the Carolina ex-Peregrine Galley at a scale of about 1/44. Now Danby is precisely the sort of man who would want to celebrate his own ingenuity with a model – particularly since the building of the ship represented a financial victory in a long fight with authority to obtain compensation for a promised pension which had not been forthcoming.
On this model the position of the main mast seems very far forward, and the rig looks so unbalanced there is a strong temptation to look for some sort of mizzen to turn it into a conventional ship rig; but there is absolutely no evidence for one. According to Deptford Dockyard records, the Peregrine Galley was first built with a light two-masted square rig, but suffered an acute lack of after-sail (the main probably carried some kind of bilander sail, which fits with what is known of the Royal Transport’s rig). The Dockyard felt that the only solution was to rerig the vessel completely with a full ship rig, and this was carried out in January 1703, barely two years after the Peregrine was completed. This is why most of the iconography shows the vessel as a three-masted ship.
There is one clinching piece of evidence: when the ship was employed, in effect, as the Duke of Marlborough’s yacht, carrying him to and from his continental campaigns, there was criticism of the ship’s domestic arrangements. The most startling of these was that the galley was the wrong way round with the fire hearth facing the magazine. Careful inspection of the model reveals this very feature.
The Peregrine Galley shared the Danby reputation for fast sailing, and the hull form was to be very influential in the half-century that followed. As late as 1756, when the first 12pdr frigates were being designed, the Richmond class were based on this form. This design in turn was repeated in 1801 so Danby’s influence on cruiser design could be said to stretch over a century.
Having lost the Royal Transport, Danby later persuaded the government to fund the Peregrine Galley, another innovative yacht for his own use, but again it was so popular with the monarch that it was retained in naval service. Persevering with his desire for the state to fund his hobby, Danby capped his semi-official career with the outlandish Royal Anne Galley, a two-decker designed to be rowed with 66 oars on both decks. But strangest of all was a privateer he designed with a wasp-waist midship section – as if the ship had breathed in at the waterline – known, perhaps appropriately, as ‘Lord Danby’s Maggot’, ‘maggot’ being seventeenth-century slang for an unhealthy obsession.
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