Episode 53: Clinker to Carvel (and how to shove sphagnum into wood)
We dumbly delve into the deep and desolate doldrums that define trying to understand the growth and development of Dutch shipbuilding in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, particularly in Holland. Conditions would conspire to allow this industry to flourish across the Low Countries. There is, however, a distinct lack of written information from the shipbuilding sector in the 15th century to speak about it definitively. Historians and archaeologists have put together and continue to put together as many pieces as possible, however much of the detail is forever lost. As such, speculation must play its part. And that’s what we’re going to do today!
“Clinker to Carvel (and how to shove sphagnum into wood)” episode artwork by Steven Straatemans
In our journey thus far through the history of the Netherlands we have mostly followed a chronological tangent, tracking certain events and characters that we’ve identified as being most useful in helping us communicate narratives, historical work and arguments that have been developed about Dutch history by people far more knowledgeable than ourselves. For the majority of our episodes this has involved following what we’ve often referred to as a sort of Game of Thrones history, referring to the political power-plays, manipulations & machinations by those whose names were, for a variety of reasons, recorded and passed down through the annals of time. This often means talking about institutional construction, development and destruction, as with big changes in politics, religion, education or economics. However, what remains an insurmountable task in all of this is to understand and communicate the changes in basic, one might say ‘everyday’ things, that actually dominate the lives of all people. For example, you could visit a market in some Dutch town in the 1200s and go back to the same market in the 1500s and, even though you are in the same place, essentially doing the same activity, many details and features would have changed from the goods being bought and sold, to the fashion, to the manner and form of peoples’ religious devotion to the architecture around you. When we look back at the past and see clear, broad-stroke developments in things like technology, philosophy, religion or commerce, we are forever, inescapably blinded to the countless tiny changes that occurred at a grassroots level that actually shepherded in the big, visible changes. People have always thought, tinkered, experimented and spread or argued ideas to and with one another. More often than not these little changes went unrecorded, because they were initiated by people either illiterate or too involved in what they were doing to be keeping a diary about it.
Accounting for this kind of ‘everyday’ change is the chosen task of historians, anthropologists and archaeologists; but it is one that will never be complete. We will never know all the trends and forces that have impacted changes in our societies’ histories, especially when the overwhelming majority of behaviours, thoughts and conversations from the past cannot be backed up by written statements, witness testimonies or archeological findings. To explore the unverifiable sections of history is to delve into the realm of speculation and we at this podcast are not qualified to do too much of that, although a little dabble in it now and then doesn’t hurt. Sometimes, though, as with the subject of this episode, there is simply no other choice.
The influence of Dutch shipbuilders
The last time we really spoke at all about ships was way back in episode 16, The Fishy Tale of Willem Beukelszoon. That was little more than a glancing description of the Haringbuis, the herring-fishing ship that was developed in the Low Countries in the late 1300s to allow fishermen to spend extended periods of time out at sea. Beyond that, the extent to which we have spoken about shipbuilding was in that episode, talking about the relationship between the fishing and shipping industries. To quote myself, from way back in a time when we were but sweet, naive children of a podcasting summer… “Ship-building was another area that tied in with this fishy fortune. For a long time already, it had been one of the main industries in Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, and as necessity drives development, so did Dutch ships develop to cater to the growth of the herring industry.” Well, friends, that is grossly insufficient coverage of an industry that has long been so fundamental to the Netherlands and now we simply must properly visit and explore this most important aspect of Dutch history.
If you want just a glimpse at how profoundly important Dutch shipping would become to other peoples around Europe, we can do that by breaking into an early “ding ding ding, bet you didn’t know that was Dutch!” Here is a roll call of English maritime words that we bet you didn’t know were Dutch: Pump (pomp), skipper (schipper), sloop (sloep), smuggler (smokkeler), trigger (trekker) and yacht (jacht) all come from Dutch and were popularised in English during the time of Dutch maritime ascendancy. We can also look at Russian words of a Dutch origin, purely because the Russians adopted Dutch naval practices after Tsar Peter the Great visited and lived in Holland in the late 17th century. Until then, Russia had not had a proper, modern navy, so many nautical terms simply did not yet exist. As a result, they borrowed from the Dutch, who were teaching them. Some examples include the Russian word today for ‘pennant’ is Vympel, coming from the Dutch, ‘Wimpel’; the word for a ship-mate, Shturman, comes from the Dutch ‘Stuurman’, who was the person in charge of steering the ship; and the word for sea voyage is Farvater, coming from the Dutch word for a navigable waterway, ‘Vaarwater.’ Also interestingly, while the Russian words for North, East, South and West are (in my best Australo-Russian accent, sever, yug, vostok and zapad, it is common in Russian naval culture to read them off the compass as nord, zyuyd, ost and vest.
