HMS Victory

used to do on text stuff all the time. And ladies and gentlemen, yes, I am talking about a return to listener mail. I don't know why I leaned back from the microphone, probably like that I was going to say, I'm wearing heads. I didn't do a longtime listeners of tech stuff. Realized that I used to do a big listener mail thing. But we know, and yeah, we're not We're not gonna We're not gonna subject you to all that.

It's a kinder, gentler tech stuff. But we do have some amazing listener mail that we wanted to talk about. And in fact, this one was incredibly long. There were there were three big suggestions in it, and so we had to pare it down. So I'm just going to read the part that refers were actually doing for this episode, so it goes Hi, guys, thanks for making the podcast. I listened all the time at work as I drive

so much. My favorite episodes are the really long ones where you really get stuck into the history of a company, like the Amazon podcast. I'm guessing you must have loved the HBO trilogy. But here goes the actual request. The HMS Victory and HMS Warrior are interesting subjects, partly because the Victory is still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy and is the oldest commission warship in the world.

The Constitution in the United States of America is the oldest still afloat, but also because the technology used was amazing for its time. The HMS Warrior had such strong armor that they used modern weapons of the time to test the armor fired at point blank range. Keep up the great work, Simon. Well, Simon, thank you very much.

We're gonna talk specifically about the Victory because as we were doing our research and building out the history for this, we realized we could not truly do justice to both subjects if we tried to cram them into a single episode. All right, because I don't know about you guys, but I was not, you know, really intimately familiar with the technical workings of warships up until I did this research.

And there's a lot to them. There's so many, i mean, really cutting edge naval technology was being used to create these things, and so we really wanted to go in depth into what this thing looked like and how it was constructed. And even to do that, you had to go back and look at the history of the British Navy because the whole evolution leading up to the victory was very important to understand why those developments were so

instrumental in the victory being such a powerful ship. So first things first, before we even go into the history, I think it's time for us to take a little tour. And Lauren, I'm gonna you're gonna be happy to know. Right outside the studio, I've set up an entire peer with a ship docked air so I'm going to take you on a tour of a boat so i can

show you what everything is. So it's truly incredible. Is Atlanta is landlocked, but but I'm impressed by by this modern technology that you have used to accomplish this Simon's email was inspirational and I could do no less. So it's truly a beautiful day. So yes, so let us let us go, let us travel to this ship. Alright. So now, Lauren, if you take a look at this ship. Here, you see this front part where the the whole of the ship is its curving down into the water. So

the front part of the ship is called the bow. Right, So everything that's toward the direction of the bow when you're on a ship is called four. So if you're walking forward exactly, so if you're walking forward towards the bow, you're walking for everything behind you is aft because it's after right. Now, the back part of the ship is the stern. So if you walk aft, you're walking towards the stern. Now you've got to learn your left from

your right. Oh, I actually know this one, okay. So the left side of the ship, if you're if you're facing four, you're facing the bow, is the port, yes, and the right side is starboard. That's right. Although in the old old days, port was also known as larboard, so you had larboard and starboard. That's much better. Why did that's I mean? I okay, I guess it's a little similar when you're yelling, you're shouting pirates off the larboard. Now, then you might you know, people said, did you say

starboard or larboard? Which which gun do have fire? There's gonna be a lot of accents in this episode. It's left right, right, right. Well, let's see, let's just call it port and it's easy to remember. You just hold up both your hands and whichever one makes the P. Wait a minute, that's not right. No, no no, no, if you have a hook, it works, that's true if you do alright, So then as long as your left hand was the one that was cut off, you're in good shape.

So Captain Hook not so good because his right hand was cut off. And well only in the book and the Disney movie is different. You know, we're getting a little off track. Okay, let's get back this this tour. So we've got the ports and the starboard side. Also the apocryphal story that the reason why we call posh posh is because it stands it's an acronym that stands for port out, starboard home, as in those are the

sides that face. But that's that's apocryph No, but it's commonly said, so top deck of the ship, the weather deck so called because it's exposed to the elements. Uh, the you don't call them floors on a decks. Yeah, so you can go down below decks, but there are multiple decks in warships in particular, so typically that deck has several raised areas. The front is spelled or castle,

but it's pronounced forecastle. Sure, okay, just like the the person who's in charge of overseeing sailor discipline on a ship is spelled boatswain, but it's pronounced boson. I'm I'm willing to accept your word. Yeah, there's something about the English. They just like to drop entire syllables and and letter sounds out of their words until you you hear it and you think, how do you spell that? Oh, it's spelled or castle, but it's pronounced forecastle. So that's in

the front of the ship. You know, it's for castle. So when you when you break it down like that, it makes sense. It's in the forward part of the ship, and it's a raised portion of the deck. So this is generally used as a place for soldiers to stand, and so if your ship is being bordered, there on a raised platform where they can fire down onto the boarding enemy. That's the ideas. Always get that elevated position.

