Illuminated Treatise, Practical Instrument, Mathematical Notes
The Multiple Lives of a Shipbuilding Manuscript
Stefano Farinella
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the famous English writer and politician, was also a collector of printed books and manuscripts. His personal library of some 3,000 volumes is housed and catalogued in the Pepys Building of Cambridge University, still arranged exactly as he left them. Among these volumes, manuscript PL 2820, known as Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrighty, tells a particularly interesting story. Originally meant to be a manual of shipbuilding by the renowned Tudor shipwright Mathew Baker (1530–1613), its contents and physical characteristics reveal a long and surprising history that ended when the manuscript found its final form and its place in the Pepys Library. What does this manuscript tell us about Early Modern shipbuilding, and its relationship with mathematics? And how does the materiality of the artefact reveal its different uses, including that of a mathematical tool?
The Fragments, as the title given to them by Pepys suggests, do not constitute a finished treatise. In fact, the current order of the pages suggests that they were in the form of loose paper sheets before being bound by Pepys. Nowadays, the manuscript’s form is that of a volume with calf binding, containing 80 written folios (160 numbered pages), 398 × 280 mm in size, plus 48 blank folios added by Pepys’ binder. The manuscript does not include his name, but various clues point to Mathew Baker as being its first author and scribe. The first pages of the manuscript are written in a beautiful secretary hand, and offer a short mythical history of shipbuilding, including Greek myths and biblical stories.
These pages are also illuminated with sketches and coloured drawings. On the first page of the manuscript we find an unfinished drawing of Noah’s Ark (Fig. 1) alongside coloured sketches of builders with different tools, ranging from a simple hammer to a gnomon. The drawings and historical references indicate that, originally, the manuscript was meant to be something more than a simple shipbuilding manual for practitioners; its sophistication suggests that it was prepared with the intention of offering it to a patron who, in his appreciation, might reward Baker with money or favour. Such transactions were not uncommon at the time: for instance, in 1604, shortly after James I acceded to the throne, the explorer George Waymouth (c. 1585 – c. 1612) gifted the new king a beautiful manuscript titled The Jewell of Artes, which, like the present manuscript, treated practical topics such as shipbuilding, navigation and gunnery, but was decorated with beautiful illustrations and was almost certainly intended to showcase his skills and talents more than simply provide useful information.
The 160 pages of Baker’s manuscript contain detailed explanations and examples of different shipbuilding topics, such as hull design, midship bends, masts, yards, sails and much more. However, a close examination of the manuscript shows firstly, that this work remained unfinished, and, more importantly, that the purpose and scope of the manuscript changed during Baker’s lifetime. Although Baker began to write the beautifully illustrated shipbuilding treatise in the 1570s, by the 1590s the project had been abandoned, possibly due to the death of the patron for whom the work was initially conceived. Subsequently, the loose sheets, now in their second life, became Mathew Baker’s personal notes, in which he scribbled annotations on diverse shipbuilding topics. This new purpose is also reflected in the appearance of the manuscript where, on many pages, the visual organization is somewhat chaotic, the beautiful secretary hand of the first pages has become more careless, and comments are frequently added in italic hand.
What makes the Fragments particularly interesting for historians of science is that Baker belonged to a special category of artisans, who are often referred to as mathematical practitioners. The whole of Baker’s manuscript is filled with mathematical rules and constructions, and Baker himself stressed the importance of ‘Arithmetic and Geometry’ in ship design; nor was he averse to criticizing shipbuilders who lacked the necessary mathematical skills. Baker communicated and exchanged knowledge with professional mathematicians. For example, some personal notes currently kept by the British Library and taken by Thomas Harriot (c. 1560–1621), who was probably the most capable mathematician of Elizabethan England, show that Harriot was in contact with Baker, devising advanced mathematical rules for problems such as hull design and the scaling of masts. Thus, studying the Fragments offers us a glimpse into the use of mathematics in practical contexts in the Early Modern period, as well as into the interactions and exchanges of knowledge which took place between scientists and practitioners during the Scientific Revolution.
As a skilled mathematician, Baker knew that not every shipbuilder was as knowledgeable about geometry and arithmetic as himself. Thus, one of his goals was the construction of rules and tools to help shipbuilders who lacked the necessary skills. Indeed, some folios of the Fragments are made of pasteboard, and are thicker than the others; this difference in materiality points to their function, namely, that they are meant to be used as tools, and the mathematical knowledge they contain underlies this usage. For example, on page 82, Baker explains his mathematical rule for finding the ideal diameters of all the masts of a ship. The rule is relatively simple: starting from the length of the main mast, the diameters of all the masts of the ship are determined by a linear proportionality, whose coefficient depends on how broad the ship is with respect to its depth. However, Baker devised a graphical tool to obtain these measurements without performing any calculations: he drew different columns with different scales, all associated with the different masts of a ship (Fig. 2). When looking closely at the top left corner of the page (seen at the bottom left of Fig. 2), one can see a small hole, corresponding to what today we would call the origin of the axis of the graph (Fig. 3). A photometric stereo image of this portion of the page shows signs of wear on this hole, as well as carved lines used to draw the graph (Fig. 4). By using either a compass or a small thread, the user could connect this hole with the last column, and the intersecting points with the other columns would give him all the required diameters. Pages like this one, drawn using Baker’s skills as a mathematician but in which the mathematics needed to perform the calculation is hidden, are tools which make use of practical mathematical knowledge. Once again, this is not an isolated case. Other printed books and manuscripts, such as The Jewell of Artes, are also interactive and meant to be used as tools. This reveals yet another role of this surprising manuscript.
Baker died in 1613, but many pages of the Fragments contain notes dated up to 1627. These are written in a different hand, and the presumed author is the mathematician John Wells (d. 1635), who was an authority on sundials, but also a naval officer. This later layer contains notes on various topics. Since Wells was writing later, and was a skilled mathematician, he could simplify calculations by using logarithms. On occasion, he commented on and improved Baker’s methods and calculations; he also included notes on geometry, sundials and other topics. As an example of the presence of these different layers, page 31 contains Baker’s notes on how to calculate the amount of plank that could be obtained from a piece of timber, followed by Wells’ unrelated notes on how to build an ellipse using a table of sines (Fig. 5). The fact that Wells inherited Baker’s manuscript, and added his own notes and comments, once again provides important clues as to the interaction between mathematicians and practitioners in Early Modern England.
From Wells, the manuscript passed to a contemporary in naval administration, Thomas Turner (d. 1681), who, in 1664, lent it to Samuel Pepys. In his diary Pepys described it as a ‘rarity’. Somehow, he seems to have obtained ownership of the manuscript, eventually giving the manuscript its final and current form. Pepys’ binder trimmed the 80 original folios to their current size, occasionally cutting out content and annotations. 48 blank leaves were added at the end of the manuscript, perhaps with the intention of including an index or further content. The volume was given Pepys’ usual front and end plates, and bound with calf binding. In 1724, the Fragments arrived in Magdalene College along with the rest of the Pepys Library, which has remained unchanged. The history of this manuscript, reflected in its materiality, provides us with important insights into Early Modern English manuscript culture, shipbuilding techniques, the different epistemic roles of manuscripts and the interactions between mathematics and practice in the period known as the Scientific Revolution.
References
Barker, R.A. (1986), ‘Fragments from the Pepysian Library’, Revista Da Universidade de Coimbra, 32: 161–178.
Harkness, Deborah E. (2007), The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Social Foundations of the Scientific Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jardine, Boris (2020), ‘The Book as Instrument: Craft and Technique in Early Modern Practical Mathematics’, BJHS Themes, 5: 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2020.8.
Johnston, Stephen Andrew (1994), ‘Making Mathematical Practice: Gentlemen, Practitioners and Artisans in Elizabethan England’, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge.
Knighton, C. S. (2004), ‘A Century On: Pepys and the Elizabethan Navy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6/14: 141–151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440104000210.
Description
Location: Pepys Library, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
Shelfmark: PL 2820
Date: Started in the 1570s, content added at least until 1627, bound between 1664 and 1703 (possibly in the 1660s)
Material: paper and pasteboard, different inks and pigments, calf binding
Size: 398 × 280 mm (pages)
Origin: London, UK
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to the staff of the Pepys Library, in particular to Catherine Sutherland and Isobel Renn, for assisting me in consulting the manuscript in person, for providing me with the photographs used in this article, and for allowing me to publish the article on the website of Magdalene College.
Reference Note
Stefano Farinella (2026), Illuminated Treatise, Practical Instrument, Mathematical Notes: The Multiple Lives of a Shipbuilding Manuscript. In Leah Mascia, Thies Staack (eds): Artefact of the Month No. 35, CSMC, Hamburg.