Enslaved: A note on Ships and the Sea
¡¡¡may contain spoilers up to current chapters!!!
This is a reference for readers of Enslaved to learn something of the sources and inspirations for the sailing vessels in this story.
I write this note because one of the main comments I get from readers is awe over the amount of research I do for this fic. In a way, I feel like a fraud for it, because I have done relatively little research specific to Enslaved - instead I'm drawing on knowledge remembered from university classes and documentaries and professional research on other topics and other random sources.
Enslaved chapters 27 and 28 are a good example of how I've actually done less research than it perhaps appears. It is always appropriate to cite one's sources, though, so here's how I gathered the information for Katara and Zuko's time aboard an Earth Kingdom Eastman vessel.
I have a nautical background of sorts and much of the language and basic descriptions of shipboard life come directly from my own experience, whether through my time on boats or through professional experience studying them. Any term that sounds "odd" in the narrative is likely a proper boat term - "overhead knee" is one that comes to mind. A ship's knee is a wooden support cut from the base of a tree, where the roots splay out from the trunk and form a piece of wood with a natural bend in it. Knees were used in lots of shipboard applications, especially to hold up the beams that support the deck.
I also, embarrassingly, tend to speak in "nautical" out of habit - I actually say "aft porch" and "go below" and "secure the overhead," as I was raised to do and has been reinforced by later experience.
So I'm familiar to a certain extent with the nautical life and old-time ship construction and sailing and such. However, the Nu Shi Lian is of a specific "type" of ship that I'm only barely familiar with - the type of vessel called a Dutch East Indiamen. These were large vessels, fully-rigged ships or brigs or barks that sailed from Northern Europe to the Far East to trade lead and iron and wool and preserved meat for silk and spices and tea and china. I had a general knowledge of them from old readings; I gained more specific information from a volume that has sat on the shelf in my natal household for as long as I can remember. Here's a more-or-less proper citation:
1962. A volume in the Story of Man Library: Men, Ships, and the Sea: And Other Adventurers on the Sea. Capt. Alan Villiers. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Chapter 17: Stately East Indiamen ply the spice trade. Chapter 23: Seagoing Merchants.
I decided after reading this article that the Nu Shi Lian is a three-masted bark, which means she has one "fore-n-aft" sail on the stern mast and the rest are squared - a ship built for sailing the ocean with the trade winds, but the fore-n-aft sail gives her a bit more maneuverability as she approaches a harbor.
So there's the research I did. Here's the research I didn't do.
I didn't really research how a merchantman (that's a general ship classification) of the time is crewed, beyond that she is typically owned by a company that may be headed by the captain or may be headed by financiers in the home port. The captain commanded the ship throughout the voyage but also served as the company's representative when they reached China or India, bargaining with the "factors" (agents of "factories" that specialized in trade) in those ports for suitable payment. A good captain could get very rich in just a few voyages.
However, a captain is just the head of the beast. Beneath the captain are the officers and the crew - and I didn't research what a merchant crew of the era looks like. Instead I compromised between "vague" and "quasi-navy." Naval crew structure hasn't really changed in two or three hundred years: you have a captain, a handful of commissioned officers who are leaders, petty officers who lead the crew, and "the crew" who may be drunkards abducted from port or who may be sons of a long line of sailors. Merchant ships were (and are) less rigidly structured, but again, I didn't bother to research how.
Furthermore, most of my descriptions of the everyday workings aboard the Nu Shi Lian are just drawn from the movie Master and Commander. To be fair, it is a Hollywood blockbuster with a commendable attention to detail (really - they did their homework to the degree that the cannonmen are flinching in just the right way), but it's very much about a British warship in the Napoleonic War. Not an East Indiamen merchant trader sailing around Africa to China, irregardless of how close the Rose (now the Surprise, following the movie refit) is to my own heart.
Then on top of all that, there's the way I've been fusing East and West - Asian and Euro-American - influences all through this story. So maybe the Nu Shi Lian isn't a bark but instead a lanteen-rig equivalent, perhaps something like Zheng He's great ships or what their descendants would have looked like had China maintained its imperial fleet into what's become known as the Age of Exploration. This is likely one of the reasons I turned away from drawing and moved into writing: describing the feel of the ship is more important than deciding the specifics of rig.
Also, while we're discussing ships, Toph's Good Earth as described in chapters 9 through 11 is a merchant brig, based directly off the Lady Washington - perhaps better known as the Interceptor or "that boat from the beginning of Star Trek: Generations." She's a versatile little vessel that carries cannon as well as cargo, herself a replica of the first American merchant ship to reach the Pacific Northwest, piloted by Captain Gray around Cape Horn not long after George Vancouver's voyage through that area.
Gray's other ship, incidentally, was the Columbia Rediviva; the Columbia River is actually named after that ship and the stories say Washington Territory, later the State of Washington, was named for the Lady Washington - and furthermore not named "Columbia" because they didn't want it to be confused with the District of Columbia back on the Potomac's swampy shore; ironic given that the District of Columbia is now better known by the name of its largest city, Washington.
