Post Description

This book has been written principally for makers of ship models. In fact the research which forms the bulk of the material contained here was begun many years ago with the sole purpose of building a model of Royal Caroline, with Plate XLIX of Chapman's Architectura Navails Mercatoria as the only available item of information. In addition to the most detailed plans, we have sought to provide as much information as possible concerning the ship's history and, within the limits of the available space, the contemporary construction techniques and fitting-out procedures, with particular reference to rigging. Given the quality of British specialist publications (recently in particular) on British seamanship and individual ships, it is unusual for foreign authors to venture into a subject like this for such a demanding public. The fact is, however, that once our initial orientation difficulties were overcome, the existence in Great Britain of institutions which are a model of efficiency, such as the Public Records Office, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Archives, have made our research much easier. We wish once more to express our gratitude to these institutions, as we did in the Italian edition of the book, and particularly to: NAM Rodger of the Public Records Office, DJ Lyon, James Lees and Alan McGowan of the National Maritime Museum. Finally we wish to explain why we have made some use of the metric system in dealing with a subject like this where the old systems of measurement are still widely used by modelmakers in English-speaking countries. This particu­larly concerns the thickness of the rigging, which contemporary writers expressed in inches of circumference. We had laboriously converted these to diameters in the metric system for the Italian edition and it seemed a cumbersome and perhaps misleading operation to reverse the process. References to practices in Continental navies and to the development of rigging were much more plentiful in the text and footnotes of the Italian edition. English language readers have a wealth of specialised works available on this matter which anyone wishing to widen his knowledge of naval history can consult. We will refer the reader to them, but we wish to mention expressly those which we have found most useful in our work, namely Masting and Rigging ofEnglish Ships of War by James Lees and Seamanship in the Age of Sail by Harland and Myers.