alt Hacker News> Its planks are made of Pomeranian oak from modern-day Poland, and the wood of its frame came from the Netherlands.
I'm surprised the raw materials came together over such a distance. That transporting lumber was economical back then is remarkable.
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Well, as the article says:
> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber
Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!
Check out the History of the Germans season on the Hanseatic League [0]. The bulk goods trade was in the Baltic / Northern Europe was actually huge. The Hansa themselves traded all the way from London to Novgorod. Anyway, it's an absolutely fascinating subject and period.
You might be interested in tin transport during the bronze age then - You'll find tin mined in Cornwall in ships that sank off the coast of Turkey 3500 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_during_a...
This is because the material characteristics were so important that there simply were no good alternatives. Just like you would use steel for one thing and aluminum for another today. There were whole libraries of wood samples that you could go and look at or even test to ensure that your structure held up. Windmills are another item where wood from multiple locations came together.
Wood ranges from one extreme to another in terms of density, hardness, ease of working, strength in various directions and so on. There are hardwoods that are so hard that you can't really work them with normal tools and there are softwoods so light that you have to handle them carefully or you'll dent them.
I’m more surprised we can tell so precisely where wood that spent 600 years under the sea came from
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I live in a late 18th-century rowhouse where there is large stonework for window sills/surrounds/doorways all done in a very specific pink granite that was carved from a shoreline quarry a significant distance away. Massive stones, 100kg+ each, had to be transported by horse-drawn cart, over not-easy-terrain, a distance that would have taken two horses probably 8-9 hours per trip, and enough stones that it was probably 15-20 trips. Let alone the effort that had to have been required to carve surprisingly square/cuboid shapes from solid granite without power tools. It's mindblowing to me that someone was able to afford such a home construction, let alone the time taken to do it, in ~ 1790. It isn't a particularly rare style in this neighborhood either.
Fast forward 200 years, and I was sweating at the cost just to hire someone to deliver new hardwood countertops from a place not much further away. By truck. By a single person. In a single afternoon. No horses required.