yards of kersey; 1 fish copper kettle, one small fish copper kettle, 1 machine for sweetening water; 1 machine for making cordage and 9,500 feet of spare cordage; 202 iron cringles; six boat grapnels; 7 hatchets; 24 boat hooks and a fish hook; 16 marline spikes; 78 sail needles and 12 sail making palms; 68 thimbles; 56 leather buckets; 11/2 tons of vinegar and 21/2 barrels of tar; 68 spare sails and 72 spare blocks; a 32-ft barge, a 31-foot-long boat, a 28-ft pinnace, two 25-ft deal cutters and a ten-foot fouroared boat, plus all their oars. The ship itself had a pair of giant sweeps with which to propel it in a calm. There were two 70-fathom seine nets, and a mass of fishing gear for albacore, dolphin and bonito, plus some shark-fishing gear fitted with a chain. There was a mackerel line but no turtle nets. The Thunderer carried a Dutch ensign, as well as a French and a Spanish one; a Dutch, Spanish and French jack and a Dutch, Spanish and French pendant, all of which could be used to disguise her identity or to trick the enemy. The stores themselves are a record of vigilance and danger, of damage foreseen and emergency accounted for. It is a world of shattered spars and blown-out sails, men and objects lost overboard, worn sheets and frayed halyards, blocks split and lost, hammocks torn, lift tackles gone, lanyards broken. It feels nearly comfortless.
Alongside it, one can place the list of complaints with which a ship’s surgeon would have to deal, the human impact of this strained life in the damp, dangerous world of a man-of-war: ulcer of frenum of the penis; drunk falling from deck on keelson; hands caught in block; catarrh; rheumatism; diarrhoea; contusion; colic; falling while hauling on the braces, causing venereal hernia; fall while taking down the hammocks, producing dislocated shoulder; letting an adze slip while repairing a cutter and the blade cutting into his Achilles tendon; slipping and falling into tender (a boy aged 16); fractured humerus falling on deck in a wind; rheumatism in the knees; tonsillitis; inflamed glands in groin; ‘fell on deck with four or five men over him in a gale’; stabbed in forehead when ashore; fell out of his hammock on to deck; falling down drunk; a fall into the waist; ankles swollen; epilepsy, (the prospect of which aloft was terrifying); guts—griping, discharge of blood, faeces scanty and white; severe pain in loins; right hand dragged into a block, ends of fingers fractured; sole of left foot punctured by a scrape. More often than not men took several days before they reported they were hurt. One was said to complain simply of ‘Hypochondriasis’. Others, for whom the strain was too much, are described merely as ‘hectic’ or ‘withdrawn’. ‘Mania’ afflicted all categories of men on board.
It is remarkable, in the light of the deeply demanding conditions in which it operated for years at a time, that the navy of 1805 achieved what it aimed for. Deep orderliness was a quality which struck visitor after visitor to the fleet. Part of a diary survives kept by an anonymous tutor to a 15-year-old midshipman called Frederick Gilly cruising on board HMS Gibraltar enforcing the blockade off L’Orient in 1811. The tutor was catastrophically seasick but, like Coleridge, was entranced by the very things which most navy men would not bother to have noticed. Coleridge had gazed for hours at ‘the sails sometimes sunshiny, sometimes snowy: sometimes shade-coloured, sometimes dingy’. The tutor, despite his seasickness,
found a pleasure totally new and indescribable in attending to the execution of orders. What most attracted my notice was the silence which prevailed; not a word was spoke but by the officers commanding, which not only showed the fine order to which the ship’s company had been reduced, but also the alacrity with which everything might be done in case of emergency…
At 11 o’clock all the men are mustered and inspected at their divisions by the captain and officers. All hands are expected to appear dressed in clean linen and their best clothes, consisting in the summer of blue jackets and white trousers.
This is not the usual picture of the rough and ready, brutalised workforce of a British man-of-war, but this journal, naively enthusiastic as it might be, was written for no purpose but the tutor’s own. On Friday 9 August 1811, he recorded that
When several ships are in company it is a very interesting sight to observe the manner in which anything is conducted, as for instance getting under weigh, coming to anchor, loosing and furling sails etc. The signal is first of all given from the admiral’s or commodore’s ship and then all begin at the same time and there is no small emulation in making a display of smartness and discipline. If the command be given to furl sails, then the first lieutenant orders the bosun to ‘Pipe all hands to furl sails’. They then come on deck and wait for the word. In the meantime the midshipmen stationed in the tops take their places. The next word is ‘man the rigging’. This is obeyed by the men ascending the first ratlines of the shrouds and there staying till the lieutenant sings out ‘Away aloft’. When they have got into the tops they wait again for the last word, ‘Lay out and take in—reefs.’(According to the number of reefs out when the sails were loose.) The whole fleet acts with smartness and dispatch.
That too is what you must imagine on the morning of Trafalgar, as the logs laconically describe the evolutions of the fleet, responding to a shift in the wind by coming on to the other tack, ‘wearing ship’ by taking her stern through the wind, raising the topgallant yards as the wind drops and more sail is needed, shaking out the reefs in the topsails, setting the steering or studding sails with which to add the slightest extra fraction of a knot in the light airs, setting the royals above the topsails, for that little bit more, and then lowering the ships’ boats from the davits and towing them on long lines astern. In their cradles on deck, they would not only have interrupted the line of fire; a shot landing among them would have sprayed the deck with murderous splinters.
A ship, to a stranger a maze of complexity, is to a seaman the infinitely exact working out of a few basic principles. The hull combines two contradictory qualities: quickness through the water for the chase of the enemy; steadiness to provide a platform from which guns could be fired. Greater waterline length provided the first, greater beam the second. The profile of men-of-war, seen from bow or stern, was curved steeply in above the waterline because it was realised that if the guns on the upper decks could be brought nearer to the centreline of the ship, there would be less roll and for a higher proportion of the time the muzzles of the guns would be on target. Two ships alongside each other could be touching at the waterline but forty feet apart at the quarterdeck. The heaviest guns, which fired roundshot weighing 32 pounds each, enormous objects, 9ft 6in long and weighing very nearly three tons, were on the lowest decks, those above getting increasingly lighter, for the same reason. The keel of course was dead straight, made of vast baulks of elm, the bow extremely bluff, because there was more room aboard if the full width of the ship was carried as far forward as possible. The stern sharpened to a point, allowing the water to run smoothly off the lines of the ship, reducing drag. The very structure of their world was shaped to a purpose.
Everything in the hull was for strength. The frames or ribs of the ship were set in pairs along its full width, and carefully jointed so that no joint in any timber lay alongside a joint in another. It was a dense structure. If you stripped away the outer shell, the frames would still occupy two thirds of its outline. The whole structure was held together by iron bolts above the waterline and by bolts made of copper alloy below it. The hull was clenched into tightness. The underwater profile was sheathed in copper to keep it clean of weed, a form of anti-fouling and to deter the ship worm which destroys ship timbers in the tropics.
This immensely solid hull was then bridged internally with the heavy deck beams, huge oak timbers, each one placed beneath a gun, cambered slightly to meet the curve of the deck (cambered so that water would run off it) and fixed with grown-oak knees—cut from the curving part of a tree—which held the beams in place in both the vertical and horizontal plane. Over that was laid the deal deck planking, each plank two inches thick and 12 inches wide. The final element was the hull planking, several layers of it: particularly thick timbers known as wales fixed under each row of gunports, further thickening timbers above and below the wales, a mass of exterior planking, four inches thick, followed by interior planking of the same density, and on top of that, still further timbers known as riders and standards to give yet more internal strength. The construction method is more like
