days under such varying conditions that it was difficult indeed to
foretell whether a vessel were seaworthy or not. A commissioner of
James the Second’s reign complained bitterly of the injudicious
management whereby “many a fast sailing ship have come to lose that
property, by being over-masted, over-rigged, over-gunned (as the
_Constant Warwick_, from 26 guns and an incomparable sailer, to 46
guns and a slug), over-manned (_vide_ all the old ships built in
the parliament time now left), over-built (_vide_ the _Ruby_ and
_Assurance_), and having great taffrails and galleries, etc., to the
making many formerly a stiff, now a tender-sided ship, bringing thereby
their head and tuck to lie too low in the water.”
In spite of these strictures it must be remembered that our ships
had qualities which, brought into action by brave crews and resolute
leaders, served the nation well in the day of battle. In no naval
war, perhaps, did superiority of material exert such a consistent and
preponderating effect as in the seventeenth century wars between this
country and Holland.
The tactics of the English leaders involved close-quarter fighting. The
material, both guns and ships, certainly favoured these tactics; though
to what extent tactics dictated the form of the material, or material
reacted on tactics, it may be difficult to decide. In one respect
tactics undoubtedly directed the evolution of the material: while
the Dutch employed a “gregarious system” of mutual support of their
vessels by others of various force, fighting in groups and throwing in
fireships as opportunity offered, the English always sought to match
individual ships.[18] Forming in line ahead--a formation, said to
have been first used by Tromp, which enabled our vessels to avoid the
fireships--they came to close quarters in a series of duels in which
the strength and prowess of each individual ship was its only means of
victory. The success of this plan caused the Dutch to imitate it. The
size of their ships rapidly grew; their weakest units were discarded.
Three-deckers were laid down, at first carrying only 76 guns, but
later, after the peace of 1674, as large as the British first rates.
But by that time the critical battles had been lost and won. And the
success of the British is ascribed, in Derrick’s memoirs, chiefly to
the superior size of our ships, “an advantage which all the skill of
the Dutch could not compensate.”
With the institution of the line of battle a need arose for a symmetry
between ships which had never before existed. From this arose, not only
that more complete differentiation of force[19] which lasted through
the following century, but a still more stringent ruling of dimensions
according to “establishments,” which ruling, injudiciously applied,
was henceforth to exercise so harmful an effect on English naval
construction.
After the peace of 1674 the navy sank into inefficiency. The French
navy, on the other hand, ascended in power with an extraordinary
rapidity. By 1681 it had expanded so much under the fostering care of
M. Colbert that it comprised no fewer than one hundred and fifteen
ships of the line. In design, as apart from construction, French ships
were superior to ours. In size especially they had an advantage, being
universally larger than British ships of the same artillery force: an
advantage based on the law, known to our own shipbuilders but never
applied, that _the greater the dimensions of a ship, relatively to
the weight she has to carry, the better she will sail_. So superior
were some French ships which visited Spithead seen to be, that in
imitation of them Sir Anthony Deane was ordered to design and build the
_Harwich_; and from the plans of this ship nine others were ordered
by parliament, the class constituting the greatest advance in naval
architecture of 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.
---------------------+----------+-------+-------+------+-------
Establishment | Length | Keel |Breadth| Depth|Tonnage
|(gun-deck)| | | |
---------------------+----------+-------+-------+------+-------
1706 } | 171′ 9″ |139′ 7″| 49′ 3″|19′ 6″| 1809
1719 } 100-gun ships | 175′ 0″ |140′ 7″| 50′ 3″|20′ 1″| 1883
1745 } | 178′ 0″ |145′ 2″| 52′ 0″|21′ 6″| 2091
_Commerce de | | | | |
Marseille_ (120) | 208′ 4″ |172′ 0″| 54′ 9″|25′ ½″| 2747
_Caledonia_ (120) | 205′ 0″ |170′ 9″| 53′ 8″|23′ 2″| 2616
---------------------+----------+-------+-------+------+-------
§
The slow progress of naval architecture up to the end of the eighteenth
century, an advance the rate of which may be gauged from the fact that,
except for sheathing and pumps, no important improvement was patented
between the years 1618 and 1800, has been characterized as consisting
mainly of approximations to the successive forms and arrangements
of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French ships, all of which had
been in their turn superior to ours. Until the end of the eighteenth
century the “bigotry of old practice” had effectually opposed any
radical improvement, even though such improvement had been operating
for years in foreign navies and were brought continually before the
eyes of our professionals, embodied in captured prizes. In his _Naval
Development of the Century_ Sir Nathaniel Barnaby has drawn attention
to the remarkable similarity which existed between the _Caledonia_
of the early nineteenth, and the old _Sovereign_ of the seventeenth
century: “Almost the only things of note were the reduction in height
above water, forward and aft, and a slight increase in dimensions. The
proportion between length and breadth had undergone but little change.
