To attempt to trace in any detail the evolution of the sailing warship is a task, it must be at once admitted, far beyond the scope and intention of the present essay.

The history of naval architecture is, of course, a vast and many-sided subject. Few are the writers who have dealt with it, and, for reasons which will appear, few of those have written in the English language. Such books as treat of it are too cumbrous and technical for easy reading; they are not written in the modern style; by the frequent digressions of their authors on matters of general history, high politics, battles, economics, commerce, and even sport, they bear witness to the difficulties of the task and the complexity of the subject. The history of naval architecture still remains to be written. In the meantime the student will find the monumental Marine Architecture, of Charnock, and the smaller Naval Architecture, of Fincham, invaluable fields of inquiry; among the historians the works of Nicolas, Laughton, Corbett and Oppenheim, will furnish him with the materials for the complete story of the evolution up to the end of the eighteenth century.

The following pages give a sketch, drawn chiefly from these authors, of the progress of the timber-built sailing ship and of the principal influences which guided the evolution. Lessons may still be drawn from this history, it is suggested, which even in the altered circumstances of to-day may be of value in some other application. One lesson, long unlearnt, the great blunder of two centuries, lies clearly on the surface. The2 evidence will show how, by our long neglect of the science of naval architecture, the British navy fought frequently at an unnecessary disadvantage; but it will also show how, masters of the art of shipbuilding, we gave our fleets such a superiority in strength and seaworthiness as almost to neutralize the defects inherent in their general design.

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Before the fourteenth century the sailing ship, i.e. the ship in which sails were used as the chief motive power, could not compete in battle on equal terms with the oar-driven vessel; both in the Mediterranean and in Northern waters the oar-driven galley possessed advantages of speed and handiness which relegated the heavy, high-built and capacious sailing ship to the position of a mere transport or victualler. The fighting ships were the galleys: long speedy vessels with fine lines and low freeboard, propelled by rowers and fought by soldiers clad in mail and armed with swords and lances. Sails were carried, but only as secondary power, for use when the galleys ran before the wind.

Sea tactics consisted in ramming and boarding; the vessels were designed accordingly. The royal galleys of King Henry III, which formed the fighting fleet of Hubert de Burgh, are described as having each two tiers of oars, with platforms along each side over the heads of the rowers, on which the soldiers stood. Hung on the bulwarks in front of them were their shields. From the gaudily painted mast pennons and banners floated on the wind; a large square cotton sail, embroidered with the royal arms, was triced to the yard. The masthead was crowned with a circular “top,” a repository for bricks and iron bars wherewith to bilge an enemy vessel. At both ends of the galley were raised platforms or “castles” filled with picked soldiery, who during the approach to action would pour brass-winged arrows into the enemy and who, when the enemy had been grappled, leaped aboard. From mechanical engines low down in the waist large stones would be projected, and, if on the windy side, quicklime would be thrown, and other “instruments of annoyance.” The galleys were lightly built, and carried no pumps. It was no uncommon sight, we are told, to see half the knights baling, while the others fought hand-to-hand with the enemy.

3 By the year 1300 the size and utility of ships had made considerable advance. Two masts were given them, each supported by a few shrouds and carrying a single large square sail; neither masts nor sails were yet subdivided, but the sails could be enlarged by having one or more “bonnets” laced to their lower part. Of the two masts the taller, the foremast, raked considerably over the bows, and both were surmounted by tops, with flagstaff and streamers. A central rudder appeared in this century, in place of the paddle fixed to the quarter, and a rudimentary bowsprit. The largest cogs, as they were now called, were of 250 tons burthen. When hired of merchants for war service, they were converted by the addition of fore-, aft-, and top-castles, built high so as to overtop, if possible, the enemy. The war vessels were at this time lavishly decorated; the sails were silk, dyed red or embroidered with armorial designs, the tops and stages were aflame with banners and pennons, the masts and yards were gilt. Large sums of money were spent by the knights in beautifying their ships.

But in this century two great inventions brought to a close an epoch in warship construction. Gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were discovered. Cannon were adapted to ships in place of the mechanical engines which had formerly been carried, and by aid of the compass, housed in its wood-pegged bittacle in the steerage, vessels began to venture out of touch with land and sail with a new security the uncharted ocean.

The effect of each of these two discoveries was the same: a growth in the size, strength, and capacity of ships, a decline in the use of oars and a greater reliance on sails. High sides were required against the waves, stouter timbers to support the weight of ordnance, more capacious holds for the stowage of the ballast, food, and cordage which would be needed for a long sea voyage. The galley, with its low flush deck and outward-sloping sides was ill adapted for the new conditions; a new construction was seen to be needed. Two new types were evolved, one in the Mediterranean and one, more gradually, in Atlantic waters.

Even before the Christian era there had been a distinct differentiation between the ships of the Mediterranean and those of the Atlantic seaboard. The latter, as shown by Nicolas’ quotation from C?sar, were more strongly built than the Roman galleys, with flatter bottoms, to “adapt them to the shallows and to sustain without danger the ebbing of the tide,”4 and with prows and sterns “very high and erect, to bear the hugeness of the waves”: properties which, even before the advent of fire artillery, conferred on them important advantages.1 Nevertheless, complete differentiation did not obtain until after the discovery of gunpowder and the mariner’s needle. Before that time the vessels used by the Northern nations in war were of the galley type, built by themselves or, after the Crusades had revealed the superiority of the Mediterranean powers in warship design, hired not infrequently from Venetians or from Genoese. The Genoese were the chief naval mercenaries of Europe at this age: “Genoese were vice-admirals to the English king, and Genoese galleys fought for the French at Sluys.”

The new type evolved in the Mediterranean was the galleasse. For centuries, as we have seen, large sailing ships had been used for commerce, both in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean. With the inevitable increase in size brought about by the adoption of cannon, and by the desire for greater sea-keeping qualities, resort was now had by the Genoese and Venetians to sails in war vessels as a means of propulsion of equal importance with oars. Thus an uncomfortable compromise was effected between oars and sails; both were provided. The galleasse was originally a large decked galley, with three pole masts for its lateen sails, and with cannon spaced at intervals along its sides above the rowers. In form it differed little from the galley, but in the disposition of its armament it was entirely different; it represented the first stage in the evolution of the broadside fighting ship.

But the galleasse, though it might meet the requirements of Mediterranean warfare, was almost as unsuited as the galley to Atlantic conditions. Accordingly the warship underwent a separate and independent development at the hands of the Atlantic nations. Forsaking the galley, they took the lofty, strong and capacious sailing merchant ship as the basis of a new type, and from the lumbering carrack and caravel and dromon they evolved the vessel which eventually became known as the galleon. A distinctive naval architecture, Gothic rather than Byzantine in character, was thus founded on the Atlantic seaboard. The oar was entirely superseded by the sail. The ships were high, and their sides, instead of falling out like those of galleys, were curved inwards so as to “tumble5 home” above the water-line: an arrangement which protected the ordnance, added to the strength of the vessels, and tended to render them steadier gun-platforms. The top-castles were retained on the masts, but the end-castles disappeared, or rather, were incorporated into the structure of the lofty bow and stern, to provide accommodation for officers, and cover for the crew. The voile latine gave way to the voile quarrée. In place of the large lateen sails carried by galley and galleasse, were smaller sails and courses, square, more easily manipulated and allowing of greater variation in disposition and effective area, to suit the conditions of weather and the trim of the ship.

Throughout the fifteenth century the sailing ship developed. “While in the first quarter,” writes Mr. Oppenheim of English shipping, “we find that men-of-war possess, at the most, two masts and two sails, carry three or four guns, and one or two rudimentary bowsprits, at the close of the same century they are three- or four-masters, with topmasts and topsails, bowsprit and spritsail, and conforming to the characteristics of the type which remained generally constant for more than two centuries.” The English mariner had by this time acquired his honourable reputation. In merchant ships he carried Bordeaux wine, the casks of which became the unit for measurement of their tunnage; even in winter months, we are told, he braved the Bay with pilgrims on tour to the shrine of St. James of Compostella. Large royal ships of over 1000 tons burthen were built, in the early part of the century, in English yards. As builders the Normans seem at this time to have excelled.2 But the most wonderful development of the science of seamanship in all its branches took place in the Peninsula. Largely through the inspiration of one man the greatest efforts of Spain and Portugal were directed to the cult of navigation and geography, the improvement of shipbuilding, and the discovery of new and distant lands and oceans. A brilliant impetus was given to the study of ship construction by the voyages of Columbus, the Cabots, Vasco di Gama, and other intrepid spirits who, by aid of the compass, braved the moral and physical terrors of far-distant voyages—“fighting immensity with a needle.”

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With the development of artillery the value of the sailing ship for sea warfare came gradually to view. Naval tactics suffered a complete change.

Until the early days of the sixteenth century sea-fights had been land-fights in character; ships came as quickly as possible to close quarters, grappled or charged one another, cut rigging, and essayed to board. The sailor was subservient to the soldier. The gun, represented in the main by serpentines, periers, murderers, and other quick-firing pieces, was primarily a defensive armament, for the defence, firstly, of the entire ship, or, in the event of the waist being captured, of the fortified end citadels or castles. “These castles, which in vessels especially constructed for war came to take the form of a forecastle and a half-deck, were made musket-proof; and being closed athwartship with similarly protected bulkheads, known as ‘cubbridge-heads,’ were impenetrable to boarders; while at the same time, by means of loopholes and quick-firing pieces in-board, they could enfilade the waist with musketry and murdering shot. Thus a ship of the English pattern, at any rate, could rarely be held even if boarders entered, until her ‘cage works’ or protected castles were destroyed by gunfire.”3 The ship itself, being deep-waisted and built with an exaggerated sheer upwards toward bow and stem, had no continuous deck: the decks were laid on various levels, rising from the waist by steps to the two citadels, an arrangement which did not contribute, as a flush-deck would have done, to the longitudinal strength of the vessel, and which was found inconvenient for the working and transport of ordnance of the heavier sort.

King Henry VIII, in his efforts to possess fighting ships superior to those of Spain, France and Scotland, raised not only artillery but ships themselves to a different r?le. As he personally urged the manufacture of ordnance in this country by the subsidizing of foreign talent, so he sought to improve the design of his ships by inviting Italian shipwrights to come to England and apply their knowledge to the royal vessels. Dockyards were founded at Woolwich, Deptford, and Portsmouth. Large ships were laid down, several were rebuilt, with many improvements embodied in them: chief of these7 being a new artillery armament. The king had seized the advantages of the sailing ship with broadside fire. “The development of broadside fire,” says Sir Julian Corbett, “was a question of gunnery, of naval architecture, and of seamanship. With Henry’s introduction of heavy guns on board his larger vessels, however, the true note had been struck, and by the end of his reign the first two arts had made great strides. Guns of all patterns and sizes were being cast in England, both in bronze and iron, which were little inferior to those Nelson fought with.” The result of the king’s efforts was seen in the ships laid down in the last years of his reign. The frontispiece of Mr. Oppenheim’s History of the Administration of the Royal Navy is a picture of one of these, the Tiger, a four-masted flush-decked vessel, with no sheer, little top hamper, a long tier of ordnance on the gun deck, and with a beak-head ending in a spur: one of a class “which shows a very great advance on anything before afloat and indicates a steady progression towards the modern type.”

In short, a reversion to a smaller and seaworthier type took place. The large, unstable and unwieldy “great ship,” such as the Henry Grace á Dieu, built on the Spanish model, with lofty ends overweighted with small ordnance, was not effective. A new invention, attributed to Descharges of Brest in 1501, viz. the adaptation of portholes to ordnance along the sides of a ship, perhaps suggested a better form. As the century advanced, as new and far-distant countries appeared on the map, the arts of seamanship and gunnery continuously improved; naval architecture made a corresponding progress. For sea fighting the high-charged and imposing “great ship” gave place to a more perfected type—the galleon. “It was the development of the galleon,” insists the historian, “which changed the naval art from its medieval to its modern state.” The galley, eminently suited to the Mediterranean, where winds were light and slave labour abundant, was found to be increasingly unsuitable for Atlantic warfare; the galley was in danger of being rammed, in any wind, by a strong, quick-turning sailing ship, and suffered from having nearly all its artillery in the bows; moreover, “the galley service was always repugnant to our national temperament.” The galleasse, the hybrid between the oar-driven galley and the sailing ship, suffered from all the disadvantages of the compromise. The great ship had now proved to be cumbrous8 and expensive, crank and unseaworthy, leewardly and unmanageable in even a moderate breeze.

The galleon therefore became the type favoured by the English navy. Whereas the merchant ship was short in proportion to its beam, the galleon was built long, with a length equal to three times its breadth. It had also a long flat floor like a galley, and was of lower freeboard than a round-ship. “It was also like a galley flush-decked, and would seem always to have had the half-deck carried across the waist so as to make one flush-deck with the old forecastle. In the larger types the quarter-deck was also carried flush from stem to stem, so that latterly at any rate a true galleon had at least two decks and sometimes three. On the upper deck in the earlier types were erected both fore and aft high-castles as in a galleasse, but usually on curved lines, which gave the hull of the old-fashioned galleons the appearance of a half moon.”4 The depth of hold at the waist was only about two-fifths the beam. Its artillery was light but effective, being composed of light muzzle loaders, a mean between the man-killers and the heavy bombards of an earlier day. Its masts and spars were made heavy and large sail area was given it, for speed and quick man?uvring were the essential qualities which it was hoped to oppose to the lumbering, high-charged ships of Spain. Victory was to be sought by a skilful combination of seamanship and gunnery, rapid fire being poured into an enemy at a convenient range and bearing. “Plenty of room and a stand-off fight” sufficiently defines the sea tactics of the new era.

