As you have seen in previous posts from a lot of contributers there is a lot of data available on this ship, but from contemporary sources it is rather limited and sometimes contradictional. For the main dimensions I have made a comparison in excel between the contemporary data, handed over via the biography of Phineas Pett, with the recontructions of Werner Bruns and John McKay. A major difference between Werner Bruns and John McKay is the sources they have used for their reconstruction of the missing data for the ship.
Werner Bruns has used a Doctrine from around 1620 written by an unknown source about English ship building. The source is a little early for SotS finished in 1637 and written 15 years before the build, but for sure it was a source used during Phineas Pett's working life time.
John McKay has based his reconstruction on Deane's Doctrine of 1670, 33 years after the ship being finalized.
Werner Bruns made a complete reconstruction of the hull shape available to everyone and which can be found on his fantastic website on this topic.
Allerlei Informationen zum Thema Schiffbau vergangener Jahrhunderte, sowie auch Archivunterlagen. Handschriften werden auch behandelt.
www.werner-ulrich-bruns.de
John McKay published his book about SotS some years ago. This is a very nice book worth every penny but his design is questionable. See more about the book here.
Sovereign of the Seas by John McKay 1637 Part 1 Hardcover:296 Pages Publisher:Seaforth Publishing 3rd March 2020 Language:English ISBN-10:1526766299 ISBN-13:978-1526766299 DIMENSIONS:254x295x25mm RRP:£40 SYNOPSIS Sovereign of the Seas was probably the most lavishly decorated warship ever...
shipsofscale.com
There is a third possible source which is the compleat shipwright from Edmund Bushnell from 1664, 27 years after the build. I am currently looking if this a usable source for a design comparison with the two other mentioned designs and see if there are remarkable differences.
At least we know the designs of Phineas Pett were forward in time compared to the market. The ship was build by his son Peter which would mean again the ship design would have been modern.
Secondly if you are writing a book about ship building you would expect it is a book showing experiences and common practise used at the time and not showing the most modern methodes practised by progressive builders like the Pett's. You would therefore expect that Pett used his latest ideas and lifetime experience combined with the fresh look at things from his younger son in his piece de resistance the SotS. So maybe using a later source doctrine is an aceptable idea.
Who's right we just don't know but I hope to shed some light on this by comparing the design evolving from different contemporary sources.
From the comparison in the data sofar we see that Werner Bruns used all the contemporary data in his design coming from the Pett autobiography allthough his center frame is slightly different on the top timbers sweep (which is not handed over in time) than in the Autobiography center frame reconstruction.
I have highlighted the data different as in the contemporary source in yellow and herewith we see McKay changed a lot of these to fit to his design.
See the excel attached
Next time I will discuss the sources I am currently using to retrieve as much data as possible.
All comments or extra data is welcome.