So, in line with the content of this episode, we bet you didn’t know all of those things were Dutch! And hopefully the point is made, Dutch shipbuilding will be so fundamental to the History of the Netherlands that, were we to ignore it any longer, any further analysis of that history from this point on would have us being like a vessel swept out to sea without a rudder. So, let’s go get ourselves a rudder, and specifically a Dutch rudder.
An imaginative journey to a shipyard
To do this let’s imagine our way to the 1490s. You are a worker in the shipyards just outside Amsterdam, a wealthy mid-sized town in the north of Holland. After having gone to mass at the Old Church in the town’s centre, you’re heading back to the shipyards you work on. You cross the Zeedijk, the raised levee on the east side of the town. You pass through a small portcullis called the Waterpoortje - a gate set in the city wall that was only built in the previous decade. This brings you out to a bridge that crosses over to an island called the Lastage. This is distinctly not a part of Amsterdam. It’s a raised strip of land built up in the moorland just outside the walls on the eastern flank. The informal name, Lastage, indicates a place where goods are loaded and unloaded onto boats. In 1387, the Amsterdam city council first gave permission for people to build outside the city’s defences here. Since then it has developed into an industrial shipyard area. That doesn’t stop people living on it, however. They’re generally other workers like yourself, living and toiling and, in the way that humans do, together forging a sense of communal identity in defiance of the city’s demands.
Your footsteps thud out on the wooden bridge as you step across. A gust of wind assaults you with the sharp scent of burning pine tar and pitch, invading your nostrils and causing your eyes to water. A smelly, loud, hubbub of activity awaits you amongst the workshops, warehouses and living quarters. You step off the bridge onto the soggy ground and you are immediately surrounded by the sight and scent of rough hewn timber. Around you are stacks of logs, mostly oak and pine, that have been brought down the rivers from Westphalia and Bavaria in Germany, but also from further away places like Sweden and the Baltic lands. There are piles of wainscot and wooden lattices lying against the ramparts. It feels rather chaotic. In the distance is a long row of buildings. There are workshops and warehouses where the wood will be taken and dried, before being fashioned into either framing or the actual planks that are formed into the ship's hull. You see a long ropewalk, it seems to cover the length of the entire island. You watch as a child around 8 years old spins a wheel, while a ropemaker walks along the entire length making sure the strands of hemp or flax fibres are being correctly spun into rope. You register the rhythmic hum of hand saws going to and fro, gnashing their teeth through fibres of wood. There is a bang bang bang of a hammer, accompanied by a pause as somebody picks up another nail or rivet and puts it in place, before forcing it into place with another bang bang bang.
The harbour’s water flanks your left hand side, lapping a sort of beach that is used to either float ships or for careening them on their sides for hull repairs. You look towards the harbour and see what looks to be a very newly built ship crane, lingering over the water. A quay runs in front of you toward the buildings and opens up even further into a huge yard space. On both land and water there are ships at varying states of development. Those on water are obviously closer to completion, if not finished already, and bob about, held reasonably in place by anchors or mooring tethers. Others are less complete. You count three of them in their early stages on the dry-dock, mere skeletons propped up by scaffolding, with men clambering over them like ants over the rib cage of some great, deceased beast. They are busy measuring, talking, hammering and sawing. You walk up to one of the partly-built ships, past the accompanying workbenches and look at it with a critical eye.
It is a buis, a fishing ship, that a team of you have been working on for some weeks. The massive keel runs the length of the boat, bow to stern. Towards the bow - the front end of the vessel - one massive piece is joined masterfully with another huge oak beam, giving the characteristic profile of these low, broad ships. One major difference with normal busses though, is that this one has been given a deliberately lower bow. The framework to create the fat hull already reaches out from the keel. You bend down to look underneath at the work that was done yesterday when the garboard strakes were laid. The garboard strakes are the first planks of the hull that run adjacent to either side of the keel, going from stern to bow. Your inspection tells you that they were expertly joined to the keel by the carpenters. A good job on these strakes is crucial for a ship’s watertightness. You crouch further down and slowly walk the length of the ship, looking at the caulking on the strakes, inspecting the fine work for faults. You are relieved when you don’t find any. This caulking was, after all, the work you did yesterday.
The carpenters have continued on since the early morning and there are already two more rows of planks added to the frame, ready for caulking. You appreciate the way they have been fit together, using a method known as karveel, or carvel. The side edge of each plank has been exactly planed, allowing each plank’s edge to perfectly meet that of their neighbour, which makes it difficult to tell where the edge of one plank meets that of the next. This is the way you personally prefer. You’re from Flanders and when you were first learning the trade there some two decades ago, carvel planking was a revolutionary style brought from Italy, Spain and Portugal. You consider how here, in Holland, it is only recently that ships are being built entirely with the joined edging.
Clinker or carvel?
