Large Sailing Boats – Small Sloops

Konstantinos Bolanachi also shows us, from astern, the “Liner ‘SMS Emperor’ in the Battle of Lissa”, the last wooden liner to be built, which was, at the same time, also a screw liner of the Imperial and Royal Navy; all the more astonishing because it was precisely the ‘ramming technique’ that brought about the Austrian victory in this battle. The “SMS Emperor” lost bowsprit and foremast in the process, the vent was smashed, and a fire broke out on deck (M. Christian Ortner). In both versions of Anton Romako’s “Tegetthoff in the Battle of Lissa”, he all but blends out the entire ship. He places the rear admiral and his officers on the quarterdeck of the armored frigate “Archduke Ferdinand Max” above the helm, although all of them were actually on the bridge. It is no longer the historical deed that is primarily reported, but the feelings and experiences of the people acting during a single moment (Stephan Koja).

In Lorenzo Butti’s “Seascape with Scirocco”, the Mediterranean Sea is literally as smooth as glass. In the right-hand background, however, a change in the weather announces itself over the haze. Blowing across the Mediterranean from the Sahara, the scirocco is a steady, hot desert wind that shifts from a southerly to south-easterly direction. On the brig’s foremast, the ‘customs stander’ can still be seen, indicating readiness to the ‘clearance’ of the necessary customs and tax duties when the ship enters the harbor. But the crew is already rowing back in two boats to board the ship.

Johann Peter Krafft shows us in the small drawing “Pfenek” basically how most of these sailing ships were built over centuries: First, the future hull was laid ‘on a keel’ at an angle to the water, the most important longitudinal structure attached to the floor amidships, which forms the "backbone" of a ship, so to speak. The transversely stabilizing ‘frames’, the “ribs,” were attached to this, which in turn support the ‘plank gangways’. In his almost entirely fictional story “Das Trockendock” (The Dry Dock), which still wanders like a ghost through numerous schoolbooks, the writer Stefan Andres (1906–1970) describes a ‘launching’ in the arsenal of Toulon, alluding to the work of the French ship engineer and designer Antoine Groignard (1727–1799), during which, as is supposedly customary, a convict had to knock away the last support beam under the ship’s hull. If the convict succeeded in escaping from the moving hull, he would be pardoned, which until then––and again this time––no one had ever been granted. In order to put an end to this cruel procedure, Groignard had campaigned for the ‘dry dock’, but was beaten to death with a hammer by an angry convict when it was completed, because he had deprived him and all the other convicts of the illusion that they could gain their freedom.

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