Muslims alike10. In 1317 Manuel Pessanha took up the post of Admiral after a similar invitation from D.Diniz. It is sometimes suggested that the latter group were the first navigators in Portugal, but the probability is that they were military commanders who brought specialist shipbuilders with them, and who had no need of navigation: galleys were essentially limited to coasting voyages, both for reasons of sea-keeping capability and autonomy of operation. The planting of the forest of Leiria, explicitly pines for shipbuilding timber, is said to date from this period.
It would be wrong to suppose that there were no significant ships in Portuguese hands before the arrival of the Genoese in 1317: Afonso III for example had a fleet of navios grossos at the siege of Faro in 1270, and used these and galleys to harry the African Moors in the third quarter of the thirteenth century11. (Lisbon had been recaptured with the aid of crusaders en route to the Mediterranean in 1147).
As for the form of shipbuilding, we may note that the earliest Italian manuscripts, of roughly this period, clearly use terms that show that elaborate geometrical hull moulding techniques were already in place12. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the recorded units of shipbuilding measurement in Portugal - the palmo and goa (256 and 768mm) - derive from the early Genoese connection; just as Portuguese methods appear to have remained differentiated from the recorded methods of Venice. At the same time, there are other units of less certain origin, and many terms are of Arabic origin, probably related to the fishing vessels of the Muslim period. The caravela was a fishing vessel in Portuguese records from the thirteenth century, though in the form q?rib the term at least may be traced to older Mediterranean trades that are recorded as far as Spain by Goitein, from the Cairo Genizah material13.
Before that, lasting northern influence had reached the Douro in the fifth century: Filgueiras has demonstrated that the boats and ploughs alike of the Douro region match those of the Suevi, from the southern Baltic area14. The traditional local boats of the Douro and north of this line are still clinker, and to the south they are carvel (though we may note a strange outcrop on the statue of Pombal at the Rotunda in Lisbon). Clench-built vessels continued to be used for shipping at least to the end of the fifteenth century. Three ships were even purchased from Holland for the India voyage in 150615, whose construction was presumably shell-built, if not clinker. Thereafter a polemic arose as to the merits of different ship types, timbers and hull fastenings suitable for Portuguese voyages.
Thus Portugal was a meeting point for many traditions, and a springboard for greater things.
Early records
Even though extant written records commence from the twelfth century, they are sparse (and often ambiguous) until the second half of the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century records are of three basic kinds for our purposes. The chronicles speak mostly of people and events, and maritime information is mostly incidental and imprecise. However, we know that until about 1436 Portuguese voyages utilised only barcas and barineis, both square-sailed, the latter clinker built. It may be noted, then, that the open-ocean islands of Madeira and the Azores were (re-) discovered and settled with such vessels. The caravela only appears as more than a fishing boat from the 1430?s16. That is, it came into use as the volta, the wide oceanic sweep of the return journey, eventually via the Azores, necessitated by prevailing winds and currents, became progressively longer as the exploration of the African coast advanced. The critical factors were probably speed, and the ability to make some headway against headwinds if the prevailing winds failed, and thus to get back before water ran out. The caravela was otherwise far from an ideal choice. Its large lateen sail needed a large crew, and even then was dangerous; and the hull was too slight to carry stores and water for long periods. Dias, the first to pass the Cape, in 1487, called for different ships for the open Atlantic: he wanted higher sides, specifically; and was himself lost in the voyage of 1502. Indeed from about that time, caravelas often went out to India under square rig, just as they did to the West Indies. Columbus? opinion expressed in 1503 makes their limitations even under lateen rig perfectly plain17. Columbus was not one of the caravelas? most skilful proponents: his trail of abandoned ships has been a mainstay of recent archaeological searches.
We should not forget that the caravela was a warship for most of our period. In 1501 there were 35 of them assigned to a pan-European fleet18, in addition to large numbers on the India traffic. The chronicle of Jo?o II suggests that serious naval ordnance developments began in caravelas19. Not only were caravelas carrying very heavy guns on 2-wheeled carriages, firing forward or to the side20, in the manner described by Cleves for about 1500, and incidentally as found on the half deck of the Mary Rose, but they had perfected the practices of ricochet firing, and stand-off artillery fire from line-ahead by 1501 at latest21.
