Sovereigns of the Sea

Angus Konstam

Description

Savor the story of the ultimate warship in Sovereigns of the Sea: The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship, which chronicles the history of Sovereign of the Seas, an immensely powerful floating fortress. You will enjoy this gripping tale of an arms race that created and ruined empires, changed the map of the world, and led Europe out of the Renaissance and into the Modern age. Understand how the Sovereign of the Seas became the model for a whole new generation of warships that would dominate naval warfare until the advent of steam power.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military
• History of Europe
• Naval
• History
• Sovereign of the Seas
• Renaissance

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 août 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620458747
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SOVEREIGNS OF THE SEA
The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship
Angus Konstam

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2008 by Angus Konstam. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Credits appear on page 329 and constitute an extension of this copyright page.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Konstam, Angus, date.
Sovereigns of the sea: the quest to build the perfect Renaissance battleship / Angus Konstam.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-11667-8 (cloth)
1. Warships-Design and construction-16th century. 2. Warships-History-16th century 3. Ordnance, Naval-History-16th century. 4. Artillery-History-16th century. 5. Naval art and science-Europe-History-16th century. 6. Naval history, Modern-16th century. I. Title. II. Title: Quest to build the Renaissance battleship .
V795.K66 2008
623.822 5-dc22
2007046861
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Peter Konstam, FRCS, OBE (1908-1995), born a century ago, into a very different world. Surgeon, refugee from the Nazis, man of culture, all-round European, and an inspirational father.
CONTENTS
ATLAS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION The Quest
1 Europe Comes of Age
2 Knights of the Sea
3 The Shipbuilding Revolution
4 The Great Rivals
5 The Black Art of Gunfounding
6 The Baltic Connection
7 From Carrack to Galleon
8 The Invincible Armada
9 Phoenix from the Ashes
10 Prestige over Practicality
11 Toward the Holy Grail
12 The Sovereign of the Seas
POSTSCRIPT The Ship of the Line
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CREDITS
INDEX
ATLAS The North Sea and Surrounding Area The English Channel and Surrounding Area The Baltic Sea and Surrounding Area
PREFACE
This book was almost a quarter century in the making. Back in the summer of 1983 I had just left the Royal Navy and was busy thinking about what to do next. I was visiting my parents in Orkney, Scotland, when a magazine came in the mail. An old aunt had died, and while my mother was sorting out her estate, the mail was being redirected. My aunt was a graduate of St. Andrews University, and they were still sending her their annual graduates journal. One day I was idly flicking through it when I came across an article about the foundation of a new department: the Scottish Institute of Maritime Studies, run by Dr. Colin Martin. It was one of those career-defining moments. The postgraduate course it planned to run involved a combination of maritime archaeology and historical research. It sounded custom-made for me. After all, I had dived in the navy and studied history at Aberdeen University. Amazingly, my reading of the article was followed a week later by a visit to my father by an academic who was touring Orkney-Dr. Geoffrey Parker, then professor of modern history at St. Andrews. He praised the course and recommended that I apply.
Three months later I was a student again, and immersing myself quite literally in the world of maritime archaeology. It was all fascinating stuff, but while I found the ships of the ancient world engrossing enough, my real interest lay a little later-the era of the Age of Discovery and the early days of the sailing battle fleets. When the time came to write the thesis for my master s degree, I opted for exactly that period, and over the next year or so I wrote a thesis with the less than snappy title of Naval Artillery to 1550: Its Design, Evolution, and Employment. Another part of the appeal was that this was virgin territory-despite Dr. Martin s excavations of Spanish Armada shipwrecks and the recent raising of the Mary Rose , very few people had really looked at the way guns played a major part in the evolution of the Renaissance warship.
Although it sounded glamorous enough, my subsequent career as a maritime archaeologist lasted less than a year. In the summer of 1985 I was hired by the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London to help organize a two-week archaeological dig. I stayed for ten years, having discovered a whole new career as a museum curator. Naturally enough, my main field was artillery, and over that decade I met hundreds of archaeologists and divers, museum professionals and academics-all of whom added something to my understanding of guns and ships. In 1995 I left for a new job in Florida, where I was immersed in a whole new world of Spanish shipwrecks, sunken treasure, and yet more guns lying on the seabed. More than a decade later I found myself back in Scotland, surrounded by the piles of notes, books, photos, and drawings accumulated during this twenty-five-year quest to find out more about the ships of the Renaissance. I thought it might be time to put some of it down on paper. This is the result.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project took so long to come to fruition that I couldn t begin to list all the people who helped along the way, or even the places I visited in my search for evidence of ships, guns, or both. An awful lot of people have pointed me in the right direction, or told me when I was making an idiot of myself, including curators, archivists, maritime archaeologists, metalworkers, shipbuilders, historians, academics, librarians, salt-encrusted sailors, and gung-ho divers. The best I can do is mention a few of them.
I would particularly like to express my gratitude to the staff of the National Maritime Museum, the British Library, the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London, and the Public Record Office, all in London; the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Florida; the Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia; the Vasa Museum and the Swedish Maritime Museum in Stockholm, Sweden; the Mary Rose Trust and Fort Nelson Museum of Artillery in or near Portsmouth, Hampshire, England; the National Library of Scotland, the United Services Museum, and the Scottish National Archives in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain; the Museo Naval and the Army Museum in Madrid; the Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam; the Dutch Army Museum in Delft, Netherlands; the Mus e de l Arm e in Paris; the Mus e National de la Marine in Brest and Port-Louis, France; the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven, Germany; and the Germanishes Museum in Nuremberg, Germany. There are too many people in these institutions to mention by name, so please accept my profuse thanks.
However, I would like to single out a handful of individuals who have been especially helpful over the years and who have inspired me to keep up the quest. Dr. Colin Martin and Dr. Robert Prescott of St. Andrews University are at the top of the list, for pointing me in the right direction. Then there s Ruth Rhynas Brown and Robert Smith of the Royal Armouries, who let me into their museum and introduced me to experts such as John F. Guilmartin Jr. and Joe Simmons III of the United States, Jeremy Green of Australia, Jan Piet Puype of Holland, and Adrian Carruana of the United Kingdom. Then there were the rest of the staff at the Royal Armouries-A. V. B. Norman, Guy Wilson, Graeme Rimer, and Nick Hall, who put up with my artillery obsession. I also owe a special debt to Dr. Margaret Rule, Andrew Fielding, Chris Dobbs, and Alex Hildred of the Mary Rose Trust. Alex in particular knows more about Tudor guns and gunnery than anyone since the sixteenth century, and she guided me past the obvious pitfalls. The late David Lyon and Teddy Archibald of the National Maritime Museum walked me through their painting collection, argued with me over a beer about minor points of ship design, and generally showed me how little I really knew. I miss them both. Finally I have to thank my late father for all his translation work; my mother for her long-suffering patience; and, of course, Aunt May, that old St. Andrews graduate whose magazine started me off on this long quest.
INTRODUCTION
The Quest
This book tells the story of Renaissance rulers, their guns, and their ships. It describes the first attempts by naval designers to introduce guns onto warships, and it reveals the consequences of this groundbreak