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tended to clog the limber-holes of the bilge and rot the frames and
floor timbers; while the stowage space amidships was further
usurped by the cook-rooms, which were placed on the shingle, and
which, by the heat radiated from their brick sides, did damage to the
timbers and seams in their vicinity. Vessels were rarely sheathed.
Though John Hawkins had devised a system of sheathing by a
veneer of planking nailed over a layer of hair and tar, it was only to
ships going on special service in seas where the worm was active
that sheathing was applied. Sheathing possessed, then, some
significance. In 1620, for instance, the Venetian ambassador
reported to his government the discovery that some of our ships
were being sheathed, and from this fact deduced an impending
expedition to the Mediterranean.
With the navy in the depths of neglect and with shipbuilding in
the state described, Phineas Pett began to impose his permanent
mark on design and construction. The mechanism by which he
secured his results, the calculations and methods and rules used by
him, were veiled in profound secrecy, in accordance with the
traditions of his profession. He began by new-building old ships of
the Elizabethan time, giving them an improved form so far as
practicable. His friend and patron was the young Prince Henry, for
whom in 1607 he made a model which the king greatly admired.
And shortly after this, in the face of much jealousy on the part of his
rivals, he laid down by command a new great ship—the Prince Royal,
of 1187 tons, with a breadth of 43 feet and a keel length of 115
feet, double-built and sumptuously adorned, in all respects the finest
ship that had ever been built in England. She carried no less than
fifty-five guns, her general proportions were of a unity, and her
strength was of a superiority, far in advance of current practice. In
strength especially she marked an advance which yielded benefit
later, in the wars with Holland. She was double planked, “a charge
which was not formerly thought upon, and all the butt-heads were
double-bolted with iron bolts.”
But how difficult a matter it was for a builder to depart from
tradition, is shown from Pett’s account of the inquisition to which he
was subjected in connection with the building of this famous ship.
His rivals took advantage of the “Commission of Enquiry into the
abuses of the navy,” of 1608, to indict him for bad design, bad
building, and peculation. So much hard swearing took place on both
sides that at last King James himself decided to act as judge, and at
Woolwich, with the wretched Phineas on his knees before him,
opened his court of inquiry. “Much time,” says the diarist, “was spent
in dispute of proportions, comparing my present frame with former
precedents and dimensions of the best ships, for length, breadth,
depth, floor, and other circumstances. One point of proportion was
mainly insisted upon and with much violence and eagerness urged
on both sides, which was the square of the ship’s flat in the
midships, they affirming constantly upon their oath it was full
thirteen feet, we as constantly insisting that it was but eleven foot
eight inches.” In the end the king called in a mathematician and had
the controversy settled by actual measurement. None of the charges
brought against him being sustained, Phineas was acquitted and
restored once more to royal favour, to his own delight and to that of
his youthful patron, Prince Henry.
The Prince Royal marks a new epoch in ship design. She was
such a departure from all previous forms that she made the fame of
Phineas Pett secure. She became, indeed, the parent or type of all
future warships down to the beginning of the nineteenth century; for
(says Charnock), were the profuse ornaments removed, her contour,
or general appearance, would not so materially differ from that of
the modern vessel of the same size as to render her an uncommon
sight, or a ship in which mariners would hesitate to take the sea. In
her a final departure was made from the archaic form imposed on
fighting ships by tradition. The picture Charnock gives of her is of a
highly ornamented but low and flush-decked vessel armed to the
ends with two tiers of heavy guns. The projecting beak-head, a relic
from the galley days which had been so prominent a feature of
Tudor construction, has almost disappeared: the bow curves
gracefully upward to a lion close under the bowsprit. The wales have
little sheer; the stern is compact and well supported, with beautiful
lines. The quarter galleries are long, and are incorporated in the
structure in a curious manner: in the form of indented, tower-like
projections, with ornamented interspaces. The whole picture gives
evidence of stout scantlings and invaluable solidity. Although in
many respects the Prince Royal was a masterpiece she was primitive
in the variety of her armament. On the lower deck she carried two
cannon-petro, six demi-cannon, twelve culverins; on her upper deck
eighteen demi-culverins; and on quarter-deck and poop a number of
sakers and port-pieces. Also, unfortunately, she was built of green
timber, so her life was short.
