The Evolution of Shipbuilding
Friday, October 13, 2006 at 11:56 Discovering the Great South Land
by Byron Heath
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first recorded European contact with Australia, the landfall of Dutchman Willem Janzoon in his tiny scout ship the Duyfken at Pennefather River on Cape York Peninsula. The background to this event and the wider story of European knowledge of Australia is documented in a new book by retired electrical engineer Byron Heath.
In the book Discovering the Great South Land Heath explains how the advances made by Europeans in ship design and navigation from the 15th century onwards enabled them to conduct mostly successful return voyages to the other side of the world. Large overseas trading empires quickly followed, leading ultimately to the discovery and charting of the east coast by James Cook in 1770 and the establishment of a British colony takes a new look at the Age of Discovery penal colony 18 years later.
Heath discusses how Europe’s great nautical ventures started with the Portuguese caravel, an amalgam of early European and near eastern ship designs. This produced a relatively easily operated, ocean going vessel of quite shallow draft, ideally suited for exploring unfamiliar coastlines.
The author uses an engineer’s rather than an historian’s approach to show how naval architecture and shipbuilding evolved from the caravel base, adapting new technology such as combining fore and aft rigged sails with square ones, improving hull designs, replacing the whipstaff method of steering with a spoked wheel, introducing copper sheathing to antifoul the hull and an antiscorbutic diet to counter scurvy, the scourge of the long distance sailor.
In documenting the gradual improvement in navigational instruments, chartmaking and routing aids, he discusses the quadrant and astrolabe through to the modern sextant for finding latitude and for longitude, from the dead-reckoning method to the development of accurate chronometers, all now superseded by the satellite-based global positioning system.
Heath’s book also looks closely at shipbuilding methods, especially of the highly productive Dutch shipyards. He explains how a resource-poor country sourced timber from all over Europe and how, with the aid of wind-powered machinery, a small workforce could produce a merchant ship for the Dutch East India company in little more than a month.
The Duyfken was a product of one of those shipyards and its West Australian built replica graces the front cover of the book. This little ship, weighing just 140t and 34m in length, earned a world first in historic ship reenactment by sailing from Australia via Indonesia to the Netherlands in 2001/2002, taking one year to complete the voyage. Since the ship was launched in Fremantle in 1999, it has covered more than 65,000km, testament to the seagoing qualities of Age of Discovery ships and to the enthusiasm and dedication of the reenactment crew. Anyone who is interested in sailing ships and how technology influences historical developments will find this book a fascinating read.
This review of Discovering the Great South Land, written by Bob Jackson, was originally published in Engineers Australia magazine, January 2006. You can purchase a copy of the book from EA Books:
