Nautical Research Journal 211


3. Models with fi ve rowers across to scale. Various benches are drawn in position with appropriate measurements.


considered building their ocean-going vessels, they wished to build bergantines. In his European Discovery of America, Samuel Eliot Morrison describes the sixteenth-century bergantine as a keeled galley-style vessel with oars, about forty feet in length, shallow draſt , and with one or two lateen sails. Typically, it would have six to sixteen rowing benches. One of Ponce de Leon’s vessels was a bergantine. Due to time and construction constraints, de Vaca notes that the expedition built what he describes as barcas not bergantines. Dr. Worth describes a barca in this context as a name for a barge-like vessel without a keel, usually fl at bottomed, oſt en used for river transport.


Later, in the 1540s, Cabeza de Vaca described building bergantines at a shipyard when he was the governor of the Spanish colony in South America at Rio de La Plata.


Dr. Worth translated the description of the barcas as forty-three feet long, with fi ve being built. Cabeza de Vaca described the barcas as twenty-two cubits in length each, so previous writers had assumed this meant a length of thirty-three feet (with an English cubit equal to eighteen inches). However, Dr. Worth noted that a sixteenth-century Spanish Royal cubit, which was typically used for vessel measurements, was longer at about 23.5 inches (about 0.6 meters),


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