In building a ship of unprecedented burthen Pett had the
support of a large public opinion. The advantages attaching to large
size were by this time generally appreciated: in the case of fighting
ships, in respect of strength, artillery force, and sea endurance, in
the case of merchant ships, in respect of carrying capacity and
economy of crew. The growth in the size of merchant shipping
during the reign was indeed remarkable. Trade followed the flag,
and the Jacobean merchant made haste to profit by the conquests
of the Elizabethan adventurer. For a short while after the war with
Spain our mercantile marine was stagnant; at the accession of
James I only small vessels of less than a hundred tons were being
built, and English merchants were having strange recourse to the
hiring of foreigners. But this state of things did not last for long. The
story of the success of the Earl of Cumberland and his 800-ton
Scourge of Malice, and the sight of the great Portuguese carrack
captured in 1592, are said to have stimulated the merchants of
London to possess themselves of vessels fit for the Eastern trade. It
is said, again, that the appearance of two large Dutch ships in the
Thames supplied the sudden impulse to build big. Be that as it may,
“the idea spread like wild-fire.” Larger ships were laid down, and by
the end of the reign the country possessed a considerable fleet of
ships of 500 tons and above. In one instance, at least, the pendulum
swung too far, and experience soon exposed the disadvantages of
excessive dimensions: the reduction in strength, the unhandiness in
shallow waters, the almost impossibility of graving and breaming,
the risking in a single bottom of too great a venture. The Trades
Increase, built for the new East India Company in 1605 by William
Burrell and launched by the king at Deptford, was of no less than
1,100 tons burthen. On her first voyage to Java she was lost by fire,
and no more ships of her size were ordered by the Company.
With the expansion of merchant shipping and with the
recognition of artillery as the main instrument of naval warfare
fighting ships made a corresponding advance in size. The
Commission of Reform of 1618, on whose report the subsequent
reorganization of the Navy was based, held that the primacy of the
big gun had at last been established. “Experience teacheth,” the
Commissioners recorded, “how sea-fights in these days come seldom
to boarding, or to great execution of bows, arrows, small shot and
the sword, but are chiefly performed by the great artillery breaking
down masts, yards, tearing, raking, and bilging the ships, wherein
the great advantage of His Majesty’s navy must carefully be
maintained by appointing such a proportion of ordnance to each ship
as the vessel will bear.” They recognized the extravagance of small
ships, and advised that in future the royal navy should consist of a
nucleus of about thirty large ships, which with the merchant fleet
should form one complete service; royal ships of over 800 tons;
great ships of over 600 tons; middling ships of about 450 tons. They
also formulated the chief requirements of naval construction in
considerable detail. This pontifical pronouncement on ship
dimensions was doubtless of value in connection with the
contemporary project to which their work had reference;
nevertheless it formed a dangerous precedent for future
administrations. It shackled the genius of the shipbuilder. It
degraded design. The ship, especially the timber-built sailing
warship, was essentially a compromise between a number of
conflicting elements. To obtain full value from his skill the designer
required as free as possible a choice of means to his end; and any
over-drawing of the specification, or surplusage of data beyond the
barest requirements, tended to tie his hands and render impossible a
satisfactory design. It was this over-specifying of dimensions in the
interests of standardization which, as we shall presently see,
stultified shipbuilding in England not only in the seventeenth but
throughout the whole of the eighteenth century.