Throughout the reign of Elizabeth the galleon still remained the favourite type, though opinion differed, and continued to differ through the two following centuries, as to the degree to which it was desirable to “build lofty.” The Hawkins family of Plymouth shipowners carried a great influence in the councils of the navy. Sir John Hawkins, whose experience of shipbuilding and seamanship rendered him a man of importance, was the author of improvements in this respect, as in so many others; “the first Elizabethan men-of-war, the fastest sailers and best sea-boats then afloat, were built to his plans; and from the time of his appointment as Treasurer of the Navy dates the change to the relatively low and long type that made the English ships so much more handy than their9 Spanish antagonists.”5 His kinsman, Sir Richard, on the other hand, preferred large and high-charged ships, “not only for their moral effect on the enemy, but for their superiority in boarding and the heavier ordnance and larger crews they would carry. Two decks and a half he considers to be the least a great ship should have, and was of opinion that the fashion for galleasse-built ships—or, as he calls them, ‘race’ ships—in preference to those ‘lofty-built’ had been pushed too far.”6 Ships with large cage-works had an advantage, he maintained, in affording cover for the crew and positions for quick-firing batteries; his opponents argued that the weight of top-hamper saved by their abolition could be put with better advantage into a heavy artillery.

The advocates of the fast, low-lying ships carried the day. War came with Spain, and there was soon work to show what the English ships could do. The Armada Papers7 light up for us, by the fitful glare of the cressets of Hawkins and Co., the preparation of the fleet at Plymouth, and show us what state of efficiency the royal ships were in. “The Hope and Nonpariel are both graved, tallowed, and this tide into the road again,” writes William Hawkins to his brother. “We trim one side of every ship by night and the other side by day, so that we end the three great-ships in three days this spring. The ships sit aground so strongly, and are so staunch as if they were made of a whole tree. The doing of it is very chargeable, for that it is done by torchlight and cressets, and in an extreme gale of wind, which consumes pitch, tallow, and firs abundantly.” Not only the few royal ships, but the whole of the force which lies in the Sound is tuned for the fight. “For Mr. Hawkins’ bargain,” writes the Commander-in-Chief to Lord Burghley, “this much I will say: I have been aboard of every ship that goeth out with me, and in every place where any may creep, and there is never a one of them that knows what a leak means. I do thank God that they be in the estate they be in.” The Spanish ships prove to be in a very different condition. High-charged and leewardly, poorly rigged and lightly gunned, they are so hammered and raked by Lord Howard’s well-found fleet that, when bad weather ultimately comes, they are in no condition to combat the elements. With masts and rigging shattered, water-casks smashed, no10 anchors; short-handed and leaking like sieves, they are hounded northwards to a disaster unparalleled in naval history.

And now, before tracing its evolution through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, let us glance at the warship as it existed at the end of the Elizabethan era, and note its chief constructive features.

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Athwart a keel of large squared timbers, scarphed together and forming with a massive inner keelson the principal member or backbone, were laid the curved frames or ribs which, bolted to each other and to the keel with iron bolts washered and clinched, gave to the hull its transverse strength and form. These frames were held together, as they curved upward from the ground or floor level, by thick longitudinal wales, worked externally along the frames at convenient heights, and curved so as to suit the degree of sheer desired.

At the fore end the wales and frames converged to the centre-line and the keel was prolonged upward to meet them in a curve or compassing timber, forming the bow or stem: to the beauty and shapeliness of which, with its projecting beak-head, the builder devoted much of his attention and skill. At the other end the frames and wales converged to a square and lofty stern. The stern post was a massive timber fastened to the keel and sloping somewhat aft from the vertical, and from it rose two fashion-pieces “like a pair of great horns,” which formed, with the horizontal arch and transom timbers, the framework of the stern. When the frames had been built up to the requisite height the upper ends of each opposite pair were joined across by horizontal beams, which were secured to them by means of brackets or knees; such beams were worked at the level of the main and other decks, and served to support them when laid. Joined by its beams, each pair of frames thus formed a closed structure: a combination of members which was to resist crushing and deformation, the blows of the sea, the stresses of gunfire, the forces due to the weight of the guns and the vessel itself, and especially the forces thrown on it when the vessel was aground or on a careen. The rigidity of this combination was enhanced by the fitting of pillars which were placed vertically over the keelson to support each beam at its middle. And sometimes the lower pillars were supplemented by sloping11 struts, worked from the curve of the frames up to the middle of each beam above.

The skeleton of a ship thus formed, built with well-seasoned timber, was left standing on the stocks “in frame” for a considerable period, sometimes for years, exposed to the open weather. On it eventually a skin of planks was fastened, secured by wood trenails split and expanded by soft-wood wedges, both internally and externally; and inside the ship, to reinforce the frames and in line with them, timbers known as “riders” were worked. On the beams the decks were laid: the orlop below the water-line level, and above it, at a height suitable for the ordnance, the main or gun deck; above that the upper deck, on the ends of which were reared the poop (sometimes a half-deck, extending from the stern to the mainmast, sometimes on that a quarter-deck, over the steerage) and the forecastle.

Such, very briefly, was the mode of ship construction. The resulting structure, when caulked and swelled by sea-water, presented a water-tight and serviceable vessel. Timber provided, for ships up to a certain size, a suitable material. It afforded strength and buoyancy, and elasticity sufficient to obviate local strains and to spread the stresses due to lading, grounding, careening, or the actions of the wind and sea. The different parts of the ship’s frame gave mutual support, and the pressure of the fluid on the exterior of the hull tended, by constraining the component parts, to preserve the vessel.8

But the timber-built ship possessed an inherent weakness. Metal plates or girders can be bolted or riveted together so efficiently as to leave the joints between them almost as strong as the sections of the plates or girders themselves. Not so wood beams. However skilfully they might be joined, their joints were necessarily weaker than all other sections: “it was then, and still is, impracticable to develop the full strength in end connections between wooden members.”9 The softness of the wood was an additional source of weakness. Two beams fastened together by iron bolts might form initially a close and rigid joint; but if, under the action of alternating or racking stresses, they became loosened even in a minute12 degree, the tendency to become still looser increased: the wood gradually yielded under the bolt washers, the bolts no longer held rigidly, “the very fact that wood and iron were dissimilar materials tended to hasten the disintegration of the structure.” With planking a similar effect obtained. Trenails, expanded by wedges and planed off flush with the planks which they held together, had only shearing strength; if once they were loosened they had little power to prevent the planks from opening further. These weaknesses were recognised. To minimize their effects the butts of frames, decks, and side planking, were arranged so that no two neighbouring butts lay in the same line. But in spite of the most painstaking craftsmanship, the size of the wooden ship was limited by its inability to withstand a high degree of stress. As sizes increased extraordinary endeavours were made to meet the hogging and sagging strains, to prevent cambering of the hull, and to stiffen it longitudinally and circumferentially. Enormous masses of timber were worked into the internal structure in the form of riders, pillars, standards, and shores, “the whole of which had an appearance of great strength, but which in fact, from its weight and injudicious combinations, was useless, if not injurious.”10 Which did, in fact, clog the ship and usurp the space required for stowage.

As for the masts, experience fixed their number, size and position. In the earlier ships, as we have seen, four and sometimes five masts were fitted, after the Mediterranean style. But later this number was reduced to three. Of these the foremast was the most important, and it was stepped directly over the fore-foot of the vessel, the main and mizzen being pitched to suit. Their height varied with the service and type of ship. Taunt masts, like those carried by the Flemish ships, were best for sailing on a wind, for with them narrow sails could be used which could be set at a sharp angle with the keel; but short masts and broad yards were favoured by English mariners, as bringing less strain on a vessel’s sides and rigging and as being less likely to produce a state of dangerous instability. The masts were short, very thick, and heavily shrouded; the standing rigging was led to channels and deadeyes on the outside of the bulwarks. The bowsprits were large and “steved” upward at a large angle with the horizontal; spritsails and spritsail topsails were set on them,13 of use mainly when sailing before a wind, yet retaining their place in our navy till, half-way through the eighteenth century, the introduction of the fore-and-aft jib brought about an improvement and in so doing affected the whole disposition of mastage.

One feature of the masting of the old ships is notable: the manner in which the various masts were raked. In the Sea-Man’s Dictionary11 the trim of a ship was defined as, “the condition, as to draught, staying of masts, slackness of shrouds, etc., in which a ship goes best.” For a given set of conditions there was a certain rake of masts, a certain position of the centre of wind-pressure against the sails, which, when discovered, gave to the vessel its finest sailing qualities. The knowledge of this adjustment constituted no small part of the great art of seamanship. In the king’s ships a high proficiency was attained in it; merchantmen sailed under more diverse conditions and showed, it appears, a lower level of scientific inquiry. “Next to men of war (whose daily practice it is) the Scotch men are the best in the world to find out the trym of a ship, for they will never be quiet, but try her all ways, and if there be any goodness in her, they can make her go.” Generally, the effect of raking the masts aft was to make the vessel fly up into the wind, and vice versa; in ships with high-built sterns, especially, it was necessary to have the head-sails set well forward, to keep them out of the wind. To allow the masts to be raked as desired their heels were pared away, and wedges of suitable thickness were driven between them and the “partners.”

Many other factors contributed to affect, in a manner always subtle and frequently inexplicable, the sailing qualities of a ship. The form of the body, the position of masts and the setting up of the rigging, the disposition of weights, the angle of the yards, the conditions of stability, all had their effect on the vessel’s motion, and therefore on her speed through the water. Free water in a ship’s bilge, for example, had an effect on her degree of stiffness, and from this cause her speed was not easily predictable. Charnock relates how, in the colonial wars of the late eighteenth century, an American vessel, the Hancock, was captured after an unprecedented chase, solely because her commander, injudiciously supposing that by lightening his ship he would enhance her swiftness, pumped14 water out of her. It was noticed, again, that in certain circumstances the speed of a ship increased when the crew turned into their hammocks.

The lines of the ship were drawn without reference to any science of naval architecture, and merely by instinct and the accumulated experience of the builder; the laws of stability and of fluid resistance were at this time unknown. Experience indicated the desirability of a short keel, to make the ship turn quickly; of an ample rake forward from keel to beak-head—“more than a third the length of the keel, commonly,” says Sir Henry Manwayring, for, “a great rake forward gives a ship good way and makes her keep a good wind, but if she have not a full bow it will make her pitch mightily into a head sea.... The longer a ship’s rake is, the fuller must be the bow”; of a fine run aft, so as to let the water flow strongly and swiftly to the rudder and make the ship steer and sail well; of a narrow rudder, so as not to hold much dead water when the helm was over,—yet, “if a ship have a fat quarter, she will require a broad rudder.” The correct formation of the bow was recognised as of the greatest importance, and the most difficult compromise in the design of a ship. A bow too bluff offered much resistance to motion through the water; on the other hand, too sharp a bow lacked buoyancy, and, from the great weight of mastage, headsails, anchors, etc., which it had to support, caused a vessel to pitch badly in a head sea. “If the bow be too broad,” wrote Captain John Smith, in his Sea Man’s Grammar, “she will seldom carry a bone in her mouth, or cut a feather, that is, to make a foam before her: where a well-bowed ship so swiftly presseth the water as that it foameth, and in the dark night sparkleth like fire.”

Generally, a vessel built with fine lines lacked end support, and tended to become arched or camber-keeled, while its stowage capacity was inconveniently small. The ship’s sides were made with a considerable degree of tumble-home above the water-line; though this, again, was a point of compromise and much argument. For while a reduced breadth of deck tended to give the hull more girder strength and to diminish the racking effect on it of heavy ordnance, yet this feature at the same time, by reducing the angle at which the shrouds could be set, augmented the stresses which were thrown on shrouds and bulwarks.

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With the seventeenth century a new age of scientific speculation opened, and, under the personal encouragement of the Stuart kings, the art and mystery of shipbuilding received an illumination which was of great value to the royal armaments.

The early interest of James I in his navy is signalized by his grant of a charter to the corporation of shipwrights: a corporation whose short-lived story is told by the editor of The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, recently published.12 Before the sixteenth century, he tells us, no special trade was recognized for the building of warships, as distinct from traders. But in the early Tudor days, when, owing to the introduction of the new artillery the war vessel began to diverge in general design from the merchant ship, certain master shipwrights had been subsidized by the king for the building and repair of the royal vessels. The position of these officials was one of importance, their duties and privileges were extensive. The office was often hereditary. Thus, the royal patent granted to one James Baker in 1538 descended, with the accumulated lore and secrets of his profession, to his son Mathew Baker in 1572. And that granted to Peter Pett in 1558 descended to Joseph Pett in 1590. But as shipping grew and shipbuilding became more complex and widely distributed, the need for some central authority, which could regulate practice and standardize procedure, became increasingly felt. Accordingly a petition was presented. In 1605 the king granted a charter incorporating the master shipwrights of England as one body corporate and politic, for the good regulation of shipbuilding of all descriptions. In 1612 another charter was sealed, giving increased power to the confraternity: with instruction that it was to examine each new ship to see that it was properly built, “with two orlops at convenient distances, strong to carry ordnance aloft and alow, with her forecastle and half-deck close for fight.” Shipwrights’ Hall, as the corporation was called, surveyed and reported on tonnage and workmanship, and gave advice, when sought, to the lord high admiral. In the course of time its prestige declined. With the Commonwealth it grew into disuse, and by 1690 it was altogether extinct. For nearly a century the guild had struggled in vain to fulfil the intentions of its founders.

16 The most distinguished of the master shipwrights of this period was Phineas Pett, sometime master of arts at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who in 1612 succeeded old Mathew Baker as Master of the guild. Pett, who to a practical knowledge of design and construction added considerable sea experience, rose far above his contemporaries, most of whom were little more than mere carpenters, ignorant of many of the principles which are now accepted as governing ship design, and themselves governed almost entirely by tradition and blind precedent. Science was still in its veriest infancy. The progress of ship design was still by the tentative and costly method of full-scale experience; not till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when new forces and materials had been discovered which in the end spelt the decline and supersession of the sailing ship, did science sufficiently direct the lines on which large sailing ships should be built.

By his bold deviation from established usage, says Fincham, Mr. Pett established his fame and advanced the interest and power of the British navy. Before reviewing his handiwork, however, it will be convenient to note the main directions in which improvement was at this period sought.

Sir Henry Manwayring, an acquaintance for whom Pett designed and built a pinnace in the year 1616, wrote at this time The Sea-Man’s Dictionary. In the early years of the century were also written two treatises which, though not printed till a later date, had great effect in creating an interest in naval matters: Sir Walter Raleigh’s Observations on the Navy and Invention of Shipping. In the former paper Sir Walter laid down the six requisites of a good ship: viz. that she should be strongly built, swift, stout-sided, carry out her guns in all weathers, lie-to in a gale easily, and stay well. For the attainment of these qualities he specified certain structural features: a long run forward, to make her sail well; a long bearing floor and a “tumble home” above water from the lower edge of the ports, for stoutness and for stiffness sufficient to enable her to carry her lower ordnance (which must lie four feet clear above water) in all weathers. “It is a special observation,” he wrote, “that all ships sharp before, that want a long floor, will fall roughly into the sea and take in water over head and ears. So will all narrow quartered ships sink after the tail. The high charging of ships it is that brings them all ill qualities.” In the latter paper he recapitulated17 the various improvements in material of which he had himself been witness; from which for its interest we quote the following extract. “The striking of the topmast (a wonderful great ease to great ships both at sea and in harbour) hath been devised, together with the chain pump ... the bonnet and the drabler. We have fallen into consideration of the length of cables, and by it we resist the malice of the greatest winds that can blow, witness our small Milbrook men of Cornwall, that ride it out at anchor, half seas over between England and Ireland, all the winter quarter.... For true it is, that the length of the cable is the life of the ship in all extremities. We carry our ordnance better than we were wont, because our nether overloops are raised commonly from the water, to wit, between the lower part of the port and the sea. We have also raised our second decks and given more vent thereby to our ordnance, tying on our nether overloop. We have added cross pillars in our royal ships to strengthen them, which be fastened from the kelson to the beams of the second deck. We have given longer floors to our ships than in elder times, and better bearing under water, whereby they never fall into the sea after the head and shake the whole body, nor sink stern, nor stoop upon a wind, by which the breaking loose of our ordnance or the not use of them, with many other discommodities are avoided.... And to say the truth a miserable shame and dishonour it were for our shipwrights, if they did not exceed all other in the setting up of our royal ships, the errors of other nations being far more excusable than ours.” Sir Walter was inaccurate in attributing all the improvements enumerated to his own generation; bonnets, for instance, were in use long before his day. Nevertheless his paper constitutes one of the most important contributions to the history of naval architecture in this country.

In the early years of the century, too, evidence as to the shortcomings of contemporary naval construction was furnished by a fierce critic, Captain Waymouth. He proclaimed that English shipwrights built only by uncertain traditional precepts and observations; that none of them could build two ships alike or predict with accuracy their draught of water; that all their ships were crank, leewardly—“a great disadvantage in a fight”—difficult to steer and sail, too deep in the water, of less capacity than the Hollanders, and so badly built and designed as frequently to require “furring,”18 or reinforcing by extra planking. He advocated building ships longer, broader, with longer floors so as to reduce their draught, and snugger in respect of upper works. And though he failed on trial to translate his ideas into successful performance, his criticisms are accepted by historians as being probably well-founded.

The opinions expressed by the above writers13 indicate for us in general terms the chief particulars in which the ships of this period fell short of naval requirements. They were designed without knowledge of the laws governing the strength of materials, stability, and the motion of bodies through water; they were built without adequate supervision, frequently of green timber badly scarphed or cut across the grain, and were overburdened with ordnance. Their holds were cumbered with large quantities of shingle ballast which tended to clog the limber-holes of the bilge and rot the frames and floor timbers; while the stowage space amidships was further usurped by the cook-rooms, which were placed on the shingle, and which, by the heat radiated from their brick sides, did damage to the timbers and seams in their vicinity. Vessels were rarely sheathed. Though John Hawkins had devised a system of sheathing by a veneer of planking nailed over a layer of hair and tar, it was only to ships going on special service in seas where the worm was active that sheathing was applied. Sheathing possessed, then, some significance. In 1620, for instance, the Venetian ambassador reported to his government the discovery that some of our ships were being sheathed, and from this fact deduced an impending expedition to the Mediterranean.

With the navy in the depths of neglect and with shipbuilding in the state described, Phineas Pett began to impose his permanent mark on design and construction. The mechanism by which he secured his results, the calculations and methods and rules used by him, were veiled in profound secrecy, in accordance with the traditions of his profession. He began by new-building old ships of the Elizabethan time, giving them an improved form so far as practicable. His friend and patron was the young Prince Henry, for whom in 1607 he made a model which the king greatly admired. And shortly after this, in the face of much jealousy on the part of his rivals, he laid down19 by command a new great ship—the Prince Royal, of 1187 tons, with a breadth of 43 feet and a keel length of 115 feet, double-built and sumptuously adorned, in all respects the finest ship that had ever been built in England. She carried no less than fifty-five guns, her general proportions were of a unity, and her strength was of a superiority, far in advance of current practice. In strength especially she marked an advance which yielded benefit later, in the wars with Holland. She was double planked, “a charge which was not formerly thought upon, and all the butt-heads were double-bolted with iron bolts.”

But how difficult a matter it was for a builder to depart from tradition, is shown from Pett’s account of the inquisition to which he was subjected in connection with the building of this famous ship. His rivals took advantage of the “Commission of Enquiry into the abuses of the navy,” of 1608, to indict him for bad design, bad building, and peculation. So much hard swearing took place on both sides that at last King James himself decided to act as judge, and at Woolwich, with the wretched Phineas on his knees before him, opened his court of inquiry. “Much time,” says the diarist, “was spent in dispute of proportions, comparing my present frame with former precedents and dimensions of the best ships, for length, breadth, depth, floor, and other circumstances. One point of proportion was mainly insisted upon and with much violence and eagerness urged on both sides, which was the square of the ship’s flat in the midships, they affirming constantly upon their oath it was full thirteen feet, we as constantly insisting that it was but eleven foot eight inches.” In the end the king called in a mathematician and had the controversy settled by actual measurement. None of the charges brought against him being sustained, Phineas was acquitted and restored once more to royal favour, to his own delight and to that of his youthful patron, Prince Henry.

The Prince Royal marks a new epoch in ship design. She was such a departure from all previous forms that she made the fame of Phineas Pett secure. She became, indeed, the parent or type of all future warships down to the beginning of the nineteenth century; for (says Charnock), were the profuse ornaments removed, her contour, or general appearance, would not so materially differ from that of the modern vessel of the same size as to render her an uncommon sight, or a ship in which mariners would hesitate to take the sea. In her a final20 departure was made from the archaic form imposed on fighting ships by tradition. The picture Charnock gives of her is of a highly ornamented but low and flush-decked vessel armed to the ends with two tiers of heavy guns. The projecting beak-head, a relic from the galley days which had been so prominent a feature of Tudor construction, has almost disappeared: the bow curves gracefully upward to a lion close under the bowsprit. The wales have little sheer; the stern is compact and well supported, with beautiful lines. The quarter galleries are long, and are incorporated in the structure in a curious manner: in the form of indented, tower-like projections, with ornamented interspaces. The whole picture gives evidence of stout scantlings and invaluable solidity. Although in many respects the Prince Royal was a masterpiece she was primitive in the variety of her armament. On the lower deck she carried two cannon-petro, six demi-cannon, twelve culverins; on her upper deck eighteen demi-culverins; and on quarter-deck and poop a number of sakers and port-pieces. Also, unfortunately, she was built of green timber, so her life was short.

In building a ship of unprecedented burthen Pett had the support of a large public opinion. The advantages attaching to large size were by this time generally appreciated: in the case of fighting ships, in respect of strength, artillery force, and sea endurance, in the case of merchant ships, in respect of carrying capacity and economy of crew. The growth in the size of merchant shipping during the reign was indeed remarkable. Trade followed the flag, and the Jacobean merchant made haste to profit by the conquests of the Elizabethan adventurer. For a short while after the war with Spain our mercantile marine was stagnant; at the accession of James I only small vessels of less than a hundred tons were being built, and English merchants were having strange recourse to the hiring of foreigners. But this state of things did not last for long. The story of the success of the Earl of Cumberland and his 800-ton Scourge of Malice, and the sight of the great Portuguese carrack captured in 1592, are said to have stimulated the merchants of London to possess themselves of vessels fit for the Eastern trade. It is said, again, that the appearance of two large Dutch ships in the Thames supplied the sudden impulse to build big. Be that as it may, “the idea spread like wild-fire.” Larger ships were laid down, and by the end of the reign the country possessed a considerable fleet of ships of21 500 tons and above. In one instance, at least, the pendulum swung too far, and experience soon exposed the disadvantages of excessive dimensions: the reduction in strength, the unhandiness in shallow waters, the almost impossibility of graving and breaming, the risking in a single bottom of too great a venture. The Trades Increase, built for the new East India Company in 1605 by William Burrell and launched by the king at Deptford, was of no less than 1,100 tons burthen. On her first voyage to Java she was lost by fire, and no more ships of her size were ordered by the Company.

With the expansion of merchant shipping and with the recognition of artillery as the main instrument of naval warfare fighting ships made a corresponding advance in size. The Commission of Reform of 1618, on whose report the subsequent reorganization of the Navy was based, held that the primacy of the big gun had at last been established. “Experience teacheth,” the Commissioners recorded, “how sea-fights in these days come seldom to boarding, or to great execution of bows, arrows, small shot and the sword, but are chiefly performed by the great artillery breaking down masts, yards, tearing, raking, and bilging the ships, wherein the great advantage of His Majesty’s navy must carefully be maintained by appointing such a proportion of ordnance to each ship as the vessel will bear.” They recognized the extravagance of small ships, and advised that in future the royal navy should consist of a nucleus of about thirty large ships, which with the merchant fleet should form one complete service; royal ships of over 800 tons; great ships of over 600 tons; middling ships of about 450 tons. They also formulated the chief requirements of naval construction in considerable detail. This pontifical pronouncement on ship dimensions was doubtless of value in connection with the contemporary project to which their work had reference; nevertheless it formed a dangerous precedent for future administrations. It shackled the genius of the shipbuilder. It degraded design. The ship, especially the timber-built sailing warship, was essentially a compromise between a number of conflicting elements. To obtain full value from his skill the designer required as free as possible a choice of means to his end; and any over-drawing of the specification, or surplusage of data beyond the barest requirements, tended to tie his hands and render impossible a satisfactory design. It was this over-specifying of dimensions in the interests of22 standardization which, as we shall presently see, stultified shipbuilding in England not only in the seventeenth but throughout the whole of the eighteenth century.

But the report of 1618 was doubtless of great value as a guidance for the building of the new Stuart navy. “The manner of building, which in ships of war is of greatest importance, because therein consists both their sailing and force. The ships that can sail best can take or leave (as they say), and use all advantages the winds and seas afford; and their mould, in the judgment of men of best skill, both dead and alive, should have the length treble the breadth, and the breadth in like proportion to the depth, but not to draw above 16 foot of water because deeper ships are seldom good sailers.... They must be somewhat snug built, without double galleries and too lofty upper works, which overcharge many ships and make them loom fair, but not work well at sea.” As for the strengthening of the royal ships the Commissioners subscribed to the manner of building approved by “our late worthy prince”: “first, in making three orlops, whereof the lowest being two feet under water, both strengtheneth the ship, and though her sides be shot through, keepeth it from bilging by shot and giveth easier means to find and stop the leaks. Second, in carrying their orlops whole floored throughout from end to end. Third, in laying the second orlop at such convenient height that the ports may bear out the whole fire of ordnance in all seas and weathers. Fourth, in placing the cook-rooms in the forecastle, as other ships of war do, because being in the midships, and in the hold, the smoke and heat so search every corner and seam, that they make the oakum spew out, and the ships leaky, and some decay; besides, the best room for stowage of victualling is thereby so taken up, that transporters must be hired for every voyage of any time; and, which is worst, when all the weight must be cast before and abaft, and the ships are left empty and light in the midst, it makes them apt to sway in the back, as the Guardland and divers others have done.”

