In stately guise, all smart and trim, rides the Victory to-day at the flagship’s moorings in Portsmouth Harbour, flying at her masthead the red St. George’s Cross flag of the Admiral holding the chief command at the principal naval port of the British Empire. To see her now, spick and span and as smart as paint can make her, she looks at the first glance barely a day older than the latest launched of the old style wooden men-of-war that are yet left among us doing harbour duty in various capacities. The old St. Vincent, which passed away only the other day, a worn-out veteran, was launched ten years after the Victory had fired her last shotted gun. The still existing Asia, at Portsmouth, was launched thirteen years after the Victory had finally retired from the sea. The Victory as a fact had been some years afloat and had fought her first battle long before the great-great-grandfathers of most of us were old enough to trundle a hoop or spin a top. She forms in herself, indeed, a direct and actual link between our own day and the times of George the Second.

Two famous Admirals of the Seven Years’ War time, Anson and Boscawen, were the Lords of the Admiralty who signed the order to lay the Victory’s keel. The names themselves take us back into history well over a century and a half. And the difference between things then and now is wider than the gap of years. It is difficult indeed, as we nowadays see the Victory in Portsmouth Harbour, amidst the stir and activity of a modern naval port, to realize how wide a space her lifetime really covers.

Imagine yourself as a visitor at Portsmouth on any afternoon almost of the present year of grace, and observing what takes place in the harbour round the Victory. Here comes along, sliding swiftly past between ship and shore, a long, low-built black torpedo-boat; or a yet more grim-looking sleuthhound of the sea, a thirty-knot destroyer, with squat funnels and high-raised forecastle, from which peers forward the long barrel of a twelve-pounder, shearing its way ahead on business of its own. Now a snub-nosed gunnery-school gunboat passes, returning from a day’s target-practice out beyond the Warner lightship, with a weapon that can fire from twelve to twenty aimed shots in a minute. Then, it may be, a brand new twenty-three-knot cruiser passes, coming back from a trial run, or a huge high-sided four to five hundred feet long battleship of from fifteen to eighteen thousand tons, stern and resolute of appearance, her giant barbette guns of massive bulk and enormous length, weighing each from fifty to sixty tons, and able to send an eight hundredweight twelve-inch shell from fifteen to twenty miles, and with the certainty of being able to hit the mark with each shot at half that range—the horizon limit from on board. It was not so long ago that one of our battleships (the Commonwealth), firing at eight thousand yards at a target representing an enemy’s battleship, dropped successive twelve-inch shells into a space the size of a lawn-tennis court, and, at the same distance at the third round, shot away a boat’s flagstaff that topped the target. At all times, too, there is a passing and repassing of Navy steam-launches and pinnaces, and now and again the busy forging to and fro of puffing harbour tugs and yard craft of all sorts. Such are every-day sights in Portsmouth Harbour in these times of ours.

Then carry your mind back to the year in which the Victory first figured on the Estimates of the Navy—1758. Imagine yourself standing on the Hard as a sightseer in the Portsmouth of the Seven Years’ War time—on, say, a day in October of the year when my Lords at Whitehall were making their final decision about the ship’s dimensions.

At this same moment, by the way, there is lying in a far-off parsonage, in an out-of-the-world locality on the Norfolk coast, a puny baby boy, a fortnight or three weeks old, so sickly that he is not thought likely to live. So weakly, indeed, is the child that his baptism—at which the name Horatio was given to the small babe—has taken place privately, just six days after his birth.

You would, in Portsmouth Harbour on that October afternoon of 1758, have seen something very much like this.

First of all, almost opposite the Hard, and just where the Victory herself now lies, there is moored a big yellow-sided two-decker of foreign build flying the British flag. Just now, perhaps, there is no man-of-war name all the world over of more unpleasant notoriety than hers. She is the Monarque, a seventy-four, taken from the French, and it was on her quarter-deck, some eighteen months ago, on a dull and cloudy March day, that they shot Admiral Byng. The Monarque has now just returned from “Straits” service, and if you went on board her you would see, still there, and part of the ship’s company, the men of the platoon of marines who formed Byng’s firing party.

Near the Monarque lies a big ninety-gun three-decker—a yellow-sided vessel also, for all men-of-war are so painted. It is the St. George. In her cabin Byng’s court martial sat some twenty months ago. The court, by a grim coincidence, was held in the very cabin that had been Byng’s own thirteen years before that, when Byng was captain of this same St. George. There, on a snowy January day, as plenty of people at Portsmouth can tell you, for they were looking on, Byng stood to hear his sentence in his own old cabin, crowded almost to suffocation with spectators, stuffy and close, and the walls “sweating down” with trickling beads of water; the hapless, doomed British Admiral, standing there, firm and erect, with squared shoulders, calmly facing his judges, with his own sword lying on the table, its point turned towards himself.

To the very last, they say, Byng expected an acquittal. He had not anticipated, at the worst, a sentence more severe than a reprimand. So he himself said in the cabin of the Monarque, on the very morning of the 27th January, when the Admiralty Marshal came to accompany him on board the St. George to hear the finding of the court. He learnt the dread reality first as he came up the side of the St. George. At the entering port a personal friend, instructed privately by the President of the Court to do so, stood waiting to give the Admiral a word of warning. As he met his friend, Byng saw instantly from his downcast countenance and embarrassed manner that things had gone adversely and that the sentence was a hard one. “What is the matter,” asked the Admiral, “have they broke me?” The bearer of the news, convinced that Byng had no idea of what was coming, hesitated and stammered. Byng stopped short. He gazed fixedly at his friend for a few seconds, and then changed colour as he seemed to take in the situation. A moment later he had recovered himself. Exclaiming in a calm tone, “Well, well, I understand: if nothing but my blood will satisfy them, let them take it,” he passed with set countenance into the presence of the Court.

Beyond the St. George lies another “Mediterranean ship,” just returned home—the Revenge, one of the ships in Byng’s battle. It was the damning evidence of the Revenge’s captain—Frederick Cornwall, now at home on half-pay—as they all say in the fleet, that settled Byng’s fate. “If I cannot disprove what you have said, Captain Cornwall,” exclaimed Byng, as the one-armed captain of the Revenge turned to leave the cabin, after a futile attempt at cross-examination on the part of the Admiral, “may the Lord have mercy on me.” There is no need to go further.

If you could look round to Spithead from the Hard, you would see the old Royal Sovereign on duty as the port flagship. On board her it was that, on the morning of the execution, Admiral Boscawen put his signature to Byng’s death warrant, and the order for the firing party. She is the oldest ship in the King’s Navy, in which connection the Sovereign has other memories of her own. The great Duke of Marlborough named her at her launch in the year that William the Third died, and it was in her great-cabin, during the Sovereign’s first cruise, that Rooke’s council of war planned the swoop on the Vigo treasure galleons, which Vigo Street, in London, serves to commemorate. Some of the old ship’s timbers, it is the fact, formed part of the frame of Charles the First’s world-renowned Sovereign of the Seas, and were salved, by special Admiralty order, out of the débris when the Sovereign of the Seas was burned at Chatham in January, 1696, by the carelessness of a sleepy bos’un’s mate.

Out yonder at Spithead, too, at this moment, rides at anchor yet another veteran of our old-time navy, the Royal Anne. They have a really marvellous continuity of service, some of these ancient men-of-war. The Anne carries us back to the time of the Dutch raid up the Medway. She was launched as the Royal Charles to fill the place of the Royal Charles that the Dutchmen carried off. William the Third renamed her the Queen, in honour of his consort, and the ship kept that name until George the First came over. King George, having at that time his legal consort under lock and key in Germany, promptly renamed the ship. He called her after himself, Royal George—the first of the series. Three kings, indeed, have been present at this ship’s various “christenings.” Charles the Second was present at her first naming as the Royal Charles; William the Third saw her renamed the Queen. George the First paid a special visit to Woolwich when she received the name Royal George, and gave £300 to be divided among the dockyard men employed at the float-out, in honour of the occasion. The name Royal Anne was given to the ship only two years ago, when the present Royal George, Hawke’s flagship in the Channel Fleet, was launched. She exchanged the name for that borne on the stocks by the Royal George.

Within sight from the Hard is an 80-gun three-decker, the Royal William, just back from the capture of Louisbourg, Cape Breton. She, too, was launched as long ago as Charles the Second’s reign, under the name Royal Prince, and she fought her first battle at Solebay, eighty-six years ago. She carried James Duke of York’s flag during part of the battle, and Prince Rupert in turn had his flag in her in a later battle. William the Third gave the ship her present name, and under it she fought at La Hogue as Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship, not without distinction.

If one might dip into the future and witness events just one year later, the visitor to Portsmouth would then see the Royal William there again, and again just arrived from across the Atlantic. This time she would be in other guise—a ship “in mourning,” all over funereal black, with yards set to point in all directions—“a-cockbill,” as the old term went—and colours at half-mast, firing minute guns, and with a funeral procession of boats putting off from alongside to bear to the shore the body of General Wolfe.

