Found: Medieval Cargo Ship – Largest Vessel of Its Kind Ever | Hacker News Reader

Found: Medieval Cargo Ship – Largest Vessel of Its Kind Ever

smithsonianmag.com

164 pointsbookofjoe56 comments

Announcement from museum: https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/news/archaeologists-rev...

> On its stern, researchers were shocked to find extensive remains of a castle, a kind of covered deck where the crew would have sought shelter. Records show that castles were distinctive features of medieval cogs, but no physical evidence of them had previously been identified.

I suppose this explains why the thing that exists on more modern ships is called a “forecastle”.

PS go check the pronunciation for that word as it’s quite surprising.

‘Folksal’?

You aren’t wrong.

The forecastle of a ship is in the forward part of a ship — at the front, not the back. Looking at renderings of cogs, the 'castle' at the stern seems more to anticipate the modern bulk carrier, with an accommodation block with bridge on top at the aft end, looking out over the cargo holds.

Ships of that era and leader had castles on both ends fore and aft. It's just the forward one than retained in usage as a sailing term, even after foredecks no longer looked like castles. The aft castle became a quarterdeck, a poop deck, a cockpit or a bridge etc.

Meanwhile, a built-up and elevated stern 'castle' is advantageous place to put the steering and command position, close to the rudder and with visibility of the whole ship, it's rig, plus where the ship is going. While maximizing mid-ship area for cargo. If you have to pick one end or the other, stern is the more comfortable end of the ship being most sheltered from wave action and weather. Being elevated and fortified also helps as a fighting/defensive position, but that is less important for modern cargo ships. 'Anticipation' isn't quite the right word as shipbuilders have always worked within the same basic design considerations and trade-offs, as the sea itself continues to enforce the same fundamental constraints.

Other types of ships also had castles, such as the carrack and galleon. They are super tall and ungainly looking compared to modern ships, even those from the 19th and 18th centuries.

> Its planks are made of Pomeranian oak from modern-day Poland, and the wood of its frame came from the Netherlands.

I'm surprised the raw materials came together over such a distance. That transporting lumber was economical back then is remarkable.

Well, as the article says:

> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber

Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!

Yea, this is like the early railroads making steel cheaper via cheaper transport of bulk ore/coal, that made cheaper railroads, that then ship more products made of steel to larger markets opened by the extended rail networks, etc.

This happened with tin all the way back in the Bronze Age, where a lot of it was shipped as ingots from industrial-scale mines / smelters in Cornwall all the way to the Mediterranean empires to mix with copper to make Bronze.

A cog-based auto-catalytic wood industry is super interesting.

Also this stuff never happens by design. Some entrepreneur notices things and the costs, make a decision, suddenly more products exist, organic trading routes appear. There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government. The market solves the problem

In the US context that's largely true, with the government providing useful regulations after the fact (allowing national corporations, railroad right-of-way law, etc.).

The exception being guys like JP Morgan who organized industry cartels that acted as private "central planners", part of which turned into the current Federal Reserve Bank.

But for countries like China and many others in Asia with strong state capacity, industrial policy was planned top-down for the "commanding heights" of industry like: roads, rail, shipping, airlines, telecom, steel, energy, etc., and that actually worked very well, faster than private markets alone, with the benefit of existing tech and models to follow.

We are talking about a sophisticated international trading system that happened 600 years ago. Clearly you don’t need anything like that to make it happen. Let alone Ancient Rome, Greece, Assyria, Sumer…

In your above comment you said:

> There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government.

The response above is just pointing out that although you don't need a grand design or hyper-managerial government, it can be done using that approach too.

I posit it’s actually far more efficient to just let the market do its magic. No need for absurd Chinese state intrusions

This is speculation tinged with economics dogma.

>Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!

It's cogs all the way down!

Infinite cog glitch!

Check out the History of the Germans season on the Hanseatic League [0]. The bulk goods trade was in the Baltic / Northern Europe was actually huge. The Hansa themselves traded all the way from London to Novgorod. Anyway, it's an absolutely fascinating subject and period.

[0] https://historyofthegermans.com/hanseatic-league/

They had trading posts in Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland.

You might be interested in tin transport during the bronze age then - You'll find tin mined in Cornwall in ships that sank off the coast of Turkey 3500 years ago.

