Avast! What Tom should have been reading about the age of fighting sail

By
Jeff Williams

Age
of fighting sail bureau

"C. S. Forester" (AKA Cecil
Louis Troughton Smith) was a delightful writer of fiction but a less successful writer of naval history. His Age of Fighting Sail has long received mixed reviews among modern naval
historians interested in that period. Forester had a tendency towards "received
wisdom" and was careful not to contradict technical details he had already
incorporated into his marvelously successful "Hornblower" series novels.

As we all know,
there is a tendency for nations to inflate their victories and diminish their
defeats. Consequently, it had become customary in re-telling the extraordinary
saga of the British Navy in the age of sail to emphasize the superiority of
French-built ships versus those of the Royal Navy. It made the long period of
English naval victories even more amazing and intrepid. Even still, like most
myths, the lore of superior French and Spanish ship design did in fact contain
an element of truth for a period.

In the past thirty
to forty years a great deal of intense academic research has been performed
concerning the ship building and construction practices of the French, Dutch,
Spanish, and American sailing navies, but most particularly into the British
Navy of the sailing era. Much legend (knee deep when it comes to
naval affairs) has been stripped away by contemporary naval historians
such as Brian Lavery, Robert Gardiner, and others.

Brian Lavery is undoubtedly the world's leading authority on the sailing ships of
the line, having spent decades researching the subject to its smallest detail. He
has a number of volumes to his credit but the ones that directly address the
subject of this article would be:

The
Ship of the Line -- The Development of the Battlefleet 1650 -1850, Vol. One




The Ship of
the Line -- Design, Construction & Fittings, Vol. Two




Nelson's
Navy, The Ships, Men and Organization 1793-1815

In Building
The Wooden Walls -- The Design and Building of the 74-Gun Ship Valiant, Lavery uses his
first two chapters to describe how the Royal Navy entered the 18th century
undefeated but with ships that were generally poorly designed. Their design
patterns had become rigidly conservative with little scope for experimentation.
This was partly due to a complacency derived from long success in battle. Why
fix what's not broken?

The French on the
other hand, understanding that they could not defeat the British Navy because
of the need to finance large standing armies and a shortage of ports and seamen,
decided on a policy of building speedier and more powerful ships. Later in the
century, the new American Navy facing the same problems as the French adopted a
similar policy in lieu of a battle fleet.

For the British
the end of that complacency came in 1755 with a new surveyor of the Navy, the
redoubtable Sir Thomas Slade, and his partner William Bately. The creative
logjam in the hidebound surveyors office, that controlled the design protocols
for the Navy, was removed and British shipbuilding moved into a new era.

At the time of the
Seven Years War, the Royal Navy as a result of the through defeat of both the
French and Spanish in battle had captured many of the latest French and Spanish
ships. As standard practice, the Navy took the lines off those ships, repaired
them if possible and incorporated them into its own fleet. With the practical
experience of having these captured ships now as part of the British fleet it
became apparent that they contained many advantageous qualities. Slade merged
many of those French ideas with his own into a new British building practice.

As an example, it
was customary in that era for French battleships to be more "weatherly"
(meaning how close they can sail to the wind) by being able to sail 6 points (on
the 32 point compass rose) to the wind, while the average British battleship
could usually manage only 7 points. That weatherliness was usually largely a
function of the relationship between the length and breadth of a vessel. That
feature was very important for ships trying to achieve the "weather gauge" (upwind)
on an enemy vessel -- rather like a Spitfire fighter trying to gain an altitude
advantage on a ME 109.

Slade's new
renaissance in British naval construction is usually considered to have been
initiated with the building of HMS Valiant.
This ship's lines were actually taken from the captured French Invincible. Valiant,
along with her sister Triumph, were
the lead ships in a new 74-gun class that began to standardize the British
battle line for the next 70 years. British ships were lengthened, their
armament re-ordered to be more formidable, and the ships became nearly as fast
and weatherly as their French peers but more robustly built.

It should be noted
that while French ships were fast and Weatherly, there was a price to pay for
those features. One of the costs was "hogging," a circumstance where the bow
and stern of the ship actually droops down from a lack longitudinal strength,
thus destroying its sailing qualities over time. Generally, British shipwrights
tried to keep the scantlings and timbers stouter than French practice and also
maintained narrower room and space (the space between frames) than the French
in order to minimize the hogging of the keel. Later, British dockyards used the
Sepping's method that allowed a greater length to be built into their ships by
using a very strong diagonal framing process. Also, in the new class of ships,
the British lower main gun decks were designed to be a little higher above the
waterline in order to make them less wet and more available when the ship
heeled in the wind. Often the lower gun decks of French ships were so low to
the water that even in a moderate breeze the gun ports were unusable.

Importantly, I
might add that the British were the first to completely copper the bottoms of
their entire fleet beginning around the time of the American War for Independence.
This factor had a radical impact upon hull durability and speed, comparable
with almost any changes in actual ship design. It was hugely expensive but kept
ships out of dry-dock and improved their weatherliness and speed and helped
assist uniform the speed characteristics of the whole battle fleet when in
formation. This crucial change in itself was comparable in impact to the 20th
century's incorporation of the microprocessor into modern naval electronics.

In consequence of
these changes, the battles fought by the British Navy from the period of the
American Revolution, French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic wars were
generally fought with ships of equal or superior design characteristics to
those of their assorted opponents. This was particularly true of British
frigate designs that evolved even faster and were the blue water cruisers of
their era.

As most people who
have an interest in naval history know, ship design was only one factor -- important
as it was in the development of naval superiority. Unlike armies, navies cannot
be improvised. They required factors such as the availability of trained and
experienced seamen, gunnery science, navigation skills (advanced mathematics),
seamanship, signaling (an area of complete British superiority), and a
developed and practiced doctrine of aggressive leadership. These were all
crucial in achieving and maintaining superiority at sea. As the superlative
American Admiral Nimitz said, "better good men on a bad ship than bad men on a
good ship."

As a final note,
Spanish ships (many British considered Spanish captures superior to those of
the French) and Dutch ships to a lesser extent were also very interesting in
their own right and deserve coverage. The Dutch naval tradition is outstanding
though their ships had a tendency to be rather small and shallow of draft to
allow them to clear the mud flats off the Dutch coast. The American
contribution to naval design in the age of sail was both unique and of
generally very high quality and is a full story in itself.

Incidentally, Robert Gardiner, a superb historian of naval architecture, has a number of books out on the specific
design elements of various classes of ships such as frigates, brigs, ships of the line, etc., of this period. His work is excellent and
spares no detail.