Referring to this famous image of Richelieu looking at....stuff.
What are the big tall things? They look like stakes, but it's a pretty weird angle to be stakes. Who are they trying to skewer with that?
Boats !
In order to blockade La Rochelle from the sea, Richelieu ordered a massive dyke to be built in front of the city. You can still see today where it was built :
https://imgur.com/a/lztyD (Google Maps)
The dyke was 1,5km long, and 4000 workers were needed to built it. So what are those stakes ? There is a reference to them in Richelieu's memoires :
"Et pour fermer le passage à quelque petit vaisseau qui eût pu se couler, on y fit d'autres machines qui tenoient toute l'ouverture de la digue et beaucoup davantage, et étoient faites de grandes pièces de bois enfoncées et liées pardessus avec de la charpente. On appela ces machines-là chandeliers"
"And to close the passage to some small vessel that might have run through, they made other machines that held the entire opening of the dike and much more, and were made of large pieces of wood pressed and tied together. These machines were called candlesticks"
On this map of the dyke (sorry for the horrible quality, could not find anything better), you can see those "candlesticks" on the second row :
You can see that they look quite different from the stakes seen on the painting by Henri-Paul Motte. The painting itself is a XIXth century artistic rendition of the event, and a massive exaggeration in size is obviously at play here.
Sources :
Mémoires de Richelieu sous le règne de Louis XIII
Pierre Miquel, Les Guerres de Religion, Paris, Fayard
