Stitching It Together: Sailmaking from Antiquity to the Industrial Revolution and The Historic Sail Research Project

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Sailmaking is among the most central, but least studied facets of historic seafaring. Extant information is scarce and although iconography illustrates general sail plans, the actual structures of sails from antiquity to the Industrial Revolution are largely unknown. The Historic Sail Research Project was started by master sailmaker, Louie Bartos, to uncover those elusive details of traditional sailmaking. For three decades, he parsed historic texts, studied iconography, and examined archaeological samples from Vasa, Mary Rose, Jeanne-Elisabeth, HMS Victory and others. He brought a sailmaker’s eye to the academic study of sailmaking and published many of his findings, becoming a renowned expert in historic sailmaking. Before his death in 2020, Bartos passed his project on to nautical archaeologist, Nathaniel Howe, to continue the research and prepare a book encompassing the findings of the HSRC and its study of the tools, materials, and general principles and practices of preindustrial sailmaking.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow