Shipbucket

Very interesting additions, never knew anything about Japanese sailing vessels from this era before.

_________________
Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

Good work!

Hi, guys! Thanks for your input! The Red Seal japanese trade vessels were very interesting ones, and the regulations are more interesting: any nation that had attacked a Shuisen ship, was forbiden to trade to Japan in the future. So effective was this messure, that in Manila a dutch and a spanish squadrons stopped the battle, when a japanese trade ship entered to the bay, because both sides tried to avoid any harm to the rising sun ship.

Now, my first western vessel : a spanish zabra, sturdy but handy, a rather small ship, smaller than a galleon but able to fulfil many roles of the bigger vessel, and well armed for her size. In fact, the main burden between the Bay of Biscay Spanish harbours and Spanish Flanders in late XVI and early XVII centuries was made in zabras:

Here is shown a rather generic one (but towards to the bigger size), with the flag flown by ships engaged in the northen routes to the Spanish Netherlands, a red St. Andrew´s cross over white and blue stripes.

Credits: I owe a lot of details to the previous DP´s magnificent drawings. Thanks. Cheers.

Splendid addition. Looks like over time You might become our local sail ship expert (along DP).

Hi, B. Oh, no! I am learning while drawing ! I am just trying to remember the vessels that I read when I was a child, or the old movies in W&B TVs (in my country, TV was in B&W at least until the Soccer World Cup of 1978: Poland vs Peru, 1-0, the next Cup was even worst against the poles: 5-1 !). For example the first reference of this drawing was (for me) in the famed novel by James Clavell "Shogun".

Portugal was the first Western maritime power involved in the trade, at least in a considerable scale, with Far East. A well known type of sailing vessels involved in the trade with Japan were the famed "black ships", or Kurofune, named in this way by the japanese because the hull was painted with pitch. Later, the term kurofune was used in Japan to name all the western ships despite their nationality.

The Black Ships, or Nau do Trato ("Trade Ships") were very big carracks, with a solid construction with the best woods avilable in western India, able to withstand the weather, winds and seas of the far eastern route between Goa, Macau and Nagasaki. This type of ship is very represented in the japanese art of the late XVI - early XVII centuries, as part of the "Nanban" ("southern barbarians" as portuguese and spaniard misionaries and traders arrived form the southern routes) art.


A pair of comments: I depicted the vessel without the green and white portuguese flag used in the eastern waters, because the Nau do Trato is from the late XVI century. Instead she is flying a portuguese flag with the well known "quina", the 5 balls arranged in cross typical of Portugal. The other interesting fact is that despite being almost universally represented in modern (at least from the XX century) portuguese art and models with huge red crosses in almost all the square sails (the crosses were from the Order of Christ, the Portuguese Templars), in the Nanban art, the crosses were absent (despite small detailes usually depicted, from the beard and moustaches of the portuguese, to the matchlock mechanisms of the muskets, and maritime details such of the rigging). Also, in old western pictures of the era (XVII century), the crosses are lacking. For that reason is that I prefer to avoid the red Order of Christ cross in the main sails of the carrack depicted here, but instead is flying the flag of that order in the foremast. Cheers.

Well done!
Don't be so modest. After all, we are all learning while drawing and I don't think any of us here has reached to limits of own potential in this regard, so, of course, improvement is always possible - but especially sailing ships are particularly tricky, both because of their complicated features and because of shortage of source material.

Ah... "Shogun"... the television version was one of those series that were making Polish streets empty back in the 1980s - when we had only two tv channels and western-made movies/series/programs were relatively scarce (they were broadcasted, but because state was always short of foreign currencies, state television had to always think twice before spending a dollar).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEGqH52nGY8

Arigato, Eswube-San!

PS: As you can see, we were also fans of Shogun´s TV version! (in that era, we had 4 commercial channels, and the state channel -so boring-, of course no cable, but Betamax, cassettes and vinil discs... and I proudly had a Commodore 64 "computer"! Oh, the fantastic 1980s !).

Betamax was never popular in Poland - we went straight to VHS. Instead, we had something probably unknown anywhere west of the Iron Curtain: bootleg vhs casette market. Casettes were recorded, most often in West Germany, with a movie + an episode of tv series (like A-Team, McGyver, Knight Rider or Airwolf - or many others, but these were most popular, I guess) or sometimes two movies if they were short enough (or tape long enough) and provided with a voice-over with translation (quality ranging from crappy in-house to professional). Then vendors would sell them on the bazaars, though point was, that if/when you got bored, you could re-sell the casette to them.
In the early 1990s they were fairly quickly replaced by official casette rental, with licensed tapes (quite often they were ran by the same guys that had stalls with pirate copies in the 1980s).
And as for the computer games... well, let's just say that official/legal copies were something practically nonexistent until late 1990s. It was a closed circle: although there was huge interest in games, legal games were too expensive for the incomes of the day, so next to nobody would buy them in the official stores - especially if they could get a pirate copy, therefore there were no stores, as it was uneconomical to run them, and because there were no stores, everybody had to use pirate copies, because even if they could afford to buy them officialy, they couldn't for the lack of stores...
Oh, the good old days.

https://bi.im-g.pl/im/33/96/13/z2054046 ... tach-V.jpg

Btw. sorry for off-top.

Hi, B. Yes, it was an off-topic, but I enjoy a lot reading it ! (and I will confess you that I never owned or watch a non-pirate video, even worse, I never saw a legal one even in the video stores !). Cheers!

PS: I was watching the amazing DP´s "San Martin", and I noticed that my portuguese carrack almost lacks of pulleys ( ). I am searching once again, and I going to correct it.

Corrected. Nao do Trato with more pulleys!