Then you have the quarter deck, which is really the last quarter of the ship that's in the aft part. This tends to be lower, right, it doesn't not necessarily raised up. You might have a waste in the middle, which is a depression in the middle of your ship. That's where you would put boats boats. By the way, I'll go ahead and say this, even though I have it later in my notes. A boat, here's how technical

we get. Is a small a vessel to fit aboard a ship, and a ship is a large enough vessel to carry a boat, just like a mountain is larger than a hill, and a hill is smaller than a mountain. It's one of those definitions that is not at all useful, and I'm glad that that's extremely clear. But that's the way. That's the way it works. So then in the very after the ship, in most warships, you have another raised deck.

Now this deck is the infamous poop deck, the poop I heard another possibly apocryphal tail that the reason it is called a poop deck has nothing to do with evacuation. It has to do with the fact that if you were to have visitors aboard your ship, you would probably put them on board this deck. It's in the very back, so they can see everything that's happening because it's raised up.

It's in the back. You're you're out of the way of all the action because all the sailors are having to deal with the sales that are in the main part of the ship, and they would get quote unquote pooped, which I assume means amused when they would see waves coming aboard, coming over the side and dousing the sailors while whereas they're up. Yeah, stay classy, all right. So then you've got the deck below the top deck, which is commonly called the gun deck. Now there may or

may not be guns on the gun deck. Typically on your ships you would have the cannon on the weather deck. So the top deck right, the gun deck might not have any guns on it at all. It may just be used for the mess, which is where you eat and also the place where you would bunk for the night, except instead of bunk, you would hammock. So or if you were in a really old ship, you had a rope that you would lean on to fall asleep. Yeah, no,

those were rough days. Um. Also, sometimes in older ships you would just have to sleep on the deck of the ship. So, uh, yeah, the cannons on the top deck. If it were a really sophisticated warship, there would be multiple gun decks and there would be can ends on each one. Eventually they started figuring out, hey, we should put the heavy cannons towards the lower decks because uh they provide more stability. But you can't go too low because then you're below the waterline and and you open

up a port, then that's not right. You're you're a sinking your ship and being not really effectively shooting in anything. No gunpowder when it gets wet, not terribly. Yeah, okay, but let's let's go back up above decks and what are what are these? What are these giant poles? They seem to be masts. Those would be masts, and you typically would have multiple masks aboard these ships. You might hear of a three master or a four master. These

refer to the number of masts on the ship. The mass, of course, are the poles upon which the sails hang. You have some some bars that are horizontal that are supported by the masts. Those horizontal bars are called yards So if you ever heard yard arm, that is referring to these these horizontal poles those support the sales. Of course, sales are what provide the propulsion aboard these ships. You know,

you're using wind power right right. And there's a few different different types of sales, lots of different types of sales, and some of them are very specific to specific masts. So if you have let's say a three mast ship, your your first mast is the foremast. That's the one closest to the bow, so it's the one closest to the foe. You might also have a bowsprit, which is uh,

an extension of the bow that goes up. So if you've ever seen one that has like a really long pole that extends out kind of like a nose on the ship, that's the bow sprint or or bowsprit, depending upon how you want to pronounce it. That may also have some sales attached to it. But then you have the foremast. Next you would have the main mast or the main mast, and then you have the mizzen mast in the very back. Uh. If you have a really big ship like a foremaster, you might also have a

Bonaventure mast. Uh, these would have the sales. And like you said, there are different kinds of sales. Their jibs, which are triangular sales that are usually found in the front of the ship, attached to the bow and the bow sprit. You have square sails, which would be the topsails, the main sails, and the top gallant or to gallant, i should say, and the royal sales, which are at the very very top. So these are these are the square ones. And then you've got these other kind of

weird trapezoidal shaped sails called spankers. Again, keep a classy kids, Yeah, having spankers aboard your ship, it's a good thing. Your boson might be one of them. But yeah, no, we're talking about sales here. Well, but they are at the stern of the ship. Yes they are. The spankers are by the poop. So I'm so but sure, I'm sorry. No, no, no, it's fine. I was. I was gonna go the same way.

And it's amazing that we haven't completely fallen apart already. No. So you know, the the other big picture of of of sailing vessels, the sailor at the helm, the wheel, the ship's wheel where the sailor's gripping the wheel tightly, there's probably like some sort of storm going on into it, and then much much like car driving on TV, you just you just twist that thing everywhere. Yeah, no, okay. First of all, ship wheels were a relatively late invention

as far as warships are concerned. The ship's wheel didn't come into play until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Now that the Victory had a ship's wheel, because that was built in the mid eighteenth century, but anything that was built before the early eighteenth century did not use a wheel, used what was called a whip staff or a tiller. So this is essentially like, you know, a big tiller is like a lever that you would joystick

kind of, except it was horizontal, not vertical. You would lean against it to the right or to the left in order to maneuver the ship, and the wheel was meant to emulate that, but doing it through a system of essentially ropes and pulls. So um and in fact, it took a while for them to perfect the way of creating the right tension so that you wouldn't end up with slack or too much tension with the wheel and thus you would affect the maneuverability of a ship.

So that concludes our tour. We have seen the basic ship here, you know, just I guess we could have mentioned that most of the ships also had a large cabin for the captain or the commander of the vessel to stay in. That cabin typically ends up having at least one major compartment for the commander of the ship. It's a little more comfortable, it's definitely more spacious than

the crew quarters. And also typically it's used in battle situations as well, So even the captain's room ends up getting cleared out for battle, and cannon will be rolled in and moved through gun ports. Yeah, so even there, every single bit of space that could be used for combat on these ships was done. So so if we want to really talk about the victory, we gotta look back to some of the earlier ships that kind have

led into it's it's being built. So if you look all the way back into the very beginning of the English navy, you gotta go back to the fifteenth century, So fourteen hundreds, this is when cargo ships called carricks were becoming a really popular design in all of Europe, not just England, but you know France and Spain, lots of countries use these kind of ships that were either three or four masted ships and they had a large

aft castle, so very similar to the forecastle. This would be on the aft side obviously the stern side um, and they would use a lot of cannons, but they would all be on the top deck because at the time no one can really figure out how to use cannons below decks that would not also risk the ship capsizing in the water due to due to water coming in through the gun ports. So they were all on the top decks, and uh, they were not terribly maneuverable.

They were pretty top heavy with all those Yeah. So like you can imagine if you had to take a pretty dramatic turn to the to port or starboard that with that top heavy you could capsize the ship. Yeah, and in fact that did happen, uh in one notable case that we'll talk about in a second. But those were the types of chips that were used by like like Columbus and Magellan. Absolutely. Yeah. The if you've heard about the the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,

those were all carricks. Uh. They In fact, as I recalled, Columbus called one of them a cow because he felt that it steered that way. So but then we move forward into the days of good King Henry the Eighth, one of the most enlightened, uh egalitarian rulers in English history. That's what he's known for. It. Yeah, that that, and you know, being brutal and petty and uh and petulant. Yes, um, hey, look I know King Henry the Eighth. King Henry the

eighth is a friend of mine, all right. So at the Georgia Renaissance Festival anyway, and the guy who plays him does it perfectly because he's like he's like a three year old having a timper tentrum all day long. He's jovial and and angry. Yeah, that's terrific. At any moment he could, he could demand for your head on a pike. But Henry the seventh. So, Henry the Eighth's father was the first king to really start to establish

an official navy. Although although most of his naval ships were converted merchant ships, yes, that's exactly right, they weren't designed to be warships. He was essentially saying, hey, that boat, you have it belongs to the crown now and merchants will be like, alright, I guess I work for you now,

all right, you're paying the checks. So yeah. So Henry the eighth decided to start commissioning actual warships to be built for the English Navy, and one of the first ones was called the Mary Rose, named after one of Henry the Eighth's siblings, a beloved sister of his who did not lose her head. No, no, Mary Rose did not lose her head. Um. Yeah, So the mary Rose was a pretty phenomenal ship. They managed to do a

couple of different things. First of all, it was one of the first ships of the English Navy to have a carvel hull. So there are two major types of holes at the time that this ship was built. There was the carvel style and the clinker style. The clinker style was older and it was done by overlapping boards, so that think of it like shingles on a roof. So that's what the hull was like. It wasn't smooth. It was the shingle depends like the opposite of water dynamic.

It was hydrodynamic, yeah, exactly. It was not as maneuverable. It also had lots of other problems. You could end up having leaks as well. Carvel was a way of having these be end to end. That's where you get that smooth ship appearance and uh and it was kind of a revolutionary way of building ships and it also made them even sturdier. Actually, the way that they came

to build these and put them together. You had a keel that that's the backbone of your ship, and then you put a frame on it, and then you would lay out the boards to side by side and watertight that's an important part. Yeah, they put a lot of calk in there to keep it watertight. Good. So yeah, otherwise your ship is not so much a ship as it is a collection of boards is going to get you very wet very soon. So then another innovation that came about was due to Henry saying, hey, I want

more guns on this thing. Henry had a lot of enemies in Europe. He did not make friends easily. I can't imagine why. Actually made friends pretty easily, but he forgot them really easily too. So yeah, he he decided that he wanted to have gun ports cut into the side of the hull in order to have more cannons aboard,

and shipbuilders were not excited about this idea. As we discussed earlier, cannons were typically kept on the top decks at the time because they were afraid of I mean, anytime you've got extra holes in the side of your chip, Yeah, you got a place where water can come in, especially during stormy weather. That was the big one, uh, the actual weather phenomenon, not the song. So they wanted to have some way of having these gun ports used without

