Flute
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The Fleute , also known from ancient times as Fluite, Fluit, Fluyt, Fliete, Vliete , was a three-masted merchant ship originally from the Netherlands with a large load capacity and a shallow draft. After the cog, it was the second Nordic type of ship that also served as a model for the nations of the Mediterranean region . It was probably also the first type of ship on which the tiller was replaced by a steering wheel . The type of ship of the Fleute is generally known mainly through the depiction of Dutch merchant ships in the pictures of old masters .
In the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century it was the preferred and most widespread merchant ship there for European voyages , with which bulk goods in particular were transported.
Spread and use
Due to its high economic value in use, the fleece quickly spread beyond the Netherlands to other countries, including the Mediterranean. In the 17th century , the Fleute was the best and most widespread merchant ship in Europe. Not only was it easier to sail than a galleon , it also required significantly fewer crew members than comparable ship types. In addition, the Fleute also offered tax advantages. At the time of the emergence of the flute type of ship, the Danes calculated the duty for the important passage of the trade route into the Baltic Sea according to the size of the deck area. In order to reduce these fees per cubic meter proportionately, the Fleute had a projecting hull, but at the same time the side walls narrowed sharply towards the top, which made for a small deck with a high cargo capacity.
Development and characteristics
As a pure merchant ship, the Fleute was constructed strictly according to economic aspects and in favor of the low production costs dispensed with almost all elements and components used for representation or military purposes. So she had only slightly decorated superstructures on the bow and stern . In contrast to the carracks and galleons common at the time, a continuous middle deck was also dispensed with in favor of loading capacity. At that time, the Fleute was one of the few types of ships that could not be converted into a military or privateer ship due to the lack of a usable cannon deck. The most conspicuous visible feature of the Fleute was the idiosyncratic design of a bulbous cargo space with a round stern (round gate) and a narrow deck due to the strongly inwardly curved frames : a shape that came about exclusively through the adaptation of the merchant ship to the Danish customs regulations. From a technical point of view, however, the Fleute has developed independently from smaller coastal ships that have been steadily enlarged, primarily from the Dutch Bojer . The Fleute was thus a completely new, originally Dutch type of ship, which, in contrast to most ship types of its time, was not a further development of the galleon. The flute had a comparatively shallow draft, adapted to the shallow Dutch ports. If you look at the cross-section of the ship's hull, it is almost round up to the point where the concave side walls of the superstructure begin. Nevertheless, this type of ship had unusually high masts in relation to its overall size. The yards were shorter compared to a Galleon and the sails so noticeably narrower and higher. The flute carried two square sails on the two foremast , a square and a latin sail on the aft mast and a blind one on the bowsprit . Later the flute got a third square sail and the bowsprit a top blind.
The deck rose towards the stern, as was common with many types of ships at the time. The flute was completed with a stern structure that was only provided with a narrow mirror wall above the waterline . In terms of design, however, the superstructures were much more strongly integrated into the hull structure than the block-like forts of the caravels or galleons. The ratio of length over all to breadth was about 4.6: 1 for the flute, while it was about 4.0: 1 for a galleon and only 3.0: 1 for a carrack. In fact, it was a very slim ship for its time. This impression is likely to have been reinforced by the tall masts and narrow sails. Over time, the bases for calculating customs duties were changed and the decks of the floods became wider.
The first known Fleute was launched in 1595 in the city of Hoorn in the Netherlands. The flute was replaced in the 18th century by the ship type of the Galiot .
The length of the flood was usually between 28 and 36 m and the tonnage 150 to 400 tons. It had a crew of 8 to 22 men. She mostly had a light armament and was used in addition to trade routes in Europe also on the routes to Asia and America (where the larger return ship was more common) and as a transport ship for the Dutch Admiralty.
The hull, masts and trees were made of wood , the rigging of natural fibers, the running rigging of hemp.
Effects
The appearance of the Fleute sparked a revolution in shipping and shipbuilding and had lasting economic consequences in Europe.
Constructive influences on future ship types
The elongated construction of the ship type benefits the reduction in draft and width while at the same time providing high loading capacity. The Fleute was not only a fast, agile sailor, but could also be carried by a relatively small crew thanks to the narrow yards and the efficient use of pulleys. The flute was thus able to go close to the wind for a square sail. These characteristics subsequently led to parallel developments such as the pinass ship , from which further developments such as the return ship and the frigate were later derived.
