Amsterdam ships completed in the summer of 1653

I was working on my annotated list of ships that fought in the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665, when I noticed that the Oosterwijk was 140ft long. The Amsterdam and the Oosterwijk were built under the First Anglo-Dutch War building program and came into service late in the summer, after the Battle of Scheveningen. They were both 140ft long ships. They were a non-standard size, as supposedly, they were going to build 150ft, 136ft, and 130ft ships under the two thirty ship programs. In fact there were many deviations.

My estimate of the 1628 bronze 24pdr drake gun weight

My first attempt at an estimate where I have an idea of dimensions for a gun is a 24pdr bronze drake from 1628. I have a lower resolution scan of Nico Brinck's drawing, so I had some trouble reading the numbers. The gun is about 2273mm long (8ft long in Amsterdam feet). My weight estimate, based on metal volume is 2739 pounds (Amsterdam pounds of 494.09 grams). I do all the important calculations in metric measurements.

I have more from Nico Brinck

Thanks to what Nico Brinck has given me, including in May, I have enough to make more progress on a Dutch gun model. There seems to be value in switching to metric lengths and estimating the actual bore length and diameter. Unlike the English, gun lengths are not on even 6in intervals. I am also using metric weight measures, the motivation for metric is to be able to deal with things like Rijnland feet and Amsterdam feet interchangeably as well as Swedish feet and pounds.

I need to calibrate my formula for Dutch guns

I am finally dealing with the difference in the Dutch pound and the English pound and the Amsterdam foot and the English foot in my gun calculations. I need to find one of Nico Brinck's gun drawings that I have a both a weight in Dutch pounds (one pound is 494.09 grams) and the measurement in centimeters (I think that is what is used for dimensions). That will allow me to calibrate the formula. My original formula was based on English feet and inches and English pounds. The Amsterdam foot is aboutg 283mm and is divided into 11 inches.

Dutch gun speculation

The two bronze 24pdr guns carried by the Zeeland ship Goes in 1652 and 1653 are interesting, because they only weighted 2384 pounds. To me, that means that they were short and had thin metal, certainly being chambered guns. They seem to have been the sort of mid-Seventeenth Century equivalent to a 24pdr carronade. The problem is that I have no way of knowing just how thin the metal was. My wild speculation puts the length at 5-1/2 Amsterdam feet.

Dutch guns

My project for yesterday was to compile a spreadsheet of Dutch ship gun inventories. I don't have complete coverage, but there is enough to be useful. There is limited information on 36pdr guns. All that I have is from the gun inventory for the Zeven Provincien that was published. There was a larger type of bronze 36pdr that averaged 6635 pounds. There was a somewhat smaller 36pdr that averaged 6282 pounds. The heavier 24pdr averaged 4923 pounds. The Zeven Provincien only had two of these. I knew about the other four that were carried by the Zeeland ship Vlissingen in 1653. Most bronze 24pdr guns carried by the Zeven Provincien averaged 4420 pounds. I can see that I have some reorganizing to do on the list, so that there may be some small adjustments in the averages, but those are about right, as is.

Hosting for two sites is down

Two of my web sites, Graphic-Artist-2.com and AngloDutchWarsBlog.com are both down due to a fire at the hosting service, Avahost. They really do not know how long it will take to get back up. I could tell there was a problem with traffic from those two sites disappeared from my tracking.

My current short project

Frank Fox called me to today to ask about guns carried by Dutch ships at the Battle of Lowestoft that he needed to know about. That got me started on making a list of ships with dimensions and gun lists that I know about, giving credit to the source for the dimensions and gun lists. I was actually able to put a good number of hours in on this, so that I made significant progress this afternoon. Of course, very little of this information has been published. I will at least supply this to Frank Fox, as he has shared a lot of information with me. Naturally, before I did anything with this, I would get photographs of the original source documents. I have a pretty good idea where to look. It is just that my focus has been on 1648-1654.