Grantville Gazette-Volume XI Read online

  In the seventeenth century, the rate of loss of sailing ships was 10–30% a year (Kohn I, p. 23). The losses could be the result of nature (storms and shoals), or piracy. The Baltic was free of pirates, but the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and certain Asian waters were hotbeds of buccaneering. In 1620–23, out of "thirty four ships sailing from Lisbon or Goa, eight were wrecked, two captured, and nine forced to return to harbor." (Parry, 195). Portuguese losses in the Asian trade were estimated as occurring in one in five sailings during the period 1550-1650 (Id.)

  One method of protecting one's self was to take out insurance. A typical premium was 18–20% (Kohn I, p. 32), so this was usually resorted to only in the case of cargoes with a high profit potential.

  An alternative to insurance was to diversify the risk. You split your cargo among several ships, hoping that some at least would reach their destination. You sold shares (usually one share for each crewman, for a total of 16 to 70) in your cargo to other merchants, and you bought shares in other voyages from them in turn. (Kohn I, p. 28)

  In 1591, a Dutch merchant sent thirty ships to Italy; "God was the insurer." The result? "Two foundered and ten were seized en route, although some of these were eventually recovered." (Kohn I, p. 32). This not only shows how high the rate of predation was in the Mediterranean at the time, but also illustrates how use of several ships can save you from losing your entire investment.

  You could increase security by arming your ships. Of course, that meant that capacity and capital which could otherwise be invested in cargo was diverted to cannon, shot, powder and gunners. A long distance trader was more likely to be armed than a coaster in the pirate-free Baltic (although, in the 1632 universe, the Baltic is not peaceful).

  A compromise was the convoy system, in which several unarmed or lightly armed vehicles traveled together with a common, heavily armed escort. This system usually worked well at sea; in 1782, insurance rates were 20% for unescorted ships and 12% for those in a convoy (Armstrong, 55). However, it was not a panacea, because the convoy was also a juicier target. English and Dutch privateers flocked to attack the Spanish gold fleets.

  In 1645, during the English Civil War, a wagon convoy, carrying cloth valued at 10,000 pounds, with a 80 man escort, was successfully ambushed by 200 cavalry sent out by the Earl of Northampton (Crofts 45). Consequently, the carriers adjusted to the wartime conditions by presenting a "scattered target" (Crofts 46–7).

  Pre-RoF Transport Vehicles

  Characters in 1632 can acquire their own "vehicles" (from mules to sailing ships), or hire others to ship goods for them. Carrying capacity and speed estimates are given in Table 1. For purchase prices and rental costs, see the Transportation System Addendum.

  * * *

  Draft and pack animals. Pack animals carry the cargo in panniers, one on each side. Draft animals pull some kind of passive cargo-bearing vehicle, such as a cart, wagon, or sleigh.

  Insofar as land travel was concerned, carts and wagons were used mostly in local and regional trade. While their carrying capacity was greater than that of pack animals (mules, donkeys, horses, and, in the desert, camels), they were slower, and less able to negotiate rough terrain. Long-distance travelers were more likely to have to cross regions without good roads, and also more likely to face bandits or armies (the distinction can be a fine one). They would find it inconvenient if they were unable to move off-road when it is prudent to do so. Hence, long-distance overland traffic was heavily reliant on pack animals.

  The premier pack animals are mules and donkeys. Horses are more expensive, more finicky, and more vulnerable to disease and accident, and hence they are more likely to be used as riding horses by the merchants and guards, than as pack animals.

  * * *

  In general, animals can pull a greater load than what they can carry directly. A light horse can carry 200–300 pounds, but could draw a 1,000-pound laden cart.

  Where roads are good enough to permit the use of wheeled transport, you are likely to see mules, donkeys and oxen drawing wagons. The wagons which engaged in long-distance carriage were called "long wagons" in England, and they seem to have appeared by 1567 (Crofts 7).

