© Richard Barker

March 2002

THIS UNPUBLISHED PAPER WAS PROVIDED TO PARTICIPANTS AT A WORKSHOP AT MAX PLANCK INSTITUT, BERLIN, IN NOVEMBER 2001.

Abstract

This paper will first present material taken from a paper by ****. It includes the extant part of a text then identified as by Nikolo Sagri, from perhaps 1560-70, on the estimation of the tonnage of merchant ships, by formula. Though there are passing references to Ragusan shipbuilding in Crescentio and Pantera, and to individual ships, especially around the 1588 Armada period, there had seemed at the start of this study to be little of substance in print in English. There are tantalising references to two other Ragusans who wrote on nautical topics in the mid-fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, but this writer had until recently failed to trace any reference to the authors or their manuscripts in any English library.

[Translation of and commentary on the Croatian paper and the original manuscript text].