Ship Construction
‘IGNORANT’ SHIPWRIGHTS?
THE SHIPBUILDERS of the seventeenth century have received an almost uniformly bad press, a perception formed to a large extent by the memorably damning judgements of Samuel Pepys and members of his circle. Pepys himself accused them of knowing little of mathematics and building ‘wholly without art’, so that several of them ‘depended upon their eyes … [and] never pretending to the laying down of a draught, their knowledge lying in their hands so confusedly, so as they were not able to render it intelligible to anybody else’.1 Similarly, Pepys’s friend Sir Henry Shere grumbled that shipwrights worked to ‘a few old clumsy rules, a little vulgar arithmetic, and some small institution of practice’.2 Worse still, according to Pepys, the shipwrights were, almost to a man, a bunch of lazy, drunken, gouty illiterates, and were clearly inferior to Noah, whose Ark he held up as an example of good construction.3 Amid this sea of ignorance, Pepys promoted his friend Sir Anthony Deane as the pioneer of enlightened new scientific practices; indeed, his damning censure of every significant shipwright in England, which begs the question of how any of them ever managed to build anything that floated, was designed specifically to ensure that Deane became the only plausible candidate for an important position on the Navy Board.4
Anthony Deane, whom Pepys first encountered when he was an assistant at Woolwich in the early 1660s, became master shipwright at Harwich in 1664 and served there until 1668, when he moved to Portsmouth; he became resident commissioner there in 1672. Deane designed some twenty-five warships and instructed Pepys in the art of shipbuilding, although Pepys’s knowledge of the subject always remained relatively limited (as he freely admitted in his more modest moments).5 In 1670 Deane presented Pepys with a treatise outlining his working methods; in this, he laid down the mathematical principles that he used for determining the shape of the frames and the overall construction of the hull.6 In return, Pepys was lavish in his praise of Deane, whom he credited with being the first to ascertain how to measure a ship’s displacement before it was launched.7 In fact, it seems likely that this knowledge had been common within the ‘ignorant’ shipwrights’ community for many years; perhaps Deane successfully bamboozled Pepys into accepting his unjustified claims, or Pepys deliberately made out an exaggerated case for Deane to further his career.8 A shipbuilder of the next generation, William Sutherland, claimed that Deane was actually not ‘much of a mathematical practitioner’, but rather a man who ‘had the art of talking well’, always a trait that seems to have held undue influence over Samuel Pepys.9
By tradition, the London chartered company of Master Shipwrights was consulted over the building of warships. They viewed and approved draughts, and surveyed the construction process to ensure that the builders were adhering to the specifications.10 When ships were built in private yards under contract, approval from Shipwrights’ Hall was required before payments were made to the builders.11 Yet according to Pepys, the Shipwrights’ company was hidebound by old and inaccurate rules that they did not enforce in any case.12 It was certainly difficult to eliminate traditional practices and prejudices in shipbuilding, where an emphasis on practical experience was reinforced by a rigid apprenticeship system, but from the 1580s onwards an increasing number of technical treatises were published, and Deane was certainly not the first or only Englishman to attempt to adopt a more theoretical approach to shipbuilding.13 Edmund Bushnell published his Compleat Shipwright in 1664 (the work was clearly popular, as six editions were published before the end of the century), and in 1685 Edward Battine presented to James II his ‘Method of Building, Rigging, Apparelling and Furnishing His Majesty’s Ships of War’, a detailed breakdown of almost every statistic applicable to a sailing warship of the time, including her dimensions, building and running costs, armament and stores. Both Bushnell and Battine specified the proportions needed for building ships of all rates, and these varied relatively little from Deane’s, suggesting that the constraints placed on shipbuilders by the compromises they had to make to obtain all the desired qualities of a sailing warship left them little room for manoeuvre.14 Moreover, some of the shipwrights whose intelligence and abilities were denounced by Pepys and Deane were far from being mere blockheads relying on rule of thumb. John Shish, one of those who supposedly could not make a draught intelligible, actually sent Pepys detailed dimensions for a ship he was building, including the rising and narrowing figures at specific frames of the hull.15
DESIGN
