Labor Inputs and crew sizes, Late Imperial Chinese oceanic vessels

I had originally just ran with the first statistics I found for crew sizes, those in Dr. Nanny Kim's "Mountain Rivers, Mountain Roads: Transport in Southwest China, 1700‐1850."

The numbers given for crew size/labor-input for both large (400 tons) river vessels and ocean-going freighters are very high (1 crew per 53 tons, 1 crew per 27 tons) compared to a lot of the statistics I found subsequently, One figure from Bozhong Li indicated a crew size of 1 crew per 24 tons for oceanic vessels in the first half of the nineteenth century, while the overwhelming bulk of statistics were 12 tons per sailor or less. For river vessels the average ton per sailor was much lower, overwhlemingly in the 2 to 7.5 range. Crawfurd and certain other 19th century sources give the same tonnage for oceanic vessels, as does Antony in his work on Piracy gives crew sizes of 15-25 for coasting junks, and 60-100 for larger vessels, which would present a maximum of 12 tons/sailor for large oceanic vessels, but probably much lower as most ships were 100-400 tons.

So the numbers in the secondary literature vary widely, and I really would like to get at some of the primary sources for this type of information. But it has been very difficult to try to obtain a copy of the primary sources on oceanic crew sizes, Chen Chen Fang has published various Filipino records of the junk trade which list crew sizes and vessel tonnage (華人與呂宋貿易（1657—1687)), but attempts to purchase the ebook were stymied by my lack of a credit-card issued by a Taiwanese bank.

A major Japanese compendium of trade ship reports, which I believed includes crew and tonnage is Hayashi Harunobu, Hayashi Nobuatsu, comps., Ura Ren’ ichi, anno., Ka-i hentai (Tokyo, 1958)

But I have similarly been unable to find a version of it to buy as a book or Pdf. There is secondary literature which gives some of the info I'm looking for, but not both sets of data (crew sizes and tonnages).

The search for a full monograph on this topic or a accessible form of the historical data continues.

"Tou" de Seac-Ki e de Kong-mun

Recently purchased a copy of Artur Leonel Barbosa Carmona's books "Lorchas, Juncos, e Outros Barcos Usados No Sul Da China" which as the title implies is written in Portuguese. If there is an English version of the text I have found no evidence of it's existence.

The book is a fairly short work, richly illustrated, focused on craft of the Zhujiang/Chu Kiang delta and South China Sea. As far as I can tell, there is little overlap with Worcester or Audemard or other major works on the topic. I have no Portuguese or Iberian language skills, but the google-translate app has a helpful photo translate tool that I have been using to read the sections of the book which interest me most.

The section below was particularly interesting, as I have never seen a vessel resembling the one in the illustration.

"The 'Tou' is a generic designation of row boats. The largest has 75 cubits in length, 20 in the mouth [beam] and 5 to 6 in draft...forming a large deck, with two floors and accommodation for passengers and cargo holds...They run routes for these ports in the East River Delta. Today these "tous' are already in tow by steamboats, costing $9,000 and $10,000"

I have been looking for additional information about these sorts of vessels, the picture aligns with some of the information I have seen passenger boats towed by steam launches. The top level of decking seems to be the sort of rough mat awning under which the cheapest class of far sheltered on overnight journeys. The front half of the vessel resembles photographs and descriptions of other towed passenger vessels, but the rear half of the vessel is more like the stern of a mayangzi or the larger class of Hua Ting.

All in all, an interesting source which has presented many new lines of inquiry to pursue.

74-gun Man-of-War alterations

The first ship map I made was largely based a set of historical blueprints from the Greenwich Naval Museum's image repository.

I didn't know anything about naval architecture at the time, so the hanging magazines, hold, and orlop deck all have major errors in them. 

 

I also distinctly remember deciding to re-label the cable store as a sail locker, which is sort of comical after you learn how raising the anchor works. I do not clearly recall the motivation at the time, I guess I thought there were too many distinct storage spaces on the Orlop deck, or did not understand how a cable store was quite different from a Bosun's store. 

Thus a situation where I know there a some glaring errors in the map, but buying Lavery's 'Anatomy of the ship: Bellona' to get the precise arrangement seems a bit excessive to revise a TTRPG .pdf I'm selling for $2. I probably still will do it just to have another book in that beautiful series. Perhaps will wait until one of the few dozen people who have bought my map on drivethrurpg notices.

In any case, the issue offers an interesting case study in making/writing something while one is still learning the major contours of the subject matter. I find it a lot easier and quicker to get the first draft written, when untrammeled by the weight and nuance. But the trade-off is a much longer revision process, and major errors that will occur to you after you have finished the project and moved on to other things.

The offending article:

Song Dynasty Riverboat

I was prompted to add this design to the ongoing Chinese rivercraft project when I saw a model of a similar vessel in a set of pictures from a Chinese maritime museum.

 

It took me a while to make the very obvious connection that it is a reconstruction of one of the vessel types from the famed painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” (清明上河圖) by Zhang Zeduan.

There are 28 ships and boats in the painting, a number of which are variations on this general design

 

I extrapolated the dimensions from a set of pictures of a modern model kit from various angles. The length to beam ratio was very low, the beam of the vessel seemed far too large, so I paused this set of plans until I could find a relevant academic source. At this point I also thought the mast was a bipodal sail mast rather than a mast for a tracking cable. The embarrassing first draft of this vessel featured a sail.

Dr. Nanny Kim (Universitat Heidelberg) provided the source I was looking for with her excellent paper "The houseboat in pre-modern China". Her research confirmed that the vessel dimension I had arrived at were historically reasonable, and proposed two potential internal arrangements of this type of vessel.

I'm nearly done with the full set of plans, though the taper of the bow is not quite to my liking. The draft of the vessel might also need revision.

Sources:
Kim, Nanny. "The houseboat in pre-modern China: Technology and culture in mobility history." The Journal of Transport History 37.1 (2016): 5-26.

Preview of the diagrams: