From the comments:
Do you have any references on how harbor taxes drove ship design? I've never heard of that concept and it sounds fascinating. Asked by Rick T
Indulge me for four minutes. Let me share the "story" as I remember it.
The Mediterranean Sea is very well suited to short-hop trading. There is an abundance of harbors that are close together due to the wrinkled nature of the topography. Many civilizations popped up so there are/were many cities sited on those natural harbors.
It is conceivable that a trading ship could spend almost as much time in port unloading-purchasing-loading as sailing. It might drop anchor in a new port after sailing two days so it could conceivably be averaging 50 port-calls a year.
Compared to the 2000 miles of east-west coastline of Africa approximately 2500 miles to the south (Sierra Leone to Camaroon), the 5000 miles of Med coastline from Spanish Gibralta to the mouth of the Nile boasted in approximately the same east-west extent and a far more salubrious climate (important for developing surplus for trade), and MANY more ports. Africa being handicapped by shallow seas, barrier islands and mangrove swamps for the majority of that coastline.
Competition for rents
Economists use a strange term for the allocation of profits in a value-chain. They call it "competition for rents".
Consider how that bowl of cornflakes showed up in your cereal bowl this morning.
Salesmen sold seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and equipment to a farmer who rented land and grew the corn. He sold the corn to an elevator who sold it to speculators in Chicago who sold it to Kellogg's. Kellogg's hired an advertising firm and paid multiple media outlets to advertise their brand of corn-flake. Kroger and Walmart and Dollar General bought pallet loads of the cereal and you or your beautiful wife probably purchased a box of them for $5.34.
OK...who gets how much of that $5.34? At the farmer-to-elevator hand-off the amount had been whittled own to about $0.15 for the weight of the corn that went into that box.
Back to the ship...
The same dynamic was in place as the ship traveled from port-to-port. The ports charged some fee for the use of the facilities each time a ship docked. Governments (sigh, shrug) never change. At fifty port-calls a year, the fees became astronomical to the ship owner.
The ports took a stab at adjusting the rates based on estimates of how much the owners could pay. You cannot get blood out of a turnip. So they charged more for larger boats/ships than for smaller ones. They charged little or none for boats that called that port "home".
How do you measure a ship?
Remember, simple arithmetic beyond counting was more than most adults could accomplish.
The simplest way is to pace the length of the boat "1,2,3...15,16" and then continue counting when you paced the width "...17,18,19,20" and then base the harbor tax on that combined number. Another way would be to multiply the length and the width "16 times 4" but that is vastly more complicated than the string counting method.
The assumption was that if the ship was multi-deck, the top deck was not only the most accessible but it was usually the largest.
 |
| "Tumblehome" is where the top-deck is narrower than a lower-deck. |
It didn't take ship owners too long before they added a small, raised deck and added tumble-home to the designs. Bear in mind that wooden ships might only last 10 years in sub-tropical waters so they might get replaced three-to-five times during the owner's productive lifetime.
Like the fox chasing the rabbit, both got faster. The ports changed the procedure so the tax-collector measured the second deck. Another deck was added at the front midway between the height of the poop-deck and the mid-deck. The procedure was changed again...
But you asked for references, not narrative
Back in the golden days of the internet, it would have been easier to dig-up references. Alas, it is now so cluttered that it is hard to find things.
The best I could do in 30 minutes of digging is this snip from Wikipedia
It is a persistent myth that the fluyt (a type of cargo ship) was developed and functioned to evade Sound Tolls. The toll registers, however, show that during the 70 years from 1562 to 1632 it was a well-established procedure in the Sound for the toll-officers to use the bills of lading to determine the loading-capacities of the vessels passing through. They did not employ any sort of measuring device to assess the width, length, and depth of the vessels and then calculate the size of the ships. -Source
"Sound Tolls" were the harbor-taxes for the home-port of this type of ship. Reference back to the second paragraph in the section "Back to the ship...". This snip is very specific about "Sound Tolls" and does not reference any of the other, non-home ports the ships visited world-wide. Frankly, if you were an Italian portmaster in 1600, would you trust a Dutch bill-of-lading? Would you be able to read it? What if you were an Ottoman portmaster? Egyptian? Indonesian?
