Happy Tuesdays, squiders! Nano continues apace. I’m keeping about a day ahead of where I’m supposed to be, which is actually a little slow, but we do what we can.
Most of the story takes place on a ocean-faring vessel, known as the Hope’s Redemption. This is a bit interesting, having the entirety of the characters stuck in a tiny place that nonetheless has a lot of moving parts. So I also spent a lot of time on developing the ship, since it’s so important to everything going on around it.
Humans have, of course, been sailing for millennium, so that’s a lot of history to pick through. I went into it with a couple of criteria:
- The ship needed to be capable of a cross-ocean trip
- The ship needed to be relatively big, but not too big (to save on number of characters)
- Based on the state of humans in the later years (during the Trilogy) they couldn’t be at the point of the Age of Sail (late 1700s-mid 1800s)
So I settled on modeling the Hope after a carrack, which is a 15th-century sailing ship. It looks a little like this:
This type of ship was used a lot by European explorers in the late 1400s/early 1500s. It’s designed to be relatively stable and hold a lot of cargo. And it’s not that big, not compared to later ships. A carrack tended to be about 75 feet in length and have a crew of between 40 and 80 people. I went a little smaller, and settled on a crew of 36 (for my own sanity).
(I have 16 or 17 named crew at this point, so we’re about halfway there.)
I’ve added a couple of boats onto the Hope, which I don’t actually know if was standard practice or not, but I can’t imagine you’d want to beach a giant ship every time you find somewhere new. Or wade between the ship and the beach. Also I have read a lot of the Hornblower books and admit they’ve worn off on me to some extent.
The boats are called the Promise and the Dream, because there’s a theme here.
I also made myself some notes about terminology and how things work, so I hopefully vaguely sound like I know what I’m talking about. Here’s a page of that:
Even with my carefully crafted notes, I’ve noticed me messing it up a few times, so, eh, things to consider once the book is written, I suppose.
So, that’s the Hope! And a very good ship is she, though my landlubber narrator isn’t sure, as of yet.
How’s your month going? Thoughts about sailing ships?