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

Is it possible the ship was rebuilt?

No the wood is also dated.

Too wet to be on tinder though.

Dendrochronology-based age verification is coming soon

Slow clap.

Also, there's a "rings" joke in here somewhere about Tinder not being for finding a marriage but I can't figure it out.

Maybe s/marriage/stable marriage/, then we can talk about growing population of multi-ringers.

I’m more surprised we can tell so precisely where wood that spent 600 years under the sea came from

I live in a late 18th-century rowhouse where there is large stonework for window sills/surrounds/doorways all done in a very specific pink granite that was carved from a shoreline quarry a significant distance away. Massive stones, 100kg+ each, had to be transported by horse-drawn cart, over not-easy-terrain, a distance that would have taken two horses probably 8-9 hours per trip, and enough stones that it was probably 15-20 trips. Let alone the effort that had to have been required to carve surprisingly square/cuboid shapes from solid granite without power tools. It's mindblowing to me that someone was able to afford such a home construction, let alone the time taken to do it, in ~ 1790. It isn't a particularly rare style in this neighborhood either.

Fast forward 200 years, and I was sweating at the cost just to hire someone to deliver new hardwood countertops from a place not much further away. By truck. By a single person. In a single afternoon. No horses required.

Are you anywhere near (the remains of?) a canal network? That was how bulk cargo was generally transported in the 18th century. First-mile + last-mile would be by wagon, of course, though usually pulled by oxen, not horses. Canals were economically revolutionary, for 100-150 years, until railroads largely supplanted them. They remained viable, in limited circumstances (ie, some routes for some cargos), until the mid-20th century.

Astute observation; no canal, but there is a river outflow to a bay, whereby a ship could have carried stones from the quarry, albeit a long way around a peninsula; it is possible that was a more effective way to get them close, and then use horse and cart to get them the last bit of distance.

Thinking about the logistics of such a feat at that time is wild to me for just the construction of a private residence.

And it's easy to miss them as several have been covered over or filled in, depending on where you are and how big it was.

This is because the material characteristics were so important that there simply were no good alternatives. Just like you would use steel for one thing and aluminum for another today. There were whole libraries of wood samples that you could go and look at or even test to ensure that your structure held up. Windmills are another item where wood from multiple locations came together.

Wood ranges from one extreme to another in terms of density, hardness, ease of working, strength in various directions and so on. There are hardwoods that are so hard that you can't really work them with normal tools and there are softwoods so light that you have to handle them carefully or you'll dent them.

This is the kind of ship they found:

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

larger ships in the later middle ages were the Caravel and the Carrack, which typically had more than a single mast.

Is there a paper somewhere?

Statement from the Viking Museum:

https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/about-us/news-and-press...

Documentary referenced in the statement (I think):

https://www.dr.dk/drtv/episode/gaaden-i-dybet_-fra-ukendt-ha...

No. It's going to take some time, and theres a good change it'll come as a danish language monography or one or more phd thesis'.

I am wondering if there is any historical record of the ship and/or its sinking.

Apparently no one has mentioned the Vasa here yet, so I'll do it:

https://www.vasamuseet.se/en

Not quite as old but preserved almost intact and now restored on dry land. Well worth a visit.

There is the C.A. Thayer which is a restored lumber ship.

https://www.nps.gov/safr/learn/historyculture/c-a-thayer.htm

The ship they found "measures about 92 feet long, 30 feet wide and 20 feet tall. Experts estimate its cargo capacity was 300 tons"

The C.A. Thayer is 219 feet long, 36 feet wide and carried 453 tons.

Random off hand thought is the big difference between these two is the Thayer was longer. A problem I've read with long wooden ships is the flexing can open the seams between the planks to open up requiring the crew to bail water.

  Off Orford Ness she sprang a leak
  Hear her poor old timbers creak
  Pump you blighters, pump or drown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFgAeXA0dJM

Who would have guessed the Smithsonian of all organizations would have so many video popup ads.

Isn’t the greatest experience on mobile when so little of the content can be seen due to popups.

Ads ? What Ads...

I forgot that I use Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin. I don't see any ads NEVER.

> I don't see any ads NEVER

So you see some ads occasionally? Then why are you asking "what ads"?