The ships built under the regulations of the Commissioners were certainly an improvement on earlier ships in many respects, but in one element of power they proved to be deficient, namely, in speed. The stoutly built, full-bodied, lumbering English two-deckers were out-sailed and out-man?uvred, it was noticed, by the relatively light and fine-23lined Hollanders. Moreover our smaller ships were known to be no match in speed for the Dunkirk privateers which at this time infested the seas. A new type was seen to be necessary. The existing differentiation of warships into rates or classes was insufficient. For the line of battle there must be ships in which force of artillery was the predominant quality; but for other duties there must also be ships in which speed, and not force, was the distinguishing note. From this necessity was evolved the frigate.

Soon after the accession of Charles I an attempt was made to establish the new type by building small vessels on the model of the largest, miniatures which it was hoped would prove good sailors and capable, although square-sailed, of sailing near a wind. The Ten Whelps were laid down: flush-decked three-masted vessels of 200 tons, 62 feet long on the keel and 25 feet in breadth. They were not a success. It was left for Dunkirk, “the smartest dockyard in Europe,” to found the new model. In imitation of a captured Dunkirk privateer our first frigate was built in 1646 by Peter, son of Phineas Pett, and her success was such that he had the achievement recorded on his tomb. The Constant Warwick was 85 feet in keel-length, 26 feet 5 inches in breadth, of 315 tons burden and 32 guns. She was “an incomparable sailer.” Before the first Dutch war was over she had taken as much money from privateers as would have completely laden her.

It seems probable that the prestige of his name was sufficient to give Peter Pett a freedom from interference in his design which was not accorded less distinguished shipbuilders. In ’45 Andrews Burrell, in a remonstance addressed to Parliament, protested, “For the love of heaven let not the shipwrights that are to build them [three frigates for special service] be misled by those that would, but cannot, direct them, which error hath been very hurtful to the navy heretofore.” By the interference of Sir John Pennington, he asserted, the builders of the Ten Whelps were so misled that they proved sluggish and unserviceable. “Let no rules be given the shipwrights more than their tonnage, with the number and weight of their ordnance, and that the number and weight of their ordnance may be suitable to the burden of each frigate.”

King Charles, whose personal interest in the royal navy equalled that of his father, favoured the tendency to enlarge the tonnage and the individual power of his fighting ships.24 The Prince Royal displayed the advantages of size. The Dutch people, jealous of the interference with their eastern trade, were known to be building large ships. Across the channel an ambitious and all-powerful minister was envisaging the possession of a navy in which an inferiority in numbers might be neutralized by the superiority of the unit. In France a vessel of 1400 tons had been laid down. Charles determined to take up the challenge, obtaining the money by hook or by crook wherewith to build a greater. In the year 1634 the decision was made. A model of a great three-decker mounting a hundred and four guns was presented to him by Phineas Pett, and shortly afterwards the master of the shipwrights received the royal command to build a ship, and to proceed in person to the forests of Durham to select the thickstuff, knee timber, and planking requisite for the task.

Opposition to the building of such a prodigious vessel appeared from different quarters. Great ships, in the opinion of Sir Walter Raleigh, were “of marvellous charge and fearful cumber.” The cost of so large a ship must needs be great, for not only the whole cost, but the cost per ton, increased with the size of the vessel; so wasteful a process was the building of a great ship, indeed, that it was not unusual to build a small ship simultaneously, out of the timber discarded: a practice known as “building a small ship out of a great one’s chips.” Ships of the greatest size, again, were “of little service, less nimble, less mainable, and very seldom employed.” Nor was it believed that so large a vessel as that projected could be built. Trinity House, when they heard of the design, uttered a formal protest. Such a ship, they argued, would be too big for service, and unsafe from her enormous size. To carry such a number of pieces she must be a three-decker, and to build a serviceable three-decker was beyond the art or wit of man; if the lower tier were too low they would be useless in a sea, if at 5 or 5? feet above the water-line then the third tier would be so high as to endanger the ship. In spite of this protest the new ship was laid down, and nearly two years later, in the autumn of ’37, she was launched at Woolwich, “the pride and glory of the Caroline navy.”

The Sovereign of the Seas, the Sovereign, or the Royal Sovereign, as she was called by successive governments, was another great advance in size and solidity on all preceding construction, and was the masterpiece of Phineas Pett. Her25 length by the keel was 128 feet, her main breadth 48 feet, her overall length 232 feet. She had three flush decks and a forecastle, a half-deck, a quarter-deck, and a roundhouse. Her armament showed an approach to symmetry; the lower tier consisted of cannon and demi-cannon, the middle tier of culverins and demi-culverins. In one respect she was less advanced than Pett’s earlier effort, the Prince Royal, in that she had an old-fashioned beakhead, low hawses and a low and exposed forecastle. In general form she was extolled by all, and bore witness to the genius of her designer. No better form, said a later critic and constructor14 after making an analysis of her lines—no better form could have been devised for a ship built (according to the prevailing customs of the times) so high out of water and so overloaded with ornaments. The king took a personal pride in her, and during her construction visited Woolwich and “seriously perused all the ship within board.” For him an elaborate description was written which, quoted at length by various writers, serves to show the extent to which mere decoration contributed to the cost of a royal ship. Two pictures of the vessel are reproduced by Charnock, of such obvious disparity that they serve to show (as the author observes) to what a degree artists may differ in the presentment of the same vessel. They confirm, besides, the profuseness of the ornamentation which was massed on her—the trophies, angels, emblems, mouldings—which made her the occasion of loud complaints against ship-money, and “a miracle of black and gold.”

The Sovereign of the Seas had a distinguished career. When cut down a deck she proved to be an exceptionally serviceable unit, taking part in all the great actions of the Dutch wars and crowning her work at La Hogue, where she engaged, crippled, and forced to fly for shallow water the great Soleil Royal, 104, the French flagship. At length, when laid up at Chatham in 1696 in order to be rebuilt, she was set on fire by negligence and destroyed.

§

By the outbreak of the first Dutch war the modern ideas introduced by Phineas Pett had received a general embodiment in the navy. Blake found to his hand ships well suited to the intended warfare, nor was he much concerned to add either to their number or their magnitude. Only in one feature26 did the new vessels built show any difference from older construction: their depth in hold was reduced, probably to render them more suitable for work among the shallow waters of the coast of Holland.15 In other important respects improvement had preceded the opening of hostilities.

The lofty stern with which it had been the custom to endow the sailing ship was a feature which had survived from ancient times. In the galley, whose armament was concentrated in the bows, the after part was not devoted to military fittings, but was appropriated chiefly to the accommodation of the officers. So it was in the galleon or sailing ship. With the desire and need for increased accommodation the extra space was obtained by prolonging aft the broad horizontal lines of the vessel and terminating them in a square frame. To give more space, quarter galleries were then added, outside the vessel. Then extra tiers of cabins were added, also with quarter galleries, each storey, as in the case of domestic architecture, projecting over that beneath it, and the whole forming, with its surmounting taffrails, lanterns and ornaments, an excessively weighty and top-heavy structure. Similarly, at the fore end of the ship there remained the survival of the ancient forecastle.

With the acceptance of artillery as the medium for battle, with the decay of boarding tactics and the decline in value of small man-killing firearms, close-fights and end-castles, the lofty forecastles and sterns ceased to possess much of their special value. The arguments of Sir Richard Hawkins’ day in favour of large cage-works no longer held; nor could the preference of some shipbuilders for high sterns, as allowing a quick sheer and thereby contributing to the girder strength of the hull, be considered sufficient to justify their retention. The stern galleries held a great deal of wind and tended to rot the decks in their vicinity; their weight put a strain upon the supporting keel; but, chiefly, the danger of their taking fire in action induced the authorities to cut them down. For similar reasons the forecastles were attacked. But there was strong opposition to their elimination, because of the cover which they afforded in a fight. In 1652 the Ph?nix, one of the finest frigates in the service, was taken by a Dutch ship, “having no forecastle for her men to retire to.” In the second Dutch war experience confirmed their usefulness. “All the world,” wrote27 Mr. Secretary Pepys in his diary for the 4th July, 1666, “now sees the use of forecastles for the shelter of men.”

No general increase in the size of our ships took place till toward the end of the third Dutch war. Until that time the navy of France was a negligible quantity; in 1664, it is said, the only war-vessel at Brest was one old fireship. The Dutch, our only strong opponents, fought in ships not unlike our own, stout, buoyant vessels mounting from 24 to 60 guns, and of from 300 to 1200 tons burden. Geography had a curious influence on their construction. Owing to the shallowness of their coasts the Hollanders built their ships with less draught and flatter floors than those of other countries; from which policy they derived advantages of a greater carrying capacity and, in pursuit, an ability to retreat among the shallows; but on account of which they suffered a serious handicap in the hour of action, when, faced by English ships built of superior material and with finer bottoms which enabled them to hold a better wind, they were weathered and out-fought.16

There was no apparent advantage, therefore, in augmenting the size of our ships. Improvement was sought, rather, from a further unification of the calibres of the guns, and from an increase in the number carried. Their characteristics of shortness and large bore were such as to make them well-suited to the form of battle now favoured by English leaders—the close-quarter action.

In solidity of construction the English ships compared favourably with those of the Dutch. The thick scantlings introduced by Phineas Pett now proved of great value; the wood itself, tough English oak, was unequalled by any other timber. English oak was the best, as Fuller noted. Even the Dutch had built some of their ships of it; while other countries frequently built of inferior fir, the splinters of which killed more than were hit by hostile cannon balls. To what was the superiority of the English timber due? To the soil and climate of this favoured country. Under the influence of successions of warmth and cold, of rain and sunshine, frost and wind, all in a degree most favourable for alternate growth and consolidation, the English oak attained an unrivalled strength and durability. Trees planted in forests, where mutual protection was afforded28 from wind and cold, grew rapidly, but were inferior in quality to trees planted in small parcels or along the hedgerows; these latter, slow-growing and tough, felled “at the wane of the moon and in the deep of winter,” supplied the thickstuff, knees, and planking for generations of our royal ships. Their endurance was frequently remarkable. The bottom timbers would last for fifty or sixty years, but the upper works, which were subject to alternations of heat and cold, dryness and moisture, decayed in a much shorter space of time. The Royal William is quoted by Charnock as a case in point. This first rate ship was launched in the year 1719, and never received any material repair until 1757. A few years later she was cut down to a third rate of 80 guns. Participating in all the sea wars of the time, she was surveyed in 1785 and converted into a guardship, which post she filled till early in the nineteenth century.17

Much attention, as we have noted, was given in this scientifically minded Stuart age to the form of body best suited to motion through water, but the efforts to improve design were largely misdirected. Many of our ships were unsatisfactory, not only from their slowness but because they were crank or tender-sided, and unable to bear out their lower guns or even to carry a stout sail. They were so clogged with timbers internally that they could not carry the victuals and stores necessary for long voyages; and vessels built by contract were often found to be carelessly put together, of green, unseasoned, and unsuitable timber.

After the Restoration the mantle of the Petts descended on a master shipwright of Portsmouth, who became an authoritative exponent of ship design, and to whose ability several improvements were due. “Another great step and improvement to our navy,” recorded Mr. Pepys in 1665, “put in practice by Sir Anthony Deane, was effected in the Warspight and Defiance, which were to carry six months’ provisions, and their guns four and a half feet from the water.” In the same diary for 19th May of the following year occurs the following characteristic note: “Mr. Deane did discourse about his ship the Rupert, which succeeds so well, as he has got great honour by it; and I some, by recommending him. The king, duke, and every body, say it is the best ship that was ever built. And then he29 fell to explain to me the manner of casting the draught of water which a ship will draw, beforehand, which is a secret the king and all admire in him; and he is the first that hath come to any certainty beforehand of foretelling the draught of water of a ship, before she is launched.” The calculations used by Sir Anthony Deane to forecast the draught of a projected ship might win him applause among the philosophers; but the scoffer at theory was able to point to considerable achievements wrought by men who made no pretence of any knowledge of science. In 1668 the Royal Charles, 110, was launched at Deptford. “She was built,” wrote Evelyn, “by old Shish, a plain, honest carpenter, master builder of this dock, but one who can give little account of his art by discourse, and is hardly capable of reading.”

The interest of Charles II in naval architecture may be gathered from a letter written by him in 1673: “I am very glad that the Charles does so well; a girdling this winter, when she comes in, will make her the best ship in England: the next summer, if you try the two sloops that were built at Woolwich that have my invention in them, they will outsail any of the French sloops. Sir Samuel Morland has now another fancy about weighing anchors; and the resident of Venice has made a model also to the same purpose.”

To girdle a ship, was to fasten planks along her sides some two or three strakes above and below the water-line; this had the effect of adding to her beam and thereby rendering her stiffer under sail. Incessant girdling seems to have been necessary at this period, to counter the defective conditions in which English ships were designed, built, and sent to sea. Ships were consistently restricted in beam, in compliance with the faulty “establishments,” and under a mistaken notion that narrowness, in itself, directly contributed to speed. “Length,” says Charnock, “was the only dimension regarded as indispensably necessary, by the ancients for their galleys and by the moderns for galleons. Breadth was not considered, or if considered was accepted as a necessary evil.” Pepys remarked, “that the builders of England, before 1673, had not well considered that breadth only will make a stiff ship.” It was an inquiry ordered by Sir Richard Haddock in 1684 which brought to light the fulness of the fallacy; ships were subsequently made broader, and experience showed that a good breadth was beneficial, not only for stability but for speed and sea-keeping qualities.