sinking the ships. So they the shipbuilders ended up coming up with an innovation for special gun ports that had these covers, these heavy lids that could slam down in place and were water tight when they were closed, but then could be opened for action or battle so that the cannon could be wheeled out on these big gun carriages. We'll talk about those in a little bit in the second half. But then you could you know, wheel the guns out and fire. And this would allow you to

have guns still above the water line. Obviously you can't go below it, but it would also provide ability to have more stability at the base of the ship. Not that it helped out the Mary Rose. You see the Mary Rose, well, she was a pretty spectacular ship. Her her full crew component was supposed to be around four

hundred men. That's a big, big shop. I mean, most of the boats I've been on, like even even the ships I've been on have been schooners, which would never have supported like maybe maybe a crew of a dozen would be right, but four hundred now on a rating party, Like if you wanted to go and invade, say France, which you know Henry wanted to do that all the time, if you wanted to do that, then that number could

swell up to seven people aboard this one ship. And keep in mind it was it was shoulder to shoulder if you had four hundred, so crew quarters were incredibly tight if it was completely full like that. So in so we're talking more than thirty years after she had been launched, the Mary Rose sank and it might have been because she was too top heavy. She was it was on a mission to blockade some French ships too.

It was during an actual altercation with France, and as she was taking a turn, the story is that she took a bad wind. The wind hit her at just the right angle just as she was making a tight turn, and she was so top heavy. Yeah, she started to turn over and then those those lids were opening up and that was allowing water in through the gun ports

and then sank. Hundreds of scale atins have been recovered from this, uh, this wreck at least I think it's something like a hundred and twenty nine so maybe not hundreds, but more than a hundred um so, yeah, it was. The wreck has been largely recovered. It was I think in the nineteen seventies rediscovered pretty phenomenal. So this style of ship ended up being the style of choice during Henry's reign and for the first part of Elizabeth's reign as well. Keeping in mind we had a couple of

monarchs in between the two. But then Elizabeth also began to look at a different type of ships. So in seven you had Sir Walter Raleigh commissioning the h M s arc Rally. It was a galleon class ships, so no no longer carricks and uh galleon from the old French word galleon are meaning little ship to me and really freaking huge ship, yeah, because that's the way language works. The Spanish were really well known for their galleons. The

Spanish fleet was mainly of galleons. But this one was and I used the term loosely by Queen Elizabeth the First in seven for five thousand pounds. Yeah, yeah, bought because well Rally was was constantly in debt. Was Yeah, he owed the crown a lot of money. So really, by bought, she just cut his debt by five thousand pounds, and I guess he didn't really have anything to say about that, which, okay, let's let's be clear here. Elizabeth the First was no Henry the Eighth, but she inherited

some of Hank's you know, attitude. Yeah, she was, can I can I call she was? She was determined, you know, she was absolutely determined, and in every way that is great because she was able to maintain her stance and power. She was able to maintain England's sovereignty. She she made the hard choices that needed to be made. She did, but she is probably the worst possible words. She didn't that power and capacity as as she said in black Adder,

she had the constitution of a concrete elephant. Uh but yes, So anyway, this galleon class huge improvement over the Carrot class. So it had two gun decks. At an upper gun deck the weather deck and a lower gun deck which was actually one deck down. Uh. It had a double forecastle, a quarter deck, and a poop deck. The two gun

decks were incredibly effective. The helmsman controlled the ship via tiller on the poop deck, so the poop deck was elevated enough so that the helmsman could navigate and see over the forecastle, because otherwise you're kind of looking at your looking at a ship and you're thinking like, yeah, I know I need to steer it, but I can't see any landmarks. Not like they had a video screen, so yeah, you couldn't pull it. There's a Spanish galleon off the port, bell bring it up on screen. I

wouldn't work. You couldn no make it. So back in this day, but the galleon class again big leap forward. So we start seeing an evolution in various ship building and ship classes over this time. Now for large part they are just improvements over existing types of ships. By the time you get to the eighteenth century, you start seeing a new type of ship and it's all based upon the same kind of stuff that Henry was concerned with.

See the reason why Henry really wanted to have those extra gun decks so that they could do a maneuver called broadsides. Broadsides where you present the broad side of your ship, so you know you're not coming straight at your enemy. You present the broadside because that's where all your cannons are. Yeah, that's the useful bit for you, and especially if you can catch another ship as it's coming straight on heading towards you, you can fire very

effectively at them before they have time to really fire you. Right, So laying on broadsides means you just fire all the guns on that side facing the enemy vessel, and you're bound to do some pretty major damage. So with that tactic in mind, it started to guide shipbuilders in the way they wanted to build warships. So by the UH the early to mid eighteenth century, the the Board of Admiralty began to order new ships of the line and a ship of the Line was designed speci typically for this.

