The Wood Age by Roland Ennos

Author:Roland Ennos [Ennos, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-01-18T17:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Limiting Our Outlook

James IV of Scotland not only had pretensions to construct eternal buildings, but also grandiose plans to recapture Palestine for Christendom; and to do so he ordered the construction of a fleet of thirty-eight warships led by an enormous flagship. The Michael was to be the largest ship in the world, a four-masted carrack, 240 feet long, 36 feet wide, and with a displacement of around a thousand tons. Construction posed logistical problems, though, since Scotland had no shipyards big enough to build it in, and James had to found a new port for this purpose, Newhaven, two miles north of Edinburgh. The ship took five years to complete and was said to have consumed “all the woods of Fife,” but she was eventually launched in 1511 and fitted out by 1512 with twenty-four heavy guns with which to fire broadsides. The achievement put Henry VIII of England, that most egotistical king, into a fit of envy so strong that it was not assuaged until he had built an even bigger ship, modestly named the Henry Grace à Dieu, which had two gun decks sporting forty-three heavy guns and a total displacement of around fifteen hundred tons. Neither ship had a distinguished career. James was diverted from his plans for a crusade, by his commitments, under the Auld Alliance with France, to go to war with England to divert Henry from his war with Louis XII. As we have seen, he was killed at Flodden Field after his disastrous invasion of 1513, and his big ship was sold off to France at a bargain price of forty thousand livres. Henry’s ship, meanwhile, proved top-heavy and unstable and had to be remodeled into a smaller ship, which was mostly used as a diplomatic vessel. Its most important task was to take Henry to the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, where he memorably (to the French if not the English) lost an impromptu wrestling match against Francis I.

What these events show in hindsight and with the benefit of a broader historical perspective is not only the hubris and folly of powerful men, but the stasis of technology in the High Wood Age. For these two ships, large though they were, were smaller than the great ships of antiquity. For instance, in 240 BC the tyrant of Syracuse, Hiero II, built an enormous three-masted barge, the Syracusia, the world’s first cruise ship. Only the lowest of its three decks was built to hold cargo, around seventeen hundred tons of the grain that was one of Sicily’s biggest exports. The middle deck was fitted out for passengers and included thirty cabins, a chapel, library, gymnasium, and bath complex, all elaborately decorated and furnished with marble surfaces, paintings, statues, and living foliage. Finally the top deck housed a unit of marines and their equipment, making the ship both luxurious and secure. Like the great British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern in the nineteenth century, one main difficulty

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.