the man-of-war -- 10/4/23

04 Dec 2023

the man-of-war -- 10/4/23

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Today's selection -- from The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. In the 1700s, the man-of-war ship was the ultimate fighting weapon, and one of the most sophisticated machines yet conceived or built:

“Men-of-war were among the most sophisticated machines yet conceived: buoyant wooden castles powered across oceans by wind and sail. Reflecting the dual nature of their creators, they were devised to be both murderous instruments and the homes in which hundreds of sailors lived together as a family. In a lethal, floating chess game, these pieces were deployed around the globe to achieve what Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: ‘Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.’

“[A prime example was] the Centurion. Swift and stout, and weighing about a thousand tons, she had, like the other warships in Anson's squadron, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards--wooden spars from which the sails unfurled. The Centurion could fly as many as eighteen sails at a time. Its hull gleamed with varnish, and painted around the stern, in gold relief, were Greek mythological figures, including Poseidon. On the bow rode a sixteen-foot wooden carving of a lion, painted bright red. To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the hull had a double layer of planks, giving it a thickness of more than a foot in places. The ship had several decks, each stacked upon the next, and two of them had rows of cannons on both sides--their menacing black muzzles pointing out of square gunports. Augustus Keppel, a fifteen-year-old midshipman who was one of Anson's proteges, boasted that other men-of-war had ‘no chance in the world’ against the mighty Centurion.

A historical reenactor in Roman centurion costume. Note that the vambraces used in this reconstruction are an anachronism.

“Yet building, repairing, and fitting out these watercraft was a herculean endeavor even in the best of times, and in a period of war it was chaos. The royal dockyards, which were among the largest manufacturing sites in the world, were overwhelmed with ships--leaking ships, half-constructed ships, ships needing to be loaded and unloaded. Anson's vessels were laid up on what was known as Rotten Row. As sophisticated as men-of-war were with their sail propulsion and lethal gunnery, they were largely made from simple, perishable materials: hemp, canvas, and, most of all, timber. Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

“Most of the wood was hard oak, but it was still susceptible to the pulverizing elements of storm and sea. Teredo navalis--a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot--ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.) Termites also bored through decks and masts and cabin doors, as did deathwatch beetles. A species of fungus further devoured the ship's wooden core. In 1684, Samuel Pepys, a secretary to the Admiralty, was stunned to discover that many new warships under construction were already so rotten they were ‘in danger of sinking at their very moorings.’

“The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years. And to survive that long, a ship had to be virtually remade after each extensive voyage, with new masts and sheathing and rigging. Otherwise, it risked disaster. In 1782, while the 180-foot Royal George--for a time the largest warship in the world was anchored near Portsmouth, with a full crew onboard, water began flooding its hull. It sank. The cause has been disputed, but an investigation blamed the ‘general state of decay of her timbers.’ An estimated nine hundred people drowned.”