ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys sources that indicate quite clearly that the leading shipwrights of the sixteenth century did not build their ships by eye, but after a careful process of design. The leading shipwrights led major industrial enterprises. They were in a word designers, or men who could translate an idea, a conception in the mind's eye, into instructions for numerous craftsmen to cut timbers that would then form a complex three-dimensional structure, with the required characteristics of capacity and seaworthiness. The problem being addressed by the introduction of ribbands is the exact parallel to that of fairing lines on paper. Moulding progressively more frames, further changes the balance, providing a more extensive definition of the hull at the expense of more rigorous control of the variation of shape between frames. There is some evidence that models were used in the sixteenth century in English yards.