  Oxen are immensely strong; they can pull 150% of their own weight. Ox had other advantages; they were less subject to disease, they were less likely to be stolen, and they made a good meal if food became more important than transportation. And they were cheap. Their big disadvantage was their slow speed (1 mph).

  * * *

  If the travelers are going outside the area where they can stay at inns each night, part of the load will be provisions for the humans, even if they intend to let the animals graze.

  * * *

  Coaches were first used to transport those who could not ride themselves by reason of age, infirmity, or modesty. By Elizabethan times, town coaches had become popular, as much as a status symbol as for the practical service they rendered.

  By the time of the RoF, there were at least a few stage coaches serving the British public For example, in 1629, you could take a stage coach between London and Cambridge (Crofts 125). The term "stage" implies that they had regular routes. Long-distance stage coach service was acutely dependent on the adequacy of the roads. They were typically pulled by four or six horses, and carried six or eight passengers.

  For more information on coaches and wagons, see Bergstralh, "Adventures in Transport," this issue.

  * * *

  Finally, there were boats and ships, ranging in size from wherries to the Manila galleons. Which brings us to the issue of carrying capacity.

  Carrying Capacity

  A quantum leap in carrying capacity was achieved when you left dry land. According to Kohn, a river boat could carry as much as 400 mules (forty tons). The maximum size of the boat actually depends on the river conditions. On most British rivers, the barges were at most twenty to forty tons (Willan 97), but on the Thames, barges eventually reached a size of 250 tons (Sailing Barge Ass'n). On the Elbe-Lubeck canal, the standard size boat was 19 meters by 3.25 meters, and carries 12.5 tons. (Hadfield 33). The largest Russian barges were 150–170 tons (Hadfield 56).

  Of course, ships are much more expensive than mules or carts, and so purchasing one makes sense only if you are regularly moving large cargoes. Indeed, large ships were usually built, to order, for a group of merchants, each thereby acquiring a share in the ship. (Kohn I, p. 29).

  The typical size of a sailing ship depended on circumstances. Small ships could use shallower waters, narrower straits, and smaller harbors. They could find full cargoes faster, and could be loaded or unloaded quickly. On the other hand, large ships had lower manning ratios (Brautaset), and were less vulnerable to small craft attack, less likely to founder in storms, and more hydrodynamically efficient.

  In general, the size of the ship dictated whether it specialized in short, medium or long distance trade. For Bristol vessels operating 1539–46, only one, the 255 ton Saviour, carried goods to the Levant. The ships primarily with France and Spain were 30–135 tons, median 90 (Evan 19–20). The largest engaged exclusively in the (local) Irish trade was 25 tons.

  Kohn says that in the seventeenth century, the "typical" English ship trading to Spain was twenty to forty tons. (Kohn I, p. 25). But the Red Dragon, sent in 1601 to the faraway spiceries of Asia, was 600 tons (Milton 73).

  Propulsive Force, Resistance and Energy

  To move forward, a vehicle must overcome opposing forces: surface friction, hydrodynamic or aerodynamic drag, and (if it moves upward) gravity.

  The less these opposing forces, the less effort is required to move a given load. That's important, because there are limits to how much pull can be exerted by an animal or an inanimate powered vehicle.

  So friction is important. If the cargo is on a sledge, the load (including vehicle weight) can be 50% of a draft horse's weight; if it is on a wheeled vehicle with a good road beneath it, the load can be 100%; if it is a car on a rail track, 1000% (keep that in mind when considering the evo
lution of USE's railroads), and finally, if it is towing a barge, a magnificent 6500% (HNC)

  * * *

  As it moves, the vehicle expends energy, and the greater the resistive forces, the more energy is used up in moving a given distance.

  That energy, in turn, has to come from somewhere. Sailing ships, of course, capture the free energy of wind and current, but their courses are in turn constrained by the movement patterns of the air and water.

  Most other vehicles must use chemical energy, carefully collected in the form of food for animals, or fuel (wood, coal or oil) for engines, and convert it as efficiently as possible into the energy of motion.