The battle tactic was that you would line up all of your ships in a column, so you would have your various ships of the line built for war one behind the other, and then ideally when you came upon your enemy, you would maneuver in such a way where your entire line of ships can all lay on broadsides in a in a sequence against your enemy, and it was devastating. So if you made a mistake in that maneuvering phase, it was game over. It was almost guaranteed

to end up causing uh, you know, failure. So they ordered twelve of these in seventeen fifty eight, and uh one of those would be the HMS Victory. And they wanted to have big gun decks. They wanted to be able to withstand a lot of damage, and so it had to be, uh, something really really spectacular. And this was also the same year that a particular person who ends up being incredibly important in the history of the HMS Victory was born, Lord Nelson. So Lord Nelson very

important figure in history. This is sort of the coming a stuff you missed in history class episode. But you know, we've got a lot more to say, and we're gonna talk specifically about the Victory and what made her so special in just a moment. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back, and now it's seventeen sixty five and the HMS Victory is ready to launch. It had been prepared in the old single dock in Chatham's Royal Dockyard, and

she was pretty useful ship. They she she saw action and lots of engagements, not just not just the most famous one which everyone remembers, the Battle of Trafalgar. I mean I remember it there well, you know, not personally, but I've I've seen I've seen statues and I've read about it. But also she was used in the American Revolution, not by the Americans obviously, also the French War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic War, clearly, you know that's

another one. And then it was the flagship of Vice Admiral Nelson, So she would end up being recommissioned in eighteen o eight. We'll talk specifically about that in a little bit. But also then was serving in the baltic Um. She switched to harbor service eventually, which meant that she was kind of used for dignitaries. It was a residence, it was a tender boat like. It was kind of the English Navy's way of saying, we're really proud of this particular ship. She has served us. Well, we don't

want to scrap her. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of out to pasture, but not in the dead way. And the look at this really beautiful old cow, right, yeah, she's she's she's a good old cow. She's a good old cow. And as far as I know, no one ever described her as a cow. Um. She actually steered quite well. So let's talk about what went on with the construction of this thing. I mean, it was a massive undertaking.

This was not as big a ship as some of the ones that Henry had commissioned back in his day, but was so sophisticated and so well put together that it required a lot of work. So the construction crew of HMS Victory was a sizeable one of around two hundred fifty men. And according to the resources I was looking at, they looked at a lot of a lot of wood. Yeah, like like a hundred acres of forest.

That's some six thousand mature oak trees. Um were used to provide the wood for the ship, along with some fur almond, pine um. Mostly all taken from the forests of Kent and Sussex, which is good because if it taken in from the hundred acre wood Winnie the po would be homeless. Now at that time, trees were selected carefully for their size, right, they had to. They had to sit there and look specifically like, well, we need this size to make these certain planks, and only that.

But there were certain natural parts of trees that became in really useful. Yeah. Yeah. The the largest of them were like these oaks that were thirty ft high. Others were forked or had these special y shaped branches that would allow for particular bits to be made from a single piece of wood, thus making it stronger than it otherwise would be. Right, instead of having to make a joint between two pieces of wood, the natural joint of the y shaped oak meant that they didn't have to

to engineer that. It was already built into it, so they didn't have to worry about that being a weak point. It was pretty phenomenal. So they built the keel first, That of course, is the backbone. That's the part that runs along the very bottom of the ship. Yea. And then they've built the frame. And normally what you would do is you would season the wood for the ship, and by season we mean dry it out. Yeah, you

want to get all the moisture out. You want to you want those boards to shrink as much as they can possibly shrink, because what does shrink as it looses moisture? And if you and if you shrink it after it's built, then you've got that loose collection of planks that's gonna get you very wet. You get a leaky a leaky bill. And also, you know, this would also mean that they ship itself would be more resilient to damage, it would be stronger. So normally you would season would over several

months because you don't want to take too long. Usually these ships when they're being built, they're being built for a specific purpose. Yeah, yeah, you've got an order out and so it kind of needs to be filled in a certain period of time. Maybe maybe war is going on or war is imminent, and so there's a there's a very strong incentive to get this thing built. But in this case, the wood wound up being seasoned over a period of several years. Yeah, because peace broke out. Yeah,

I know, it's so irritating. You're sitting there, you're like, oh, man, twelve ships of the line. Peace breaks out, and then suddenly everyone's like, well, a bunch of workers just ticking the desk. No need for us to build that. There's no no rush now, might as well just leave that wood under the canvas. So it's seasoned for three years

as opposed to six months. So it was well and truly seasoned by the time the Victory construction started up again, and it meant that the ship, when it was fully built, was much more resilient than it would have been if they had just been seasoned for a few months. So it ended up being a great thing for the ship, um, even though I'm sure the people who were designing it and building it and paying for it were a little irritated. Now, the upper deck has a lot of nails in it.