Off the dockyard, on this October afternoon of 1758, awaiting their turn for repair, are two jury-rigged ships. One is a small, old-fashioned sixty-four, firing a broadside of some 540 lb. weight of metal. The other is a giant 80-gun ship of French build, and brand new. She is bigger than the finest first-rate in King George’s service, a fair match for the new Royal George, and fires the tremendous broadside of 1136 lb. weight of metal. Yet the little ship took the big one in a midnight battle last February. It was as fine a feat of arms as the Navy has seen. The two are the Monmouth and the Foudroyant. They have just come into port, and both show plenty of marks by way of battle scars. If you were to row round the Foudroyant you would find her, on her larboard side, where the Monmouth made her attack, battered almost to splinters. The fight lasted four and a half hours, from eight till after midnight, and went on for most of the time within pistol-shot. The Monmouth in that time used up four tons of powder and about ten tons of cannon-balls. At Gibraltar, where they repaired the Foudroyant to bring her to England, they had to plug over seventy shot-holes at the water-line—and two or three cannon-balls had gone through some of the holes.

One more word of the Foudroyant. It would seem as though, in the Portsmouth of these times, we cannot lay the shade of Admiral Byng. The Foudroyant was flagship of the fleet that Byng failed to beat, and Arthur Gardiner, who later commanded the Monmouth when she took the Foudroyant, was Byng’s flag-captain. Captain Gardiner, after Byng’s battle, it is said, swore that if ever he got another ship, however small, and met the Foudroyant, he would attack her and take her, or sink alongside. He got the Monmouth and met the Foudroyant and kept his word; meeting himself a heroic death on his own quarter-deck in the heat of the battle.

A second French man-of-war, taken on the same occasion and also badly mauled—the Orphèe, a smart 70-gun ship, prize to the Revenge—lies near the Foudroyant; also recently brought to England from up the Straits.[8]

All the day long there keeps on a continuous passing up and down the harbour of small war-vessels and dockyard craft of every sort. Here a fireship goes by, a small two-masted vessel, readily distinguishable by the heavy iron double hooks and grapnels that tip the yard-arms; and that little boat towing astern. The hooks are meant to grip and hold fast the fireship’s destined prey as she sheers alongside. The fireship’s crew set the quick match-train leading to the stacks of pitch-barrels and other combustibles all over the vessel, ablaze at several points just as they are closing the enemy, and the little boat is for them to escape in at the last moment. Now a bomb-ketch passes, a clumsy craft with masts set well aft and two heavy 13-inch mortars, trained for firing over the bows right ahead, set side by side in the fore part of the ship, where the foremast would stand in an ordinary vessel. A rakish-looking Portsmouth privateer, it may be, now comes by, towing a prize astern of her—some captured French “sugar ship” from Martinique, snapped up off Ushant. Then there passes, on the way to one of the guardships or “receiving” ships, a press-gang tender, coming in from a run along the South Coast. She has been out for some days to pick up hands for the fleet, and some of those on board could tell more than one ugly story of high-handed doings among the villages and farmsteads on the coast, within a night’s march from the sea. In confinement under hatches on board, it is quite possible, is also the unfortunate crew of some homeward-bound merchantman, waylaid and boarded almost within sight of home, off the back of the Isle of Wight. It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.

All day long duty-boats keep going up and down. Now it is an admiral’s twelve-oared barge with the flag at the bows; now a captain’s gig, or a pinnace, pulling between ship and shore; now a midshipman’s boat scurrying off to answer the flagship’s signal. Ships’ long-boats with water-casks and pursers’ stores for various men-of-war in harbour, pass and repass, and beer hoys and yard craft of all kinds. You can always tell a dockyard boat by the heavy way in which the “maties” row, giving their elbows a curious lift with each stroke. At intervals, also, ships’ launches and wherries go past, and lighters carrying cables or anchors, spars and sailcloth, or gangs of shipwrights from the yard on their way to Spithead to attend to pressing repairs to some Channel Fleet ship or frigate just come in and impatient to be off again.

Now and again, two or three times a month perhaps, a line of ships’ launches from newly arrived vessels from Spithead are to be seen following one another up the harbour, crammed with men—swarthy foreigners, poor, ragged, dejected-looking wretches for the most part. Each boat has its guard of red-coated marines, standing under arms at the head and stern, all with bayonets fixed. The boatloads comprise prisoners of war, taken at sea and on their way to undergo confinement in Porchester Castle,[9] going to join their two thousand compatriots already there. A favoured few in due course may obtain exchange by cartel, but the greater number must perforce endure their captivity to the end of the war.

Such were some of the every-day scenes to be witnessed in Portsmouth Harbour at the very time that the Admiralty order for the building of the Victory was being drafted.