As an aside, by the seventeenth century the situation had changed. Large numbers of caravelas continued to be built by merchants for the Brasil trade, and were lost also in large numbers to the Dutch with their cargoes, largely of sugar. It is an interesting question as to what became of the hulls: few resisted or are otherwise recorded as sunk. Neither hull form nor rig were suitable for Dutch use.
Gois records a standing fleet of two hundred vessels in 1554, equipped from what must indeed have been one of the greatest arsenals of naval ordnance and stores. There are records of astonishing ships in the Portuguese service throughout our period. While the vast Madre de Deus is well known22, and visually at least the Sancta Caterina de Monte Sinai, 800 tons, built in Cochin in 1512, and armed to the teeth for a voyage in 151623, some are less well known. The 1,000-ton nau of about 1490 for example, guardship of the Tejo, though it also went to the Mediterranean24. Or the S?o Jo?o (popularly the "Botafogo": Spitfire) of 1533/4, one and a half times the length of the largest India ships, with an exaggerated but clearly exceptional armament25. Or in the 17th century the largest ship in the world, the Padre Eterno, built in Brasil, but whose remains are now rotting quietly somewhere off Montijo in the Tejo - a virtual site in the database. She carried home cargoes of 2,000 tons of sugar alone26.
Another area of interest is tonnage measurement, for fiscal and construction purposes. There are records from around 1500 that describe a fully developed administrative and technical procedure for gauging a ship, using the regulated hoops of standardised barrels, to determine actual capacity in tuns and fractions of tuns at stations along the hull, defined by the length of the tun. While the accounts beg a few questions about the use of the largest barrels as the basic measure, and how they were nested, the standard unit of keel length, the rumo, is related to the Lisbon tun of that period. Tonnage, as capacity in tuns, was clearly a reasonably precise measure long before the simplified (but probably less accurate) procedures of tonnage formulae emerged during the sixteenth century. Relating the cargo-space dimensions of archaeological finds to barrel sizes is clearly a pre-requisite27.
We can also find inventories of the barrels carried in specific ships from this period, notably the first two voyages of Vasco da Gama in 1497 and 1502; by no means all were iron-bound, and this history has also to be unravelled.
A further aspect of the textual sources concerns timber for shipbuilding. One particular point is incidental to the development of Madeira: an infinite source of high quality timber from about 1420, excluding oaks, and pines (planted only from 1515). Dias Leite (publishing in 1589) speaks of the introduction of water-powered saw mills producing plank for the mainland, but also some more exotic species for furniture, and possibly ship-timbers. The issues are ambiguous in almost all the texts, and Dias Leite himself has a curious passage:
".... there was such quantity of such beautiful and hard wood that they carried supplies of planks, beams, and masts to many parts, which was all sawn with water-mills... And at this time, because of the great quantity of timber that they carried from here to the Kingdom, they began to make with it ships with top[-mast]s and fore castle, because before they did not have them in the Kingdom, nor anywhere to sail to, nor did they have more ships than caravelas of the Algarve, and barineis in Lisbon and in Porto"28.
This has been interpreted literally as meaning that previously the Portuguese could not build larger ships - defined as having topmasts, which is after all only 50 tons. However, authors of his own period claim that Portuguese shipbuilding was founded on cork oak and pinhos bravo and manso, all ideal for their ships (up to more than 1,000 tons). None of these timbers were available from Madeira. The interpretation is simply incompatible with the specialised shipbuilding texts of Oliveira and Lavanha. We could also note that the previously inadequate shipping had in fact reached Madeira; and that saw-mills are of limited use for ship-timber.
An alternative interpretation might be that the larger ships were soon built precisely to transport the quantity of great timbers of Madeira.
