Four masts good? Six masts better!

[Peerie Maa]

I'm probably going to step in it here, my history is not that good but I believe the song dynasty was the one that was gung-ho for trade with the rest of the world. They had already been engaged in that for a long time before zheng he came along. When zheng returned he was basically ignored because the ming was more inwardly focussed and didn't want to have anything to do with the outside. Eventually that didn't work well, but at the time it was fine. Sometimes the results of a policy take a few hundred years to show up.

Song was actually a prtty good dynasty, maybe even better than tang in some ways.

That doesn't answer my question about junks tho

Hm, they did finance 7 voyages, so could not have been all that insular. Foreign trade continued after a shift of power pulled the plug on the large fleets, but in the hands of merchants rather than the imperial eunuchs.

[George.]

Eh?
Details, please, George.
Seagoing ships only- the Lake Nemo pleasure barges do not count.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula%27s_Giant_Ship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_(ship)

And why not the Nemo ships? The largest Chinese ships were probably ceremonial fair-weather vessels as well.

[George.]

I have not, but I will point out that one of the things that happened once European and Chinese seafarers had got into regular contact was the development of the lorcha . A lorcha was a European schooner type hull under a two or three masted Chinese sail plan.

To me that looks like a Portuguese caravel hull type and mast layout (roughly). That also fits the period better.

[Peerie Maa]

To me that looks like a Portuguese caravel hull type and mast layout (roughly). That also fits the period better.

This type of vessel was developed around 1550 in Macau, then a Portuguese colony in China.^[1] This hybrid type of vessel sailed faster than traditional pirate ships and British traders began to use it after the First Opium War.
The Vũng Tàu shipwreck is a lorcha that sunk near the Côn Đảo Islands and has been dated to about 1690.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorcha_(boat)#

so a century after the treasure ship fleet.

[carioca1232001]

The sea-routes between the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the East African seaboard - to include Zanzibar - were used by seafarers from India predating Jesus Christ.

Similarly India´s seaboards to seafarers from China, and vice-versa, suggesting that the Chinese were also in the know about sailing to the said regions

Having sailed around the Cape of Good hope, the Portuguese engaged Arabian pilots to provide the guidance needed to venture on successfully eastwards.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

We are desperately short of photographs of lorchas. They were everywhere, and then they weren’t.

[carioca1232001]

To me that looks like a Portuguese caravel hull type and mast layout (roughly). That also fits the period better.

After all that hard work you went through building Dahlia from the keel up, you have matured into an expert on hull forms and shapes of old

[birlinn]

Thanks for #39, George.

[Besserwisser]

I seem to remember a giraffe pictured on a Chinese painting of 1414.

The giraffe was brought back on one of Zheng Ha's voyages, likely from east Africa. It was a big tourist attraction back home and was said to have inspired much wonder and poetry.

Contrary to some assertions above, the voyages had numerous purposes, indicated perhaps by the wide variety of scholars, naturalists and artists (as well as troops) carried aboard.

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[Besserwisser]

So why were sea-faring Europeans sighted in India only in the late 15 th century ?

Lots of answers to questions like that, but the lure of the spice trade profits was defs a central reason for it happening when it did.

The goal was to find a way around the Islam middlemen who controlled the classic route and, thereby, snaffle their share of the profits.

Undermining the Venetians in the process was the steak knives.


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[Besserwisser]

Europeans had ships as big as that 1500 years earlier.

Help me out George...

Is it to suggest we shouldn't be doubting the scale of Zheng Ha's ships?

Or is it a way of saying: big deal, us Europeans have been there, done that?

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[Besserwisser]

Zheng He's fleet, as large as it might have been and as far as it might have gone, seems to have been little more than a top-down stunt. Build some huge ships and go very far just to show how great you are - regardless of whether the ships are really suited for the voyage. You get lucky once and they don't catch a typhoon and sink.

To travel overseas sustainably you need bottom-up technological evolution and freedom to experiment and optimize. That is why in the end it was the Europeans that reached China, and not vice-versa.

Some rather dubious speculation there George.

It might help to know that trade in the East Asia/Indian Ocean region had been happening for a kinda long time before the Europeans arrived, for which suitable maritime craft were required and (with "bottom-up technological evolution and freedom to experiment and optimize"), likely well adapted to purpose.

One purpose was the trade in spices, principally from south-east Asia and India. Seems what they had, met their needs: trade with only the occasional scuffle where satiation ruled.

The needs of the Europeans , on the other hand, having no direct access to the source of the spices, and little idea (geographically) about where this might even be (other than a generalised notion of 'India'), meant they were differently motivated.






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[George.]

Help me out George...

Is it to suggest we shouldn't be doubting the scale of Zheng Ha's ships?

Or is it a way of saying: big deal, us Europeans have been there, done that?

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I was responding to this:

What little fact there is all seems to point towards hull lenghts of 200-250 feet possibly though unlikely in some extreme case (maybe some chineese equivalent of the infamous Great Harry) approaching 300 feet. We are talking about ships the size of an European first rate three decked ship of the line in the early 1800-s. No meagre feat in the early 15th century.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I do not share in the fascination with the seven voyages of Zheng He.

Unlike the European voyages of exploration, the Ming voyages accomplished nothing that lasted.

I may have my history wrong here, but iirc the reason Zheng He’s voyages were curtailed was an objection by the civil service of the day to the tremendous cost of these expeditions, and this led to one or more Imperial Edicts banning Chinese people from owning ships with more than two masts or travelling more than three li distant from China.

The consequences of this were disastrous then and they live with us today:

First, because Chinese people were banned from seagoing, Japanese people, often characterised as “pirates”, were able to range up and down the coasts of China much in the manner of the Vikings ranging up and down the coasts of Europe a few centuries earlier, raiding and slaving. The Imperial Chinese response to this was to order people not to live near the coast.

This in turn led to the construction of the walled villages which are characteristic of the coastal regions of Guangdong.

Another consequence of what some people thought was a silly policy was disobedience. Merchants accustomed to trading with what are now the Philippines and Vietnam wanted to carry on doing so. They developed the legal fiction that the sea up to three li from the coast of littoral states was “China”, hence the eleven dash line and the nine dash line.

Zheng He’s expeditions have been brought to prominence by modern Chinese people who wanted and want to encourage their countrymen to develop both their own merchant fleet and their own Navy. But really they were more like the Apollo Program in the USA; a tremendous national effort carried out by a nation that was at the zenith of its powers, but of no practical benefit.

[Tom Hunter]

The USA got a lot more out of Apollo than China did out of Zheng He's voyages. To make the analogy work the US government would have to ban the launching of satellites, destroyed all the technology associated with the program and forbidden future research into almost everything.

As Andrew points out the Chinese response to the cost of the voyages was a disaster for China.

[heimlaga]

Those things have happened time upon time in China.
From archeological evidence we know that the chineese had invented blast furnaces as well as various method to turn the cast iron into wrought iron and all this at a time when europeans only could make small amounts of low grade iron using the most primitive methods. Then for some political reason the industry was shut down and the knowledge forgotten. Apparently those in power felt threatened by development.


It is basicly the same sort of reasoning as is considered a sound business strategy in some larger businesses.
Forbid everything that isn't certified and make the certification process to expensive that only big businesses can afford to produce certified goods. Then there is no development anymore and monopolies become stable.

[George.]

Imperial Edicts banning Chinese people from owning ships with more than two masts or travelling more than three li distant from China.

While Europeans were free to experiment and explore.

Ming lasted 250 years past zheng he, they probably had their reasons. Maybe they were successful at what they wanted to do.

I am pretty sure they would have preferred their ships discovering America, and their gunboats going up European rivers, rather than as it played out. But one man rule means that when the man is stupid and obstinate, the whole nation moves backwards.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Those things have happened time upon time in China.
From archeological evidence we know that the chineese had invented blast furnaces as well as various method to turn the cast iron into wrought iron and all this at a time when europeans only could make small amounts of low grade iron using the most primitive methods. Then for some political reason the industry was shut down and the knowledge forgotten. Apparently those in power felt threatened by development.


It is basicly the same sort of reasoning as is considered a sound business strategy in some larger businesses.
Forbid everything that isn't certified and make the certification process to expensive that only big businesses can afford to produce certified goods. Then there is no development anymore and monopolies become stable.

I think it is incredibly difficult to know why things happened in the past in China. The language is a barrier, the culture is another. One theory that appeals to me is the idea put forward by Jared Diamond in his enjoyable book “Guns, Germs and Steei”, namely that the introduction of New World vegetables early in the Qing dynasty doubled the population and made investment in technology unnecessary. But it’s just a theory.

Modern Chinese people may find their past quite hard to understand too. I have a trilingual edition of the Analects of Confucius:

1. As written
2. Modern Chinese
3. English.

The language of the Analects is as far from modern Chinese as Anglo-Saxon is from modern English.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

We are desperately short of photographs of lorchas. They were everywhere, and then they weren’t.

