© Richard Barker
February 2001
THIS UNPUBLISHED PAPER WAS PROVIDED TO PARTICIPANTS AT A MAX PLANCK INSTITUT WORKSHOP, NOVEMBER 2001.
Abstract
Fournier's Hydrographie of 1643 has long been noted as containing a geometrical midship section which he termed the ancient method1, unfortunately without specifying how ancient, or where it was practised. It has an archaic appearance about it: a simple quadrant arc is raised on a flat floor, with a longer radius arc extending the side upwards above that. The majority of known frame shapes from the period around 1570 onwards, when they come to be recorded widely, are much more angular in the bilges and at the maximum breadth, resulting from the use, typically, of three arcs in place of the single quadrant.
If as seems likely, this method was part of a wider shipbuilding tradition employed (but not necessarily originating) on the Atlantic coast of northern Europe, we might especially note the possible link to the somewhat mysterious "whole-moulding" that first appears only in texts of the eighteenth century, and in several of which the midship section is based on that same simple quadrant linking a flat floor and a vertical side, albeit only representing small open boats at that stage.
It is a moot point whether "whole-moulding" takes its name from forming the whole hull from a single mould (which is never actually achieved in full), or from the more restricted fact that the whole midship section is created from a single mould. The rest of the hull is formed with rising and narrowing scales (sometimes marked on staffs) for that mould, without any rotation and consequently with a generally constant angle of the side; and that same mould is inverted to form the hollowing curve between bilge and keel. The degree of rising and narrowing is relatively empirical, either from a drawing, or by copying previous examples with the same markings (the surmarks) for the consecutive, adjusted positions of the mould(s) and rising square.
Though Fournier gives no supporting text, it seems quite possible that what he is describing is actually a form of "whole-moulding". This is in fact as close to the "Mediterranean" method as it is to the method of all English treatises from 1570 to 1711, when Sutherland first mentions whole-moulding as one method of design; and for ships, not just for the small boats which are the case from Murray (1765) onwards. That is, the key difference between whole-moulding and the fully developed Mediterranean method is that the legno in ramo or trébuchement is nil: the mould is not rotated about the bilge. By contrast, the English treatisers' method from the end of the sixteenth century does not use a single mould for the side, and is based on adjusting a series of tangent arcs within a grid that itself has narrowings and risings applied to it. This gives great flexibility in forming the hull shape, since the side is not formed by a single rigid mould, while still using only a small set of moulds for an entire ship. (Indeed it is not unknown for the term whole-moulding to be applied loosely or anachronistically for the treatisers' method, on that basis2).
This paper will consider the implications of these observations, taken together with a wider range of evidence for occurrences in documents and archaeology of similar characteristics, to explore the possible origins of what is known as whole-moulding, and thence perhaps of European moulding more generally. To that end it also considers some of the lesser known English sources.
[Provides verbatim sources, figures and discussion].