We may insert at this point the interpretation of Pimentel Barata29 that the Portuguese used cork oak, exclusively (excepting only Indian and Brasilian timbers), for ship-timber. This is apparently an act of faith based on the preferences of Oliveira and Lavanha, though it is impossible to wholly reconcile these quasi-classical commentaries with the facts of economic history. The reality is that ships were built with what was available, and European oak was imported into Lisbon in the sixteenth century30. Some of this was planking: more vulnerable to ship-worm than frame timbers (though Lavanha speaks of teredo following the grain of treenails into framing). We need some archaeology.
Iconography is sparse too. There are occasional views of the Ribeira, and about 1535 the spectacular panorama of Lisbon, now in Leiden. However, many views of Lisbon showing ship-building are Dutch prints with the features of Lisbon, copied from one original or another, but clearly illustrating Dutch ship-building methods. Just such a one adorns the Academia de Marinha. Most of the iconography of the period of the discoveries was actually made in the second half of the sixteenth century, notably the Mem?rias das Armadas and Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu.
There are interesting questions arising from the launching of ships in Portugal31. A group of large vessels seen ashore in the Ribeira about 1520 in a Book of Hours32 are variously bow, stern and broadside to the water. Fernandes alone of the technical sources provides even sketchy details, a cradle and groundways for a large nau, apparently bow-launched. An engraving of 1707 shows a ship under construction in just such a way33. It is a problem exemplified by the statement of Saverien, 1758: "the Portuguese... consider it better that the vessel enter the water by the stern than by the bow. They no doubt have their reasons, but it is not easy to discover them"34. An archaic sledge-cradle based on keel and bilgeways can be seen on Madeira: all these topics will hopefully be the subject of archaeology one day, both as infrastructure and for the permanent results that cradles and other aspects of launching and careening will leave in ships.
Books and quasi-technical manuscripts
The first published work is Oliveira?s Arte da Guerra do Mar (a single copy extant from 1555)35, but as regards the ships themselves this is a poor source, compared with Oliveira?s later works, from 1570 or so. The Ars Nautica contains the first drawing approximating to the later body plan, a hundred years before its time; but awaits full publication.
Between 1570 and 1625 we have a number of major manuscript sources, first studied at an acceptable level by Pimentel Barata, though several were known or had been published from the late nineteenth century. Oliveira?s Livro da F?brica das Naus, Lavanha?s Livro Primeiro da Architectura Naval, and Fernandes? Livro de Tra?as de Carpintaria have all been published, from the period (1580-1640) when Portugual was ruled by Spain, and in the early part of which Portuguese shipbuilding was highly developed. Lavanha for example held senior positions in the Spanish administration.
There is a mass of little-used archive material for the later part of our period - Livro N?utico, Palha MSS, and collections in the major archives, all slowly emerging.
Components of the manuscripts - timber and structural features
The major texts of Oliveira and Lavanha commence with classical introductions, establishing the credentials of the writers, and little more. There are long sections on timber for shipbuilding, which also rely heavily on classical authors, then only relatively recently recovered and published. These tend to suffer from being out of context for the Iberian scene; and also following the errors of the originals. Oliveira discovered that he had been misled by grammarians between writing Arte da Guerra da Mar and Livro da F?brica das Naus. The most conspicuous problem is with the mysterious lerez, presented as a Portuguese shipbuilding timber, while translated as larch in modern material, and confused by Oliveira and Lavanha with that Alpine timber, used in Italy and Germany. It may have been a black pine; but the first timber found that is not an oak, or pinhos bravo or manso, must be a candidate.
Oak is a favourite topic. The wonders of cork oak (Q.suber) for a ship?s skeleton (but not planking) are clearly already part of the mythology of Portuguese shipbuilding. The reality may be rather different. Conspicuously, frame timbers greater than one palmo square (256mm) are not mentioned in the Portuguese texts. Whether this reflects a continuing Mediterranean construction style, or simply the lack of larger ship-timber is not known, but it is a topic that needs to be pursued. Oddly, European oak is cited as used in masts, though Freire Costa qualifies this as for the madres, the cores of made-masts, as drawn by Fernandes.