30 But even if a ship were built initially broad enough, the continual addition of armament and top-hamper to which she was often subjected had the effect eventually of impairing her stability. In such a case there were two remedies: to ballast or to girdle. The former expedient was objectionable, as it involved an increase both of displacement and of draught. Girdling was therefore generally practised. By this means the vessel was made stiffer, her buoyancy was improved, and her sides were also rendered less penetrable between wind and water. Even if, when thus girdled, she proved to be less stiff than the enemy this was not altogether a disadvantage: she formed a steadier gun-platform, her sides were less strained by the sea and, because her rolling was less violent, her topmasts were less liable to be sprung. But sufficient stiffness was necessary to allow of her lowest and heaviest tier of guns being fought in moderate weather; and for this reason alone, girdling was preferable to ballasting, in that the former tended to keep the guns high out of water while the latter brought them nearer the water-line.

Although rigidly restricted in dimensions, ships put to sea in these days under such varying conditions that it was difficult indeed to foretell whether a vessel were seaworthy or not. A commissioner of James the Second’s reign complained bitterly of the injudicious management whereby “many a fast sailing ship have come to lose that property, by being over-masted, over-rigged, over-gunned (as the Constant Warwick, from 26 guns and an incomparable sailer, to 46 guns and a slug), over-manned (vide all the old ships built in the parliament time now left), over-built (vide the Ruby and Assurance), and having great taffrails and galleries, etc., to the making many formerly a stiff, now a tender-sided ship, bringing thereby their head and tuck to lie too low in the water.”

In spite of these strictures it must be remembered that our ships had qualities which, brought into action by brave crews and resolute leaders, served the nation well in the day of battle. In no naval war, perhaps, did superiority of material exert such a consistent and preponderating effect as in the seventeenth century wars between this country and Holland.

The tactics of the English leaders involved close-quarter fighting. The material, both guns and ships, certainly favoured these tactics; though to what extent tactics dictated the form of the material, or material reacted on tactics, it may be31 difficult to decide. In one respect tactics undoubtedly directed the evolution of the material: while the Dutch employed a “gregarious system” of mutual support of their vessels by others of various force, fighting in groups and throwing in fireships as opportunity offered, the English always sought to match individual ships.18 Forming in line ahead—a formation, said to have been first used by Tromp, which enabled our vessels to avoid the fireships—they came to close quarters in a series of duels in which the strength and prowess of each individual ship was its only means of victory. The success of this plan caused the Dutch to imitate it. The size of their ships rapidly grew; their weakest units were discarded. Three-deckers were laid down, at first carrying only 76 guns, but later, after the peace of 1674, as large as the British first rates. But by that time the critical battles had been lost and won. And the success of the British is ascribed, in Derrick’s memoirs, chiefly to the superior size of our ships, “an advantage which all the skill of the Dutch could not compensate.”

With the institution of the line of battle a need arose for a symmetry between ships which had never before existed. From this arose, not only that more complete differentiation of force19 which lasted through the following century, but a still more stringent ruling of dimensions according to “establishments,” which ruling, injudiciously applied, was henceforth to exercise so harmful an effect on English naval construction.

After the peace of 1674 the navy sank into inefficiency. The French navy, on the other hand, ascended in power with an extraordinary rapidity. By 1681 it had expanded so much under the fostering care of M. Colbert that it comprised no fewer than one hundred and fifteen ships of the line. In design, as apart from construction, French ships were superior to ours. In size especially they had an advantage, being universally larger than British ships of the same artillery force: an advantage based on the law, known to our own shipbuilders but never applied, that the greater the dimensions of a ship, relatively to the weight she has to carry, the better she will sail. So superior were some French ships which visited Spithead seen to be, that in imitation of them Sir Anthony Deane was ordered to design and build the Harwich; and from the plans of this ship nine others were ordered by parliament, the class constituting the greatest advance in naval architecture of that32 time. But this departure from precedent had little effect. In dimensions as compared with tonnage we continued parsimonious. In the face of French experience we cramped our ships to the requirements of the faulty “establishments”; and until the end of the century no increase in size took place except in the case of some ships laid down in the year 1682, when the threat of a war with Louis XIV not improbably caused them to be constructed on a more extensive scale than had ever before been in practice.

In another respect our ships were inferior in design to those of our chief rivals: in the extreme degree of “tumble home” given to their sides. Adhering to ancient practice in this particular, in order to obtain advantages which have already been mentioned, we suffered increasingly serious disadvantages. The sides of our ships were so convex that, when sailing on a wind, every wave was guided upward to the upper deck, thereby keeping the crew continually wet. The deck space required for the efficient working of the sails was contracted. Moreover, ships having this high degree of convexity were more easily overset than were wall-sided ships. This exaggerated convexity had a striking effect on one feature of our construction, viz. the manner in which we affixed the chain-plates, to which the shrouds were secured, in a low position on the curve of the hull; while Holland and France raised them to a more convenient height—over the upper tier of guns, in their two-decked ships.

On the other hand the horizontal lines of our ships were (in the absence of science) cleverly moulded. The after lines in particular were well suited for supporting the stern and at the same time allowing a free run of water to the rudder; other nations, overlooking the importance of this part of the vessel, adhered to the old-fashioned square tuck and stern which was a chief but unappreciated factor of the resistance to the passage of the vessel through water.

When war actually broke out in 1689 the balance of material between English and French was much the same in character as it had been between English and Dutch. Our fleet was once more in a seaworthy and efficient condition. Our guns were generally shorter and of larger bore than those of the French; our ships were narrower and less able to bear out their ordnance, but their sides were thicker, and better able to withstand the racket of gun fire. Once more, at La Hogue, the British33 squadrons showed that they possessed the offensive and defensive qualities which favoured victory in close-quarter fighting; and the end of the century found the prestige of the navy at a level as high as that to which Cromwell and Blake had brought it.

In the decade which ended in 1689 the navy had passed, on its administrative side, “from the lowest state of impotence to the most advanced step towards a lasting and solid prosperity.” In Pepys’ rare little Memoirs the story of this dramatic change is told. We read how, after five years’ governance by the commission charged by the king with the whole office of the Lord High Admiral, the navy found itself rotten to the core; how in ’85 the king resolved to take up its management again, helped by his royal brother; how he sent for Mr. Pepys; how at his instigation new, honest, and energetic Commissioners were appointed, including among them the reluctant Sir Anthony Deane; how Mr. Pepys himself strove to reorganize, how new regulations were introduced, sea stores established, finances checked, malpractices exposed, the navy restored both in spirit and material.

Mr. Pepys claimed to prove that integrity and general knowledge were insufficient, if unaccompanied by vigour, assiduity, affection, strictness of discipline and method, for the successful conduct of a navy; and that by the strenuous conjunction of zeal, honesty, good husbandry and method, and not least by the employment of technical knowledge, the Royal Navy had been rendered efficient once again.

The following extract from an Essay on the Navy, printed in 1702, is here quoted for its general significance:

    “The cannon (nearly 10,000 brass and iron) are for nature and make according to the former disposition and manner of our mariners’ fighting (whose custom was to fight board and board, yard-arm and yard-arm, through and through, as they termed it, and not at a distance in the line, and a like, which practice till of late our seniors say they were strangers to), they are therefore much shorter and of larger bore than the French, with whom to fight at a distance is very disadvantageous, as has been observed in several fights of late, their balls or bullets flying over our ships before ours could reach them by a mile....” etc., etc.

34

§

In Laputa, early in the eighteenth century, the people were so engrossed in the mathematics that the constant study of abstruse problems had a strange and distorting effect on the whole life of the island. Their houses were built according to such refined instructions as caused their workmen to make perpetual mistakes; their clothes were cut (and often incorrectly) by mathematical calculation; the very viands on their tables were carved into rhomboids, cycloids, cones, parallelograms, and other mathematical figures!

To most Englishmen of that time any attempt to apply science to shipbuilding must have appeared as far-fetched and grotesque as these practices of the Laputans. Ship design was still an art, veiled in mystery, its votaries guided only by blind lore and groping along an increasingly difficult path by processes of trial and error. The methods of applied science were as yet unknown. The builder was often a mere carpenter, ignorant of mathematics and even of the use of simple plans; the savant in his quiet study and the seaman on the perilous seas lived in worlds apart from each other and from him, and could not collaborate. Such speculative principles as the shipbuilder possessed were almost wholly erroneous; no single curve or dimension of a ship, it is said, was founded on a rational principle. Everything was by tradition or authority. Knowledge had not yet coalesced in books. Men kept such secrets as they had in manuscript, and their want of knowledge was covered by silence and mystery. Preposterous theories were maintained by the most able men and facts were denied or perverted so as to square with them. “Forgetful of the road pointed out by Lord Bacon, who opposed a legitimate induction from well-established facts to hypothesis founded on specious conjectures, and too hastily giving up as hopeless the attainment of a theory combining experiment with established scientific principles, they have contented themselves with ingeniously inventing mechanical methods of forming the designs of ships’ bodies of arcs of circles, others of ellipses, parabolas, catenaries—which they thought to possess some peculiar virtue and which they investigated with the minutest mathematical accuracy. So they became possessed of a System. And, armed with this, they despised all rivals without35 one; and, trusting to it, rejected all the benefits of experiment and of sea experience.”20

The intervention of the philosophers had not had any appreciable effect. Sir William Petty had indeed projected a great work on the theory of shipbuilding; he had carried out model experiments in tanks, and had invented a double-keeled vessel which, by its performances on passage between Holyhead and Dublin, had drawn public attention to his theories.21 In his discourse before the Royal Society on Duplicate Proportions, he had opened out new and complex considerations for the shipbuilder; inviting him to forsake his golden rule, or Rule of Three, and apply the law x varies as y2 to numerous problems in connection with his craft. But it could soon be shown, by a reference to current practice, that this new law could not be rigidly applied. And the shipbuilder, realizing his own limitations and jealous of sharing his professional mysteries with mathematicians and philosophers, was willing to laugh the new theories out of court.

Again, of what practical use had been the discovery of the “solid of least resistance” or of that “cono-cuneus” which Dr. Wallis had investigated with a view to its application to the bows of a ship? A final blow to the scientists was given when the Royal Katherine, a three-decker of 80 guns, designed by the council of the Royal Society, was found so deficient in stability that it was deemed necessary to girdle her. Old Shish had beaten Sir Isaac Newton and all the professors! The impossibility of applying abstract scientific principles to so complex a machine as a sailing ship, moving in elements so variable as air and water, was patent to everyone. The attitude of the professional may be judged from the resigned language of William Sutherland, a shipwright of Portsmouth and Deptford Yards, who in 1711 published his Ship-builder’s Assistant:

“Though some of our preceding Master Builders have proposed length as expedient to increase motion, yet it has seldom answered; much extra timber is required to make them equally strong. Besides, if the solid of least resistance be a blunt-headed solid, extreme length will be useless to make cutting bodies.”

36 Again, in connection with the dimensions of masts:

“Though several writers say, that the velocities are the square roots of the power that drives or draws the body; from which it should be a quadruple sail to cause double swiftness. Hence, unless the fashion is adapted to the magnitude of the ship, all our Art can only be allowed notional, and the safest way of building and equipping will be to go to precedent, if there be any to be found. But this is a superfluous caution, since ’tis very customary, that let a ship be fitted never so well by one hand, it will not suit the temper of another. Besides, the proper business of a shipwright is counted an very vulgar imploy, and which a man of very indifferent qualifications may be master of.”

Science was, in short, discredited. The corporation of shipwrights had disappeared, not long surviving the fall of the house of Stuart. No master-builder had succeeded the Petts and the Deanes having sufficient influence and erudition to expose the faulty system under which warships were now built, English shipbuilding had once more become a craft governed entirely by precedent and the regulations. The professor was routed, and the practical man said in his heart, There is no knowing what salt water likes.

Yet the science of naval architecture was at the dawn. Not in this country, but in France, in the early part of the eighteenth century, research and inquiry received such encouragement from the State that it conferred on their fleets a superiority of design which they retained for long: a superiority which enabled them, in the guerre de course which was developed after La Hogue under the intrepid leadership of men like Jean Bart, Forbin, and Duguay-Trouin, to strike us some shrewd blows.

We propose to summarize as briefly as possible the principal events which mark the evolution of the scientific side of naval architecture.

A mere enumeration of the names and works of the men who chiefly contributed to the discovery of the true natural principles underlying the performance of sailing ships would suffice to show the debt owed by the world to French effort, and the tardiness with which this country faced the intellectual problems involved. In the year 1681 a series of conferences was held at Paris on the question of placing the operations of naval architecture on a stable scientific basis; but before that date, in 1673, Father Pardies, a Jesuit, had published the37 results of his attempts to calculate the resistance of bodies moving in fluids with varying velocities. In ’93 the Chevalier Renaud and Christian Huyghens were engaged in public controversy on the merits and deficiencies of Pardies’ laws. In ’96 James Bernouilli entered the lists on Huyghen’s side, and in the following year a remarkable work appeared from the pen of another Jesuit, Paul Hoste, professor of mathematics at Toulon. Father Hoste, having noticed the frequency with which vessels of that time required girdling, had put the question, why they should not be built initially with the form which they had when ultimately girdled. The replies given him being unsatisfactory, the professor investigated a whole series of problems: the relation between speed and resistance, the effect of form on resistance, stability, stowage, the properties affecting pitching, and the best form of bow. Though incorrect in much of his theory, he had admittedly a great influence on later research. He was followed, in 1714, by John Bernouilli, professor at Basle, whose investigations were purely theoretical. And then, a few years later, M. Bouguer made his great discovery of the metacentre, that all-important point in space whose position in a ship, relatively to its centre of gravity, marks with precision the nature of the vessel’s stability.

