Threedecks Forum

You are going to have a lot of difficulty finding detailed weapons listings for the Dutch, nobody else has managed it. Most of their archives were destroyed by fire.

The best published source is probably Jim Benders 'Dutch Warships in the age of Sail', but that is limited and has wide scale omissions. Frank Fox's 'Four Days Battles' is the best for that year. There is almost nothing for the 16C that I know of. The data from Jim's book has also been wholly transcribed into Three Decks, together with relevant information from Frank's book.

Nice, thanks Cy - I suspected this might be the case. I found a few detailed archaeological write-ups, detailing cannon sizes from Dutch wrecks of the era, so I thought I might try to gauge their overall weight to their caliber/weight of shot against the information I have on Dutch cannons - see if I can identify the recovered / documented cannons.

Thanks again for your time, and your work here on the forum - certainly an excellent resource!

If you have not seen it already, you might want to consult John F. Guilmartin, Jr. "The Guns of the Santíssimo Sacramento" at http://www.angelfire.com/ga4/guilmartin.com/Santissimo.html

This is about a Portuguese galleon lost off the coast of Brazil in 1668 and explored by Brazilian navy divers, 1976–78.

I just ran across this in my files while looking for something else. I had downloaded it in 2011 but I just checked the URL and it is still good.

Thanks for the heads up Navclio, I have already read that one - very interesting stuff!

I have settled on a process of making all Dutch and English guns of the ADW period drakes unless they were chasers, with the exception being the British Demi-Cannon, which seemed to be a drake even in chaser positions (according to the wikipedia entry on the Sovereign of the Seas). This allows me to move forward with my ship statting-out.

as an aside, the only difference between drakes and regular cannons in my system is the range (drakes having about half the range of their regular counterparts) - does this sound correct?

Just found this site so a late reply. The book: Nautical Instruction, by Diego Garcia de Palacio,, printed in Mexico in 1587, and translated to english by J. Bankston in 1988, lists how armament was placed on a Spanish ship-of-war in the 16th century if interested.

Very interesting, thanks -although a Little late - already published the wargame

I can easily take the information into account if/when there is a second edition though!!