  The greater the friction or drag, the less distance which can be covered as a result of the consumption of a given quantity of fuel. Or, in traveling a given distance, the more fuel is consumed. Which increases the cost of carriage.

  From Road to Rail

  The engineering purpose of a road to allow a vehicle to carry an increased load, or move at a greater speed, than it could over unimproved ground. It accomplishes this purpose by providing a smooth, low-friction surface.

  The wider the road surface, the greater the cost of construction, and so one can build a roadway more cheaply if the vehicles can somehow be constrained so that their wheels follow a particular track. Then only the trackway need have a fancy, expensive surface. While the trackway could be set level with the ground, the vehicles then escape the track too easily. The first solution, found in ancient times, was to cut grooves to receive the wheels. Unfortunately, these grooves, outdoors, easily filled with water and dust, thereby defeating their purpose.

  In the mines of pre-modern Europe, particularly heavy loads had to be moved, which provided the incentive to find a better solution. This was to raise, rather than lower, the track; the tracks became rails. However, while this allowed water to runoff, the wheels could also slip away to one side or another. Hence, a flange had to be attached, either to the rails or to the wheels, to prevent derailment.

  Flanging the rails meant that an ordinary cart, of appropriate axle length, could be run. However, as the track length increased, it meant that a considerable amount of material had to be invested in the flange. Flanging the wheels meant that the vehicle was dedicated to rail movement, but the flange investment was then determined by the amount of rolling stock rather than the length of track.

  One also had the choice of flanging the outside or inside edge of the wheel (or rail). However, if the flange is on the inside edge, a sidewise push tends to rotate the car so that the flange bears down on the rail; while if the flange is on the outside edge, a similar push lifts the flange away, defeating its purpose.

  Eighteenth-century collieries explored all of these options (NOCK/D, 105). However, modern railroads use inside edge-flanged wheels (Armstrong, 4).

  Double-flanged wheels are used on some alpine funicular railways, and on temporary logging "railroads" in which the rails are stripped-down tree logs.

  The Train Principle

  A train, in essence, is a series of vehicles coupled together so a few (usually just one) provides guidance, or motive power, to all of the others. A string of pack mules, led by a "bell mule," is one kind of train. Wagons can be lashed together into a true "wagon train" and hauled by a single team of draft animals. A line of barges, with a steam-powered boat pushing or pulling the others, is also a train. But the epitome of the train principle is the railroad train, in which one or more locomotives pulls (or, occasionally, pushes) unpowered cars.

  Why did the train principle become dominant on railways? The reasons include ease of maintenance, ease of replacement (after breakdown or obsolescence) of motive power, efficiency ("idle trains do not waste expensive motive power resources") and safety are all factors ("Locomotives," Wikipedia). Clearly, the crew requirements are less, too.

  But perhaps the most important reason for operating trains is that it allows for a much higher traffic density. The spacing between the individual cars on a train is just a matter of inches, at most, feet. While the distance which must be maintained between one train and the next increases to some degree as the length of the train increases, the net result is that there can be more cars per hour per track if they are part of a long train, than if they were independently operated. One industry source (Armstrong, 5) gives these figures for trains traveling at 60 mph:

  1 car trains, stopping distance 800 feet, cars per hour 365

  4 car trains, stopping distance 1,000 feet, cars per hour 945

  80 car trains, stopping distance 3,000 feet, cars per hour 2,535

  Cost of Carriage

  The basic cost of transportation is what some scholars call the cost of carriage: the rental cost (or amortized purchase cost) of the vehicle, plus the cost of hiring and feeding the necessary muleteers, carters or sailors, and any draft or pack animals, for the duration of the journey.

  In general, it is cheaper to ship goods by river barge than on pack animals or wagons. Economic historians have estimated that "carriage by road was . . . 4 to 12 times more expensive than carriage by inland waterway." (Kohn I, p. 50; Emerson, 254) The rates were higher on the smaller rivers, or on the upper reaches of large ones, but still were usually less than half the overland rates. (Willan, 121). However, bear in mind that the historians are referring to the pure cost of carriage, which ignores tolls.

