"Medina Sidonia's barge.(1588) Scale:1/350" Topic

Hi all!,
Today I've finished a special ship. Medina Sidonia's barge. This little ship was used to move fastly in the fight. It has oars and sails and was used to send message to others ships or plan the strategy.

I hope you like it!

Best regards,
Julián.

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or my facebook page:

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Um, nice work, but I note that your rowers seem to be facing the wrong way.

You are right, Outlaw… hahaha tomorrow I will change the position
thank you for the observation!

I love your work and attention to detail, but the crew would not have been rowing at the same time as sailing. As someone who both rows and sails my own traditional wooden boat as well as having crewed a replica 1776 American gunboat, I can assure you that deploying the oars while moving under sail is a good way to break your oars and hurt yourself. Thanks for sharing your work.

OBW

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OldBlackWater
The sail deploy with light winds….and it helps with oars. You can see a lot of ships in Baltic sea or Mediterranean sea.

I'm not sure how they'd get the oars out of the way on a boat this small, but galleys sailed with the oars in place but held up out of the water (at least sometimes):

I've seen period drawings of fustas and bergantines like this too (can't find them on line, sorry), so I wouldn't be surprised if this was standard practice aboard craft with lots of long oars and small interior spaces crowded with bodies – at least in situations where the oars might have to be deployed quickly or unexpectedly. It probably took quite a bit of time to stow a lot of oars, or to deploy them from stowage.

I don't know how this was achieved. The oars might have been lashed down, or maybe the oarsmen sat or stood on them, or maybe either as appropriate to the time/distance being traveled. Dunno.

- Ix

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Galleys were poor upwind sailors, so it might be reasonable to supplement the sails with oars when crawling slowly along with a light wind abeam or off a bow quarter like this one you linked to:

That's a really nice painting, but I'd still be careful about using modern paintings as "evidence" of how old ships were used in operation. I wouldn't give this picture any credence at all:

There isn't enough room for the rowers' heads, with that many guns aboard there had to be more than one rower per oar, the guns in the bow are land carriages without any tackle to hold the recoil, the wind is blowing the sail one way and the flags another way… the artist clearly wasn't paying attention.

- Ix

In second photo I think the wind is blowing obliquely but the artist doesn't use a very good perspective

anyway I have information on the use of the galleys of the sixteenth century and actually helped each other oars and sails. Assuming a strong wind blows, then logically, rowers would collect their oars.

That second picture actually looks like what an artist would paint if he'd never seen a galley but had only a description. It has all the right parts – guns in the bow, two masts, an arrumbada, a big lateen spar, a bowsprit/boarding bridge – but none of them quite fit together the right way. The hull is too short, there are only half the oars needed, the spar curves the wrong way, the guns are the wrong type, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if this was painted in the 19th C. Who's the artist?

- Ix

I figured I should have been more clear with my post but then we wouldn't be having this discussion with the great galley illustrations if I had. Indeed, in very very light wind you could use oars with the sails but if you look at the period illustrations presented by Yellow Admiral you see the sailing galleys have their oars out of the water. On the model the oars are in the water. The posted illustrations are also all larger vessels then the one depicted by Julian's model. I concur that period illustrations are not always accurate. I was just thinking that the wind depicted creating the waves and filling the sail and flags on the model suggests to me way more wind then you would be rowing in. Details details. Again thanks for sharing.

OBW

I don't know

OldBlackWater: You are right, filling the sail suggests more wind

On the other hand, it's a small sail, there are only 14 rowers, and they're hauling around a whole garden shed. Maybe they need all the locomotion they can get…

Putting aside all of our rambling ruminations about the oars – that model looks really nice, Julián. As usual. I wish I had your modeling skill. Was this model based on source material, or just a plausible supposition?

- Ix

Mi cliente send me this photo.

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It's the reason I made this type of boat but I have just spoken with him and I am going to change the ship.

1:350?
Impressive work on ship and crew!