On land and at sea

This chapter examines the possible working processes of those who took part, on land and at sea, in the tasks associated with shipbuilding and sailing. We must, moreover, bear in mind that when we begin to study maritime work and workers, we change industries. In Catalonia and its hinterland in Aragon and the Pyrenees, there were enough forests to regularly supply the shipyards of Barcelona or the port of Sant Feliu. If in the forest, cutting and sawing was the job of sawyers paid by the day, piece-rate sawyers a fill worked in the shipyards. If the work and interaction, on very different levels, of people with very varied training and abilities were needed for the complex construction or maintenance of a ship, specialized nautical knowledge had to be combined with simple brute force when it came to putting a crew together. In the late Middle Ages, wood was the essential raw material for building ships.