But the report of 1618 was doubtless of great value as a
guidance for the building of the new Stuart navy. “The manner of
building, which in ships of war is of greatest importance, because
therein consists both their sailing and force. The ships that can sail
best can take or leave (as they say), and use all advantages the
winds and seas afford; and their mould, in the judgment of men of
best skill, both dead and alive, should have the length treble the
breadth, and the breadth in like proportion to the depth, but not to
draw above 16 foot of water because deeper ships are seldom good
sailers.... They must be somewhat snug built, without double
galleries and too lofty upper works, which overcharge many ships
and make them loom fair, but not work well at sea.” As for the
strengthening of the royal ships the Commissioners subscribed to
the manner of building approved by “our late worthy prince”: “first,
in making three orlops, whereof the lowest being two feet under
water, both strengtheneth the ship, and though her sides be shot
through, keepeth it from bilging by shot and giveth easier means to
find and stop the leaks. Second, in carrying their orlops whole
floored throughout from end to end. Third, in laying the second
orlop at such convenient height that the ports may bear out the
whole fire of ordnance in all seas and weathers. Fourth, in placing
the cook-rooms in the forecastle, as other ships of war do, because
being in the midships, and in the hold, the smoke and heat so
search every corner and seam, that they make the oakum spew out,
and the ships leaky, and some decay; besides, the best room for
stowage of victualling is thereby so taken up, that transporters must
be hired for every voyage of any time; and, which is worst, when all
the weight must be cast before and abaft, and the ships are left
empty and light in the midst, it makes them apt to sway in the back,
as the Guardland and divers others have done.”
The ships built under the regulations of the Commissioners were
certainly an improvement on earlier ships in many respects, but in
one element of power they proved to be deficient, namely, in speed.
The stoutly built, full-bodied, lumbering English two-deckers were
out-sailed and out-manœuvred, it was noticed, by the relatively light
and fine-lined Hollanders. Moreover our smaller ships were known to
be no match in speed for the Dunkirk privateers which at this time
infested the seas. A new type was seen to be necessary. The
existing differentiation of warships into rates or classes was
insufficient. For the line of battle there must be ships in which force
of artillery was the predominant quality; but for other duties there
must also be ships in which speed, and not force, was the
distinguishing note. From this necessity was evolved the frigate.
Soon after the accession of Charles I an attempt was made to
establish the new type by building small vessels on the model of the
largest, miniatures which it was hoped would prove good sailors and
capable, although square-sailed, of sailing near a wind. The Ten
Whelps were laid down: flush-decked three-masted vessels of 200
tons, 62 feet long on the keel and 25 feet in breadth. They were not
a success. It was left for Dunkirk, “the smartest dockyard in Europe,”
to found the new model. In imitation of a captured Dunkirk privateer
our first frigate was built in 1646 by Peter, son of Phineas Pett, and
her success was such that he had the achievement recorded on his
tomb. The Constant Warwick was 85 feet in keel-length, 26 feet 5
inches in breadth, of 315 tons burden and 32 guns. She was “an
incomparable sailer.” Before the first Dutch war was over she had
taken as much money from privateers as would have completely
laden her.
It seems probable that the prestige of his name was sufficient to
give Peter Pett a freedom from interference in his design which was
not accorded less distinguished shipbuilders. In ’45 Andrews Burrell,
in a remonstance addressed to Parliament, protested, “For the love
of heaven let not the shipwrights that are to build them [three
frigates for special service] be misled by those that would, but
cannot, direct them, which error hath been very hurtful to the navy
heretofore.” By the interference of Sir John Pennington, he asserted,
the builders of the Ten Whelps were so misled that they proved
sluggish and unserviceable. “Let no rules be given the shipwrights
more than their tonnage, with the number and weight of their
ordnance, and that the number and weight of their ordnance may be
suitable to the burden of each frigate.”
King Charles, whose personal interest in the royal navy equalled
that of his father, favoured the tendency to enlarge the tonnage and
the individual power of his fighting ships. The Prince Royal displayed
the advantages of size. The Dutch people, jealous of the interference
with their eastern trade, were known to be building large ships.
Across the channel an ambitious and all-powerful minister was
envisaging the possession of a navy in which an inferiority in
numbers might be neutralized by the superiority of the unit. In
France a vessel of 1400 tons had been laid down. Charles
determined to take up the challenge, obtaining the money by hook
or by crook wherewith to build a greater. In the year 1634 the
decision was made. A model of a great three-decker mounting a
hundred and four guns was presented to him by Phineas Pett, and
shortly afterwards the master of the shipwrights received the royal
command to build a ship, and to proceed in person to the forests of
Durham to select the thickstuff, knee timber, and planking requisite
for the task.