There was almost the same arrangement of decks and ports; the same
thin boarding in front of the forecastle; the same mode of framing
the stern, the same disposition of the outside planking in lines
crossing the sheer of the ports; nearly the same rig; the same external
rudder-head, with a hole in the stern to admit the tiller; and probably
the same mode 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.”
[Illustration: DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATING DISTORTION OF FRAMES UNDER LOAD]
From these remarks it will be clear that a new method of construction
which, by substituting the triangle for the rectangle, prevented the
distortion of a ship’s hull under the stresses of hogging and sagging,
would constitute an important innovation: even more important if, in
addition, the new method resulted in a large economy of material. Such
a system Sir Robert Seppings introduced. Treating the hull as a girder
liable to bend, he disposed the timbers to the best advantage to resist
deformation. The rectangular system, wherein frames and riders formed
rectangular cells with no other power of resisting distortion into
rhomboids than that derived from the rigidity of the joints, had been
proved inefficient; just as a common field gate would be inefficient,
and would easily distort, if built up solely of vertical and horizontal
timbers without any diagonal brace to make it a rigid figure. He solved
the problem with the triangle. By bracing each quadrilateral cell with
a diagonal timber he thereby divided it into two rigid and immovable
triangles, and thus made 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.
[Illustration: DIAGRAM REPRESENTING A SHIP WITH TRUSSED FRAMES]
This was one element of Seppings’ system. The others were: the
filling in of the spaces between the ground frames of the ship, so
as to oppose with a continuous mass of timber the tendency of the
lower parts to compress longitudinally, and to form a thick and solid
bottom; the omission of the interior planking below the orlop clamps;
the connection of the beams with the frames by means of shelf-pieces,
waterways, and side binding-strakes to the deck; and the laying of the
decks diagonally.
In two other important respects Seppings improved on previous
construction.
At Trafalgar the _Victory_, during her end-on approach to the enemy
line, was raked, and her old-fashioned forecastle, with its thin
flat-fronted bulkhead rising above the low head, was riddled and
splintered. This and similar experiences led to the introduction by the
Surveyor of an improved bow, formed by prolonging the topsides to meet
in a high curved stem, which not only deflected raking shot, but also
consolidated the bow into a strong wedge-shaped structure supporting a
lofty bowsprit, and capable of being armed to give ahead fire from a
number of guns.
Similarly the weakness of ships’ sterns was remedied. The broad flat
overhanging stern which had been given to our 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.”
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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]
[Illustration:
‘Victoria’
Breadth = 59′ 2″
Length = 204′
‘Caledonia’
Breadth = 53′ 6″
Length = 205′
Fig: 1.
‘Vernon’
Breadth = 52′
Length = 176′
‘Barham’
Breadth = 47′ 10″
Length = 173′ 8″
Fig: 2.
TYPICAL SECTIONS OF “SYMONDITE” AND CONTEMPORARY SHIPS]
Nevertheless his opponents, as before remarked, freely acknowledged
the value of his services to the country, especially in breaking down
the restrictions which had hitherto 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.
[Illustration: A TUDOR SHIP OF PERIOD 1540-50
From a Cottonian MS. in the British Museum]