A treatise by Euler, entitled Scientia Navalis, was published in 1749, and a little later, stimulated by prizes offered by the Société Royale des Sciences, Don G. Juan in Spain, Euler in Russia, and Daniel Bernouilli in Germany, all published the results of their investigations into the forces acting on a rolling ship. Euler’s contribution was especially valuable. Treating the ship as a pendulum he laid down two definite rules for the guidance of shipbuilders, (1), not to remove the parts of a ship too far from the longitudinal axis, (2), to make the most distant parts as light as possible.

Up to this time the discoveries of the mathematicians had had little practical effect on shipping. The abstruse form in which new truths were published, and the lack of education of the shipbuilders, prevented that mutual collaboration which was necessary if the art of shipbuilding was to benefit by the advances of science. Soon after 1750, however, a succession of able men, possessed of imagination and initiative, led inquiry into practical channels, and by actual trial proved, incidentally, that much of the accepted theory was faulty. The Chevalier de Borda, a naval captain and a member38 of the Academy of Sciences, investigated with models the resistance of fluids to motion through them, and enunciated laws which shook confidence in current beliefs. The result was a commission from the government to three eminent men, M. D’Alembert, the Marquis Condorcet and the Abbé Bossut, to report on and continue de Borda’s investigations. The report, read by the Abbé before the Academy in 1776, confirmed generally de Borda’s theories, and revealed new problems—in particular, the alteration in shape of the free water surface and the effect of wave resistance, the latter of which was ultimately to be solved in this country by Mr. W. Froude—that required investigation. The circumstances of this commission illustrate the enlightened interest of the State in the advancement of knowledge, significant testimony to which was paid by Abbé Bossut. “M. Turgot,” he said of the Comptroller-General of Finances, who took responsibility for it, “who is not only an admirer of the sciences, but has pursued the study of them himself amidst his numerous important official functions, approved of our intentions, and granted every requisite for prosecuting them.”

In the same year curious and important discoveries were made by M. Romme, professor of navigation at La Rochelle. In an endeavour to find the form of ship body which would give good stability in conjunction with small resistance, he ascertained the importance of the “run” or after part. Hitherto the form of bow had absorbed attention to the almost entire exclusion of the form of run, except in so far as it had been shaped to allow water to flow freely to the rudder. M. Romme called in aid methods which are now approved as scientific, but which were then conspicuously novel: he experimented by comparative trials between models in which all variable features except one had been carefully eliminated. He was rewarded by some new discoveries. By fixing the length and successively varying the curvature of different parts of his models he laid bare an important paradox. While at low speeds the resistance was least when a sharp end was in front and a blunt end in rear, at higher speeds the opposite obtained. This accounted for a great deal of the contradictions of previous investigators. M. Romme went further: the curves by which the bow of a ship was connected with her middle body, hitherto looked on as all-important, were shown to be relatively immaterial. He astonished the world of39 science by proving that, given certain conditions, the resistance upon an arc of a curve is the same as that upon the chord of this arc. His deductions were proved by commissions to be well founded. Experience confirmed that the form of the bow curve did not much influence the resistance experienced in passing through water; on the other hand the form of the run was shown to have a far greater effect than had hitherto been suspected.

In the year before M. Romme published the results of his experiments a treatise appeared, full of empirical rules and shrewd reasoning, by one of the greatest naval architects, Henry de Chapman, chief constructor of the Swedish navy, an Anglo-Swede who came of an old shipbuilding family of Deptford. Chapman was a most gifted shipbuilder. Though his formul? were empirical, they were founded on careful observation and induction, and his name ranks with those of Phineas Pett and Anthony Deane in the history of naval architecture.

Nothing, so far, had come from English writers. “The only English treatise on shipbuilding that can lay any claim to a scientific character was published by Mungo Murray in 1754; and he, though his conduct was irreproachable, lived and died a working shipwright in Deptford dockyard.”22 But indifference was at last giving place to interest. Inspired by the formation of the Society of Arts in 1753 (which Society was itself inspired by the recognition, on the part of the founder, of the value of prizes and rewards in improving our breed of racehorses) a London bookseller named Sewell succeeded in 1791 in forming a Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture. “Impressed with the many grave complaints which reached him as to the inferiority of our warships as compared with those of France and Spain,” he gained the interest of Lord Barham and other influential men. A meeting was held at which it was decided, as something of a novelty, that the theory and art of shipbuilding were subjects of national importance; that a radical deficiency in knowledge of the same existed; and that the most effective remedy was a focussing of the wisdom of the country on this matter by the institution of the above Society.23

40 For a time the society flourished. A learned paper by Atwood before the Royal Society, on the stability of a rolling ship, proved that this country was not wholly destitute of mathematical talent. An interesting series of experiments was carried out for it by Colonel Beaufoy, a devoted student who had made his first experiments on water resistance before he was fifteen years old. It appears that his attention was first drawn to the subject by hearing an eminent mathematician state one evening that a cone drawn through water base foremost experienced less resistance than with its apex foremost; and it was said that sailors always took a mast in tow by the heel. The paradox excited young Beaufoy’s curiosity. Before bedtime, with the assistance of a neighbouring turner, he was making experiments in one of the coolers in his father’s brew-house, a large bunch of counting-house keys being put into requisition as a motive power. Though the society was dissolved in 1799 Beaufoy continued to pursue this subject with unabated zeal until his death. In one direction, especially, he did good work. Attracted by the frequency with which North Sea fishing vessels, fitted with wells for carrying the fish, foundered at sea, he showed experimentally the loss of stability involved in carrying open tanks of water. He also demonstrated to English builders by means of models that Bouguer’s diagram of metacentric stability was of great practical value, even for large angles of heel. “His experiments,” says Mr. Johns, “should take an important place in the history of stability of ships.”

§

We now revert to the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the desultory warfare which was carried on during the reign of Queen Anne events occurred to demonstrate the superiority in design of the French warship over its English opponent of the same nominal force. One in particular, an expedition under Count Forbin which was intended to cover a descent on the Scotch coast in favour of the Pretender, “showed, even in failure, that in material France held a lead on us.” Chased back to its ports from the latitude of Edinburgh by larger English forces, Forbin’s squadron proved a superiority over all our ships, both in speed and seaworthiness. In weather which disabled many of our vessels the French41 squadron arrived home with the loss of only three—and these all English built.

At about the same time the capture by us of a 60-gun ship, the Maure, of extraordinarily large dimensions for her rate, showed the direction in which French design differed from our own. The recapture, not long afterwards, of the Pembroke, which was now found to carry only fifty, instead of her original number of sixty-four guns, corroborated (says Charnock) the direction in which improvement was sought and found.

But for some time the lesson remained unlearnt. For a number of years the inferiority of our design was an accepted fact; “every action won by British valour was a stigma to British science.” Throughout the whole of this century we set no value on scientific principles as applied to naval architecture, and were content to remain copyists. Although before the advent of the Napoleonic wars we had thus endeavoured to reduce their balance of advantage, yet even so the French still maintained an absolute superiority in design. In the first half of the century this superiority was especially conspicuous; and, in conjunction with an inferiority of seamanship and workmanship which in the end more than neutralized all its advantages, it was the cause of the disreputable incongruities which Charnock has depicted in his well-known epigram: Very few ships captured by the enemy from the British have ever continued long the property of their possessors. If it has so happened, that one of them, being in company with others of French construction, has ever fallen in with any English squadron, that ship, almost without exception, has been among those captured, and most frequently the first which has fallen. On the other hand, the recapture of any ship from the British, which was originally French, is a circumstance extremely uncommon. Captured French ships were sought for as the best commands, which not infrequently were the means of recapturing captured English vessels.

Very seldom was our failure to overhaul the speedy Frenchman attributed to inferiority of design; nearly always to the fortuitous circumstance that we were foul-bottomed and the enemy clean; which may have been sometimes true, but which was evidently a partial and inaccurate explanation.

We have already made mention of the periodic “establishments” of dimensions to which ships built for the royal navy were made to conform. The first of these, after the rules laid down by the commissioners of James I, was decreed in 1655,42 when Blake was organizing a new standard navy. In 1677 dimensions were established for ships of 100, 90, and 70 guns, but were exceeded in the case of those ships which were actually built; and in ’91 a revised establishment for all classes, very similar to those which previously governed practice, appeared. In 1706 a new establishment was decreed, a compromise between the ideas of the Surveyor and the master shipwrights, in which the dimensions of each class were slightly increased. The dimensions still remained small compared with those of all foreign ships, however, and still “all superior faculties of sailing were attributed to the mere length of the vessel itself, without any but trivial regard to shape or form of bottom.” Assuming that the ships built under this establishment derived some slight advantage over earlier construction on account of their augmented tonnage, yet this was nullified when, in 1716, the force of their armament was raised. As the work of a committee presided over by Admiral Byng, a new establishment of guns was ordered, a change being made in calibres but not in numbers:—

First and second rates, instead of carrying 32-pounders on the lower, 18-pounders on the main, and 9-pounders on the upper deck, were ordered to carry, 42-pounders (or 32-pounders) on the lower, 24-pounders on the main, and 12-pounders on the upper deck. Eighty-gun ships, instead of carrying 24-pounders on the lower, 12-pounders on the main, and 6-pounders on the upper deck, were ordered to carry 32-pounders on the lower, 12-pounders on the main, and 6-pounders on the upper deck. Seventy-gun ships, which in the previous century had carried 18-pounders on their main, and 9-pounders on their upper deck, and which during the reign of Queen Anne had carried 24-pounders and 9-pounders, were now ordered to carry 24-pounders and 12-pounders. And so on with the smaller rates.

In 1719 a new establishment for ships was decreed, the dimensions slightly exceeding those of 1706, but being totally insufficient for satisfactory construction. In ’32 and ’41 attempts were made to formulate new rules; but the master shipwrights seem to have been loth to accept the lesson which the French enemy was teaching them, and hesitated to recommend any radical departure from traditional practice.

At length, in 1745, general complaint of the inferiority of our ships in size and scantlings forced improvement on the43 authorities. Spain, who had joined France in war against us, possessed ships which exceeded in size even French ships of the same rate. The capture in 1740 of a Spanish 70-gun ship, the Princessa, by three of our ships, nominally of equal force with herself but of far inferior dimensions and scantlings, is said to have been the chief cause of the new reform. Their lordships of the Admiralty, surveying naval construction in this country, noted that our royal ships were weak and crank, while those of other nations went upright. There was no uniform standard of size, ships of the same class were of different dimensions, the existing establishment was not adhered to. They therefore decided on a new establishment, based on the latest armament of guns; which should result in ships which would carry their lower tier six feet above the water, and four months’ provisions.

The new standard was of little avail, for the same error made some thirty years previously was now repeated: with the augmentation of the ship dimensions the armament was also raised in calibre. The first rates were ordered to carry the 42-pounder (which had before been optional) on their lower deck; the 90-gun ships, 12-pounders on their upper decks; the eighties, 18-pounders and 9-pounders instead of 12’s and 6’s; the seventies, which were only two hundred tons in excess of the former establishment, 32-pounders and 18-pounders, instead of 24’s and 12’s. “The ships, therefore, built by this establishment proved, in general, very crank and bad sea-boats.”24

This establishment was, in point of fact, little adhered to. The war with France during the years 1744–8 repeatedly revealed the defective nature of our ship design. Experience pointed to the necessity either of reduced gun-weights or of larger ships. Able administrators were now willing, under the inspiration of such names as Hawke and Anson, to initiate improvements. Our naval architecture at last took benefit, though still by slow and cautious degrees, from foreign experience. Some time was necessary for results to show themselves; not only were new decisions slowly formed, but the rate of building was deliberately slow. The Royal George, for instance, described as “the first attempt towards emancipation from the former servitude,” was ten years building. But, when war broke out again in 1756, the improvements already embodied44 in the newest construction proved of considerable benefit. The establishment of ’45 was given the credit. “The ships built by the establishment of 1745,” says Derrick in his Memoirs, “were found to carry their guns well, and were stiff ships, but they were formed too full in their after part; and in the war which took place in 1756, or a little before, some further improvements in the draughts were therefore adopted, and the dimensions of the ships were also further increased.”

To meet the advances in French construction a new classification of rates took place, with French captured ships as models. The capture of the Foudroyant, for instance, in 1758, provided us with the form and dimensions of a splendid two-decked 84-gun ship. Our 80-gun three-deckers were thereupon abolished, and no three-decker was thenceforth built with fewer than 90 guns. The capture of the Invincible, in 1757, gave us a valuable model for a 74-gun ship, a rate highly esteemed, which bore the brunt of most of this century’s warfare.25 From her was copied the Triumph, and other experimental 74’s, with dimensions varying from those of the Invincible, were at this time laid down. All 50-gun ships had already dropped out of the line of battle; they were now followed by the 60’s. No more 60 or 70-gun ships were built; their places were taken by 64’s and 74’s respectively, of relatively large size and displacement.

