In boat building

Boat building

Boat building, one of the oldest branches of engineering, is concerned with constructing the hulls of boats and, for sailboats, the masts, spars and rigging.-Parts:* Bow - the front and generally sharp end of the hull...

, carvel built or carvel planking is a method of constructing wood

Wood

Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

en boat

Boat

A boat is a watercraft of any size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is a...

s and tall ships by fixing planks to a frame so that the planks butt up against each other, edge to edge, gaining support from the frame and forming a smooth hull. Such planking requires caulking between the joints over and above that needed by the clinker built technology, but gives a stronger hull capable of taking a variety of full-rigged sail plans, albeit one of greater weight. On the up side, Carvel built construction enables greater length and breadth of hull as well as superior sail

Sail

A sail is any type of surface intended to move a vessel, vehicle or rotor by being placed in a wind—in essence a propulsion wing. Sails are used in sailing.-History of sails:...

 rigs

Rigging

Rigging is the apparatus through which the force of the wind is used to propel sailboats and sailing ships forward. This includes masts, yards, sails, and cordage.-Terms and classifications:...

 because of its strong framing, and is the most critical development that enabled the centuries long dominance of the powers of Western Europe in the Age of Sail

Age of Sail

The Age of Sail was the period in which international trade and naval warfare were dominated by sailing ships, lasting from the 16th to the mid 19th century...

 and beyond.

Carvel developed through transition from the age-old Mediterranean mortise and tenon joint method to the skeleton-first hull building technique which gradually emerged in the medieval period.

History

In western knowledge and culture, carvel construction originated in the Carrack

Carrack

A carrack or nau was a three- or four-masted sailing ship developed in 15th century Western Europe for use in the Atlantic Ocean. It had a high rounded stern with large aftcastle, forecastle and bowsprit at the stem. It was first used by the Portuguese , and later by the Spanish, to explore and...

 and Caravel

Caravel

A caravel is a small, highly maneuverable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean. The lateen sails gave her speed and the capacity for sailing to windward...

 ship

Ship

Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant marine vessel. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing,...

s of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the two types of ships both being invented in Iberia

Iberian Peninsula

The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...

 from which they were first sailed by the kingdoms of Portugal

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 and Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 in the early trans-oceanic voyages of the Age of Exploration. At the same time as their appearance, the centuries-long battles to expel the Muslims from Iberia were gradually swinging to the Christian side, represented by the Kingdom of Aragon

Kingdom of Aragon

The Kingdom of Aragon was a medieval and early modern kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula, corresponding to the modern-day autonomous community of Aragon, in Spain...

 and the Kingdom of Castile

Kingdom of Castile

Kingdom of Castile was one of the medieval kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula. It emerged as a political autonomous entity in the 9th century. It was called County of Castile and was held in vassalage from the Kingdom of León. Its name comes from the host of castles constructed in the region...

, which were not united into Spain until the time of Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

. Their invention is generally credited to the Portuguese people

Portuguese people

The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....

, who first explored south along the coast of Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

 searching for a trade route

Trade route

A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long distance arteries which may further be connected to several smaller networks of commercial...

 to the far east

Far East

The Far East is an English term mostly describing East Asia and Southeast Asia, with South Asia sometimes also included for economic and cultural reasons.The term came into use in European geopolitical discourse in the 19th century,...

 in order to avoid the costly middlemen of the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations who sat upon the routes of the spice trade

Spice trade

Civilizations of Asia were involved in spice trade from the ancient times, and the Greco-Roman world soon followed by trading along the Incense route and the Roman-India routes...

. Spices, in the era, were expensive luxuries and were used medicinally.