You know, you gotta you gotta hammer down all the planks so that it's a sturdy place for people to people and cannons to travel across. So that means that you had to have a lot of nails. And I thought was fascinating that the if you were to take all the iron and copper nails out of the upper deck, first of all, the British would be so mad at you, super super man, like you just took the top of

our boat. Uh, your ship. I know it's a ship, but it would be two tons of iron and copper nails just just for that upper deck now the bottom of the hole here. Yeah, it's coated in more copper sheeting. Well okay, originally it was coated in a mixture of oil and brimstone, and this was in order to keep stuff like barnacles off of the sides of the ship

to prevent damage to it um. Eventually, in sight that would be replaced by a coating of copper sheeting to to really keep the um the ship worms out of it, which aren't worms at all, but rather burrowing so saltwater clams. Yeah, nobody, nobody wants that. No, that's that's bad news. So yeah, I end up being a little bit, a little bit

on the expensive side. Uh. In the time that was built, it cost sixty three thousand, one d seventy six pounds sterling, which is now close to about twenty million pounds, which is almost thirty four million in US dollars as of this afternoon's exchange rates. Wow. Yeah, so not not a cheap boat ship. So let's talk about how how how she measures up. So she's she's two hundred twenty seven feet long, which is uh sixty nine and she's fifty one ft ten inches wide at our widest point, which

is nearly sixteen meters. And if you wanted to completely deck out this ship, like you wanted every single post filled, how many people would would it be? Eight hundred and twenty one? That one would be the captain ah or Nelson for when it was his fly ship. But yeah, eight hundred and twenty one. So that means that you would actually divide that up into UM two four hundred and sixty men for a shift, and then the rest would be taking care of the ship. So we'll talk

about that in a little bit too. Because the life aboard a ship was special, y'all. So she was designed to carry one hundred cannons on three gun decks, so doing doing one better for him. The eighth ships three gun decks, So you had the weather deck, the top deck, that one had some guns, then you had the next deck down the mid gun deck, and then next the one down was the lower gun deck. And they also if you looked at the gun decks, the heavier guns

are on the lowest gun deck. Yeah, except for the two heaviest of them all, but I'll talk about those special in the second. So total, she had a hundred four guns during the battle at Trafalgar, So she had the the you know, the hundred cannons plus four. Her first broadside during that battle would have weighed one point twenty five tons. So if you added up all the shot that came out of that broadside, that's how heavy

it would be. And it was actually a greater armament on board that ship than was used by the entire British army during the Battle of Waterloo. So if you looked at all the artillery that they used, that was dwarfed by what was on this one ship. Okay, but you said that there were different types of cannons on it, right, Yeah, So you often will hear about cannons being referred to as as a certain like number and then called pounder.

And that's not the pound weight of the cannon at all, because I mean, because some of them are like thirty two pounders. Yeah, pounder. You're like, well that that cannon doesn't sound I could carry a thirty two pound cannon. Yeah, No, thirty two pounder refers to the weight of the shot being used, not the weight of the cannon. So the cannon was weighing more like three point five tons now

that you put them on a carriage. So they would actually be on a on a thing that has wheels, right, it would have like two wheels in it or four wheels, and be on this carriage, and the carriage it's off would be secured to the ship by giant ropes. Because here's the thing. When you fire a cannon, you get that opposite reaction and the cannon rolls backward, right, So the ropes have to be there otherwise the cannon rolls all yeah, yeah, you just lost half your crew because

you fired a gun. Um, So the thirty two pounders were firing thirty pound shot. Those were on the lower gun deck. So your mid gun deck had twenty four pounder guns and the upper deck had the twelve pounder guns. But then you had the two biggins. They were smashers. These were sixty eight pounders. They fired shot that weighed

sixty eight pounds. They were meant to be used at the very four of the ship when you were amy like you were heading toward a ship, so that you could just completely decimate that thing before you even get there. And I know, decimate means that I would only really eliminate ten percent of the ship. They would colloquially decimate, thank you. So shooting one of these guns was an

incredibly complex affair. You had had a crew of six per cannon, and each person on that crew had a very specific duty, and they would be numbered actually numbers one through six rather than names, because in battle you really can't hear a whole lot, so you wanted to simplify things as much as so. Number one would be the person whose job it is to aim and fire the cannon, and then you had people whose job it was to raise or lower the barrel of the cannon

with a spike. Uh. They would be on either side, and one of them would be number two and the other one would be number five because you numbered them by the by going around the cannon, So two and five they were in charge of adjusting the height of the barrel, and they had to use spikes to do it because otherwise, you know, you have to have the leverage. You would never be able to lift this on your own.

Then you had a person whose job it was to sponge the gun so or well, actually number three technically would be the person loading it, so they'd be loading it with the shot and with the powder. But then number four would be sponging the gun. Sponging means that you would use a wet sponge to plunge down the barrel of the cannon after you had just fired it.

