The first of these was “Mémoires sur la marine des anciens” (“Memoirs on the navies of the ancients”), Le Roy’s first lecture on naval architecture. Presented at the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in February 1770, this lecture presented analyses and detailed explanations of the evolution of ships and sails to demonstrate that the historical and scientific approaches had to work in tandem. In Le Roy’s words, history and nature were similar: “History, as much as nature, frequently offers us a mass of sterile facts; she also sometimes presents us with some more precious, but more rare facts, from which can be drawn, as from a prolific spring, a great number of truths.”[4] History and nature both yielded the ever-important principles needed for scientific understanding. Without a historical underpinning, a technical understanding of ship building would be faulty. The same applied to history of naval architecture: it made little sense without understanding the kinds of technological changes that gave rise to the present problem. And like Les ruines, Le Roy’s first work on ships identified the development of an idée over time. The only difference here, of course, was that he looked to examples from Phoenician, Greek, and Roman shipbuilding to prove his point.
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| Catherine Haussard, engraving showing historical development of vessels. Figure 3 represents Odysseus’ raft. Figure 4 is a Phoenician vessel. Figures 5 and 6 are the side and front elevations of an Egyptian ship. From Le Roy, “Premier mémoire sur la marine des anciens,” 596. |