Ship plans were traditionally laid out at full scale in moulding lofts or on the ground, beginning with the master frame amidships, then using proportional rules and compasses to draw arcs (or sweeps) to those proportions in order to determine the size and shape of the other frames. Representations of these schemes on paper had been common in treatises since the sixteenth century, but traditionalists like Bushnell still preferred to draw out the shape of each frame on the mould loft floor.16 However, it is clear that scaled plans were being used extensively as an integral part of the construction process for much of the seventeenth century, although it is not always clear whether they were the first stage in the construction process or represented stages in that process as it progressed. Expatriate British shipwrights, such as Francis Sheldon and David Balfour, used ship’s plans, and the fact that the Scot, Balfour, was working in Denmark in the first decade of the seventeenth century, when he produced ‘the earliest working ship’s plans in existence’, places the perceived ignorance of seventeenth-century shipwrights in a very different light.17 Several chance survivals point in the same direction. Pepys preserved a number of Tudor draughts, and these still survive in his library.18 A surviving draught of the Prince Royal, built in 1610, may date from the time of her construction, while a drawing of the midship bend of the Hampshire was apparently made when she was built in 1653.19 In 1663 Pepys was granted a showing of Commissioner Pett’s‘bodies’ (or sectional drawings),‘wherein he seems to suppose great mystery in the nature of lines to be hid, but I do not understand it at all’; indeed, it maybe that the shipwrights’ determination to keep their specialist knowledge as secret as possible contributed to the false impression that they were unscientific and ignorant.20
Draughts for the ships in the 1664 building programme were submitted to the king and Duke of York, and the laying out of moulds and actual construction did not commence until these were approved. Pepys took a set of the ‘1664’ draughts home from the office, including one drawn by Deane for the Rupert. Pepys immediately and unprofessionally let a private builder scrutinise them, and reported his scathing criticisms of Deane’s work back to the shipwright.21 A similar system was used for draughts of the ‘thirty new ships’ commenced in 1677, which were viewed and approved by the king and Admiralty Commission before work began; a further series of draughts was made on squared paper by Edmund Dummer, clerk to the surveyor of the navy, as building progressed during 1678–81.22 Between about 1675 and 1685 William Keltridge produced a series of detailed drawings of four Fourth Rates, one Fifth and two Sixth Rates, as well as precise costings for all aspects of building ships of all rates.23 These are the earliest full scientific ship plans to survive in Britain, and compare what Keltridge considered to be the ‘old’ and ‘new’ designs for frigates. His designs reveal lighter scantlings even than those favoured by Deane, a prominent advocate of speed; this may have been due to the experience of the wars against the Barbary corsairs, whose ships tended to be more lightly built and thus faster.24 However, at exactly the same time a different set of war experiences were changing the construction of the largest rates in precisely the opposite way. The 1673 campaign saw the fleet battered by severe storms and three battles within ten weeks, and the experience may have convinced decision makers that new ships needed to be built with stronger framing. Even Sir Anthony Deane, the enthusiast for light scantlings and fine lines, seems to have accepted the argument. Deane, King Charles II and Prince Rupert, who had commanded the fleet in 1673, all advocated the enlargement of the ‘thirty new ships’ begun in 1677, despite opposition from Pepys. This made the ‘great ships’ stiffer and thus more durable and effective gun platforms.25
FRAMING, PLANKING AND DECKS
English shipwrights built in an entirely different way from their Dutch counterparts. Dutch shipwrights entirely eschewed the use of preliminary draughts, but placed greater emphasis on the use of formulae for all the proportions.26 The keel was the first part of the ship to be built, and was formed of up to five separate pieces of elm. The Dutch would then determine the position of the master rib, usually a third of the length of the keel from the stern post. They would then raise the bow and stern posts and the master rib, after which planking up commenced. In English yards, the main frames (up to eighty in all) were all fastened to the keel and erected before work began on the floor and planking.27 Each frame consisted of three main sections, the floor timber (or timbers) crossing the keel, the futtocks (which formed the main part of the bend) below the waterline, and the top timbers. The overlaps between timbers were known as scarfs. There has been some debate about the precise way in which the timbers were fitted together to form frames, but it seems clear that in smaller ships there were usually two sorts of futtocks, upper and lower, primarily because it was difficult to obtain timber large enough to create single futtocks; by the 1670s larger and middling-sized ships were being framed with three futtocks, and First Rates may have had four.28 Three futtocks strengthened the hull but also increased the pressure on timber supplies, as two additional timbers per frame now had to be supplied.29 At roughly the same time, it also became common practice to use ‘chock scarfs’, small pieces of timber fitted at the ends of frames to strengthen them, although they could also be used to replace decayed frames.30
The title page of one of William Sutherland’s treatises on shipbuilding.
(RICHARD ENDSOR COLLECTION)
Planking progressed almost simultaneously with the framing. The planks were reinforced, and the hull strengthened longitudinally, by the addition of wales, bands of timber which ran the entire length of the hull. According to Deane, the placing of the lower wale was vital; it determined ‘the good or bad shape of any ship, for by this wale is all the others set’.31 The most common form of fastening was the ‘treenail’ or trennel, a wooden peg driven into a slightly smaller bored hole. Gunports were cut through the planks at intervals determined by the shipwright’s proportional rules.32 The hulls were caulked (sealed) firstly with oakum, which consisted of old sails and ropes boiled into one piece. The planks were then coated with ‘white stuff’, a composite of rosin (increasingly replaced by turpentine), brimstone and oil.33 This was expensive, and towards the end of the seventeenth century it was replaced to some extent by the cheaper ‘black stuff’, a mixture of tar and pitch, although ‘white stuff’ was retained for ships deploying overseas.34 Internally, deck beams were supported by several different kinds of knees and pillars; Deane used iron supports, which he called ‘dogs’, instead of knees in the Royal James, which he built at Portsmouth in 1670, but this seems to have been a unique response to a temporary shortage of timber, and the experiment was not repeated for over thirty years.35 A lattice framework of carlings and ledges was fitted between the beams, and deals fastened over these to form the deck itself.36 The whole structure had to be strong enough to bear the massive weight of the ship’s ordnance and to cope with the forces generated when that ordnance was fired, so headroom between the decks was kept to a minimum, perhaps no more than five feet on the main gundecks, and the number of supporting timbers must have made the decks even more cramped and claustrophobic.
The effects of warfare and natural attrition meant that ships often required significant repairs every few years, and these could be drastic; if necessary, the hull was completely opened up to replace as many of the floor timbers, futtocks, knees and other timbers as needed renewal, and the dimensions and sailing qualities of a ship could be altered significantly in the process.37 Unsurprisingly, it was almost as difficult for contemporaries as it has been for historians to judge when a repair became a ‘great repair’, a ‘great repair’ became a rebuilding, and a rebuilding became the construction of what was effectively a new ship.38 Ultimately, though, it was cheaper to carry out such extensive works on existing ships, even if the changes actually weakened the hull, than it was to build a new ship, and the oft-derided seventeenth-century shipwrights seem to have been astonishingly ingenious in their abilities to ‘make do and mend’, even with hulls that were in the most advanced stages of decay.39
SHIPBUILDERS
The great majority of seventeenth-century warships were built in the royal dockyards, and the very largest effectively had to be built there, for no other yards had the infrastructure or the manpower. Of the nine First Rates built between 1649 and 1688, three were built at Portsmouth and two each at Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham. But during the particularly frenetic periods of expansion in the early 1650s and late 1670s, and occasionally at other times, the royal yards could not cope with the scale of the building programme. On those occasions, some orders had to be put out to contract among private shipbuilders, despite the administrators’ deeply held conviction that private contractors built inferior ships and lined their pockets in the process.40 Charles II and Pepys originally intended that all of the ‘thirty new ships’ commenced in 1677 should be built in the dockyards, but in the event seven Third Rates had to be built under contract, four at Blackwall, one at Bristol and two in a private yard at Deptford.41 The allocation of an order to a particular yard was accompanied by definition of its intended dimensions (the most important being length of the keel and the beam) and an estimate of the cost.42 Shipwrights in the royal dockyards were usually given only very broad specifications to work with, notably the length of the keel and the beam, and had a great deal of latitude in interpreting these bare specifications; the First Rates Prince and St Andrew, both completed in 1670 at Chatham and Woolwich respectively, ‘greatly exceeded their dimensions and scantlings’, according to Pepys, so the costs of labour and materials greatly exceeded their budget, and serious thought was given to cancelling them.43 A table of scantlings was drawn up for the ‘thirty new ships’, partly to standardise the design, partly to reduce the chances of shipwrights varying the scantlings on their own initiative, and partly to avoid future criticisms that the ships had been built too extravagantly.44
A later copy of what appears to be a long-lost contemporary ship’s draught, possibly by William Keltridge, showing a large Third Rate similar to the Boyne of 1692 and the Royal Oak of 1690 (a rebuilding of the ship launched at Deptford in 1674). With its intricately constructed patterns of lines and arcs, the draught illustrates the complexity and highly scientific nature of late seventeenth-century ship design.
Private shipbuilders were much more constrained than those in the royal dockyards. Not only were they given the main dimensions such as the length of the keel, the breadth of the ship and the depth in the hold, but the scantlings and even the size of the bolts to be used were spelled out explicitly in the contract.45 The builder received a down payment, and then part-payments when construction reached predetermined stages. Thus in April 1678 Henry Johnson of Blackwall received £5,000 at the start of construction of a new Third Rate, followed by six payments between May and November (the first when the floor was in place and the keelson bolted, the last when the upper deck and gundeck were laid) and a final payment in August 1679, following the completion of the ship.46 As contract builders were paid by the tonnage of the ship (and received up to £1010s a ton for some of the thirty ships), Pepys and his fellow administrators had an obvious incentive to constrain the shipwrights’ ability to exceed the nominal dimensions, and the checks carried out by Shipwrights’ Hall were thus essential both as an audit and as ‘quality control’.47
THE SUPPLY OF TIMBER
The unprecedented expansion of the navy from 1649 onwards and the gradual shift towards larger and larger ships of the largest rates placed enormous strains on the country’s forests at exactly the time when Royalist estates were being ravaged or neglected. The Royal Katherine, a Second Rate built at Woolwich in 1662–4, alone required over 1,900 loads of timber, much of it obtained from Waltham Forest.48 (One load was fifty cubic feet, or approximately one tree.) The major building programme of 1664 required the felling of 2,700 trees in the royal forests, while Portsmouth dockyard was entitled to cut down 350 trees a year in the New Forest.49 An Act of 1662 allowed the navy to requisition horses and carts at set prices, but the weather, poor roads and uncooperative ‘locals’ often made it difficult to get the wood physically to the yards.50 Consequently, work was often delayed for want of timber, especially of large timbers that could be used for keels and stern posts, or the curved ‘compass timbers’ that were used for the floor and top timbers, the futtocks and the knees which supported the decks.51 Many contemporaries bemoaned the destruction of England’s oak forests (John Evelyn wrote an entire book, Sylva, on the subject). Various ways of replenishing them were suggested; in 1669 an Act of Parliament was passed to enclose part of the Forest of Dean as a nursery for ships’ timbers, and the 1660s and early 1670s also witnessed unsuccessful attempts to obtain timber from Scotland and Ireland.52 By 1673 there was said to be a ‘present shortage’ of timber,53 and the ‘thirty new ships’ programme of the 1670s placed even greater demands on the country’s store. In 1677 a series of meetings of the Admiralty Commission, attended by the king, discussed the shortage and possible ways of alleviating it.54
Diagram to illustrate the framing and beams of a Fourth Rate frigate, based on the Hampshire of 1653)
(RICHARD ENDSOR; WITH THANKS TO THE MARINER’S MIRROR, IN WHICH THE DIAGRAM WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED)
However, the navy’s ‘timber crisis’ seems to have been less profound than it was once thought to be, and probably represented only a temporary shortage in the traditional sources of supply closest to the yards.55 Extensive searches were made for new sources of timber: the king and the Admiralty fully expected to have to resort to suppliers who had not dealt with the navy before, and in May and June 1677 Phineas Pett and Deane went into Norfolk and Suffolk to locate new supplies. Despite some reluctance, new suppliers eventually came forward.56 In 1678, for instance, Thomas Ellis of Steyning in Sussex contracted to provide one of the ‘thirty new ships’ building at Johnson’s yard in Blackwall with all its floor timbers, rising timbers, futtocks, transoms and stern post.57 The planks covering a ship’s sides (which were usually three or four inches wide) and the deals that formed her decks were less difficult to obtain. ‘East country timber’ was obtained in large quantities from Scandinavia, but there were also good domestic supplies within relatively easy reach of the dockyards.58 In 1685 the navy obtained large amounts of plank from Suffolk for the yards at Deptford and Woolwich; timber was sent to the same yards by water from Reading and Guildford, while Hampshire supplied Portsmouth, and Kent supplied Chatham. Shipping costs usually made it impractical to vary these traditional supply routes.59
Two diagrams illustrating the remodelling of a ship’s stern to reflect changing fashions in warship design. In 1677 the stern of the Hampshire of 1653 was altered to provide a new set of windows for the upper cabin.
(RICHARD ENDSOR; WITH THANKS TO THE MARINER’S MIRROR, IN WHICH THE DIAGRAMS WERE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED.)