Opposition to the building of such a prodigious vessel appeared
from different quarters. Great ships, in the opinion of Sir Walter
Raleigh, were “of marvellous charge and fearful cumber.” The cost of
so large a ship must needs be great, for not only the whole cost, but
the cost per ton, increased with the size of the vessel; so wasteful a
process was the building of a great ship, indeed, that it was not
unusual to build a small ship simultaneously, out of the timber
discarded: a practice known as “building a small ship out of a great
one’s chips.” Ships of the greatest size, again, were “of little service,
less nimble, less mainable, and very seldom employed.” Nor was it
believed that so large a vessel as that projected could be built.
Trinity House, when they heard of the design, uttered a formal
protest. Such a ship, they argued, would be too big for service, and
unsafe from her enormous size. To carry such a number of pieces
she must be a three-decker, and to build a serviceable three-decker
was beyond the art or wit of man; if the lower tier were too low they
would be useless in a sea, if at 5 or 5½ feet above the water-line
then the third tier would be so high as to endanger the ship. In spite
of this protest the new ship was laid down, and nearly two years
later, in the autumn of ’37, she was launched at Woolwich, “the pride
and glory of the Caroline navy.”
The Sovereign of the Seas, the Sovereign, or the Royal
Sovereign, as she was called by successive governments, was
another great advance in size and solidity on all preceding
construction, and was the masterpiece of Phineas Pett. Her length
by the keel was 128 feet, her main breadth 48 feet, her overall
length 232 feet. She had three flush decks and a forecastle, a half-
deck, a quarter-deck, and a roundhouse. Her armament showed an
approach to symmetry; the lower tier consisted of cannon and demi-
cannon, the middle tier of culverins and demi-culverins. In one
respect she was less advanced than Pett’s earlier effort, the Prince
Royal, in that she had an old-fashioned beakhead, low hawses and a
low and exposed forecastle. In general form she was extolled by all,
and bore witness to the genius of her designer. No better form, said
14
a later critic and constructor after making an analysis of her lines—
no better form could have been devised for a ship built (according to
the prevailing customs of the times) so high out of water and so
overloaded with ornaments. The king took a personal pride in her,
and during her construction visited Woolwich and “seriously perused
all the ship within board.” For him an elaborate description was
written which, quoted at length by various writers, serves to show
the extent to which mere decoration contributed to the cost of a
royal ship. Two pictures of the vessel are reproduced by Charnock, of
such obvious disparity that they serve to show (as the author
observes) to what a degree artists may differ in the presentment of
the same vessel. They confirm, besides, the profuseness of the
ornamentation which was massed on her—the trophies, angels,
emblems, mouldings—which made her the occasion of loud
complaints against ship-money, and “a miracle of black and gold.”
 The Sovereign of the Seas had a distinguished career. When cut
down a deck she proved to be an exceptionally serviceable unit,
taking part in all the great actions of the Dutch wars and crowning
her work at La Hogue, where she engaged, crippled, and forced to
fly for shallow water the great Soleil Royal, 104, the French flagship.
At length, when laid up at Chatham in 1696 in order to be rebuilt,
she was set on fire by negligence and destroyed.

§
By the outbreak of the first Dutch war the modern ideas
introduced by Phineas Pett had received a general embodiment in
the navy. Blake found to his hand ships well suited to the intended
warfare, nor was he much concerned to add either to their number
or their magnitude. Only in one feature did the new vessels built
show any difference from older construction: their depth in hold was
reduced, probably to render them more suitable for work among the
15
shallow waters of the coast of Holland. In other important respects
improvement had preceded the opening of hostilities.
The lofty stern with which it had been the custom to endow the
sailing ship was a feature which had survived from ancient times. In
the galley, whose armament was concentrated in the bows, the after
part was not devoted to military fittings, but was appropriated
chiefly to the accommodation of the officers. So it was in the galleon
or sailing ship. With the desire and need for increased
accommodation the extra space was obtained by prolonging aft the
broad horizontal lines of the vessel and terminating them in a square
frame. To give more space, quarter galleries were then added,
outside the vessel. Then extra tiers of cabins were added, also with
quarter galleries, each storey, as in the case of domestic
architecture, projecting over that beneath it, and the whole forming,
with its surmounting taffrails, lanterns and ornaments, an
excessively weighty and top-heavy structure. Similarly, at the fore
end of the ship there remained the survival of the ancient forecastle.
 With the acceptance of artillery as the medium for battle, with
the decay of boarding tactics and the decline in value of small man-
killing firearms, close-fights and end-castles, the lofty forecastles and
sterns ceased to possess much of their special value. The arguments
of Sir Richard Hawkins’ day in favour of large cage-works no longer
held; nor could the preference of some shipbuilders for high sterns,
as allowing a quick sheer and thereby contributing to the girder
strength of the hull, be considered sufficient to justify their
retention. The stern galleries held a great deal of wind and tended
to rot the decks in their vicinity; their weight put a strain upon the
supporting keel; but, chiefly, the danger of their taking fire in action
induced the authorities to cut them down. For similar reasons the
forecastles were attacked. But there was strong opposition to their
elimination, because of the cover which they afforded in a fight. In
1652 the Phœnix, one of the finest frigates in the service, was taken
by a Dutch ship, “having no forecastle for her men to retire to.” In
the second Dutch war experience confirmed their usefulness. “All the
world,” wrote Mr. Secretary Pepys in his diary for the 4th July, 1666,
“now sees the use of forecastles for the shelter of men.”
No general increase in the size of our ships took place till toward
the end of the third Dutch war. Until that time the navy of France
was a negligible quantity; in 1664, it is said, the only war-vessel at
Brest was one old fireship. The Dutch, our only strong opponents,
fought in ships not unlike our own, stout, buoyant vessels mounting
from 24 to 60 guns, and of from 300 to 1200 tons burden.
Geography had a curious influence on their construction. Owing to
the shallowness of their coasts the Hollanders built their ships with
less draught and flatter floors than those of other countries; from
which policy they derived advantages of a greater carrying capacity
and, in pursuit, an ability to retreat among the shallows; but on
account of which they suffered a serious handicap in the hour of
action, when, faced by English ships built of superior material and
with finer bottoms which enabled them to hold a better wind, they
16
were weathered and out-fought.
 There was no apparent advantage, therefore, in augmenting the
size of our ships. Improvement was sought, rather, from a further
unification of the calibres of the guns, and from an increase in the
number carried. Their characteristics of shortness and large bore
were such as to make them well-suited to the form of battle now
favoured by English leaders—the close-quarter action.
In solidity of construction the English ships compared favourably
with those of the Dutch. The thick scantlings introduced by Phineas
Pett now proved of great value; the wood itself, tough English oak,
was unequalled by any other timber. English oak was the best, as
Fuller noted. Even the Dutch had built some of their ships of it; while
other countries frequently built of inferior fir, the splinters of which
killed more than were hit by hostile cannon balls. To what was the
superiority of the English timber due? To the soil and climate of this
favoured country. Under the influence of successions of warmth and
cold, of rain and sunshine, frost and wind, all in a degree most
favourable for alternate growth and consolidation, the English oak
attained an unrivalled strength and durability. Trees planted in
forests, where mutual protection was afforded from wind and cold,
grew rapidly, but were inferior in quality to trees planted in small
parcels or along the hedgerows; these latter, slow-growing and
tough, felled “at the wane of the moon and in the deep of winter,”
supplied the thickstuff, knees, and planking for generations of our
royal ships. Their endurance was frequently remarkable. The bottom
timbers would last for fifty or sixty years, but the upper works, which
were subject to alternations of heat and cold, dryness and moisture,
decayed in a much shorter space of time. The Royal William is
quoted by Charnock as a case in point. This first rate ship was
launched in the year 1719, and never received any material repair
until 1757. A few years later she was cut down to a third rate of 80
guns. Participating in all the sea wars of the time, she was surveyed
in 1785 and converted into a guardship, which post she filled till
17
early in the nineteenth century.
 Much attention, as we have noted, was given in this scientifically
minded Stuart age to the form of body best suited to motion through
water, but the efforts to improve design were largely misdirected.
