Subject:
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Re: Richard II almost to Port Block
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.pirates
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Date:
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Sat, 26 Feb 2000 23:40:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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797 times
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Pawel Nazarewicz wrote in message ...
> > http://www.hinet.net.au/~rparsons/port/rii/welcome.htm
> BUT ... is it just me, or does that ship smell of Castle ... ? (Wink wink,
> nudge nudge;)
Smell? It positively reeks of Castle ;-)
I'm fairly new to the 14C, but as I understand it, the military
establishment in western Europe was run by chivalrous knights, who, while
being terribly chivalrous, demonstrated a shocking lack of imagination when
it came to maritime warfare. Since fighting was obviously and entirely
about castles, armour, sword and arrows, if you were planning on fighting at
sea, you would need castles. You couldn't build them of stone, because they
discovered (no doubt by painstaking research), that stone ships don't float.
So you took a ship, often a trader (like the Hanseatic cog 'Soggy Chip'),
built wooden castles at each end, and sallied forth. If you were
particularly serious minded and chivalrous, you might even paint the wooden
castles to look like they were made of stone.
Thankfully, since no-one in western Europe could sail very well in any
direction except more or less with the wind, and the wind is generally
excepted to want to blow in one general direction at a time, it was very
hard for ships to actually come to battle. They'd both have to happen to be
pretty much in the same place, both going in the same direction, and both
want to give battle. If all these conditions were met, they'd veer
together, and start throwing rocks, arrows, quicklime and Greek firewater at
each other, castle combat style, until they came close enough to board, at
which point they'd start throwing themselves at each other, and start
flailing about with nasty big pointy things, castle combat style.
Complicating matters was the junior status of the ship's captain,
subordinate to the ranking soldier on board, much like the driver of a
modern munitions truck. It seems these captains did not spend much time
captaining, having to spend far more time explaining to the ranking soldier
what the ship couldn't do - 'No sir, my apologies, the ship cannot go
backwards'.......
Regards
Richard
Still baldly going...
Check out Port Block at http://www.hinet.net.au/~rparsons/port/
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Richard II almost to Port Block
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| (...) this is the first time that I decided to do some serious browsing. I'm still very impressed with all the work done there. BUT ... is it just me, or does that ship smell of Castle ... ? (Wink wink, nudge nudge;) Keep up the great work both in (...) (25 years ago, 26-Feb-00, to lugnet.pirates)
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