Nor was improvement confined to form and dimensions. Attention was now paid to material. New rules were made for the cutting and seasoning of timber, and for its economical use. Sheathing was tried; in 1761 the frigate Alarm was sheathed in copper for service in the West Indies, where the worm was active. The copper was found to keep clean the hull, but at the expense of the iron fastenings; so when, in ’83, copper sheathing became general, an order was issued for all new royal ships to be copper fastened up to the water-line: an order beneficial on another count, since even without the presence of copper sheathing, iron bolts had always been liable to corrosion from the acids contained in the oak timbers. Ventilation was also studied, more for its effects on the hull timbers than on the health of the crews. The scantlings of all45 ships were strengthened. Taffrails and quarter-pieces were reduced in size, and the weight thus saved was devoted to strengthening the sterns and reinforcing the deck supports; additional knees and fastenings were provided throughout the structure. Moreover, towards the middle of the century the formation of the sails was gradually altered, first in the smaller rates and afterwards in the larger ships. The old-fashioned spritsail, which had been of greatest effect when going free, but which had also been used with the wind abeam by the awkward expedient of topping up its yard, gave place in our navy to the fore and aft jib, which could be used with the wind before the beam. Later the lateen sail on the mizzen gave place to a spanker hung from a gaff or half-yard. These alterations had a general effect on the size and position of masts and sails.

The order of 1745 was virtually the last of those rule-of-thumb establishments which had imposed rigorous maximum limits of length, beam and draught in conjunction with an equally rigorous minimum of armament weight, and which had been a glaring example of the evil effects of standardization when unscientifically and unsuitably applied. The East India service, the contract-built ships of which were designed by architects untrammelled by the rules which cramped and distorted the official architecture, provided the clearest proof that the King’s ships were, as a whole, of poor design. Naval opinion confirmed it.26

For further evidence that it was the system and not the men at fault, we may note Charnock’s statement that, given a free hand, Englishmen proved themselves better shipbuilders than foreigners. “It stamps no inconsiderable degree of splendour on the opinion which even the arrogance of Spain felt itself compelled to hold in regard to the superior practical knowledge possessed by the British shipwrights in the construction and art of putting a vessel together, when brought in comparison with that of their own people. The builders in all the royal dockyards and arsenals, the Havanna excepted, were Britons.”

How many, we may wonder, of the ships shattered by Lord Nelson at Trafalgar were constructed by our countrymen? The Victory, which was to bear his flag, was laid down (we may note in passing) in the year 1759: she was 186 feet in length on the gun-deck, 52 feet broad, and of 2,162 tons burthen.

46 In 1774 the American war broke out. The colonists, who possessed a small but efficient frigate navy, were joined soon afterwards by France, and then by Spain, and Holland. Lord Rodney acknowledged the superiority of the French in speed, who, though his ships were equally clean with theirs, yet had the power daily to bring on an action. The war proved a rough test for our honest but unscientific construction. “In 1778, assailed by numerous enemies, England put forth all her naval strength. Powerful fleets had to be found simultaneously for the Channel, the North Sea, the East Indies, America, and the West Indies. Five years of such warfare proved exhausting, the ships on paying off in 1783 were in a terrible state of decay. Several foundered returning home, owing to their ill-construction and rickety condition; their iron bolts broke with the working, and the ships were mere bundles of boards. All this was owing to want of a better system of building, such as has since been brought to such perfection by Sir R. Seppings.”27

After the peace the size of the French ships continued to increase, and every effort was made to improve their design; but they were weak both in construction and material. Large three-deckers were once more built; the Commerce de Marseille, 120, was of such extraordinary dimensions that English critics thought that “size had now reached its ultimatum.” In 1786 the French abolished the use of shingle as ballast; it created a damp vapour between decks and gave a high centre of gravity. Iron ballast had been tried in the frigate Iphigène with great success. “She was very easy in a sea when under her courses; her extremities were not overloaded with cannon; she mounted only 13 guns a side, whereas she had room for 15. She was the best sea boat, and fastest sailing ship, perhaps, ever built. Her length was more than four times her breadth.”28

In England, as witnessed by the formation of the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, feeling was widespread at this time that something was lacking in our methods of ship construction. The navy was in process of reorganization by a great administrator. In 1784 Sir Charles Middleton created an establishment of naval stores. He took under consideration shortly afterwards the growing scarcity of timber and its more economical use. And in the course of his inquiry views were expressed on naval shipbuilding which had an influence on subsequent practice.

47 The conditions under which ships were built for the East India Company were far more scientific than those obtaining in the royal dockyards. The timber was more carefully picked, and better seasoned. The hulls were laid up under cover and well aired; they stood in frame for six months, and then, when the planks had been tacked on, they stood again, and no tree-nails were driven till all moisture had been dried out of the timber. In design they were in many ways superior; in fact, they were reputed the best and safest vessels in Europe.

Mr. Gabriel Snodgrass, the Company’s surveyor, under whose supervision, it was claimed, 989 ships had been built and repaired between the years 1757 and 1794, only one of which had been lost at sea, gave illuminating evidence. “I am of opinion,” he said, “that all the ships of the navy are too short, from ten to thirty feet according to their rates, And if ships in future were to be built so much larger as to admit of an additional timber between every port, and also if the foremost and aftermost gun-ports were placed a greater distance from the extremities, they would be stronger and safer, have more room for fighting their guns, and, I am persuaded, would be found to answer every other purpose much better than the present ships. The foremasts of all ships are placed too far forward; the ships are too lofty abaft, and too low in midships; they would be much better and safer, if their forecastles and quarter-decks were joined together; for if they carry two, three, or four tiers of guns, forward and abaft, they certainly ought to carry the same in midships, as it is an absurdity to load the extremities with more weight of metal than the midships. No ships, however small, that have forecastles and quarter-decks, should go to sea with deep waists: they certainly ought to have flush upper decks.”

Ships of the navy, he considered, were too weak; they had plenty of timber, but were deficient in iron fastenings, brackets, and standards. Knees should be of iron, which was lighter, cheaper, and stronger than wood. The bottoms of all navy ships were too thin; the wales and inside stuff too thick. He particularly recommended diagonal braces from keelson to gun-deck clamps: six or eight pairs of these, secured with iron knees or straps, should prevent ships from straining as they did. He would reduce the tumble-home given to the topsides, and thus add to the strength both of hulls and masts; he would abolish quarter-galleries and give less rake to the sterns.48 Finally, he would design ships so as to require a minimum of compass timber; make no use of oak where he could substitute fir or elm with propriety; and have all timbers cut as nearly to the square as possible, to conserve strength.

His evidence, ending in a recommendation to the government to improve the status of the naval shipwrights, has been handed down as a remarkable exposition of sound knowledge and good sense. The proposals were beneficial, so far as they went, but they did not go far enough: the whole system on which the hull timbers were disposed was wrong. The continuous increase in the size of ships was gradually exposing their weakness. And though in the next century a more scientific disposition was to be adopted, for some years yet construction continued on the ancient lines.29

The great wars with France, which broke out in the year 1792, found us adding both to the length and to the scantlings of our new ships. Three years before, the Admiralty had ordered two 110-gun ships to be built, of 2332 tons burthen. One of them, the Hibernia, not finished till the year 1805, was made more than eleven feet longer than originally intended. Both of these ships were established with 32-pounder guns for their main deck.30 The unwieldy 42-pounder, used on the lower decks of first and second-rate ships, was now displaced, in most ships, by the more rapidly worked 32-pounder. Lord Keppel had tried, also, to substitute 32-pounders for 24-pounders on the main deck of the Victory and other ships in commission, so as to establish them generally; but they were found too heavy on trial. He replaced 6-pounders by 12-pounders, however, on the quarter-decks and forecastles. Carronades were now making their appearance. In excellence of material and honesty of workmanship our fleets were pre-eminent.

49 The value of large dimensions was by this time discerned; where possible extra length was given to ships building and those under repair. Size still increased. The great Commerce de Marseille, brought home a prize by Lord Hood in ’94, was forthwith matched by the Caledonia, which, ordered in this year but not completed until 1810, was the greatest ship which had ever been built in this country. Still, side by side with news of world-shaking victories, came evidence of our ships’ inferiority in design. Not only the French, but the Spanish dockyards, produced vessels which could often outsail ours. Four large prizes taken at the battle off Cape St. Vincent surprised their new owners: “under their jury-masts, and poorly manned as they necessarily were, they beat all the English ships working into the Tagus.”31

As the great wars went on, Britain deployed a constantly increasing naval force. Prizes went to swell the number of ships put in commission. “Mr. Pitt was foremost in getting every possible ship to sea; and under this pressure rotten old ships were doubled and cross-braced and otherwise strengthened and rendered fully adequate to temporary service. Trafalgar followed, and the efforts of the civil departments were rewarded.”32

We have made little mention, in the foregoing pages, of the actual tonnage or dimensions of ships, for the reason that the figures would be for the most part unreliable or misleading in import. The basis on which tonnage was measured was constantly changing. It was difficult to obtain accurate measurements of the principal dimensions; length, especially, was an indeterminate dimension, and, in the days when a large fore and aft rake was given, the length of keel gave no indication of the over-all length. Even if the over-all dimensions could be accurately measured, they gave small information as to the form of the hull: the fullness or fineness of the lines, the form of the bow-curves and tuck, the position of the section of maximum breadth, both longitudinally and relatively to the water-line—proportions on which the sailing qualities of a ship largely depended. In the seventeenth century the tonnage figures were generally untrustworthy; the Sovereign was quoted by three different authorities as being of 1141, 1637, and 1556 tons burthen. In the eighteenth century tonnage and dimensions possessed greater comparative50 value. We confine ourselves to quoting the following table of typical dimensions, taken from Charnock, showing the gradual expansion which took place in the hundred years which have just been reviewed.
Establishment    Length
(gun-deck)    Keel    Breadth    Depth    Tonnage
1706 }     171′ 9″     139′ 7″     49′ 3″     19′ 6″     1809
1719 } 100-gun ships     175′ 0″     140′ 7″     50′ 3″     20′ 1″     1883
1745 }     178′ 0″     145′ 2″     52′ 0″     21′ 6″     2091
Commerce de Marseille (120)     208′ 4″     172′ 0″     54′ 9″     25′ ?″     2747
Caledonia (120)     205′ 0″     170′ 9″     53′ 8″     23′ 2″     2616

§

The slow progress of naval architecture up to the end of the eighteenth century, an advance the rate of which may be gauged from the fact that, except for sheathing and pumps, no important improvement was patented between the years 1618 and 1800, has been characterized as consisting mainly of approximations to the successive forms and arrangements of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French ships, all of which had been in their turn superior to ours. Until the end of the eighteenth century the “bigotry of old practice” had effectually opposed any radical improvement, even though such improvement had been operating for years in foreign navies and were brought continually before the eyes of our professionals, embodied in captured prizes. In his Naval Development of the Century Sir Nathaniel Barnaby has drawn attention to the remarkable similarity which existed between the Caledonia of the early nineteenth, and the old Sovereign of the seventeenth century: “Almost the only things of note were the reduction in height above water, forward and aft, and a slight increase in dimensions. The proportion between length and breadth had undergone but little change. There was almost the same arrangement of decks and ports; the same thin boarding in front of the forecastle; the same mode of framing the stern, the same disposition of the outside planking in lines crossing the sheer of the ports; nearly the same rig; the same external rudder-head, with a hole in the stern to admit the tiller; and probably the same mode of51 framing the hull. For the ships of 1810 had no diagonal framing of wood or iron, but the old massive vertical riders; no shelf or waterway to connect the beams with the sides; no fillings above the floor-head; and no dowels in the frames. Ships were still moored by hempen cables, and still carried immense stores of water in wooden casks.”

To Sir Robert Seppings was due the series of innovations in constructional method which placed shipbuilding on a relatively scientific basis and thereby rendered it capable of meeting the increasing demands involved in the growing size and force of warships. His scheme, some elements of which had already been tested in H.M. ships, was described in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1814. In the briefest language we will attempt to explain it.

In the theory of structures, a jointed figure formed of four straight sides is known as a deficient frame, since it has not a sufficient number of members to keep it in stable equilibrium under any system of loading. A triangle, on the other hand, is a perfect frame, since it has enough, and not more than enough, members to keep it in equilibrium however it may be loaded.

