Carrack (nau)

node · earth · Iberian Atlantic and Indian Ocean

The large, high-sided, square-rigged merchantman that actually carried the trade, and the reason a Journey about exploration should not stop at the caravel. Where a caravel is optimised for working an unknown coast, a nau is optimised for carrying several hundred tons of cargo, guns, soldiers and provisions across an ocean and back, with the freeboard to survive Southern Ocean weather off the Cape. The Portuguese carreira da Índia was worked by naus that grew steadily heavier through the sixteenth century — a trajectory that ended in ships large enough to be dangerously overloaded and difficult to handle, and the wreck rate on the India run was correspondingly brutal. The trade-off is legible in the record: the vessel type that finds a route is rarely the vessel type that can exploit it, and the switch from one to the other is the moment reconnaissance becomes empire.