DECORATION AND PAINTING
Much of a ship’s hull was not painted at all but varnished, leaving a natural wood colour which gradually yellowed over time. The lower wale and adjacent strakes were painted black, but the areas above the upper wale were either black or blue.60 By contrast with the simplicity of the paint scheme, warships after the Restoration were provided with elaborate baroque decoration that provides one of the most noticeable features of contemporary ship models or Van de Velde paintings. However, this was certainly not merely an extravagant and barely relevant afterthought. It was integral to the purpose of the ship: that is, to project a certain image of the state, and to make the ship a fitting representation of that image. Charles I had given elaborate decoration even to quite small ships, and some of them managed to retain this well into the Commonwealth period, despite the state’s initial disapproval of excessive show. This was relaxed from about 1655, when Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate resumed the practice of gilding warships.61
Most attention was given to the decoration of the bow and stern. The figurehead was usually a lion, except on the larger ships, which had individual designs that were sometimes of fantastic proportions. The original figurehead of the Sovereign of the Seas portrayed King Edgar trampling seven kings, while that of the St Michael of 1669 seems to have consisted of Ganymede being borne in a chariot drawn by a double-headed eagle, indicating that figureheads did not necessarily have a direct connection to the actual name of the ship.62 The stern was dominated by the royal arms, usually the only part of the decoration finished with real gilt (other areas were simply painted with yellow ochre to look like gilt), and these were flanked by larger-than-life-size human forms called quarterpieces.63 Gunports were decorated with wreaths, which became virtually universal from the 1670s. The beak and quarterdeck bulkheads were often adorned with full length figures in classical or martial garb.64 The quality of the work was often outstanding, for the dockyards employed some of the best wood carvers of the day. However, carvers and shipwrights did not have carte blanche in such matters; in 1677 Charles II expressed his disapproval of unduly lavish decoration, though this seems to have been at Pepys’s prompting, and was actually a tacit acknowledgment of the king’s indulgence in giving verbal orders to the shipwrights.65
The symbols adorning warships changed to reflect the politics of the day. In June 1649 the Council of State ordered the royal arms on all its ships ‘pulled down and defaced’.66 The Naseby of 1655 was given an astonishing and somewhat ‘politically incorrect’ figurehead, redolent of (and presumably deliberately modelled on) that of the earlier royal equivalent, the Sovereign of the Seas. This was described in detail by John Evelyn: ‘In the prow was Oliver [Cromwell] on horseback trampling six nations under foot, a Scot, Irishman, Dutch, French, Spaniard and English as was easily made out by their several habits: a fame held a laurel over his insulting head, and the word God with us’.67
Although the Naseby was renamed Royal Charles on 23 May 1660, when Charles II boarded her at Scheveningen, the figurehead survived until December 1663, when Pepys recorded that it was pulled down and burned in a formal ceremony attended by three commissioners of the navy and the Rochester trained band. (Typically, Pepys cared less for the potent symbolism of the figurehead’s destruction than for the fact that it would cost £100 to make a new one.)68
The usual colour scheme for warships of the period is shown in this detail of the model of the Coronation (1685), which also shows the lions’ heads often painted on the insides of gunport lids.
(KRIEGSTEIN COLLECTION)
Detail looking astern on the Adventure, showing the gunport wreaths and the figures adorning the quarterdeck bulkhead.
(KRIEGSTEIN COLLECTION)
LAUNCHING
Until the 1670s ships were launched with many of their fittings already in place, but the need to clear the slipways as quickly as possible to build the ‘thirty new ships’ (commenced in 1677) led Charles II to order the launching of bare hulls as soon as they were in a condition to float.69 Once that moment arrived, the launch of a large warship became a grand affair. The king and other members of the royal family often attended, travelling by barge to the Thames and Medway dockyards and turning launches virtually into state occasions; this practice died out immediately after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and was not revived until the second half of the eighteenth century.70 Drummers and trumpeters were on hand, and other ships in the vicinity fired their guns in salute as the new ship took to the water. Ships launched from shipways went in stern first, a tradition that was already long established, but others were built in docks and floated out. Poles carried the royal standard, the banner of the Lord High Admiral and the Union flag. The naming ceremony itself took place on the poop deck, where the king (or else the senior dignitary present) toasted the ship before formally naming it and then sprinkling the remainder of the wine on the deck. The master shipwright received a piece of plate to commemorate the launching, which was usually a goblet that he used for toasting the king and Lord High Admiral. The goblet given to Christopher Pett at the launching of the Royal Katherine at Woolwich in 1664 was worth £20.71
Detail of the model of the Fourth Rate Adventure, showing the figurehead and beakhead.
(KRIEGSTEIN COLLECTION)
The grandiose stern decoration of the Coronation (1685).
(KRIEGSTEIN COLLECTION)