The hull of a timber-built ship consisted of a number of rigidly jointed frames or cells, some lying in horizontal, some in vertical, and some in intermediate planes: the unit cell being a quadrilateral, whose sides were formed by the frames and vertical riders and by the planks, wales, and horizontal riders. Practically all the materials composing the fabric of a ship were disposed either in planes parallel to the plane of the keel or in planes at right angles to it. And up to the end of the Napoleonic wars our ships, without appreciable exception, were built on this primitive quadrilateral system. The system was essentially weak. All warships showed a tendency to arch or hog—to become convex upwards, in the direction of their length—owing to the fact that the support which they derived from the water was relatively greater amidships than in the neighbourhood of their extremities. In the old days when ships were short in length this tendency was small, or, if appreciable, a remedy was found in working into the structures additional longitudinal and transverse riders, until the holds were not infrequently clogged with timber. But as ships increased in length, the forces tending to “break the sheer” of a ship and arch its keel increased in greater ratio52 than the ship’s power of resistance to the distortion; and by the end of the eighteenth century, in spite of the aid of iron knees, stronger fastenings, and improved material generally, the essential weakness of our mode of construction had been gradually exposed. The Victory herself suffered from arching. The extremities of a 74-gun ship dropped six inches, sometimes, when she entered the water from the stocks. A similar tendency to hog took place also across the breadth of a ship, occasioned by the dead weight of her guns. When rolling in heavy weather the momentum of her top weights caused large racking stresses to be thrown on the joints between the frames and the deck-beams. The biographer of Admiral Symonds quotes Captain Brenton as follows: “I remember very well, when I was a midshipman in a 64-gun ship coming home from India, cracking nuts by the working of the ship. We put them in under the knees, as she rolled one way, and snatched them out as she rolled back again.”
DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATING DISTORTION OF FRAMES UNDER LOAD

From these remarks it will be clear that a new method of construction which, by substituting the triangle for the rectangle, prevented the distortion of a ship’s hull under the stresses of hogging and sagging, would constitute an important innovation: even more important if, in addition, the new method resulted in a large economy of material. Such a system Sir Robert Seppings introduced. Treating the hull as a girder liable to bend, he disposed the timbers to the best advantage to resist deformation. The rectangular system, wherein frames and riders formed rectangular cells with no other power of resisting distortion into rhomboids than that derived from the rigidity of the joints, had been proved inefficient; just as a common field gate would be inefficient, and would easily distort, if built up solely of vertical and horizontal timbers without any diagonal brace to make it a rigid figure. He solved the problem with the triangle. By bracing each quadrilateral cell with a diagonal timber he thereby divided it into two rigid and immovable triangles, and thus made the53 whole ship rigid. The quadrilateral, when braced, was known as a trussed frame. All the chief frames in the ships he trussed; and since all bending took place from the centre of the ship downwards to its ends, he made the trussed frames symmetrical about the centre: the diagonals sloped forward in the after body, and aft in the fore body, so as to resist the arching by extension. The truss frame was embodied, not only in the lower part of the vessel (where its effect in resisting longitudinal bending was comparatively small), but in the more nearly vertical planes, and even in the topsides between the gun-ports (where it was most effective). Its use was estimated to result in the saving of nearly two hundred oak trees in the building of a 74-gun ship.
DIAGRAM REPRESENTING A SHIP WITH TRUSSED FRAMES

This was one element of Seppings’ system. The others were: the filling in of the spaces between the ground frames of the ship, so as to oppose with a continuous mass of timber the tendency of the lower parts to compress longitudinally, and to form a thick and solid bottom; the omission of the interior planking below the orlop clamps; the connection of the beams with the frames by means of shelf-pieces, waterways, and side binding-strakes to the deck; and the laying of the decks diagonally.

In two other important respects Seppings improved on previous construction.

At Trafalgar the Victory, during her end-on approach to the enemy line, was raked, and her old-fashioned forecastle, with its thin flat-fronted bulkhead rising above the low head, was riddled and splintered. This and similar experiences led to the introduction by the Surveyor of an improved bow, formed by prolonging the topsides to meet in a high curved stem, which not only deflected raking shot, but also consolidated the bow into a strong wedge-shaped structure supporting a lofty bowsprit, and capable of being armed to give ahead fire from a number of guns.

Similarly the weakness of ships’ sterns was remedied. The broad flat overhanging stern which had been given to our ships54 throughout the eighteenth century was not only structurally, but defensively weak. In many actions, but notably in Admiral Cornwallis’ fighting retreat from the French in 1795, the weakness of our stern fire had been severely felt; and, especially in view of the possible adaptation of steam to ship propulsion, at this time foreshadowed, the desirability of an improvement was evident. Seppings abolished the flat stern in all new two- and three-deckers, substituting sterns circular (as seen from above), more compactly embodied, and having ports and embrasures in them for guns capable of fire along divergent radii. The circular stern gave place, after a few years, to an elliptical stern, which presented a more graceful appearance and afforded increased protection to the rudder-head. “The principal curves visible in it,” it was said, “harmonize so well with the sheer lines of the ship, that she appears to float lightly and easily upon the water.”

In the opening years of the new century important advances were made, too, in the organization of the royal dockyards. The interests of naval architecture were served notably by Sir55 Samuel Bentham, brother of the famous jurist and an ex-shipwright, who acquired honours in Russia and returned to England to be Civil Architect and Engineer to the navy. Bentham became a courageous Commissioner, and did much to stamp out abuses and to encourage efficiency; he was instrumental in checking the sale of stores, in abolishing “chips,” in introducing steam pumps, block machinery, and dry dock caissons, in improving the methods of building ships and of mounting carronades.

But still naval architecture, considered either as an art or as a science, was stagnant. As a class the Surveyors were men of very restricted education—“there is scarcely a name on the list of any eminence as a designer or a writer.” Those who ordered ships at the Board were “busy politicians, or amateurs without a knowledge of science, or sailors too impatient of innovation to regard improvements.” In no other profession, perhaps, were theory and practice so out of sympathy with each other. The native art of the builder was numbed and56 shackled, by the restrictions imposed upon him as to tonnage and dimensions; the study of ship form, with a view to analysing the forces under which sailing ships moved by wind through water and to discovering the laws which those forces obeyed, was still mainly an academic pastime of the Society for Improving Naval Architecture, and outside the province of the naval authorities. Our ships were still formed on no rational principle. Captured French ships served as models to be copied. Often our builders would make fanciful variations from the originals—a little more sheer, a little more beam, etc. etc.—and as often they spoiled their copies. Whenever they followed closely the forms and features of the originals they succeeded in producing vessels which were pronounced to be among the best ships in the navy.

With this state of affairs, it is no matter for surprise that much of the new construction of the period was of small value. “Sir Joseph Yorke produced a set of corvettes, longer and narrower than brigs, none of which answered; and they were sold out of the service. Then came the ‘Forty Thieves,’ a small class of 74’s; but in justice to the designer, Sir H. Peake (who copied them from a French ship), it must be added that his lines were altered by the Navy Board, and the vessels were contract-built. Lord Melville built half a dozen ‘fir frigates,’ which neither sailed nor stood under canvas. The 22-gun and 28-gun donkey frigates ‘could neither fight nor run away’; it was dangerous to be on board them; and the bad sailing of such vessels was the chief cause of our ill success in the American War. The old 10-gun brigs, or ‘floating coffins,’ as they were significantly styled, were equally dangerous and unsightly. They had no room to fight their guns; no air between decks, which were only five feet high; extra provisions and stores were piled above hatches; and the fastest of them sailed no more than eight or nine knots.”33

The merchant service was in even worse plight. The tonnage rules had had a deplorable effect upon merchant shipping. The ancient method of assessing a ship’s burthen was by measuring the product of its length and breadth and depth, and dividing this by a constant number, which varied, at different periods, from 100 to 94. Early in the eighteenth century, however, a simplification was innocently made: the depth of the average ship being half the beam, a new formula was approved—length57 multiplied by half the square of the beam, divided by 94.34 The result might have been anticipated. Dues being paid only on the length and breadth, vessels were given great depth of hold, full lines, and narrow beam. Absolved by the convoy system from trusting to their own speed for self-protection, English merchantmen became slugs: flat-bottomed, wall-sided boxes, monstrosities of marine architecture of which it was said that they were ‘built by the mile and served out by the yard.’

To raise the skill and status of our builders, the Committee of Naval Revision of 1806 presided over by Lord Barham advised the establishment of an official school, in which the more highly gifted apprentices might study the science involved in naval architecture. In 1811 the school was opened at Portsmouth, with Dr. Inman, a senior wrangler, as president. Ships were designed by Dr. Inman and his pupils excellent in many respects, and generally on an equality with those of the Surveyor and the master shipwrights. Yet still they were very imperfect. The official designs were hampered, not only by the hereditary prejudices and dogmas and by the cautious timidity of the builders themselves, but by the restrictions still imposed by the Navy Board, who insisted on a certain specified armament in combination with a totally inadequate specified tonnage: who laid down incompatible conditions, in short, under which genius itself must fail of producing a satisfactory result.

The chains were broken in 1832.

In that year, when the whole administration of the navy was in process of reorganization, the office of Surveyor was offered to and accepted by a naval officer, Captain W. Symonds, R.N.: accepted by him on the condition that he should be given a free hand in design and allowed to decide himself of what tonnage and dimensions every ship should be. Sir Robert Seppings was superannuated. The school of naval architecture was abolished. The sensation produced was powerful. “Except on matters of religion,” said Sir James Graham, when the appointment was being debated in the House of Commons some years afterwards, “I do not know any difference of opinion which has been attended with so much bitterness—so much anger—so much resentment, as the merits of Sir W. Symonds and the virtues of his ships.”

58 These violent differences and resentments have long since been composed, and Sir William Symonds has been accorded the position due to him in the history of naval architecture. His opponents, those who had resented his appointment as against the best interests of the service, rejoiced that he had freed ship design from the traditional restrictions under which it had stagnated; his chief admirers were led in the course of time to agree in the desirability of having as Surveyor a man thoroughly grounded in the scientific principles underlying the motion of bodies through water, their stability in water, and all the forces acting on a ship at sea.

In the year 1821 Lieutenant Symonds, while holding an appointment at Malta, had designed and built for himself a yacht which he called Nancy Dawson. Yachting had at this date become a national sport, and the interest of influential patrons in sailing matches was already acting as a stimulus to the study of ship form. The chief cause of the beneficial reaction from the indifference of former generations, says his biographer, was the establishment of the Yacht Club, after the peace of 1815, and the interest which men of rank and fortune henceforth took in shipbuilding, and in procuring the best native models.35 So great was the success of the Nancy Dawson, that (in his own words) he was led to believe that he had hit upon a secret in naval architecture; while experiments on other sailing boats seemed to confirm him in his principles. Great breadth of beam and extraordinary sharpness—in fact, what was described as “a peg-top section”—were the characteristic features of his system, with a careful attention to stowage, the stand of the masts, and the cut and setting of the sails.

“Upon this most slender basis was the whole fabric of Sir William’s subsequent career built. The yacht gained him the notice of noblemen and others, then followed a pamphlet on naval architecture (in which the defects of existing ships were pointed out, and great breadth of beam and rise of floor advocated); then came a promise from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville, that he should build a sloop of war on his plans, which he did, the vessel being called the Columbine (promotion intervening); then further patronage from the Duke of Portland and the Duke of Clarence, the latter of whom, when he became Lord High Admiral, ordered him to lay down59 a 40-gun frigate (promotion again intervening); then the building of the Pantaloon, 10-gun brig, for the Duke of Portland, from whom the Admiralty purchased her; then the patronage of that most mischievous civilian First Lord, Sir J. Graham; then the order for the Vernon, 50-gun frigate; and then, in ’32, the Surveyorship of the Navy.”36

To Sir Edward Reed and other shipbuilding officers the appointment of this brilliant amateur to the supreme control of the department seemed an act of war, not only on professional architects, but upon naval architecture itself. They admitted the success of the Symondite ships in speed and certain sailing qualities, but denied the correctness of his principles and strenuously resisted his innovations. A great breadth of beam was particularly objectionable to the scientific builder; not only did it imply a large resistance to the passage of the ship through water, but it contributed to an excess in metacentric height, abnormal stiffness, and an uneasy motion. “For a time his opinions triumphed; but after a while the principles expounded by his subordinates (Creuze, Chatfield, and Read) were accepted as correct, while not a single feature of Sir William’s system of construction is retained, except certain practical improvements which he introduced.”37

‘Victoria’
Breadth = 59′ 2″
Length = 204′

‘Caledonia’
Breadth = 53′ 6″
Length = 205′

Fig: 1.

‘Vernon’
Breadth = 52′
Length = 176′

‘Barham’
Breadth = 47′ 10″
Length = 173′ 8″

Fig: 2.


TYPICAL SECTIONS OF “SYMONDITE” AND CONTEMPORARY SHIPS

Nevertheless his opponents, as before remarked, freely acknowledged the value of his services to the country, especially in breaking down the restrictions which had hitherto been60 imposed on constructors in respect of dimensions. His biographer pays tribute to the intuitive genius which enabled him to tell at a glance the trim required for a sailing ship, and to sketch out, as a brilliant impromptu, the best form of hull. But were these efforts entirely spontaneous? Were they not the reward of hidden and persistent work, observation, and calculation, carried out for years by the young officer who never let a sailing ship come near him without contriving to board her and ascertain her principal properties and dimensions? Here, surely, is the undramatic but praiseworthy method by which he attained success: a method, essentially scientific, which enabled its user, even without knowledge of other important principles governing ship design, to perform a national service in revolutionizing our methods of naval architecture.

Under the control of Sir William Symonds the improvement in the form and qualities of our ships, begun under the surveyorship of Sir Robert Seppings, continued to progress. Ship dimensions increased, and now bore a more correct relation to the dead-weight of armament, stores, and crew, which they had to carry. All classes from cutters to first-rates carried a more generous beam, and gained by the novel feature. Sounder rules were devised, partly as the result of a succession of sailing trials, for the pitching of masts and the methods of stowing. In short, naval architecture entered upon a new and promising era. Foreign observers recorded the progress made. Instead of being servile imitations of the products of French and Spanish models the vessels which flew the English flag became objects of admiration to all the world.