I can appreciate their troubles. How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income. People also seem dead against subscriptions. The only way that seems to work is appealing to the LCD and raking in stream bucks but not all media/literature, especially the valuable kind, is conducive to that model.

>How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income.

I'm not sure, but we've been trying the online advertising model for a few decades now, and it's been terrible. Pop-ups, pop-unders, malware, I could go on and on. At some point it's fine to just say "no" to the advertisers after so much abuse.

Also, there's nothing stopping a website from hosting their own ads: these generally are not blocked by ad-blockers because they're served from the same domain, rather than a known ad-serving domain. But they never want to do this for some reason.

The site hosting the ads seems like a red herring? Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads? If so, that seems like a difficult proposition.

If we accept that most people won’t pay a subscription, and take ads off the table as an option, then I can only think of 2 other options:

* charitable patrons (this is a thing, but I guess not effective enough?) * selling other products to subsidize the free content

These both appear to have obvious problems and for a dubious goal of making another party subsidize the visitor’s consumption cost.

Having the visitor cover their own cost seems reasonable. What currency do they have other than money or attention? Maybe a small work problem that provides an abstracted service to a separate payer (a la reCAPTCHA, but for $).

>Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads?

No, I mean they could host their own ads. The way ad-blockers work is that they see requests from a web page to other domains, particularly known ad-serving domains, so they reject those requests, take those elements out of the page, etc. But they don't alter self-hosted images. So if a web page has a bunch of JPGs which are really ads and not just helpful illustrations, and embeds those into the page, the ad-blocker has no way of knowing these are actually ads, and can't block them.

But these places never do this because they want to outsource the advertising to someone else, and the advertisers want to not just show ads, but also track how many times the ad was served, who it was served to, how long it was viewed, and lots of other information that isn't necessary for advertising (and was never a factor back when ads were simply printed on newspaper or shown on TV). In short, the advertisers insist on spying on people now. This should not be tolerated or excused, ever.

"How is someone supposed to pay for all the overhead that goes into research and writing these articles without a source of income?"

Some people here think it's wonderful most of Wikipedia was built without paying its editors. Depends who you ask.

That’s compiling existing research and information. What about new research with field agents and equipment? The Smithsonian does a lot of that.

Smithsonian Mag used to be the Institution’s brain‑child, now it’s just a click‑bait lifestyle tabloid full of celebs. The magazine’s editorial directives have diverged from the institutions mission. They care more about pageviews and ads than research.

The front page has none of those things; I see:

* "Queen Bumblebees’ Tongues Aren’t Built for Slurping Nectar"

* "Why the Computer Scientist Behind the World’s First Chatbot Dedicated His Life to Publicizing the Threat Posed by A.I."

* "NASA to Resume Search for Missing Mars Orbiter"

* "Spaceflight Temporarily Changes the Position and Shape of Astronauts’ Brains, MRI Data Suggests"

... and more of the same.

Where have you seen what you describe?

It always amazes me how many people on "hacker news" don't use an ad-blocker.

Well, some people hold very conformist views which is surprising too.

Amazingly under only 40' of water.

That may be not that amazing for a shipwreck in the Øresund. According to Wikipedia, its maximum depth is 40m (130’) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Øresund), so chances are a lot of it is less deep. There also may be sampling bias, with shipwrecks in shallower water being more likely to be found, and, if the tides flow faster in deeper water, survivorship bias.

ships are less likely to wreck in deep water. Storms can sill overturn them (though if they are unstable getting to deep water is questionable). You mostly expect wrecks from hitting rocks on the bottom. Though in war time sinking happens in deep water.

Too late to edit, but there is one more factor: even in war, the easiest way to find an enemy ship is when it is leaving port. Thus you would expect even in war time the battles are mostly in shallow water just because that is usually what you find around good ports. (Today with radar, satellite and such finding ships at sea isn't nearly as hard, but it is still not easy if the other isn't cooperating)

The baltic has tons of wrecks. Because of its brackishness, both marine and fresh water wood decomposing organism dont survive there and thus old ships got preserved really really well. Some are in really shallow (walkable) water, especially in areas where the land is rising.

Patrician II/III anyone? One of the best games of my childhood, sweet memories

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