Gratuitous Image
Bonus section
There is a lot of reasons that I ran across on the internet that 'splained why wooden sailing ships had features like poop-decks (the one in the stern). Most of those reasons smelled of bullshit.
One reason that was given was "Poop decks increase the buoyancy in the rear of the boat." Point-of-fact: Only the portions of the ship below the water-line have any influence on buoyancy..
Another reason given was "It improved the handling of the boat". That seems improbable because portions of the boat the project upward raise the center of gravity and act like sails that cannot be adjusted. Those sound like bit minuses for handling.
A third reason "The raised poop-deck meant that the captain could see what was happening on the deck." This person watched too many movies. If visibility were the goal there would not be a blind-spot immediately ahead of the poop-deck and there would definitely not be any decks in the bow that were higher than the poop-deck.
You have a brain. I presented the evidence I was able to collect in a hasty trip around the internet. Draw your own conclusions.
Ah, the Golden Days of the InterWeb . Sadly, they are indeed cluttered - on the bright side, I know this one weird trick that allows you to...
ReplyDeleteHumanity: Adapting to government taxes and tolls almost as much as to the environment...
Allotta peope don't know that the term "turnpike" was used for a road that skirted the collection point for tolls... Ironic how now, most toll roads are referred to as turnpikes...
DeleteMy understanding is that the raised poop deck came from one, or both, of two reasons:
ReplyDelete1. It protected the tiller and ship's officers from both weather and missile weapons (first ballista and arrows, later gunpowder weapons).
2. It is a remnant of "fighting castles" , multi story structures used both defensively and offensively during boarding operations - with low powered missile weapons height helps, and the high sides made it harder for an enemy to board. (And yes, they were distinctly copied from land fortifications). They were removed as designs advanced and naval fighting came into its own.
Just my penny; due to inflation my thoughts aren't worth 2 pennies anymore.
Jonathan
I think you have it backwards. The cost of things with tangible become more expensive in terms of the nominal currency when there is inflation. That means that your thoughts are worth $2 now.
DeleteBut if you don't bathe, your armpits will be worth two scents...
DeletePeteforester, if you should watch the movie, Oscar, which I thought hilarious, the scene when Nora the maid tells Marissa Tomei's character, '... either way you'll be out of this house', and watch Marissa's facile response. Then you will know my response to your shrewd, abrupt commentary.
DeleteThank you for entertaining my question. I'm sure there are more theories about Age of Sail ship design as there are historians, the shipwrights that built them didn't exact keep design notes, at best they had rules of thumb on what worked before and some understanding of stability but no way to calculate it.
ReplyDeleteRegarding transit taxes: Of course the owners of any choke point will charge a fee if they can get away with it, that is why there are castles along the Rhine: tax collection.
I thought that it was to provide more cabin space for VIP passengers, or if there aren't any, the captain and his officers. Aft is where you want to be on a sailing ship, especially one that's been out for a while. Water was strictly for drinking, and rationed. Salt water cleans people poorly and clothes not at all, so the smell at the bow could be pretty nasty.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the raised deck at the stern kept the ship from being "pooped" or swamped by waves from behind.
ReplyDeleteHardly will I enter into the confrontation of the etymology of the term, but to say pooped is transitive, therefore poop came first.
DeleteThis reminds me of a swordfish hunting during which a member of the crew hanged his rear end over the transom to do his business. Was then, the work deck also to be known as the poop deck?
The oldest reference I found was from 1575, A Dictionary in Latine and English: puppis, the hinder part of a ship. Could be much older. No mention of a deck, though.
ReplyDeleteEtymology I saw was it came from the French for stern (la poupe). On a boat every deck is the roof/ceiling of the space below so the Poop deck is the roof of the Quarterdeck house.
Delete