foreword

for fun…

This piece of work is the fruit of a passion for ships acquired in my childhood and cultivated over the years. It pursued me by increasing when I studied seamanship and naval engineering, then in the long course of my professional life as a sailor and as an engineer.  I may not say, unlike Herman Melville, that ‘a whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard’ – I wish I could – but his Pequod certainly awoke my maritime senses when I was ten.  I have fuelled my passion over the years, by practice, by search and by reading.

It is a duty and a pleasure to hail the eminent historians and archaeologists who have so brilliantly enlightened my pet topic and so comprehensively scrutinized its intricacies on my behalf. What is the point of taking up the pen after them? None but the most futile : I must confess that my primary intention has purely and solely been to have fun by delving into this exciting domain. Now I would be delighted to entertain a possible reader.

​

… following a thread though

Neither an archaeologist nor a historian, I set my viewpoint as the one of a journalist travelling through time to track novelty down.  I have intended to trace the chronicle of creative thinking in nautical matters in the course of three centuries of intense innovation which make art craft morph to scholarly skills – a thrilling story of trial and error, of boldness and wavering, of calculation and fallacies, and, in geopolitical terms, of rise and decline.  I have set my start point in the 1660s as it concurs with the crucial appearance of learned societies – Royal Society (1660) and Académie Royale des Sciences (1666) –, and with the rising craze for theories and systems.  This is also the time of the sudden emergence of France as the challenger of sea power versus the United Provinces, at their finest hour then, and versus Britain for the next two hundreds years.  It also matches with the foundational measurement by Jean Picard of an average degree of meridian (1669) : the story thus begins when the world has got its size if not its shape... for the charts remain exquisitely fanciful indeed.  I do not expand further.  Let us enter the era of iron and steam which is also the late apotheosis of wood and sail.  Let us recall galleon, flute, frigate, ship of the line, steamer, clipper, liner, ironclad, battleship and dreadnought – all gone...

​

Sorry for the mistakes I left.  For a matter of principle, there is no AI perched as a muse on the editor's shoulder. 

Critics, remarks and suggestions welcome at lucchambon44@gmail.com  

Many thanks to Rear-Admiral Didier Fauvel for his proofreading & suggestions.

Luc Chambon, editor