The reason for this would be to extinguish any still burning gunpowder, because you want to load the next powder in for the next shot, and if you did it while there was still something burning there, you could prettymaturely. Yeah, so then you just lose that powder. Plus you could possibly end up seriously injuring or killing someone on your crew. So this was a very important part of it. And

then you had the powder monkey. Powder monkey was usually a kid, usually one of the youngest members of the crew, usually small and quick, and their job was to run down to where the all the all the the the powder was kept exactly so that was their job, was to make sure that the cannon was still having enough powder. And it didn't, then they had to run down and grab some more. So, yeah, you would fire this this cannon,

you would actually uh, it would rock it back. After it was fired, you would have the sponger sponge it really quickly to extinguish anything. You would have the loader loaded up and then you would have to have the whole crew pushing this three and a half ton carriage to move it back into position out the gun ports so you could fire it again. Now, if you were on the top deck, the weather deck, you didn't have to move and over it. At a gunport, you just

had to get it over, get it to the starting point. Yeah, so you would still have to move it, but it wouldn't be like trying to aim for the little gunport anymore. And these different types of shot, yeah, including cannonballs. Yep. That's so do damage to the whole of the enemy ships or possibly a fort if you're aiming at that that kind of thing. Bar shot, Yeah, that's to take out rigging. So rigging is the stuff that I think of it like tension wires that help hold a mast up.

If you've ever seen the stuff that people are quickly climbing up and it looks like a little like a cargo net type thing, that's the rigging. And the rigging is designed so it distributes the forces that are put against a mast, particularly when the sales are unfurled, so that it doesn't snap in half. So yeah, that that bar shot destroys rigging and sales too. Shot as well. Chain shot super nasty. So imagine two balls with a chain connecting them. It would fly out and hit things

like a mast and end up splintering the masks. So you can knock a mass down in a single hit if it was aimed just right, or you know, cut like three or four sailors in half. That could happen to Yeah, grape shot was it was the other great thing for killing a lot of people. Yeah. It's essentially shotgun, a shotgun blast, and it's just for a cannon, so

you've got lots of little, little bit little bits. Uh. These are also what those smashers that I talked about, they would often be loaded with grape shot because you're on the forecastle. Yeah, you're at a good high angle you at down to the other ship and you just wipe out the people who are on it. Yeah, it's I mean, it's war. It's a brutal business. So yeah,

definitely tough stuff. So uh so, okay, so down in those sleeping quarters, yeah, uh so, I mean did they have enough room to have everyone, I mean, all eighty one people asleep in there at the same time. Well, first of all, the admiral has his own room, right, No, they did not. That's a good question, but no, they did not. Know. What they would do is they would sleep in shifts. Uh yeah, and most you would have four hundred and sixty people asleep there. When they were eating,

you might have six hundred people in there. Uh. So the gun decks served as the crew sleeping quarters. So you didn't have any room to waste on one of these ships. So the crew did not have dedicated rooms to sleep. Yeah, it was not like a little well here's your state room, that wasn't it. And and there was a huge scramble to to get everything out of the way. Whenever you had to roll the cannons, you had to clear the decks. You had to immediately clear him.

So the way it would typically work is that if you wanted to go to sleep and it was your time to sleep, you would sling your hammock on the gun deck and you were allotted twenty one inches for your hammock and no more. So don't complain about cruise ships, y'all. Yeah, no talk about And then these were all interconnected type hammocks too, so you were like shoulder to shoulder with

people next to you. Um. Also, there's no ventilation down there, uh, and very little light, so dark, stuffy, filled with men on in hammocks. If if Pirates of the Caribbean is sounding less and less sexy to you, it should non accurate representation of what naval life is really like. Um. Also, yeah, there's no way you could. You'd have to have a crew like three times the sides of any of these ships.

But anyway, very few of them were Johnny Depps. Yeah no, and even the Johnny Depp ones, they were just Johnny Depp for that time, much lower standards back then anyway. Um. Yeah, So you would have this really close space, closed in space where all of them would be sleeping at a time, like the all of them being four and sixty of them, or if it was time to mess to eat, you would have six hundred at a time. You would have messmates that would be about eight to twelve crew members

that you would count. Those are the people you eat with, And the duty of the person to cook would rotate through the messmates. So on a particular day, it might be your day to cook for your messmates, and the ship's cook would oversee all of that. So the ship's cook's job was really to make sure that nobody messed with the galley and burned down the ship, because anytime you're using any kind of heat on board the ship, and yeah, so not not comfortable, not luxurious at all.

Now that the admiral's story a little different, but we'll talk about that in a second. If you happen to get injured, uh not sick, they did have a sick quarters area, which was not a popular place to be when you were sick. You didn't get your rum ration for one thing, so a lot of people when they got sick wouldn't report to Yeah, you know, you don't want to get out of your rum so well, you know, I mean. And the thing was that that you know you you didn't get water on chips, no, because water

would go bad. I mean they would. They would keep water as much as they could, but they would have to freshen it all the time because the water would get scummy and nasty. So they end up using beer most of the time instead. So each say there was given a ration of a gallon of beer a day and about um, I think a half pint of rama day.