This ship is to be a bastard combination of carvel and the locally far more traditional clinker built method. Clinker design, or lapstrake as it is known in English, is how ships have been constructed North of the Alps for as long as anyone remembers. You know this method inside out, it having been the standard here for so long. It means the planks overlap each other as they line the hull, held fast by wooden nails. Caulking is put at the place where the beams overlap to make it watertight, The caulking is fixed into place with sintels. A sintel is a piece of iron which gets hammered over the seams, making it watertight. You heard a blacksmith complaining about the prospect of hammering 12000 sintels into a new ship a few weeks back.
Your own master from back when you were an apprentice had spent his youth in the shipyards of Sluis. He used to brag that he was in the crew behind the first carvel built ship in the Low Countries there, sometime around 1440. Many times, from many sources, you have also heard talk about another that was built in Zierikzee about twenty years later. It’s a well known story because a shipbuilder from Breton was brought in to do it. Word spread that the local shipbuilders there were too afraid to stray far from making the flat bottomed river ships and coastal vessels, so a Frenchman had to come and do it. You grimace at the thought of such a slur on your reputation. You’ve always been excited to work on large, sea-faring ships and not just smaller vessels like a common schuit.
There are different advantages and disadvantages to both carvel and clinker, though your preference is the former. A carvel must have sturdy interior framing to attach the planks to, whereas the clinker utilises each plank as part of the structural integrity. Carvel is therefore heavier, because of the extra framing, and the clinker is lighter. Carvels move through the water more smoothly but are also extremely rigid ships, meaning they can be built larger, have bigger hulls and can bear more complex rigging systems. Clinker boats, on the other hand, along with their lightness and strength, grab the water more easily and get to higher speeds, since they do not sit as low in the water as carvels. This is also an advantage for the shallower waterways of the Dutch river delta.
A group of important men are standing around, talking. One is the schipstimmerman - the main ship builder, and another is the owner of the wharf and of the ship being built. You can hear them going back and forth discussing what has been an on-going topic for weeks. It is a variation of an argument that you’ve heard your whole life in every shipyard you’ve ever worked in. In your experience, some shipbuilders, who are almost always also skippers, are determined to experiment and want to innovate, while others are more risk-averse and stick to the traditions that they have always known. Any ship is at risk of being completely lost on a voyage, so experimentation adds extra risk to what is an already inherently risky enterprise. That this ship you are working on is going to be a bastard combination of clinker and carvel is a testament to this ship builder being willing to try something, but not yet ready to fully let go of established norms.
Ship owners, who are usually influential businessmen whose main focus is profit, so they may push a builder to cut corners or try a risky new idea if they see the financial benefit. On the other hand, you have seen many ship-carpenters and builders want to try an idea they learned from a peer, but then be stifled because the financial backers did not wish to risk the ship’s financial productivity. In the case of this particular buis, there are a few things that the two men have been discussing and arguing and debating over for many moons, as the planning phase has moved into the construction phase. Nobody here is working from a blueprint, just from knowledge, experience and skill, and so things can be tinkered with and changed throughout if it is agreed upon.
Tinkering with designs for economic benefits
So the conversations are often about value, productivity and technical change. A ship’s value is dependent on its productivity, which is garnered by measuring its output versus the labour that goes into building it. To measure its output you need to know its purpose. Is it a fishing ship? A freight ship? A fighting ship? Depending on its purpose, the desired ratio is determined, which is length versus breadth. A ship with a higher ratio (say, long and thin) will be quicker, but not carry as much cargo. The shipbuilder and ship owner need to agree on this and the shipbuilder will determine the required depth.
The main purpose of this particular ship is to sail long voyages into deep waters and hold as many fish as possible, but the builder and the owner were not able to easily agree on the ratio. The owner wants it to have a large cargo hold, so as to haul in as much fish as possible, but also to be able to be used as a cargo ship in the herring off-season, when he could send it on a voyage to the Baltics and Spain. He understands that busses, in general, have a higher ratio than other sailing ships, but his demands to increase the size of the whole ship were countered by the shipbuilder’s opinion that the greater size could actually compromise the purpose.
The herring industry skyrocketed over the last century not just because of the herring buss, but also the development of massive nets to be dragged across huge shoals of fish. This is why busses had such high ratios. The shipbuilder has been arguing that, were it to increase much further, the net would be dragged too quickly, poorly affecting the catch and, therefore, lessening the overall output of the ship. In the end, the owner cedes to the builder, with this ship being built at a ratio of 4:1, meaning in 21st century terms it will measure 20m long and 4m wide when built, with a depth of about 3m.
Anyone building a fishing ship in Holland at this time also has to decide whether or not to include a bun. A bun is a separated compartment in the hull, through which seawater flows in and out. A catch, or even processed fillets in casks, can be thrown in the bun, and the ship can travel even further and catch more. The problem with a bun, though, is that only fish can be stored in it, so the ship’s secondary capacity as a cargo ship is sacrificed. As we know, the owner of this ship definitely wants it to partake in off-season trade, so this ship will, radically for a herring buss, not have a bun.
How many masts?
