Valamar Blog

´Argosies with portly sail, the pageants of the sea’. So Shakespeare describes them in The Merchant of Venice, those charasteristic chubby wooden freighter ships that plied the Mediterranean in their heyday of the 15th and 16th centuries.

The word Argosy is derived directly from the word Ragusa. Used initially to describe the Ragusan carrack, the largest type of cargo ship of Ragusan origin, it came in time to denote any ship of a similiar type, even if the ship was not, in the words of Ragusan Nikola Sagroevic, ‘the strongest in the world and made from the finest wood’.

By the late 16th century, the largest of the Ragusan argosies were four masted floating monoliths, capable of carryng 100 tons and manned by 140 crew (captain, officers and sailors, along with smiths, carpenters, cannoneers, a doctor and a clerk). Each ship had its own carpentry, smithy, supply of drinking water, plus styful of live pigs, a rabbit hutch, and hen-coop with enough chickens to feed the crew. ‘If she only manages to complete one or two voyages, she can pay back all the money invested in her’, as the reckoning went. And some of these vessels lasted an amazing thirty years.

(ref: Visible Cities Dubrovnik, Anabel Barber)