Questons? Comments? Concerns? Tips? All are welcome.
This is a reference for readers of Enslaved to learn something of the sources and inspirations for the sailing vessels in this story.
I write this note because one of the main comments I get from readers is awe over the amount of research I do for this fic. In a way, I feel like a fraud for it, because I have done relatively little research specific to Enslaved - instead I'm drawing on knowledge remembered from university classes and documentaries and professional research on other topics and other random sources.
Enslaved chapters 27 and 28 are a good example of how I've actually done less research than it perhaps appears. It is always appropriate to cite one's sources, though, so here's how I gathered the information for Katara and Zuko's time aboard an Earth Kingdom Eastman vessel.
I have a nautical background of sorts and much of the language and basic descriptions of shipboard life come directly from my own experience, whether through my time on boats or through professional experience studying them. Any term that sounds "odd" in the narrative is likely a proper boat term - "overhead knee" is one that comes to mind. A ship's knee is a wooden support cut from the base of a tree, where the roots splay out from the trunk and form a piece of wood with a natural bend in it. Knees were used in lots of shipboard applications, especially to hold up the beams that support the deck.
I also, embarrassingly, tend to speak in "nautical" out of habit - I actually say "aft porch" and "go below" and "secure the overhead," as I was raised to do and has been reinforced by later experience.
So I'm familiar to a certain extent with the nautical life and old-time ship construction and sailing and such. However, the Nu Shi Lian is of a specific "type" of ship that I'm only barely familiar with - the type of vessel called a Dutch East Indiamen. These were large vessels, fully-rigged ships or brigs or barks that sailed from Northern Europe to the Far East to trade lead and iron and wool and preserved meat for silk and spices and tea and china. I had a general knowledge of them from old readings; I gained more specific information from a volume that has sat on the shelf in my natal household for as long as I can remember. Here's a more-or-less proper citation:
1962. A volume in the Story of Man Library: Men, Ships, and the Sea: And Other Adventurers on the Sea. Capt. Alan Villiers. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Chapter 17: Stately East Indiamen ply the spice trade. Chapter 23: Seagoing Merchants.
I decided after reading this article that the Nu Shi Lian is a three-masted bark, which means she has one "fore-n-aft" sail on the stern mast and the rest are squared - a ship built for sailing the ocean with the trade winds, but the fore-n-aft sail gives her a bit more maneuverability as she approaches a harbor.
So there's the research I did. Here's the research I didn't do.
I didn't really research how a merchantman (that's a general ship classification) of the time is crewed, beyond that she is typically owned by a company that may be headed by the captain or may be headed by financiers in the home port. The captain commanded the ship throughout the voyage but also served as the company's representative when they reached China or India, bargaining with the "factors" (agents of "factories" that specialized in trade) in those ports for suitable payment. A good captain could get very rich in just a few voyages.
However, a captain is just the head of the beast. Beneath the captain are the officers and the crew - and I didn't research what a merchant crew of the era looks like. Instead I compromised between "vague" and "quasi-navy." Naval crew structure hasn't really changed in two or three hundred years: you have a captain, a handful of commissioned officers who are leaders, petty officers who lead the crew, and "the crew" who may be drunkards abducted from port or who may be sons of a long line of sailors. Merchant ships were (and are) less rigidly structured, but again, I didn't bother to research how.
Furthermore, most of my descriptions of the everyday workings aboard the Nu Shi Lian are just drawn from the movie Master and Commander. To be fair, it is a Hollywood blockbuster with a commendable attention to detail (really - they did their homework to the degree that the cannonmen are flinching in just the right way), but it's very much about a British warship in the Napoleonic War. Not an East Indiamen merchant trader sailing around Africa to China, irregardless of how close the Rose (now the Surprise, following the movie refit) is to my own heart.
Then on top of all that, there's the way I've been fusing East and West - Asian and Euro-American - influences all through this story. So maybe the Nu Shi Lian isn't a bark but instead a lanteen-rig equivalent, perhaps something like Zheng He's great ships or what their descendants would have looked like had China maintained its imperial fleet into what's become known as the Age of Exploration. This is likely one of the reasons I turned away from drawing and moved into writing: describing the feel of the ship is more important than deciding the specifics of rig.
Also, while we're discussing ships, Toph's Good Earth as described in chapters 9 through 11 is a merchant brig, based directly off the Lady Washington - perhaps better known as the Interceptor or "that boat from the beginning of Star Trek: Generations." She's a versatile little vessel that carries cannon as well as cargo, herself a replica of the first American merchant ship to reach the Pacific Northwest, piloted by Captain Gray around Cape Horn not long after George Vancouver's voyage through that area.
Gray's other ship, incidentally, was the Columbia Rediviva; the Columbia River is actually named after that ship and the stories say Washington Territory, later the State of Washington, was named for the Lady Washington - and furthermore not named "Columbia" because they didn't want it to be confused with the District of Columbia back on the Potomac's swampy shore; ironic given that the District of Columbia is now better known by the name of its largest city, Washington.
Questons? Comments? Concerns? Tips? All are welcome.