Another big decision was the rigging: how many masts? How many sails? In the north of Europe conventional clinker-built ships had been single-masted for centuries and sails had been square whilst in the Mediterranean, lateen or triangular sails had been the norm on their quicker, carvel-built ships. Some 75 years before your working on this shipyard, a revolution in rigging had erupted that would combine elements of both styles, when a shipbuilder, probably in the south-western area of France, created the first full-rigged ship. This meant a large, carvel-built ship with three masts: a fore, main and mizzen in English, or voormast, hoofdmast and bezaansmast in Dutch. Breaking slightly out of our imaginarium momentarily, the English and Dutch words for the mast at the back of the ship, the mizzenmast and bezaansmast respectively, both derive from the Spanish and Portuguese ‘mezzana’, betraying how the greater changes that overcame Dutch shipping during this period derives from increased contact with Iberian shipbuilders bringing their knowledge in this direction.
Of the three masts, then, on a full-rigged ship the fore and main masts have big, square sails, while the mizzen has the triangular lateen sort used in the south. This type of sail allows you to sail close to the wind, which is to say as much into the wind as you can.
The shipbuilder here is not convinced of the need to make the buss fully rigged, or at least weary of it, even though it is becoming ever more prevalent in shipyards around Friesland, Holland and Zeeland. The main issue is that these early fully-rigged ships sit low in the water, at risk in the shallow estuaries and shifting sands off the coast of the low countries. A ship could easily run aground unexpectedly, which is why traditional, single-masted koggen and schuits were more flat bottomed. Again, though, the ship owner’s determination to do the South-North trade runs means that the ship would need to be fully-rigged, as it would need to have the speed only full-rigging could provide. So it was the shipbuilder’s task to find a solution to this. When, one day, a Flemish Hulk came and moored in Amsterdam he saw that its shipbuilders had already found functional ways to have three masts and a flatter bottom ship, but then realised how slow this would make it. In the end, the design the builder and the owner have settled on is for a fully-rigged buss with a moderately high ratio, three-masts and a combination of carvel and clinker planking. They dropped the bow, a radical change for this type of ship. It won’t be the quickest vessel, but the transom - which is the very back of the ship - will be made square, instead of the usual rounded, to give it extra carrying capacity. All in all, you think to yourself, this ship’s design is typical of the era. In it, traditions, experiments and borrowed ideas all collide in an effort to balance desired cost, speed, strength, handling and capacity.
Caulking
After your inspection you walk from the ship towards a big barrel hanging from a tripod, raised above a huge fire pit. It is this and several other barrels around the yard that are belching out the acrid smoke that you sniffed earlier. Bubbling away inside these barrels is pine pitch, which is used in the caulking of boats. That’s why you’re there, because you are a caulker from Flanders, having made your way here because there’s more work in the shipyards in Holland nowadays. Back home they’d call what you do tinghelen, but these strange folks with their flatter way of speaking call it breeuwen. You make your way to your foreman and start your shift.
Boats need to be watertight, of course, and ever since humans started building them we have been seeking to keep them so. Wood is an organic product that reacts to its environment. It will grow and shrink with changes in temperature and all wood has or develops cracks in it, which need to be filled in via a process called caulking. This involves an organic compound being jammed into the cracks in the wood. This can’t be just any old compound. Hemp was common, and oakum another, which is the unwound fibres of old rope. Another material, common to the north-west of Europe, is moss. Yes. Moss. This is rolled up into little snakes and jammed into the crack by use of a wooden wedge and mallet. If the ship has just been careened or hauled up and is still wet when this is done, it will be enough to just let the wood ‘take’ the compound as it dries out and shrinks. However, if the wood is dry, the compound must also be protected by a waterproof substance. Pine resin is a fantastic natural waterproof substance. However, to turn it into a workable one it must be heated and mixed with the charcoal of hardwood and, usually, herbivore manure. So in the midst of this whole scene, somebody is certainly shovelling shit somewhere.
So it is here with your tools in the shipyard that we will leave you, contentedly sitting on a stool staring at the stomach of a semi-built ship-hull, rolling your little sphagnum snake on your thigh and getting ready to jam it into cracks with your happy little mallet. Peace out, 15th century caulker and thanks for letting us join you all the way to here, an ad break, at which point we shall go our separate ways. After our time together, we understand that this was an age of incremental development and change, fuelled by foreign designs and methods, adopted and adapted by local carpenters to meet more local needs and so creating ever newer and different types of ships. One must imagine there was an air of thoughtful debate and experimentation across shipyards in Holland and Zeeland as these designs and methods were discussed. Every ship being built, still largely beyond the confines of government oversight or regulation, had its own, unique potential. In the second part of the episode, we are going to discuss some of the main sources that historians use to try and get a picture of this very opaque past.
