I'm trying to find out how many hours of labor it took to build wooden sailing ships. (Obviously it would depend on e.g. size, and the ideal result would be a formula or table relating such parameters to cost, but even a single data point, a labor cost figure for a single wooden sailing ship, would be a big improvement on nothing.)
I'm assuming that the techniques and costs involved, did not greatly change during the span of time in which wooden sailing ships were built with hand tools. (As opposed to steel hulls made in blast furnaces, or even modern fiberglass yachts, which would be quite different.) So the techniques and costs involved in building a medieval cog, a Chinese junk and a 19th-century English schooner, were probably within an order of magnitude of each other.
I have actually found some figures for monetary cost, e.g.
https://www.quora.com/In-the-18th-century-how-much-were-tall-ships-cost-and-who-mostly-owned-them
Cost was largely dependent on where the ship was built, but an average of about £20 per ton could be considered average for a fully equipped sailing vessel. A 1100 ton East India merchant ship would thus cost about £22,000.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-a-ship-cost-in-the-17th-century-in-Europe
A Dutch trading vessel of the type known as the Fluyt, was one of the most common merchant ships circa 1650–1750, they carried about half of all European shipping in this time period. A fairly standard price from the Hoorn shipyards was 10,000 Guilders. The average wage of a well off, but not wealthy, Dutch merchant was about 500 Guilders a year in the same time period. These Dutch cargo ships of 200 to 300 tons, were lighter built and faster then most British,Spanish or French ships of the time. They carried more cargo because they were not dual use merchant/ warships and had no gun decks. That also made them about half the price of a dual use merchant-warship.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-a-sailing-ship-cost-in-the-early-1500s
But, knowing the amount a ship cost, is just a worthless number - lets say, a 25 meter long wooden ship with two masts and sails - ready for take-off - in Denmark cost about 8000 rigsdaler.
Does this tell you anything? Actually no. You need to know how the economy worked at that time and what every thing else cost...
Right, that's the thing; how do these monetary costs translate to labor? I'm not confident just dividing the monetary cost by the wage at that time, e.g.
During the eighteenth century wages could be as low as two or three pounds per year for a domestic servant, plus food, lodging and clothing.
I don't think that means we can divide X pounds by 3 to get a decent approximation to years of labor input for constructing a sailing ship; for all I know, most of the cost of employing a domestic servant might have been those non-wage costs; for all I know, most of the labor input for a sailing ship (among the most advanced technological artifacts of the time, the equivalent of aerospace today) might have been skilled craftsmen paid one or two orders of magnitude more than a domestic servant.
I am making the assumption that the primary cost was labor. That's not perfectly accurate; the material costs were not necessarily trivial. A significant motive for the British government to finance the initial colonies in North America, was to obtain Eastern white pines to use as masts; at that time, tall straight trees of that size and quality were not easily obtained in Europe. Still, it seems likely that labor made at least half the total cost, so even ignoring materials completely as a first approximation would get us within a factor of two of the right answer. (Were there other substantial costs besides labor and materials?)
How do these monetary costs translate to total labor input? Or are there other sources for labor requirement to build wooden ships? I would be happy to see figures for any kind of oceangoing wooden ship built with hand tools (as opposed to sailing ships built with modern manufacturing technology, which would not have similar labor cost).