The economic revolution
The Fleute was the first type of ship that, at least in the Netherlands, was heavily standardized and based on a division of labor, with serial production. This enabled an enormous acceleration and cost reduction in production, while at the same time increasing quality in shipbuilding. A huge shipbuilding industry developed in the Netherlands. Around a hundred shipyards built ships for all of Europe in the 17th century. However, the Dutch mainly use this advantage to develop their own position as a trading nation. The dominance of the floods led to an economic triumph in maritime transport without any historical example. On the basis of these innovations, the States General established almost a monopoly for sea trade between northern and southern Europe within a few years and handled around 75 percent of trade in the Baltic Sea . In their heyday they had around 15,000 ships, about half of the world's total tonnage.
The social and economic consequences
The merchant shipping of many nations in the Mediterranean area collapsed like a catastrophe. The Dutch fleets transported cheaper, faster, safer. Halving the journey times and the low manning of the floods resulted in gigantic overcapacities of ships and seafarers for that time. In Lübeck , the most important shipping town at the beginning of the 16th century, the boatmen demanded exceptional laws against the Dutch as early as 1612, since their own merchants transported their goods on Dutch ships, while the Lübeck ships remained unloaded. Seafarers' wages continued to decline, and more and more seafarers and unemployed merchants turned to piracy as a last resort .
In 1616, the Dutch admirals Opdam and Haultain wrote in an expert report: “... which, due to the shameful greed of a few people, is more and more practiced from day to day, like the merchant ships of the kind of Fleuten or Gaingen with the lowest costs and the fewest people Lake can bring. Many careful boatmen are thereby deprived of their food and withdrawn from the service of the merchant. The people run around without employment and cannot get enough wages to earn their bread honestly, and to entertain women and children, they go on improper trips, in foreign services and even in the wages of the enemies of the Dutch prosperity. The influx of the seaman profession is decreasing, since one can find progress there so poorly. Likewise, many honest merchants, who seek to conduct their trade with somewhat greater security, are not a little discouraged in their business, considering that the goods which are brought across sea with so little difficulty in Fleuten and Gaingen spoil the common market and all profit goes to them alone. ... "
Similar designs
Pinass ship
With the increasing growth of overseas trade in the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, the need for economic, but at the same time well-fortified and suitable for the warm equatorial waters, merchant ships grew. The European voyage was dominated by the Fleute as the most effective and most widespread merchant ship. However, this type of ship was less suitable for use in the warm equatorial zones due to the strongly curved hull and the round gatta. With the pinass ship , the technical advantages of the flute were adapted to this need.
Stern boat
A special form of the flute was the stern boat (also hekboot ). A stern boat offered the ship's command significantly more space and comfort than a normal flute. The main difference between a flute and a stern boat was a wide beam that was mounted horizontally above the hainaut and made up almost the entire width of the ship. With a normal flood, the transom is very narrow and hardly changes in width over the entire height. The wide bar gave the stern boat an unusually wide transom .
In the early stern boats, the transom began very wide at the bottom and then converged further up as narrow as in a normal flute. In later stern boats, high aft hulls were dispensed with. As a result, the rear remained wider and the difference to the original type became even clearer. At the same time, this type of ship became less top-heavy due to the lower stern .
whaler
In the 17th century the Netherlands developed into the leading whaling nation in Europe and the Fleute as the dominant trading ship of this time became the preferred type of whaling ship. Whalers of this type were built in large numbers until the 18th century and used in the Arctic Ocean. Due to the special requirements of the hunt, whalers had a straight deck without superstructures. These special ships were equipped with fishing boats on both sides. In order to withstand the ice pressure, these ships were designed to be extremely robust. The planking was doubled and the frames were made of oak with reinforced cross-sections. Whaler floods were thus able to withstand the ice pressure for a certain period of time, which occurred when such ships were trapped by the ice in the North Sea off Svalbard or in Greenland waters. Due to the latent threat from Spanish, French or English privateers and pirates, the whalers, atypical for a flute, were often equipped with artillery .