The Lastage as seen in the birds eye view painting of Amsterdam
As mentioned at the start of this episode, the history of ship building in the Netherlands during the 15th century has so few sources upon which to rely. This is most likely because of the hands-on nature of the work, which did not require literacy, let alone that you keep records about what was going on. For our imaginarium of the Lastage during the late 1400s, we turned to the oldest existing map of Amsterdam, by Cornelis Anthonisz, from 1538. That is obviously half a century later from when we said, so we tried to scale back a bit, as there was quite a lot going on in the Lastage in the period between our imaginary visit and the painting being done, which we will get into in later episodes. If you haven’t seen the painting, by the way, do yourself a favour and spend some time going over it slowly in high resolution, which you can do online. It is incredible in its detail, from a birds-eye view that Anthoniszoon had to concoct himself. The Lastage is in the bottom left corner. As to other sources, well archaeology has become central to furthering the technical understanding of ships and ship-building, while the wider, though not complete emergence of ship-carpenters’ guilds in the 16th century provide documents such guild-letters, that give some sort of insight into the main people who were involved in the creation of ships.
Door Cornelis Anthonisz. - Amsterdam Museum - www.amsterdammuseum.nl : Home : Info, het Amsterdam Museum [1], Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152658375
So let’s turn to archaeology and take a stroll down sphagnum street, to explore one example of how archaeology can help us imagine a scene such as that we depicted in the first part of the episode. If you’ve been listening to this podcast since its inception, you’re no doubt feeling a little bit disappointed that we just casually mentioned that sphagnum moss was used in caulking and then moved on without discussing it in further detail. Well, fear not dear listeners, because we are going to go into it in way more excruciating detail than you could ever want.
The use of sphagnum in caulking
In the essay “The analysis of caulking material in the study of shipbuilding technology”, Vlierman et al tell us that “Material that serves the purpose of caulking must have special qualities. First of all, it should prevent the penetration of water and it must be easily pushed into the narrow joins. Moreover, it must last for many years which means that it must withstand fluctuations in temperature and salinity and must be immune to microbiological decay”.
In the study, 182 caulking samples were taken and analysed from 92 shipwrecks, ranging from the 9th to the 20th centuries. Some of the materials found to be used in caulking included liverwort (in one instance) and even hair, ‘found in medieval and post-medieval shipwrecks.’. Animal hair was used deliberately, although I can’t help but speculated that some may have found its way in there when the caulkers rolled whatever substance they were using into a little snake on their hairy thighs. Flax may also have been used and, as it has a quick decay rate, might have been used in cases where there is no caulking material left.
Let’s come back to the moss though! I don’t have to tell you, dear listener, that moss is certainly a resource in this part of the world of which there was and is no great lack. This abundance is reflected in the caulking analysis. The vast majority of the samples studied had been caulked with moss and, while there are cases of multiple mosses being used on one job - as many as 12 different types in the case of a 12th century wreck found near Utrecht- over 50% had been done so with just a single kind. What is noticeable and interesting, however, is that prior to the middle of the 13th century, the various mosses collected for use in caulking had originated in woodland areas. In the Netherlands this meant either from the sandy soil dunes along the coast or in the eastern reaches of the country. Thereafter, however, the moss samples reveal types from different and wetter environments being used, having been mostly taken from “mires, peatbogs, heathland, fenbogs, ditches, oxbow lakes and reedland” What is more, dear listener, this shift was “accompanied by a predominance of Sphagnum.” Gasp. Sphagnum. Of those samples in which just a single moss had been used, 82% of the time that moss was sphagnum. As we have looked into in the previous episode) the 11th-16th centuries were marked by intense terraforming, blocking out water and forcing its split tangents into more and more different parts of the country, as it pushed inexorably north-west. This increased the general bogginess of the land as large swathes of it continued to inexorably sink down to the waterline. Whether this transformation is reflected in or connected to the increased use of sphagnum and other wetland mosses in ship caulking is speculation on my part, but speculation I am willing to float.
Another possible reason for the shift towards the use of sphagnum and specific, single-moss caulking techniques, is that shipyards were originally just collecting moss from their nearby environs and, simply put, these mosses became rarer or, even, vanished from the area completely as the industry grew from the 13th century on. The abundant species of Sphagnum in the low countries may well have just been the most efficient type to use on a relatively large proto-industrial scale.
Also, for the purpose of caulking, Sphagnum simply meets a lot of the requirements that people doing this would have learned to identify over time, through trial and error, as the skills, knowledge and trade developed and ideas were spread and worked upon. The idea of caulk is that it absorbs water and fills gaps in wood to prevent the water getting through. Sphagnum mosses have cells that just do this. Dry Sphagnum Papillosum has been shown to be able to absorb 41 times its body weight in water. We do not have recorded diaries of caulkers and master shipbuilders processing all the lessons that led them to deciding that a single-use sphagnum stuffing was a better option than a myriad of many mosses. We can only speculate that, along the way, mosses with long tendrils were identified as being the best thing to use for a job that people were becoming more sophisticated in, both in their practices and their tools.
