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 the 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.

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 ships 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 Sir 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 and 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—length 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.”

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 down 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

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 been 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.