Origin of name
Seen from the rear, the flute with its narrow, high superstructures and the semicircular hole through which the tiller was passed resembled the head joint of a recorder with the labium. Hence, it is claimed that the name flute is based on the word flute . According to another thesis, the name can be traced back to the word "flow".
Well-known ships of this type
- Zeehaan VOC (Zehaen), launched in 1639, one of Abel Tasman's and Frans Jacobszoon Visscher's shipson the 1642 expedition.
- Derfflinger , a Brandenburg ship named after the equestrian general Georg von Derfflinger .
- Fleute Houtport . The model of this ship is now in the Prins Hendrik Museum in Rotterdam . Due to its level of detail, it is today one of the most reliable sources about the technical structure of the Dutch Fleuten that has been preserved to this day.
- The Bleeker (whaling ship, around 1660), a Dutch whaling flute of 400 tons. The ship got whaled off Spitzbergen in 1670 under the leadership of Captain Jan Lorentz Pit by a storm in pack ice, was crushed and sank.
- Black raven (Czarny Kruk). Built in 1627 as a merchant ship, the ship, equipped with 16 cannons as a warship, took part in the naval battle of Oliwa on the part of the royal Polish fleet .
Find the ghost ship
In 2003 a well-preserved wreck of a Dutch flute from the 17th century was discovered at a depth of around 125 m, 30 nautical miles east of Gotska Sandön in the Baltic Sea. Several expeditions were then sent to the wreck, which explored the wreck with unmanned diving robots (it is beyond safe depth for divers) and created a three-dimensional model from sonar data. It was ghost ship called (Ghost Ship), is 25 meters long and dates from around 1650. A film about expeditions came to the ship in 2011 for National Geographic. A hoekman (figurehead, which indicates merchants as ship owners) was recovered and another figure at the stern represents a swan, which could indicate the name of the ship. The shipwreck is upright and may have been abandoned before sinking, as indications in the rigging indicate a stop maneuver to abandon the ship on a dinghy. No human remains were found. Part of the transom had been torn off and lay behind the ship.
literature
- Robert Vorstmann: Merchants, warships and sea battles in the work of Ludolf Backhuysen , in: Henri Nannen (editor), Ludolf Backhuysen , Emden 1985
- Robert Bohn : History of seafaring , publishing house CH Beck
- Bernhard Hagedorn: The development of the most important ship types up to the 19th century , publications by the Association for Hamburg History. First volume, Berlin: Curtius, 1914
Web links
- extensive list of Fluitschip objects in Dutch museums from Maritiem Digitaal
- ARTE: "The ghost ship of the Baltic Sea"; (Sweden, 2011, 52mn; Director: Malcom Dixelius)
Individual evidence
- ^ Jan de Vries (1976). The Economy of Europe in the Age of Crisis, 1600-1750. Cambridge University Press, pp. 117-118
- ↑ Velius: Chronijk van de Stadt of Hooren, 1604, p 215
- ↑ From 1669, customs duties in Denmark were levied according to volume and no longer according to deck area. Robert Vorstmann in: Henri Nannen, Ludolf Backhuysen , Emden 1985 (Backhuysen exhibition), p. 108
- ↑ Hagedorn, Bernhard, The Development of the Most Important Ship Types up to the 19th Century, Publications of the Association for Hamburg History. Volume, Berlin: Curtius, 1914, p. 102
- ^ Vorstmann in: Nannen, Ludolf Backhuysen , 1985, p. 108
- ^ Hagedorn, Bernhard: The development of the most important types of ships up to the 19th century , publications by the Association for Hamburg History. Volume, Berlin: Curtius, 1914, pp. 110-114
- ^ Robert Bohn, History of the Sea, Verlag CH Beck, pp. 76–78
- ↑ The ghost ship in the Baltic Sea, Arte, July 2016 ( Memento of the original from June 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Malcolm Dixelius, Ola Oskarsson, Olof Nilsson, Johan Rönnby: The Ghost Ship Expedition. Frontline Deepwater Archeology in the Baltic Sea , Hydro International , January 27, 2011
- ↑ Niklas Eriksson, Johan Rönnby: The Ghost Ship. An Intact Fluyt from c.1650 in the Middle of the Baltic Sea , International Journal of Nautical Archeology, Volume 41, 2012, pp. 350-361
