Sovereigns of the Sea: The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship - Hardcover

Three months later I was a student again, and immersing myself quite literally in the world of maritime archaeology. It was all fascinating stuff, but while I found the ships of the ancient world fascinating enough, my real interest lay a little later - the era of the Age of Discovery, and the early days of the sailing battlefleets. When the time came to write my Masters Degree I opted for exactly that period, and over the next year or so I wrote a thesis with the less than snappy title of Naval Artillery to 1550: Its design, evolution and employment. Another part of the appeal was that this was virgin territory - despite Dr. Colin Martin's excavations of Spanish Armada shipwrecks and the recent raising of the Mary Rose, very few people had really looked at the way guns played a major part in the evolution of the Renaissance warship.

Although it sounded glamorous enough, my subsequent career as a maritime archaeologist lasted less than a year. In the summer of 1985 I was hired by the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London to help organise a two week archaeological dig. I stayed for ten years, having discovered a whole new career as a museum curator. Naturally enough my main field was artillery, and over that decade I met hundreds of archaeologists and divers, museum professionals and academics - all of whom added something to my understanding of guns and ships. In 1995 I left for a new job in Florida, where I was immersed in a whole new world of Spanish shipwrecks, sunken treasure and yet more guns lying on the seabed. More than a decade later I found myself back in Scotland, surrounded by the piles of notes, books, photos and drawings accumulated during this 25 year quest to find out more about the ships of the Renaissance. I thought it might be time to put some of it down on paper. This is the result.