Ashore in the streets of Portsea, old salts who had fought with Vernon when he took Porto Bello, are to be met with any day of the week. You may come across, indeed, an occasional old fellow who can remember Benbow, and how the news first came to England of the taking of Gibraltar. And sitting at his door on a sunny morning you may yet find an old Portsmouth grandsire here and there who can carry his memory further back still, and tell you how the bonfires blazed in High Street in honour of the battle of La Hogue.

Turn away now from the harbour and the Hard and take a short walk through the streets of Portsmouth town. Soldiers in the uniform that Corporal John’s men wore at Blenheim and Ramillies, rub shoulders with you every hour of the day. Some are for Canada, some for the West Indies, some for Northern Germany. All are passing through Portsmouth on the way to the great depôt camp in the Isle of Wight where the troops for oversea service assemble. Most are men of the foot regiments, with long-skirted red coats, red waistcoats, and red breeches with high white gaiters. Some wear the big cocked hat that came in with George the First; others the tall sugar-loaf grenadier cap of the Prussian pattern. Those with buff facings are “Howard’s” men; those with yellow facings, “Kingsley’s”; those with willow green, “Rufane’s”; those with blue, “Duroure’s.” For six or seven years past our regiments have had numbers, but the men still hold to the old way, and each regiment calls itself for preference according to the custom of the army for these eighty years past. Now and then a party of dragoons pass through the streets, red coated and wearing black leather fur-crested helmets and long jack-boots. These come from one of the cavalry camps at Chichester or Southampton. Occasionally, too, cocked-hatted artillerymen are to be met with, in blue coats with red waistcoats and breeches and white gaiters.

Batches of men of the standing garrison of the Fortress of Portsmouth, the “Royal Invalids,” as the corps they belong to is called, are to be seen about the streets at all hours; veterans drafted from off the Chelsea Hospital out-pension list as being sufficiently able-bodied for home-service fortress duty, old war-worn warriors bearing scars, many of them got in action at Dettingen and Fontenoy.

A Portsmouth visitor would certainly, too, have seen in and about the town a personage of some notoriety in those times: Governor Hawley, Commandant of the Garrison, the Duke of Cumberland’s hard-riding, hard-drinking friend. “Bloody Hawley” was what the soldiers called him, taking the sobriquet from the name that years before the hapless clansmen of the north gave the man who led “Butcher” Cumberland’s dragoons in the merciless chase after Culloden. In General Hawley you would have seen perhaps as badly hated an officer as ever held a King of England’s commission. “Chief Justice Hawley” the rank and file also called him: and the reason for it any one would have seen for himself by walking round Governor’s Green any day of the week, or passing beyond the postern and strolling out across the Portsmouth ramparts to the glacis on an execution morning.

The talk of the place—and of all England too at the moment—is of a French invasion.

England, in 1758, had not yet recovered from her last bad fit of nerves, brought on by truculent vapourings from Versailles at the outset of the Seven Years’ War. Government was urgently pushing on arrangements for forming an efficient militia force to fill the place of the regular battalions fighting abroad in Germany and in America, in view of the invasion scare that was threatening in the near future. Already reports had come to hand from France of the building of flat-bottomed beach-boats and preparations for large encampments next summer in the vicinity of the French Channel ports—at Dunkirk and Calais, Havre and St. Malo, and in Lower Brittany on the shores of Quiberon Bay. In every county of England and Wales the local authorities were getting ready for the early muster of the new militia levies—now, for the first time in our history, to be formed into regiments. Along the coasts of Sussex and Kent, from Selsea to beyond Dungeness and Hythe, where the open coast-line might seem to invite attack—at Littlehampton, Brighton, Blatchington, Seaford, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone—the sites for four- and six-gun batteries were being pegged out by military engineers, to be thrown up by local labourers under expert supervision. At every point along the seashore from Spurn Head to the Lizard the beacons were being watched night and day, while the local authorities of every seaboard district had standing orders to be ready, on the first alarm of a hostile landing, to transport the women and children in farm carts to the nearest towns, and drive inland the horses and sheep and cattle.

We have to turn over many pages of the world’s history to get to the year that saw the Victory brought into the British Navy. The Seven Years’ War itself, the exigencies of which called the Victory into existence, is nowadays but a schoolbook term. Frederick the Great, in the year that the Victory first figures in the Navy Estimates, was the man of the hour. Peter the Great’s daughter ruled in Russia. The “Old Pretender”—the “warming-pan baby” of Whitehall, of the year 1688—was still alive, dragging out his last years in Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. Captain Cook was as yet an unknown master’s mate, serving on board a man-of-war away across the Atlantic with Boscawen. Nelson, as has been said, was a long-clothes baby; Napoleon and Wellington were not yet born. The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Viscount Ligonier, was a French Huguenot refugee, born a subject of the Grand Monarque, who first saw war under Marlborough at Blenheim. Wolfe was an unheard of Major-General, nearly at the bottom of the list. News of Clive’s victory at Plassey had not long reached England. The elder Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” had only been in power for little over a twelvemonth. William Pitt was not yet born. Smeaton was building the Eddystone Lighthouse. James Watt was a Glasgow mathematical instrument maker, his ideas about steam hardly yet in embryo. Burke was a young Irishman in London, making a poor living out of essays for Grub Street magazines. Lord Chesterfield was still writing his letters. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was a new book, being advertised in publishers’ announcements, in two bulky quarto volumes at £4. 10s. Garrick was playing nightly at Drury Lane.

It was still the custom at Bath to announce the arrival of lords and ladies and “nabobs” with peals on the Abbey bells and serenadings by the Assembly band. Brighton was hardly on the map as yet; it was merely Brighthelmstone, a Sussex fishing village, just beginning to be visited for sea bathing by the handful of people who had heard of it through Dr. Russell’s pamphlets. Old London Bridge still had houses on it. Traffic in imported merchandise throughout the country was still carried on by pack-horse. One coach—or “machine”—a month, ran between London and Edinburgh, and took a fortnight on the road. A similar conveyance between London and Portsmouth took, under the most favourable conditions, two whole days. The mails went by postboy, and hardly a week passed without people failing to get their letters, because the local postboy had been stopped by a highwayman. Gibbets, indeed, with the bleached bones of these gentry in chains, stood on every main road out of London. Pirates were still from time to time publicly borne from the Old Bailey down the Thames in boats, heavily chained, to be hanged at Execution Dock and gibbeted at Galleons Point—on the average half a dozen a year. Just as the Admiralty draughtsmen were outlining the plans of the Victory, the news of the hour for nine people out of ten in England was the committal of Eugene Aram to York Castle for the murder of Daniel Clark.

On the day that the Victory’s keel was laid two men were pilloried in Cheapside for blackmailing a City merchant, and a bad egg accidentally hitting the Sheriff’s officer in charge of the proceedings led to a riot and fighting with drawn swords. On the day before the Victory was launched, one Mary Norwood, an unfaithful wife, condemned at Taunton Assizes for poisoning her husband, was publicly strangled in the market-place of Ilverston, her home, and her body tied to the stake and burned before several hundred spectators.

So far back does the life-story of our “old” Victory take us, touching at either end the middle of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, directly linking King George the Second with King Edward the Seventh.

HOW THEY BUILT THE VICTORY AT CHATHAM

This is the story of the building of the Victory at Chatham Dockyard, and how, why, and when the order to set to work on this particular first-rate man-of-war was given.

On the 20th of September, 1758, Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, after commanding at sea on Special Service off the coast of France all the summer, arrived in London to resume his duties on the Board. Nine days later, in the old parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was born into this world the infant boy to whom six days later was given the name Horatio Nelson. The two dates are a coincidence of interest in our story of the Victory.

Anson came back to town to hold conference with Mr. Secretary Pitt, the War Minister. Pitt had laid his plans for the future, and was ready. There were first of all to be no more half-military, half-naval expeditions up and down the coast of France. They had done little real harm to the enemy, and in two cases had ended in downright failure. The wits of St. James’s were not to get a second chance for a sneer that “the French were not to be conquered by every Duke of Marlborough” (an allusion to the general commanding the troops employed—the second Duke). The Channel Fleet was not to be received a second time on returning to Spithead with a dumb peal on the bells of Portsmouth Church. That plan of campaign had been to some extent a legacy to Pitt from the previous Ministry; he was prepared now to set on foot his own scheme. Great Britain would henceforward take the offensive vigorously and deal with the enemy at all points. Pitt’s plan was to make it first and foremost a naval war, to attack the oversea possessions of France all the world over, utilizing every ship at the disposal of the nation. The striking success achieved by Boscawen at Louisbourg had shown the way, and what could be done.

The War Minister’s projects made known to him, Anson acted. On the 14th of October the First Lord called on the Navy Board—the Department charged with the general administration and dockyard business of the Navy—for a detailed return of every seaworthy ship in the fleet, and of every ship capable of being made seaworthy. On the 24th of October he called for a Supplementary Return of the older ships, which, if for the present available, would necessarily, through wear and tear, go off the effective within three years and need replacing. Both returns, from details specially supplied by each dockyard, were presented to the Admiralty on the last day of November. They were considered forthwith, and a decision in regard to them was come to on the 13th of December. Five days later, as the result, a shipbuilding programme to add twelve ships of the line to the fleet was laid, with the Navy Estimates for the coming year, on the table of the House of Commons. Nine of the twelve men-of-war proposed were to be put in hand at once—five in the dockyards and four in merchants’ yards. At the head of the list was a new first-rate of a hundred guns, as to the preparations for which the Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard had already received instructions. That ship was the future Victory.

They were ready at Chatham. They had been expecting an order of the kind for some years. Ever since, indeed, the autumn of 1746, when the Admiralty had made inquiries at Chatham in regard to a new first-rate that it was then proposed to build at Chatham, “in the room,” as the official term went, of the three-decker Victory, old Admiral Balchen’s ship, lost with nine hundred men and officers on board, on the Casquets in the terrible shipwreck of October, 1744. The project for various reasons had been shelved, but the dockyard authorities at Chatham had not lost sight of it. To that fact, probably, we owe it that the next Victory, when she at length did come into existence, lasted to fight at Trafalgar, and also, in some degree, that the Victory remains afloat at the present hour.

Any summer’s day in the early Fifties of the eighteenth century the wayfarer among the uplands of the Kent and Sussex Wealds would have met processions of “tugs,” as the local timber conveyances were called, drawn by teams of oxen, laboriously hauling along the rough oak trunks, lopped and barked, stamped with King George’s broad arrow, and each numbered with a smear of red paint, that were in the course of events to form the frame and side timbers of the Victory. From Frant and Ashdown, Eridge and Mabledon, over all the wooded country round Tunbridge Wells where Kent and Sussex march, by Wadhurst, Buxted, and Mayfield, from Horsham on the north to nearly as far south as Lewes, they might have been seen working slowly along the clay-bound forest roads, two-and-twenty oxen to one trunk in wet weather sometimes, in charge of smock-frocked, leather-breeched Wealden peasants (“them leather-legged chaps o’ the Weald”), toiling from cross-road to cross-road towards Maidstone, where, alongside Messrs. Prentice’s wharves, the Medway timber hoys for Chatham lay in waiting. Kent and Sussex oak was proverbial at that day as being without equal in strength and toughness for the frame timbers and sides and upper works of a man-of-war—the fighting parts of a ship. And, at the same time, the wayfarer in another land, wandering where the Vistula rolls its sluggish course northwards to the Baltic, would have met a great part of the rest of the future Victory in the long rafts drifting downstream from the oak forests of Poland and East Prussia, floating slowly along, to arrive at length at the Dantzic contractor’s yard, and thence finally pass oversea to the saw-pits of Chatham. For the under-water timbers and planking of our old-time men-of-war and other parts of a ship exposed to salt water there was no timber in the world, so it was generally considered at that time, to compare in durability with “East Country” oak—“‘K’ brand, Dantzic,” in particular. Also it was cheap. By the end of the year 1754 the pick of the best shipbuilding timber in England and in all Europe had been placed in store on the berths and racks at Chatham, available for the expected big ship, thenceforward to season gradually and improve in keeping year by year.

The order to the Dockyard Commissioner at Chatham to get ready to take the Victory in hand was dated the 13th of December, 1758. It directed Commissioner Cooper to “prepare to set up and build a new ship of 100-guns as soon as a dock shall be available for the purpose.” A sum of £3200, it also informed the Commissioner, would be set aside in the coming Navy Estimates for preliminaries. It was the custom at that time to build first-rates in a dock; they were thought too big to build on a slip.

The new ship—no name was as yet officially announced for her—was to be, as we should nowadays say, an “improved” Royal George (the Royal George was our latest completed big ship, the same Royal George that came at a later day to so unfortunate an end), and for six months the draughtsmen in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy, under the supervision of Mr. Thomas Slade (afterwards Sir Thomas), Senior Surveyor of the Navy, the designer of the Victory, were busy on the working plans. These were completed by the first week of June, 1759, and laid before the Admiralty. They were formally passed on the 14th of June, and a few days later the Rochester stage-waggon from London stopped at the dockyard gates to deliver the box with the duplicate plans, all ready to be laid off and chalked down in detail, each part of the ship the actual size, on the mould loft floor. Master-Shipwright Lock would then get his mould-boards and have the saw-pits set going, in readiness for the arrival of the regulation Navy Board Order to commence building. That order came on the 7th of July.

The dock allotted for the building of the new ship at Chatham was that then known as the “Old Single Dock,” the dock now called “No. 2 Dock,” near the Admiral Superintendent’s Office and opposite the old yard clock and bell turret. There, on a Monday morning, the 23rd of July, 1759—an auspiciously bright and sunny morning as it befell—the keel of the Victory was laid.

The ship was to be afloat, according to Admiralty calculations, within thirty-three months—by the 31st of March, 1762. That meant, in the existing state of things at Chatham, working on her, at any rate during the earlier stage of getting the vessel into frame, day and night. They had two 90-gun three-deckers and two seventy-fours in various stages of building, besides the Victory to take in hand; and in addition they had nearly every week extra refits or repairs to undertake for ships coming in from the fleets at sea—a complication of tasks which involved the keeping of every man and boy of the two thousand and odd hands then on the muster-sheets of Chatham yard hard at work from Monday at daylight to Saturday at dusk. Half the establishment alternately were on overtime, working on Sundays and nightly through the week, for spells of three or five hours after bell-ringing—in dockyard lingo, “double tides” and “nights.” It was the same just then in all our dockyards; the day-gangs as they worked having each man’s meals brought from home into the yard to him, to eat in the half-hour allowed, near by his job; the night-gangs all toiling on under the flaring light of cressets and links, without a break, until past ten o’clock.

Amid such surroundings at Chatham they began building the Victory, a hundred and fifty men being employed on the ship at first, to set up and bolt together the various frames and floor timbers, and fit and fix together in place the stem and stern pieces and brackets and the huge rib timbers and beams, as fast as the converter and the sawyers could supply them. So things went on from August to the following January (1760). Then the gangs of shipwrights employed on the Victory were reduced, and the rate of working allowed to slacken down. With the French Mediterranean Fleet broken up by Boscawen—one half taken or burned and the other half cut off and shut up at Cadiz—and the French Channel Fleet shattered by Hawke, and its refugee ships lying broken-backed and stranded up the Vilaine, on the sandbanks above the bar, the stress of the war was past. And there was little need to trouble for the immediate future with only M. Berryer at the Ministry of Marine.

By August, 1760, the hull timber-work had been put together into the outline of a ship, and was practically complete in frame, the skeleton of the future man-of-war. The workmen were then almost all called off, and the ship, according to custom, was left aside for a space, to “stand in frame” and season. She had cost so far, according to the Navy Estimates, upwards of £14,000 in materials and labour.

Two months later, on the 28th of October, the Admiralty officially named the Victory. On that day their lordships signed an order that “the new 100-gun ship building at Chatham,” as the vessel had hitherto been styled in all official documents, should take the name of the Victory. At the same time a notification was sent to the Navy Board, directing them “to cause the name appointed by my Lords to be so registered in the List of His Majesty’s Navy,” and “communicated” to Chatham Dockyard.

The name, of course, from the first had been an open secret. There were at that period seven British warship names which were tacitly accepted as set apart for first-rate ships of war. They were: Royal Sovereign, Britannia, Royal William, Royal Anne, Royal George, London, and Victory. These seven had stood at the head of the Navy List as a group by themselves, in successive ships, for some seventy years and more. The name Victory, in 1760, was the only one not appropriated to any existing ship. It had been wanting ever since the disaster of 1744, and the new 100-gun ship, as a first-rate, had a right to it in accordance with the custom of the service. Thus our present Victory man-of-war is linked directly with the old-time veterans of her name; thus, indeed, from the Armada to Trafalgar, in a line of continuous succession—

But that is not quite all. In a special sense no more appropriate name could have been given to the British man-of-war laid down as the special first-rate of the year 1759. In that sense the Victory commemorates in her name the most brilliant year of warlike achievement in our annals, the most successful year for British arms that the world ever saw. In her name, in this regard, our Nelson’s Victory of to-day stands as an abiding national memorial of England’s greatest year of victory; the “Wonderful Year,” as our forefathers themselves called it, the year of Minden and Lagos Bay and Quiberon and Quebec. “We are forced,” wrote Horace Walpole, in October, 1759, “to ask every morning what victory there is for fear of missing one.”

March 31st, 1762, came—the date by which the Victory was to have been afloat. She was, though, still in frame, hardly advanced beyond that; her bottom planked over, but all above practically as yet only in skeleton, little advanced, in fact, beyond the stage at which the shipwrights had left her eighteen months before. The Admiralty’s change of plans after the French collapse at sea at the end of 1759 had put her completion off for two years. It was, however, not entirely lost time. An additional £12,000 had been laid out meanwhile for the ship in preparing and working up materials to be used in her, and seasoning them in readiness to push on with the building when work on the vessel was resumed.

The new date for completion, March, 1764, came in its turn, but again the Victory was not ready. Upwards of £50,000 had by now been spent on her, and the ship was four-fifths finished, her sides planked to the upper works and the decks laid. They had slackened off considerably in regard to new construction at Chatham after the war ended. The dockyard establishment had been reduced by two-thirds and overtime stopped. General repairs were the order of the day, to make good the wear-and-tear of war service at all the dockyards, and practically a third part of the whole sea-going navy fell to Chatham’s share of mending.

