 Chuck Fan wrote: |
| The english term Junk was a corruption of Dutch word that was used to describe the batten sailed wooden ships that plied the South China Sea. In this sense it does not have a derogatory meaning. The dimensions of the treasure ships does not seem to be consistent. There is no way a ship 200 foot wide and 450 foot long could possibly sail straight except when the wind is coming from directly behind. Such a fat ship would slide downwind like a crab if the wind is coming from the beam unless it had some truly enormous centerboard or keel. Also a rough estimare suggests a 450X200 foot vessel must weigh in the tens of thousands of tons even if it were to draw only 5 feet of water, which is almost impossible and would in anycase make it even more leewardly. Given a reasonable draft of, say 20 feet, and a block coefficient commensurate with the boxy hull depicted in the drawings, the ship would weigh 40 or 50 thousand tons. That would make this wooden ship outweigh the largest steel ship ever built until about 1910, and make it more than 10 times heavier than the largest wooden ship reliably recorded. So I don't think the records of the treasure ships are reliable or believable. Even if they were very large, they could not have the dimensions or proportions described. |
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I would be very careful about what the ancients 'could' or 'could not' do. For decades academics and historians used to discount the claims of the Viking Sagas regarding the size of some of the
Drakkar longships, insisting it was 'impossible' for such ships to be built to such size using the technology and materials of the times, and if they could, they wouldn't be able to sail them, blah, blah, blah. ALL of those discounting 'arguments' were thrown out of the window when Skuldelev 6 was uncovered, which was 117' long and sunk on purpose (a 'throwaway,' if you will!), giving credence to the famous 'Long Serpent,' which was reputed to be up to 160' long!
As far as the Chinese ships are concerned, the best reference I have come across is a book titled 'When China Ruled The Seas' by Louise Levathes. As far as records go, the Chinese were quite meticulous in their record-keeping, and had whole classes of society whose sole function was to keep meticulous records! Many of these records were kept for financial reasons, so as to keep track of the costs of building, maintenance, manning, supply, etc, etc, etc. You might as well say the records of the British Navy at Greenwich are mostly a pack of fables, because none of those ships and people exist anymore...... Also, it is important to note something about Junks in general, not often mentioned.... Although many were quite shoal in draft, they also had a selection of daggerboards/drop keels which allows them to sail quite well to windward, thank you very much! Much the same thing was used in the Incan Balsa 'rafts,' which in fact had no functional rudder in the modern sense, but a series of daggerboards that by being lifted or dropped in different sequences, would in fact steer the vessel quite happily to windward, or any other direction you care to name. Chinese junks also made use of such things as watertight bulkheads and subcompartmentation, that were not used by Western ship builders until the late 19th century....... It has been speculated that the enormous beam mentioned for some of the Chinese ships allowed for rows of masts not just one behind the other, but in parallel as well........