Allow me to start by pointing that the Amsterdam duim was 25.7 mm and not 28.3. The foot had eleven inches. The Dutch word for wale is berg-hout and Witsen calculates it from the width of the inner edge of the stem.I have been following this thread with keen attention, and am much impressed with the knowledge displayed. Perhaps this perspective on how wales evolved over the century may help.
As to derivation of the word, Bertil Sandahl, the great Swedish expert on Middle English maritime terms, says it is probably derives in the same way as Old English 'walu' = 'ridge or stripe caused by the lash'. Related to 'weal' and 'welt'. He offers examples from 1294 AD, and notes that before the advent of carvel building in the 15th C, vessels were clinker built and the wales were strips nailed on top of the planking proper, to act as fenders, and not as later, bolted to the frames. Lots of illustrations of medieval ships show them. They consisted of 'slabs' cut from the four sides of a tree trunk, planks rounded on one side, with the bark left on. This is reflected in the Dutch and German words for 'wale' ...eg Dutch 'Barghout', 'Berghout'; German 'Bargholz' = 'Bark-Wood'.
By the 17th Century, the situation was different.... the shipbuilder needed to offset the tendency of the hull to droop at the ends, or hog, something which had not been the case with the tubby medieval hull, where the overlapping of the strakes offered considerable inherent longitudinal strength to a relatively short structure. In the longer 17th C vessel, the wales were belts of extra thick planking which demonstrated great sheer, and although roughly level with their respective decks, at the stern, they were angling upwards more acutely than the deck itself, with result that the after ends of the wales tended to be cut by the gunports.
Here, somewhat shortened, is what G Laird Clowes has to say about decks and wales, in Sailing Ships: Their History and Development (1932):
The sheer or upward curve of the hull towards both bow and stern, was very marked in Elizabethan ships .....but it is seldom realized that this sheer affected the exterior of the ship only, and no relation whatever to the decks of internal arrangements of the ship. The sheer was defined by the curves of the wales.... In Elizabethan days it was still a primary rule of shipwrightry that no gun-port must be allowed to cur through these wales, and so reduce the longitudinal strength of the ship ....and the arrangement of the decks...became a difficult probllem. But as the Elizabethans were without the tradition of a flush deck, continuous throught out the ship, they solved the problem by placing partial decks at the required levels, with breaks between them, whether up or down....as occasion requiered. the Baker draughts show plainly that these breaks most usualy occurred at both ends of the waist. A common but most misleading eror of contemporary artists was to show the decks as following the external sheer, and thus attaining in the stern a slope on which would have been impossible for men to stand, let alone work a gun.This leaves the impression that there was usually a break in the deck aft , to avoid interfering with the wale. Something of the sort has indeed been done in the Prins Willem, with the two aftermost ports being dropped considerably so they cut into the second of the three wales, while leaving the upper and lower wales intact. However in general I think Clowes overstates the case, or that this principle was disregarded later on. In the case of Vasa, the lower gundeck slopes up so the uppermost wale remains intact, although a small port in the space below the tiller flat cuts the third wale from the top. In English ships of that period, some seem to have carried the guns high enough that the upper wale is untouched....for instance the 90-gun ship of 1675, and the 70-gun ship of 1698 in the NMM. [Catalog nos. 1675-1 and 1698-2]. In many of the van de Velde drawings, the gundeck runs level, with the last one or two ports cutting the upper wale. In the Dutch 2-decker of 1660, which is the subject of Heinrich Winter's Der holländische Zweidecker von 1600-1670, the 3rd and 2nd aftermost gunports cut the upper wale and the aftermost of all cuts the lower wale. In general, it can be said that in no instance are both upper and lower wale cut over the same frames.
Why are two wales separate, rather than being placed side by side? Witsen
mentions that they are separated by s two foot five inches (Amsterdam
measure), while Deane notes that in 1st, 2nd and 3rd rates, the distance
between them is over two feet (English).
To some extent the pair of wales with the two planks
between them can be thought of as functioning like an 'I' beam, although
whether the 17th C shipbuilders thought of them is way is doubtful. But IMO,
by keeping them apart they resist hogging strains better than if they were
together. However, the main reason for separating them may have been to
avoid cutting both of them in the same place.
My guess is that once the wale has been
cut, it won't do much more harm to have the neighbouring port cut it as well.
The short lengths of wale abaft the gunport serve primarily for looks.
We have so far talked of two lower wales, and although this seems to have been standard British and Dutch practice, Witsen mentions the occasion use of three wales, as in Prins Willem, and Vasa, perhaps exceptionally, has four. In the case of Vasa, I would think of the upper two wales as being the standard ones, with thelower pair as 'extras'. This judgement is partly made because the scupper pipes are placed between one and two. In Prins Willem I would for the same reason suggest that the lowest wale is the extra one.
Around 1720, practice changed and the wales were built up much more solidly,
given much less sheer, and faired off so that their existence is not in fact
obvious to the outside observer. The planks above and below gradually
decreasing in thickness.
In Victory, the main wale is formed of four strakes worked
anchor-stock fashion, and the upper wale similarly formed of two strakes.
The number of strakes has to an
even number using this technique. Using top-and-butt or anchor-stock planking
allows somewhat better use of the available timber, but also increases the
resistance to hogging, since the elements of the wale tend to wedge
themselves together and become tighter as the ship moves.
The sheer of the earlier type of wales will resist hogging better than a dead
straight wale.
The elements of the 17th C wale were scarfed together, with the surfaces
of the scarf horizontal.
Witsen mentions hook scarphs, which would resist tension, and Landström in
his book about the Vasa illustrates something of the sort. We can think of the
wales as being in tension, rather than under compression. A 19th C writer,
Mossel, compares the wales to the hoop of a cask, again underlying the tension
concept. [Het Schip p. 195]
For most of the ship's length, the wales are fairly straight, and some form of heat treatment would have taken care of any bend needed. At the bows, they curve acutely, and Ray wondered how this was managed. Alan McGowan's recent book about Victory mentions the frustration experienced by modern shipwrights in attempting to steam bend heavy timbers round the ship's bow, and says they ended up laminating the heavy members. Neither Witsen or van Yk allude to this, but according to a much later Dutch writer [J C Rijk , Scheepsbouw (1822), page 103], the forward part of the wale, or 'bow-piece' ('boegstuk'), was sawn from curved grown timber rather than being bent round the frames.
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