  Maritime traffic offered the lowest possible cost of carriage, (from 8 to 20 times cheaper, for the same mileage, than using the roads, and thus about twice as cheap as the river and canal traffic)(Kohn I, p. 50). However, since ships were the largest capacity transports, they were most suitable for large volume traders who could fill them in one fell swoop, and thus not be dependent on the gradual accretion of cargo.

  Predation Costs

  To that cost of carriage, we must add the direct and indirect costs of legal and illegal "predation." Legal predation includes paying lawful tolls for using a bridge, mountain pass, harbor, or strait, or having a ship taken by a privateer, or one holding a "letter of reprisal." Illegal predation includes being robbed, charged "protection money" or forced to sell at below-market prices by roving armies, local lords, bandits and pirates.

  The following example shows the significance of such costs. "The cost of grain at the farm gate in sixteenth-century Sicily was 10 Spanish reales per fanega [about 44 kilograms]. Carriage by land to the nearest port cost 3 reales and carriage by sea to Spain another 3.5, for a total cost of carriage of 6.5 reales. The cost of predation included 5 reales per fanega for an export license (tolls) and 1 real for insurance (a measure of the cost of piracy), for a total of 6 reales." (Kohn I, p. 52)

  Tolls continued to be onerous in later times. The actual carriage cost for transporting coal from London to Wallingford (60 miles) in the 1630s was five shillings a ton; tolls tripled the price (Willan). Around 1807, a barge carrying fifty tons from Newcastle to Frenchtown had a carriage cost of $3, but paid $25 in tolls. (Meyer 81).

  * * *

  The direct costs are the actual tolls or thefts; the indirect costs are those of defense (hiring guards, mounting cannon, etc.), avoidance (delaying departure in order to travel in a convoy, taking a slower, more roundabout route to avoid tolls or pirates), and minimizing the value at risk (smaller ships and cargos, paying insurance premiums).

  A typical crew requirement for an unarmed merchant ship was one sailor for every ten tons of cargo capacity. If a seventeenth-century merchant ship carried one gun (cannon) for every ten tons of cargo, and a gun required two additional crewmen to operate, then that would triple its wage bill.

  In general, the costs of predation are much more variable than the costs of carriage. For example, one study looked at the effect of war and piracy on the (wholesale price index-deflated) cost of shipping wine from Bordeaux to London. The index was set at 100 for 1395–1405. It reached a low of 30 during the relatively peaceful period 1315–1330, while in the 1380s (during the Hundred Years' War) it rose to 190. (Kohn I, citing Me
nard, 1991). On merchant ships in 1700–1750, wages were 28% higher for officers, and 52% higher for the crewmen, in war than in peace (Rediker, 306). Overall shipping costs were anywhere from 40% (coal from Hull to London) to 200% higher (tobacco from Virginia to England)(Olsen 172).

  * * *

  Riparian traffic was especially subject to tolls. While overland traffic, especially mules, could skirt around many roadway checkpoints by taking more primitive trails or even cutting across open countryside, the barges had to stay in the waterway, for good or ill. In consequence, it could be worth resorting to mules after all.

  "On the Seine in the late fifteenth century, tolls added 50% to the price of grain over a distance of 200 miles, and between Rouen and Chartres they doubled the price of salt." (Kohn I, p. 10). As a result, "much of the grain trade that had been carried by boat on the Seine was by 1500 being carried by wagon instead."(Kohn I, p. 15).

  In 1500, on the Rhine, there were sixty separate tolls (Kohn I, p. 10). Even a modest toll, exacted sixty times, can be a considerable financial burden. "It was largely the burden of tolls on the Rhine that led the merchants of Cologne to develop an alternative overland route to the Low Countries in the fifteenth century." (Kohn I, p. 15).