Another six months was then officially granted for the finishing of the Victory; but this time the Admiralty themselves, and the French incidentally, caused fresh delay. My Lords did their share by coming down to Chatham at the end of May, 1764, on a visit of inspection, walking over the Victory and leaving suggestions for alterations to be made which would take at least four additional months to carry out. The French hindered the intended progress by a display of aggressiveness towards England over the Newfoundland fisheries question, as left arranged by the recent Treaty of Paris. That trouble at the outset looked so serious that the workmen at the dockyards were drawn off all ships building and repairing in order to get part of the Ordinary, the ships in reserve, into sea-going state at once. So the Victory had her completion again put off.

In the midst of this French “disturbance”—as our ancestors of that time termed international unpleasantnesses of the kind—we may conveniently take our leave of the Victory on the stocks at Chatham, in the midst of a series of strange scenes the like of which, happily, have not often been witnessed in an English dockyard.

The Newfoundland difficulty was still unsettled, when, at the end of October, 1764, secret information of a startling nature suddenly reached the Admiralty from abroad. It was to the effect that a plot was on foot, with the connivance of the French Government, to destroy the English dockyards by incendiarism and fire the ships of war under construction. There proved to be reason to consider the news in a most serious light, and extraordinary measures of precaution were forthwith ordered at all the yards.

At Chatham, the nightly guard-boats patrolling the line of ships laid up at moorings in the Medway Ordinary, were doubled. Strict orders were issued to those in charge of the ships in Ordinary to keep their gun-room ports close shut all night, to send adrift before dark all shore boats lying astern, to hoist in all the ship’s boats, to haul up on board at night all the Jacob’s ladders over the stern used by the ship-keepers for getting on board. All fishing boats and hoys passing up and down the Medway were kept under observation. All doubtful or strange boats of any kind on the river were to be challenged and reported. Special dockyard guard-boats were told off to patrol from sunset to sunrise along the river front of the yard. All persons landing at the yard from the guardships after dark were to come alongside and disembark only at certain specified points. Strangers visiting the yard on business during the day were to be accompanied throughout their stay; no foreigner of whatever quality or rank was to be allowed to pass the gates without a written permit from the Commissioner. The yard-warders posted ashore on look-out round the walls of the yard were doubled, and marines were drafted into the yard to keep watch at night, “conformable to the strictest rules of Garrison duty.” A captain’s guard was posted at the dockyard gates, and a subaltern’s guard at the North-East Tower. A special parole with countersign was given out by the Commissioner every twenty-four hours. Constant patrols of marines were kept on the move round and about the yard all night. Armed sentries were posted on the river front, by the workshops and storehouses, the hemp and rope houses, and the timber berths. No fewer than twenty-two of these sentry-posts were appointed in and about Chatham dockyard, and each man going on duty was supplied with three rounds of ball.

To safeguard the Victory, the pride of Chatham, “the finest man-of-war ever built for the Royal Navy,” as they already spoke of her, a cocked-hatted, high-gaitered marine sentry, loaded firelock on shoulder, was kept pacing up and down with steady tramp alongside the dock where the ship lay, all the night long. His orders were to challenge all suspicious persons and loiterers, and all persons approaching the ship, twice—“Halt, who comes there!” If not answered after that, he was to fire. To prove himself on the alert, at every quarter of an hour, when the warders on the wall look-out towers struck their bells, the sentry had to call out the number of his post, passing it on to the next sentry, and echoing back the hail “All’s well!” A fresh man came on duty every two hours. To further ensure the safety of the Victory, once at least during every night a “visiting rounds” patrol, comprising an officer from the main guard and a corporal and file of marines with lantern and jingling keys, boarded the ship to explore between-decks and below for lurking evil-doers or any combustibles that might be secreted.

But Jack the Painter’s time had not yet come. Nothing in the way of incendiarism happened at Chatham, or at any of the other dockyards in 1764, and after two or three months of unrest, things resumed their normal state of tranquillity.

Nothing more happened after that to hinder or delay the completion of the Victory, and by the following March her bulkheads and magazines were fitted, the port-lids and the rudder hung, and the poop lanterns in place, and the caulkers and painters were getting through with their finishing touches.

On St. George’s day, April 23rd, 1765, the Commissioner at Chatham reported the Victory to the Admiralty as ready to be launched. The requisite order in reply, dispatched through the Navy Board, arrived on the 30th of April. It directed the launch to take place at the next spring tides These were due on the 7th of May.