A 90 feet long pinas by Storck

[abhovi]

People who read my previous threads know that I like to base my models on historical facts. Descriptions in ancient literature, contemporary paintings and archaeological finds are usually the sources I make my models from. I like to use modelbuilding as a method of research and paper makes a quick project possible.

There are however situations in which even historical material can be subject to serious doubts. One of such cases is a drawing attributed to Jacobus Storck, who lived from 1641 till after 1692. He was a painter of river and city views and worked together with his brother Abraham Storck, who was well known for his maritime paintings.
In the Amsterdam Scheepvaartmuseum there is a drawing known as a ‘pinas’ made by Jacobus. His name was not on it, but the comparison with another actually Storck-signed technical drawing of a Statenjacht dated 1678, justifies the attribution.



Storck shows us a side view, a top view, another side view in which half frames were drawn, and a body plan. The museum catalogue calls this the drawing of a pinas with 90 feet length between stem and stern, a beam of 24 feet and an (unmentioned) depth in hold of 11 feet. What more can you wish?

For a fool like me, who likes to build after historical material, the drawing seems too good to be true. And I am not the only one: for many years model makers have tested their skills on a plan of a ‘Fregatte Berlin’, that was published in a 50 years old German book, called ‘Risse von Schiffe des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts’ (Draughts of 16th and 17th century ships). Progress in our knowledge of Dutch shipbuilding as a result of replica and model-building experiments has shown the draughts in this book to be hopelessly obsolete and scientifically incorrect, but the presentation of the ‘Fregatte’ was obviously based on Storck’s drawing. So what could be wrong with that?



Well, in the first place a pinas, as the museum has apparently classified the ship on this drawing, is an armed merchantman. A merchant vessel is designed to carry cargo. This ship has one deck and is armed with no less than 18 guns. A sufficient crew to sail the ship and man the ordnance will exist of at least 60. Where will they stay? There is no ‘tween decks’ where they can live. Only the hold can offer some accommodation. The rest of the hold must have been filled with ammunition, food and fresh water for so many men. So, this vessel lacks any room for cargo. The ship was apparently not a pinas. It was probably a small man-of-war. Call it a frigate or a jacht.

Secondly there is this for its time extremely technical-looking drawing. The system of building ships in the era does not allow for lines plans. It was a method based on applying traditionally grown formulae and drawings were not necessary and probably not even understood. Only in 1725 the first (navy) ship was built in Rotterdam after predesigned draughts.
We see diagonal lines drawn in the frames, from where perpendiculars could be struck reaching to the frames, as visible in the Statenjacht drawing. This allowed the draughtsman to make a precise representation of a curved line. The conclusion must be that this is a drawing, made after an existing ship, documented by Storck, not a plan to build a ship from. But it is a mystery to me why someone like Jacobus, who ran a paintings-factory in Amsterdam, together with his brother Abraham, would be interested in the shape of any ship, apart from using it as a tool for their paintings. But how could that have worked? And where did he get the idea to make a representation in an anachronistic way?

Finally the shape of the underwater body of this ship is in no way Dutch. Displacement is 183,5 tons, according to the calculations of the wonderful Delftship computer program, while at least a hundred tons more are necessary to keep the ship afloat.

Together with my loyal friend Rene Hendrickx from Belgium we fed the Storck drawing to the computer program Delftship, of which I reported in an earlier thread. The outcome was, as expected, a catastrophe.
There are two ways in which the shapes of the frames are depicted. Once in the elevation plan, turned forward 90 degrees and a second time in the body plan. We can be short about the body plan. Fore and aft frames do not seem to differ and the drawing is as fake as can be. The frames in the elevation plan seemed a better option. But here is the result in 3 D.



The frames amidships seem reasonably fair, but the second last frame is hopelessly wrong. In the fore end of the ship the shape is far too small. There is no actual body volume and a ship like this would stick its nose so deep in the water that it can’t be sailed.

Time to make a cardboard frame. The second last frame I already corrected to make it fair in the aft. The fore part has remained unchanged. You can see what went wrong: there is insufficient volume in the bow. The nice S-shape you see in paintings when looking at the bow from three quarters is totally absent.
I corrected the lines so that they were in accordance with the midship section. Still I feel there is too little volume for a Dutch ship. Moreover, the gunports in the tuck were too low and the windows of the cabin were impossible to place at the right height. I was at the point where I decided to ‘abandon ship’, when a friend drew my attention to a contract for a 90 feet long ship with one deck in Van IJks book: De Nederlandse Scheepsbouwkonst Opengestelt (Dutch Shipbuilding Unveiled), from 1697. Same size, same single deck, would that teach us more about this failure?
Again Rene Hendrickx and Delftship helped me out. Though the contract was not entirely flawless (for instance a too low sternpost), the shape on the main frame showed how Storcks drawing should have looked if the ship was to be capable to sail. The difference in volume was over a hundred tons !



Here you can see that the volume of the bow is completely insufficient and how I had to remove the skin to reshape the fore side of the hull.





To the left the corrections I made to the Storck drawing, in the middle the corrected body plan, which looks very much like the 'Fregatte' drawing I showed above, and to the right the shape as it should be according to the contract in Van IJk's book. This is a typical Dutch ship shape: flat in the bottom and with full bilges.

So in the end I end up with an unfinished ‘impossible’ ship model and the conviction that Storck’s drawing in the Amsterdam Scheepvaartmuseum is a fake.
Shipmodelbuilding in accordance with 3D technology can teach us the value or uselessness of historical sources, however original they seem to be.

[CMDRTED]

I had a slightly better outcome with the Pinta hull with framework from anatomy of the ship, columbus vessels. still the entry of the fwd section seems too thin? below the waterline.

[Vermin_King]

Sorry that it didn't work out.

I imagine a diorama with this ship plowing through the seas with water rolling over the front.

[Kugelfang]

Experimental archeology in miniature. Very interesting.

--jeff

[bradford46]

A pleasure to watch a master at work.
Your conclusions make a lot of sense, and I would certainly follow them if I were doing your build. It may be that a crew of 60 would be needed, but there would not necessarily have to be sleeping accommodation below decks for them: on older ships seamen would just find a space on deck or anywhere they could and flop down, an uncomfortable, wet, and cold way to be on a ship to be sure. The presence of a dozen guns or more on a relatively small ship doesn't mean that all the guns would have to be manned at the same time. Unlike larger warships broadsides would not likely be the tactic of choice; a merchant ship would prefer to defend itself while fleeing and not engaging an attacker.
I like the way you have reasoned through this, Ab, and find your hull shape smooth and easy on the eye.

[abhovi]

Thank you all for your kind replies. I realize I have not been entirely clear in my statement. The models was a corrected design based on Storck's mysterious drawing. What it should look like was the last picture I showed, based on a contract in Van IJK's book. This is the difference, seen from a quarter view:



As you can see the left one (Storck) is much 'thinner'. If we look at any Van de Velde painting we see a clear S-shape:



But the model based on Storck did not have that shape:



Here the model is on my work bench. As you can see the underwater part in the bow is almost entirely absent... This ship won't sail.

Bradford46: you are right, not all the guns have to be manned, but this is not a trader, but obviously a (small) man-of-war. And as to the crew sleeping somewhere on deck, I'm sure that was done in the Caribbean, but in the sort of weather we have here in Europe, I promise you: no sailor would be hardened enough to survive that sort of accommodation.

Vermin_King: if I finish this model I am sure it will serve once or twice in a photoshop picture made by my son. Something that will look like this (from my book on Merchant Vessels):



Thank you all for joining me here.

