Note sull'episodio
The word junk came from the Javanese and Malay jong, a Southeast Asian trading ship, through the Portuguese junco, and Europeans applied it to the quite different Chinese ships called chuan. Where Austronesian jong were built with lashed lugs, no iron, and twin side rudders, chuan used iron nails and clamps and, since the first century CE, a single central stern rudder. Evolving from bamboo rafts rather than dugout logs, junks had flat bottoms with lowerable daggerboards and leeboards instead of a keel, and transverse walls copying the nodes of bamboo divided the hull into watertight compartments, documented by the 12th century and urged on American packet ships by Benjamin Franklin in 1787. Seams were packed with oiled fiber and sealed with a putty of lime, hemp, and tung oil that Marco Polo described.
The battened lug sail, probably Southeast Asian and shown in a carving at the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, was adopted around the 12th century: tears stop at a batten, and the sail drops like a Venetian blind. After overland routes were cut around 989 CE, the Song court encouraged overseas trade, and Guangzhou customs officer Zhou Qufei wrote in 1178 of ships like houses carrying a year of grain, live pigs, and fermenting wine. Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1347, described four-deck junks with 600 sailors and 400 soldiers. Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He led seven fleets across the Indian Ocean, but the Ming haijin sea ban then burned the fleets and dismantled the shipyards.
- In severe weather, up to 20 crew could be needed on the rudder.
- Chinese mariners relied on dead reckoning and monsoon knowledge, keeping the water bowl compass as a backup.
- Scholars estimate the treasure ships at 200 to 250 feet, not the 450 feet claimed in a 1597 novel, still dwarfing the roughly 60 foot Santa Maria.
- The junk Keying sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to the United States and England in the 1840s.
- In 1955 six young men from Taiwan sailed the century-old Free China 6,000 miles to San Francisco Bay.