The large lorcha in the top picture was photographed at anchor outside Shanghai in the late 1930s, it probably represents the upper size limit bearing in mind that a junk rig mast is a single unstayed wooden spar.

In the lower picture the vessel nearer the camera is a lorcha, the more distant vessel is a junk. This picture was taken in Indonesia.

[George.]

You can be pretty sure of whatever you want, but you don't know a single thing about china or chinese people, so your extravagant fantasies are worth about what we paid to read them. Nothing.

I know one thing about China. Some people who live there are real jerks. They attack anyone who posts anything they don't like about China, and then whine like babies when they are called xibots.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I bet if we were in the same room you would get on rather well.

Anyone want to comment on the photos above?

[Peerie Maa]

Anyone want to comment on the photos above?

What is there to say?
How about this model in the Hong Kong Science Museum? One assumes some sort of scholarly input.


And this contemporary account of large merchant ships

Marco Polo

I tell you that they are mostly built of the wood which is called fir or pine.

They have one floor, which with us is called a deck, one for each, and on this deck there are commonly in all the greater number quite 60 little rooms or cabins, and in some, more, and in some, fewer, according as the ships are larger and smaller, where, in each, a merchant can stay comfortably.

They have one good sweep or helm, which in the vulgar tongue is called a rudder.

And four masts and four sails, and they often add to them two masts more, which are raised and put away every time they wish, with two sails, according to the state of the weather.

N.B. The Chinese were not tied to having all of their masts on the centre line. Smaller masts were occasionally stepped side by side.

[Rumars]

I rather like the big one above, I wonder how big it actually is. What I find interesting is that she is rigged for a jib with a long two part bowsprit. I suppose they were in the act of retracting or extending the jib boom when the photo was taken.

As for the masts, in the late 30's they could have been steel tubes, european boats had them for some time by then.

[George.]

European ships had a spritsail and a lateen mizzen, which evolved into jibs and gaff mizzens. They helped steer the ship. Even Dalia was much less nimble without her jib.

One wonders how nimble that multi-masted junk would have been with so much sail amidships and nothing hanging over the edges.

[Peerie Maa]

No less manoeuvrable than any dhow.
The model has three sails aft and three forward that would act like an occidental jib and mizzen.

[webishop14]

where ya gonna get the people indeed?

Where are you going to get the people, indeed. And no, INDEED(c) can't help you here. These ships would need OSHA approvals (or their maritime equivalent), and where are these ships going to get that?

[George.]

Yes, but the lack of overhanging canvas, in a heavy beamy ship like that... dhows are light.

[Rumars]

Multimasted boats have no problem steering, as soon as you reef one sail, balance changes enough have them move how you want.
A three masted junk has no need for jibs to maneuver, I suspect it's more for increasing the light wind area and going to windward.

[Paul Pless]

Where are you going to get the people, indeed. And no, INDEED(c) can't help you here. These ships would need OSHA approvals (or their maritime equivalent), and where are these ships going to get that?

a liberian flag of convenience solves many problems

[Besserwisser]

So...

If four masts are good, and six masts better, then nine masts must be best. Discuss.

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[Besserwisser]

While Europeans were free to experiment and explore.

Such us vs themism can hit many hurdles. Perhaps start with the European craft guilds of that era.

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[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

a liberian flag of convenience solves many problems

Paul - don’t go there. Leave it to the IMO and the ILO. Please nicely?

[Paul Pless]

it was a poor attempt at humor

sign me, stymied by the jones act

[Besserwisser]

I am pretty sure they would have preferred their ships discovering America, and their gunboats going up European rivers, rather than as it played out.

Unlike the European voyages of exploration, the Ming voyages accomplished nothing that lasted.

Kinda Euro-centric and values-laden, those judgements.

Seven voyages with up to 300 boats and 30,000 participants on each, yet they indulged in few scuffles and managed to colonise nothing; obviously a pointless exercise.

The Europeans, on the other hand - enterprising and free and partial to a spot of carnage - managed to colonise entire continents with much smaller fleets. Now that's value for money.

It's likely there are plenty of primary documents still about that shed light on the purposes and outcomes of those voyages, but that is for the scholars of the future.

Meanwhile, I suggest it's worthwhile being open to the notion that the Zheng Ha voyages might be more akin to the Beagle than to the gunboat.



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[George.]

I suggest it's worthwhile being open to the notion that the Zheng Ha voyages might be more akin to the Beagle than to the gunboat.

That is a very high bar. It would require as proof something of the caliber of The Origin of the Species.

I'd maybe put Zheng Ha's voyages on a par with Marco Polo's.