In this little side sphagnum story, we can get an idea of how laborious and loving labour by archeologists, historians and scientists can slowly and incrementally build up a better idea of what really went on. So what, then, can written sources tell us?
A lack of written evidence
First, a reminder that the origins of the trade of ship-carpentry exists in countless occasions of people, way back in the mists of time, literally marking out a spot on a beach or next to a river, finding some local wood and building a boat. The grassroots, largely unregulated nature of it will not change for a long time and not at all in a uniform way across the Netherlands. Holland and Zeeland urbanised later than the southern low countries and the shift of shipyards from rural areas to urban ones was slow. The Lastage, where we imagined spending the first part of this episode, provides a perfect example of how outside the bounds of regulation ship-building existed within a town. From the late 14th century, up until the mid 16th, there was near constant contention between the people living and working there, their storage and living needs pushing up against the city wall, and the city itself, which had its own reasons for needing clear space beyond the wall. Ship-building was an inherently high fire-risk for any town in the late middle-ages and so was often done outside the bounds.
Across the Low Countries in the middle ages trades coalesced into guilds. Tradesmen collectivised and turned themselves into legal bodies, shoring up their particular craft and guarding its exploitation by a town authority or being conducted by outsiders. Guilds provided environments in which particular ideas, skills and knowledge could be nurtured and transferred generationally within the guild, even if guarded fiercely from the outside. Contradictorily, however, guild apprenticeship involved spending time as a journeyman, which sent youth far a wide to come into contact with other people, inevitably sharing ideas, skills and knowledge.
Guild structures and influence varied from place to place. Urban political power in Holland had long been more in the hands of merchants. The Count of Holland had only granted a charter allowing the establishment of craft guilds in 1367 so they were not as influential as in other parts of the Netherlands. Guilds, though, no matter their strength or influence, at least provide some reflection of how some people saw themselves and their trade in the society at the time. The mere existence of a guild and people wanting to belong to it tells us something, as it does when people choose not to belong to a guild. Edam is an example of a place where shipbuilding was a big and famed business, but in which a formal guild was never established. Clearly, the ship-carpenters there protected and maintained their business in a way that worked for them, for which they did not deem guild status necessary.
For the formation of guilds historians rely on guild letters, which are kind of like a guild’s founding constitution. The original of these show the time when a guild specific to a particular trade was formally established. They vary from town to town, each being specific to local conditions, but they each share some of the same subject matter, being language that incorporates the guild as a legal body, that sets the conditions for membership, and that stipulates the training required and the cost attached to entrance into the guild. There are a grand total of fourteen surviving guild-letters that are relevant to shipbuilders. Eight are from Holland and six from Zeeland. This means that even if we have what we think is the foundational guild-letter from a certain place, perhaps we are just missing the ones preceding it, as it was not uncommon for guild’s to renew their letter after a time.
Furthermore, as ship-carpenters and those working on ships were wielders of tools more than pens, extant guild-letters only give a rare insight into the collective intentions of some of the people involved in shipbuilding. Before and after guilds being established there were still organised collectives of ship-carpenters operating on personal and business levels in their local areas, even without guild certification, as in Edam and Haarlem.
Details from guild letters
The oldest guild letter that directly references ship carpentry is from Dordrecht in 1397. Dordrecht makes sense as an early place of formal organisation, given their shipbuilding industry probably started as early as the 11th century. In 1299, the town also acquired the staple-rights to any goods being shipped on the rivers through Holland. Dordrecht would enforce this right vigorously and violently, as we covered in the previous episode. Being positioned as it was, at one end of the passage inside the dunes, Dordrecht became an entrepôt for goods being shipped through Europe. From early on, one of the most important and frequent products was the timber being floated down the rivers from the Rhineland which had to, by law, come to Dordrecht before being put to market. Millers and sawyers set up shop to process the wood, while carpenters set up shop and exploited the need for so many ships coming into harbour, often needing so many repairs. From these early stages, through the 15th and deep into the 16th century Dordrecht’s ship-carpenters’ guild would remain the most stringent and regulated of ship-carpenters guilds in Holland. We know from later 16th century documents that, by that stage, only three towns in Holland had ship-carpenters’ guilds that conducted “formal tests of competence”, being Amsterdam, Arnemuiden and Dordrecht. Of these, only Dordrecht’s ship-carpenters’ guild had any really testing admission exam. Karel Davids, an emeritus professor in social and economic history from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam details this in a conference paper from 2000 entitled “Guilds, guildsmen and technological innovation in early modern Europe: the case of the Dutch Republic”. In Arnemuiden, to get into the guild, you had to take “a plank 24 or 25 feet long out of a ship and then [to replace] the same plank along the ribband so that it fits properly and [to make] a hulk mast and [to help] to step it” In Dordrecht, you had to do six things: “1) finish the bow of a new ship so that is is strong, along with its mast-knee, 2) build a boat with curved posts of four or six tons and 3) complete three out of the following repair tasks: take a board out of an old boat and replace it with another, take a plank out of a ship either fore or aft and replace it, put a post in a ship, make a fore windlass and an after windlass and put them in place properly, make and step a mast and sprit and make a rudder `and all that pertains thereto’.” I know whose ships I would rather sail on. What this tells us is that conditions in Dordrecht clearly existed to warrant the establishment of a guild earlier than in other Hollandic towns and that ship-carpentry across Holland still carried a sense of being done without great authoritative oversight and regulation.
