Page 10 - At sea

smbhax on Aug. 1, 2009

Here's the scurvy dogs' ship under sail across the great mysterious ocean. Even a relatively old sailing ship design like a carrack (I was calling it a “caravel” last week, oops; those were similarly brought along by the Portuguese in the 15th century, but caravels were smaller and more maneuverable) had quite a few sails, and looked fairly impressive when they were all flying:

http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/980/victoriasailing.jpg

One sorta interesting thing about carracks was that the third mast, the “mizzenmast,” was “lateen-rigged,” which means that it had a triangular sail sort of slung diagonally from the vertical mast. Adds a bit of contrast against all those big square or trapezoidal sails.

The large sea monsters in the background were inspired by monsters you see on old maps, like:

http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/miscellaneous/sea_monsters.jpg

http://www.strangescience.net/enlar/en_iceland.jpg

The thingy in the upper left is based on the old popular conception of a whale, for instance. There are six sea creatures here in total–can you spot them all? (One is *really* hard to spot!)

Next week we'll zoom in on the Princess (see her down there?) and see how she's faring on that big ol' boat.