The Nao of the Livro Nautico: Reconstrucing a Sixteenth-Century Indiaman from Texts
Alexander Dean Hazlett
Dissertation: May 2007
Chair: Castro
Documents and illustrations show that the premier ship in Portugal's India trade
during the 16th century was the nau, a beamy, three-masted ship, known in
northern Europe as a "Carrack."� For decades these vessels carried
passengers and cargo between Portugal and Asia. Despite the number of vessels
involved, relatively little archaeological evidence of these ships exists. While
16th century shipbuilding documents predate the development of ships plans, they
include theoretical treatises and scantling lists. From these documents it is
possible to reconstruct the construction of a nau timber by timber, employing
the mathematical relations and formulas used by the Portuguese shipwrights in
conjunction with the timber specifications from a scantling list, creating a 3D
computer model of the ship with Rhinoceros 3 modeling software. The result is an
annotated and illustrated construction sequence that shows the placement of
every timber in the vessel.