A really important practical aspect of the shipbuilding scene, in any town, was the ownership of jacks, or windlasses, which are used to haul ships and other heavy things out of the water. In the early ordinances of the Dordrecht guild, this was the central regulation. The guild owned a monopoly right to use windlasses in Dordrecht. Its members could rent them equitably, with the money going into the common pot, but had to return them in good nick. There were other benefits and obligations involved in belonging to the guild, besides just… being able to work. In 1467 Dordrecht’s shipbuilders’ guild used that common pot to give sick pay to its waylaid members. You got holidays, which were saints day and religious devotional days which you were forbidden from working on, at pain of punishment by the guild. There were also various obligations which you might not expect, like being in possession of a ‘tabbart en cap roen’, which was a long cape and a hat that had to be worn at every formal occasion, including the funerals of guild members' families. You have to imagine that more than one ship carpenter in Dordrecht had some sweaty-palm moments, trying to find his fancy bloody hat, desperate to not be late to his mate’s mother-in-law’s funeral and be punished by the guild. Jokes aside, it seems safe to say that Dordrecht’s shipbuilding industry was relatively advanced in its sophistication from early on.
Richard Unger, whose vast work we have counted upon so greatly for this episode, makes the point that the establishment of a guild is first and foremost an act of economic defence. Using Amsterdam’s ship-carpenters as an example, he writes “For Amsterdam ship-carpenters, in a rapidly growing town with a well established guild system and a government deeply involved in regulating all aspects of shipping, the choices were limited. They could let the town government legislate for them. That had obvious disadvantages. Guild organisation was common so the ship-carpenters turned first to larger guilds which might protect them and then finally to self-regulation through the chartering of their own independent guild.” The same situation applied to Rotterdam and Hoorn, two other cities in which shipbuilding would become baked into their very identities.
Amsterdam, in 1500 a town of around 10,000 burgers, had developed a shipyard in the boggy marsh just beyond its city limit. This area became known as the Lastage and was the scene of our imaginarium in the first part of this episode. Though small, Amsterdam also enjoyed particular trade rights that a shipping and therefore shipbuilding industries could be nurtured by. The town had received a staple right to all German beer coming into Holland in 1323 and was well positioned to take advantage of its defeat of the Hanseatic Wendic cities in the early 1440s (which we covered way back in Episode 23) in order to then haul ridiculous amounts of grain back from the Baltics, becoming, to all effect, a grain staple. Carpenters (not just ship carpenters) belonged to the same guild as blacksmiths (as well as at least two other guilds) before 1468 when they formed their own brotherhood of “House carpenters, ship carpenters and others…”, with appointed captains which maintained an altar (a part of the religious component of a guild’s existence that we aren’t going to go into because everything at this time should be looked at through the lens of hardcore religious devotion). The first record of shipbuilders in Amsterdam is a gild document from 1500 but it was not until between 1578-89, about a century after the period we are focusing on, that we get an official guild letter.
The document from 1500 asserts that “order, rules and policy be made for carpenters and, among others, ship-carpenters”. It tells us a fair bit about the increasing value of the skills and knowledge of the trade, but also that the men who composed it had concerns that they needed to protect the economic strength of ship-carpenters and guild members, and control certain tools. The first three articles put limitations on shipbuilding and its related activities. The first says that each ship carpenter must dedicate one pound to their guild’s altar whenever a ship was built. Secondly, at risk of a fine, only members of the guild could work on a ship with one exception, which was if the person behind the project could not get any tools or workers and the guild members would only work for higher pay than journeymen or foreign workers, such as our imaginary character from earlier. The third article is about the guild always being in possession of tools like bellows, used by caulkers to remove old caulk, and windlasses, the jacks that haul ships out of water. Again, while this all tells us about the direction that some ship-carpenters wanted to go, it tells us nothing about the shipbuilders who did not wish to partake who perhaps, hated the oversight, regulation and exclusivity that was the nature of guilds. We do not get any other perspective than these early ship-building guild members’.
It is tempting to look at these early surviving documents from Dordrecht and Amsterdam and other towns like Veere (1520), Alkmaar (1521) and point to them as foundational points of the proto-industrialisation that’s going to skyrocket Hollandic and Zeelandic shipbuilding to a position of world supremacy in just over a century. But really what they tell us is that shipbuilding was valuable enough in those places to warrant invested parties trying to protect their interests in it. They also reflect the transition that shipyards had made from the 15th into the 16th centuries, from places on the outskirts, in rural domains, to locations within urban environs.
Unfortunately for all guilds, and no less shipbuilding, inherent within their structures and nature of exclusivity was the double edge sword that would be their eventual downfall. On the one hand, the skills and knowledge are nurtured and, albeit guarded through exclusivity, handed down from generation to generation. On the other hand, in an industry that was not trying to maintain a standard but to always push for better, bigger, faster and more economic, the guild apprenticeship system saw young journeymen travelling far and wide, sharing and absorbing information from various sources on ship carpentry. As the History of the Netherlands would proceed into the 16th and 17th centuries, shipbuilding would remain integral to the shipping and trade that were fundamental to the financial systems, and which would be crucial to martial and military endeavours of a growing thalassocracy. It would cease to be the grass-roots, non-regulated industry that had been its origins and become a focus of state and private venture. Leaning again on Unger:
“Dating from the late middle ages guilds of independent producers, organizations given legal status by towns, brought together the owners of wharves who were skilled labourers. Not common in areas outside northern Europe, those institutions oversaw training in the techniques of the trade and offered a rudimentary system of grading levels of accomplishment. The guilds then gave ship carpenters an easier path to move to other towns and in the process increase their own knowledge while disseminating information more broadly. By the seventeenth century the role of those institutions decreased in importance, in part because the need to spread technological innovations declined and the scale of construction grew. The concentration of authority in the hands of the designer of the ship led to a deskilling of workers on the wharf and reduced the need for training.”
By the 1580s, about a century after the time-period of this episode’s focus, this environment of shipbuilding in Holland produced a ship called the fluyt, seen as the bookend that caps a particular period of Dutch ship development that started with the Herringbuis in the early 15th century.The fluyt became, in Unger’s words, “...the great cargo carrier of northern Europe in the seventeenth century”. It would make up the majority of the Dutch merchant fleet upon which the coming era of commercial prosperity would depend. The fluyt was far longer and narrower than its predecessors. According to one source (the poet Velius), the original fluyt had a ratio of 4:1 but this became even 5 or 6:1. It was a three masted ship with a shallow draught, requiring fewer crewmen than equivalent ships of its size and had a large hold to carry as much cargo as possible. The fluyt would be the eventual result of the period of ship-building that we have been focusing on in this episode. She would emerge in a later time, produced more industrially and under greater government oversight and regulation than her predecessors, by ship-carpenters who were becoming absorbed into urban social structures such as guilds. This eventual ship, however, that will carry unforeseen amounts of goods and people across the planet, can find her origins in all those little ideas, experiments, risks and adaptations made by countless, forever nameless people in random little shipyards all across Holland and Zeeland in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Sources used:
Theo Bakker, “Amsterdam’s zeehaven in beweging: de Lastage", https://www.theobakker.net/pdf/haven.pdf
Jeroen van der Vliet, (2007). The Lastage : the maritime quarter of late medieval Amsterdam. In M. Bochaca & J.-L. Sarrazin (Eds.), Ports et littoraux de l’Europe atlantique (1–). Presses universitaires de Rennes. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.6495
Richard Unger, (2019). Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and Atlantic, 1400-1800. In Routledge eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429426902
Richard Unger, Dutch Shipbuilding Before 1800: Ships and Guilds, Van Gorcum, 1978
Richard Unger, “Dutch ship design in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (1973) - In: Viator vol. 4 (1973) p. 387-410
Lucassen, J., & Unger, R. W. (2000). Labour Productivity in Ocean Shipping, 1450–1875. International Journal of Maritime History, 12(2), 127-141. https://doi.org/10.1177/084387140001200208
Taco Tichelaar, Oude Waal 35, Pieter Bast en de lijnbanen op de Lastage | Taco Tichelaar. (n.d.). https://tacotichelaar.nl/wordpress/huisonderzoeken/oude-waal-35/#fnref-429-3
W. H.M. de Fremery, ´De opkomst der Amsterdamsche Haven; Een studie door W. H. M. de Fremery´, Jaarboek Amstelodamum 22 (1925), 23-110.
Scheepsbouw te Amsterdam in vroeger eeuwen, door F.G.M. Douwes (Ons Amsterdam jg. 13, 1961)
Sintels - Archeologie Dordrecht. (n.d.). https://www.archeologiedordrecht.nl/vondsten/vondst-en-verhaal/kunststukje-van-de-week/sintels
Jan van Reigersbergh van Cortgene, Dye cronycke van Zeelandt, 1551
Cappers, R. T. J., Mook-Kamps, E., & Bottema, S. (2000). The analysis of caulking material in the study of shipbuilding technology. Palaeohistoria, 39/40, 577 - 590.
Davids, Karel. (2000). Guilds, guildsmen and technological innovation in early modern Europe: the case of the Dutch Republic.