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 that 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 British 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.

§

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 without 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.”

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 the 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 member 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 of 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 formulæ 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

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 French 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, 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 the 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 embodied 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 all 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 comparative 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.

§

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 of 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 ratio 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.”