Relationship between clinker and carvel

The clinker form of construction is often linked in people's minds with the Vikings, who used this method to build their famous longship

Longship

Longships were sea vessels made and used by the Vikings from the Nordic countries for trade, commerce, exploration, and warfare during the Viking Age. The longship’s design evolved over many years, beginning in the Stone Age with the invention of the umiak and continuing up to the 9th century with...

s from riven timber (split wood) planks. Clinker is the British

British English

British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

 term. It is known as lapstrake in North America. In general, the languages of other countries where the method was current use some version of the word clinker.

Carvel construction was probably invented earlier than clinker but parts of the world outside of Europe. In Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, carvel was the method of the south, probably having spread though the Mediterranean from the Middle East

Middle East

The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...

. Clinker was the method of north Europe, having developed, apparently, in the Baltic.

The smoother surface of a carvel boat gives the impression at first sight that it is hydrodynamically

Fluid mechanics

Fluid mechanics is the study of fluids and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics can be divided into fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest; fluid kinematics, the study of fluids in motion; and fluid dynamics, the study of the effect of forces on fluid motion...

 more efficient. The lands of the planking are not there to disturb the stream line

Streamlines, streaklines and pathlines

Fluid flow is characterized by a velocity vector field in three-dimensional space, within the framework of continuum mechanics. Streamlines, streaklines and pathlines are field lines resulting from this vector field description of the flow...

. This distribution of relative efficiency between the two forms of construction is an illusion because for given hull strength, the clinker boat is lighter because it has far less heavy timber framing. It therefore displaces less water so it has less to push aside while moving. The reduced displacement could be used to make the lines finer so as to make the passage through the water easier still. Of course, displacement was increased as cargo was loaded but still, the clinker vessel had the advantage in efficiency as the structure was less bulky; therefore, for a given internal volume, there was a smaller external one. That means that a bulkier cargo could be carried if need be, given sufficient freeboard

Freeboard (nautical)

In sailing and boating, freeboardmeans the distance from the waterline to the upper deck level, measured at the lowest point of sheer where water can enter the boat or ship...

. Clinker built vessels are, however, not well suited to most types of sailing rigs

Rigging

Rigging is the apparatus through which the force of the wind is used to propel sailboats and sailing ships forward. This includes masts, yards, sails, and cordage.-Terms and classifications:...

 because they lack the internal rigidity to anchor the vessel's stays against the transverse forces generated by sailing into or across the wind with either lateen

Lateen

A lateen or latin-rig is a triangular sail set on a long yard mounted at an angle on the mast, and running in a fore-and-aft direction....

 or sloop

Sloop

A sloop is a sail boat with a fore-and-aft rig and a single mast farther forward than the mast of a cutter....

 rigging

Rigging

Rigging is the apparatus through which the force of the wind is used to propel sailboats and sailing ships forward. This includes masts, yards, sails, and cordage.-Terms and classifications:...

 methods. They also lack the internal strength to support a center-board, as well as a deep keel, drastically limiting their ability to sail across or close to the wind.

Additionally, the clinker design created a vessel which could twist and flex relative to the long axis of the vessel (from bow to stern). This gave it an advantage in North Atlantic rollers so long as the vessel was small in overall displacement. Increasing the beam, due to the light nature of the method, did not commensurately increase the vessels survivability under the torsional forces of rolling waves, and greater beam widths may have made the resultant vessels more vulnerable. Thus, the greater rigidity of carvel built construction became necessary for larger non-coastal cargo vessels, as the twisting forces grew proportional to displaced (or cargo) weight. The physics of this imposed an upper limit on the size of clinker built vessels. Later carvel-built sailing vessels exceeded the maximum size of clinker-built ships by several orders of magnitude. However, clinker construction remains to this day a valuable method of construction for small wooden vessels.

See also

• Clinker
  Clinker (boat building)
  Clinker building is a method of constructing hulls of boats and ships by fixing wooden planks and, in the early nineteenth century, iron plates to each other so that the planks overlap along their edges. The overlapping joint is called a land. In any but a very small boat, the individual planks...
  
  — by way of contrast, the predominant method of ship construction used in Northern Europe before the Carvel.