Antique Korean Ships

[John Wagenseil]

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[John Wagenseil]

It is "spooky" to watch the video of Korean ships underway with their masts and sails down.
Unlike Western row galleys with their banks of oarsmen with long protruding and vulnerable oars, Korean man powered ships were sculled (Sculling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . See the sub-entry on "Single-oar sculling" and "China". )
(From wikipedia: " This system allows multiple rowers to operate one oar, allowing large, heavy boats to be rowed if necessary. The efficiency of this system gave rise to the Chinese saying "a scull equals three oars"").
Korean ships had banks of sculls which propelled the ship by making a twisting almost propeller-like motion through the water. The sculls were not lifted out of the water and did not project beyond the hull, so both the teams of scullers and the oar itself were within the hull and the sculls were protected from being sheared off by an oblique ramming attack.
This is unlike the rowers of a galley who were often completely exposed and suffered terrible causalities from missile attacks. Sculling is also more efficient that rowing and a team of scullers is more compact that an bank of oarsmen.
The Asian system of semi-rigid sails with bamboo battens (Junk rig - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) made possible the use of a very simple pole rig, and did not require a large crew to set the sails. The sails on a junk rig can be controlled from the deck.
The 16th c. Korean navy had to face a Japanese invasion. The Japanese ships were gigantic but lightly build barges, topped off with a high castle. The Japanese ships packed their ships full of archers, hand-gunners and huge masses of samurai and ashigaru (foot soldiers) for hand to hand fighting after boarding enemy ships.
Admiral Yi's response was to build smaller faster ships armed with canon that could sink the Japanese ships from a distance. Samurai and ashigaru wearing heavy personal armor did not do well in an aquatic environment.
Interestingly, about the same time but half a world away, Drake used similar tactics against the massive infantry carrying ships of the Spanish Armada.

[B-Manic]

very interesting - thanks for sharing

[paperhino]

Turtle Ship Structure

Naval War Sa-cheon

the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Gravelines.

Wiki

[whulsey]

Interesting, especially the comment about the similar dates on 2 major battles. I'm sure like most of us if you even had a world history class in high school it was much more European history then a separate chapter towards the end of class on Asian history. I think I learned more about the interactions in my art history classes then in the regular history classes.