[Vermin_King]

I've learned a lot from your threads here. Thanks

[abhovi]

Over two years ago I opened a very short-living thread about a 90-feet long 17th century ship based on a draught after a drawing in the collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam, signed by the painter Jacobus Storck (see my previous posts here above). The drawing had some most puzzling aspects; the shape was to say at the least unusual, construction lines did not match and to make a long story short, it appeared to be a fake. I was able to study the original material and proved it (and at least 11 more drawings in the same collection) to be fake by means of the watermarks in the paper: the paper was about a century younger than the date (1678) written on it. The paper was extremely thin and obviously cut from an old book, possibly a bible. The fact that the drawing was fake did not surprise me: Storck could never have made a technical drawing like this, in exactly the same manner as Leonardo da Vinci never drew a bicycle somewhere in his voluminous notes: both representations were literally loaded with anachronisms. Someone played a trick on us. Pity for many modelers who built 'die Fregatte Berlin' from the book or from the kit by Corel, because they built a fictitious model with a wrong shape and no buoyancy.
It had has bothered me for years that I never succeeded in finding any picture or print depicting a 90 feet one with a single deck. Although I have seen and studied hundreds of original paintings and drawings of 17th century ships, I never spotted one. In my opinion such a ship could never have existed. I explained that in my first post.

However, I also mentioned a specification contract by Cornelis van Yk in his book De Nederlandse Scheepsbouwkonst Opengestelt (Dutch Shipbuilding unveiled), published in 1697. It describes exactly such a ship, 90-feet long with a single deck. It puzzled me for a long time. Van Yk as a source is absolutely trustworthy, so such vessels must have existed. Was the Storck drawing right after all, even being a proven fake? It kept nagging me, like a nail in my shoe. The shape of the Storck model was proven impossible by the calculation facility in the Delftship shipbuilding program, but if such vessels existed, then what should be their shape? For me there was only one way to find out: I had to make another model and compare the two.
This is what I found out.

Together with Rene Hendrickx, my Belgium partner, I produced the plans for the Van Yk vessel and I built the model. Of course the same scale (1/77) was used. Right from the start it was obvious that its volume below the waterline was much bigger than in the Storck (or the‘Berlin’) model. The difference in displacement was over a hundred tons. The Van Yk model also had a lesser beam, which resulted in narrower decks. The 18 guns on the Storck model were not plausible, Van Yk gives an ordnance of only 12 guns. Not visible here is the difference in the dimensions of masts and spars. Van Yk provides us with the specification of the rig as well and here too we see remarkable differences, although the rigging of the ships in the German book showed that their creators did apply the rules-of-thumb that were used in the era. Van Yk notes no mizzen topmast and no fore topgallant mast, which produces a much simpler rig than the complicated rig of the Berlin reconstruction.


Here both models, unfinished, the Storck one to the left, the van Yk one to the right. Note the differences in shape. I admit, these are bad pictures, but at least the difference can be seen.

What could have been the reason to build a one-decked ship instead of a two decks one? The purpose of the vessel must have been a military one. Suppose the guns were not guns at all. If they were fake, no 60 or 70 men crew would be necessary. The ship could be sailed by a crew of 12, like many more small ships of those days. But why carry fake guns? Apparently it was done to mislead the enemy. Why? In my opinion the ship must have been built as a fire ship. That might explain the absence of a second deck. More decks meant more costs of building.
Mostly fire ships were old, obsolete vessels at the end of their careers. But there are records of ships deliberately built as a fire ship. That seems a terrible waste of money and material, but what about the costs of our nowadays cruise missiles? I heard they cost two million dollars a piece. In wartimes cost is no item. In 1668 the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1666-1668) came to an end but the war industry was producing ships at high speed. A build as a fire ship seems a plausible possibility.
I admit that there is a lot of speculation in this theory. But it is the only solution I can think of for the questions these models raise.
As for the model, I chose to show it drying its sails in a calm, with many men working on the rigging.

[rmks2000]

Fantastic work. I am not a ship model builder but can very much appreciate the skill required to design and build these.

[Don Boose]

A fascinating story! I am always deeply impressed with your maritime knowledge, artistic skill, and research tenacity. Somehow, I had missed the original post and was glad to be able to read the entire story of your research and experiments.

A pinas is in English a "pinnace," and I have just found out that the state tall ship of Delaware, Kalmar Nyckel (a replica of the Dutch-built vessel that carried Swedish settlers to America) is a full-rigged pinnace, or pinas. About Us | Kalmar Nyckel

Many thanks for these always-interesting and informative illustrated essays and splendid ship models (even the ones quickly built to test theories are beautiful).

Don