Many of our ships were unsatisfactory, not only from their slowness
but because they were crank or tender-sided, and unable to bear out
their lower guns or even to carry a stout sail. They were so clogged
with timbers internally that they could not carry the victuals and
stores necessary for long voyages; and vessels built by contract
were often found to be carelessly put together, of green,
unseasoned, and unsuitable timber.
After the Restoration the mantle of the Petts descended on a
master shipwright of Portsmouth, who became an authoritative
exponent of ship design, and to whose ability several improvements
were due. “Another great step and improvement to our navy,”
recorded Mr. Pepys in 1665, “put in practice by Sir Anthony Deane,
was effected in the Warspight and Defiance, which were to carry six
months’ provisions, and their guns four and a half feet from the
water.” In the same diary for 19th May of the following year occurs
the following characteristic note: “Mr. Deane did discourse about his
ship the Rupert, which succeeds so well, as he has got great honour
by it; and I some, by recommending him. The king, duke, and every
body, say it is the best ship that was ever built. And then he fell to
explain to me the manner of casting the draught of water which a
ship will draw, beforehand, which is a secret the king and all admire
in him; and he is the first that hath come to any certainty
beforehand of foretelling the draught of water of a ship, before she
is launched.” The calculations used by Sir Anthony Deane to forecast
the draught of a projected ship might win him applause among the
philosophers; but the scoffer at theory was able to point to
considerable achievements wrought by men who made no pretence
of any knowledge of science. In 1668 the Royal Charles, 110, was
launched at Deptford. “She was built,” wrote Evelyn, “by old Shish, a
plain, honest carpenter, master builder of this dock, but one who can
give little account of his art by discourse, and is hardly capable of
reading.”
 The interest of Charles II in naval architecture may be gathered
from a letter written by him in 1673: “I am very glad that the
Charles does so well; a girdling this winter, when she comes in, will
make her the best ship in England: the next summer, if you try the
two sloops that were built at Woolwich that have my invention in
them, they will outsail any of the French sloops. Sir Samuel Morland
has now another fancy about weighing anchors; and the resident of
Venice has made a model also to the same purpose.”
To girdle a ship, was to fasten planks along her sides some two
or three strakes above and below the water-line; this had the effect
of adding to her beam and thereby rendering her stiffer under sail.
Incessant girdling seems to have been necessary at this period, to
counter the defective conditions in which English ships were
designed, built, and sent to sea. Ships were consistently restricted in
beam, in compliance with the faulty “establishments,” and under a
mistaken notion that narrowness, in itself, directly contributed to
speed. “Length,” says Charnock, “was the only dimension regarded
as indispensably necessary, by the ancients for their galleys and by
the moderns for galleons. Breadth was not considered, or if
considered was accepted as a necessary evil.” Pepys remarked, “that
the builders of England, before 1673, had not well considered that
breadth only will make a stiff ship.” It was an inquiry ordered by Sir
Richard Haddock in 1684 which brought to light the fulness of the
fallacy; ships were subsequently made broader, and experience
showed that a good breadth was beneficial, not only for stability but
for speed and sea-keeping qualities.
But even if a ship were built initially broad enough, the continual
addition of armament and top-hamper to which she was often
subjected had the effect eventually of impairing her stability. In such
a case there were two remedies: to ballast or to girdle. The former
expedient was objectionable, as it involved an increase both of
displacement and of draught. Girdling was therefore generally
practised. By this means the vessel was made stiffer, her buoyancy
was improved, and her sides were also rendered less penetrable
between wind and water. Even if, when thus girdled, she proved to
be less stiff than the enemy this was not altogether a disadvantage:
she formed a steadier gun-platform, her sides were less strained by
the sea and, because her rolling was less violent, her topmasts were
less liable to be sprung. But sufficient stiffness was necessary to
allow of her lowest and heaviest tier of guns being fought in
moderate weather; and for this reason alone, girdling was preferable
to ballasting, in that the former tended to keep the guns high out of
water while the latter brought them nearer the water-line.
Although rigidly restricted in dimensions, ships put to sea in
these 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
 18
sought to match individual ships. 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
19
arose, not only that more complete differentiation of force 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
20
all the benefits of experiment and of sea experience.”
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
21
Dublin, had drawn public attention to his theories. 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.
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