But you would get it like a quarter at a time, and to be fair, at that point in history, a lot of people were drinking more alcohol than water because it was a much cleaner way of getting a nutrients and be liquid. Yeah. So if you need to have surgery, you have surgery, you go to the or lop deck. Surgery was pretty much which limb do you need lopped off? That was pretty much the extent of surgery. Um. Picture is so romantic. Yeah, but then you're able to tell

your part from the starboard. Uh, and then you had the the the actual construction of the ship. But she had three masts and a bow sprit, so each mast required seven trees to put one mast together. Yeah. Yeah, they were bound together with these iron hoops and hundreds of yards of ropes. Originally they were um, they were larger than that. They weren't seven trees bound together. But this was a construction that was implemented later on in

the ship's life. And I understand that the tops of the mass were actually made of a different type of wood very specific reason. Yeah, fur and pine, because they're so light and springy, so they wouldn't snap in the heavy winds. They would they would bend with them. You had twenty seven miles of rigging that's that supportive rope structure I was talking about earlier that keeps the masts UH safe by distributing those forces across the deck of the ship. And then we can talk about the sales.

Have had a lot of sales for for acres worth of canvas. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of sales. And this was all hand woven, y'all. Yeah, it took something like I read that one sale, one of the largest sales, took twelve hundred man hours to finish sewing. So that's incredible. They had um so thirty seven sales total six thousand five D square yards or five thousand four D square meters.

An additional twenty three brought on board just in case. Yeah, you know, you might have to replace a sale, you have to repair one or swap one out, so you know, anything could happen, So twenty three extra sales, lots of canvas on board that ship. They also had twenty six miles of rope. Although when you're on board a ship, you don't call it rope, you call it line. You pick up that line, you don't pick up the rope. I once got yelled at we're talking about coiling rope

and that's not rope, that's line. But I often use the wrong lingo in whatever situation I'm in. So I am a land lover. I mean I love boats and ships. I love all the lingo. But I'm certainly no sea salt. No. I just just just someone who appreciates it. So, the largest rope or line aboard this ship was built for the anchor, which makes sense, right, So you want that to be pretty strong shirt, Yeah, like a like Hulk Hogan's pythons. It was nineteen inches in circumference. It's a

big rope. Continue. Yeah, So what you're gonna do when the HMS Victory's anchor line goes wild over you? I guess not everything works in Hulk Hogan type of metaphors. By the way, if you wonder how big nineteen inches

is in metric, we're talking for cimes. Now, if you wanted to go to full sale where you're unfrolling all the sales necessary to go as fast as you possibly can, by the way, you don't under correct wind conditions because you don't want to just do that at any old time, because because the thing is is that if you catch too much wind in your sails, you're going to potentially damage your masts or or the rigging that's supporting the mass. Right,

you don't necessarily like to go faster. It all depends upon what the situation is. You don't necessarily need to unfroll every single sale and then you go faster. It doesn't work that way. All depends upon the strength of the wind and the winds direction. But if you wanted to go full sail, so however you want to interpret that, Um, that was a big deal. I mean if you're especially if you're going from you know, complete standstill the full sale. It took a hundred and twenty crew members in order

to do it. But but but an experienced crew could do it in six minutes. Reportedly, that's pretty incredible. It's it's kind of like their gun crew the HMS Victory was really proud of their gun crews who were able to fire and reload a cannon in nineties seconds, which is when you think about how complicated that that whole processes and how much you have to do, it's pretty

impressive to them and a half between shots a long time. Yeah. Yeah, I also read that they could um that they could clear the decks and prepare the cannons for firing, and a dead ten minutes. That's pretty incredible too, because you're

talking about having to move everything else all the way. Now, Graham, when you were done sleeping, you had to put your hammock up before you went on duty, you know, it was, and some of the hammocks would be put up in the rigging, which could actually help protect some of the various parts of the ship should you come under fire. But then you had the galley, which had a single stove, one stove, and it wasn't a really big stove. You

don't want a huge stove. You don't want to again, you don't want to have a big source of fire exactly. It had an automatic rotating spit for roasting animals, which was not done frequently. You could, if you were an officer, be allowed to bring a certain number of animals aboard to be slaughtered at your command to be served up for dinner. Because usually you'd be eating uh, salt packed meat, so it would be really dry and tough and you'd be eating hard take. Yeah yeah, Hartech biscuits with lots

of weevils in it. Yeah, well, I mean the weevils are extra protein. Right, Yeah, well you always choose the lesser of two evils, but the the don't blame me. Patrick O'Brien wrote that joke. So the spit, you might say, well, how was it an automatic spit? I mean, we're talking about a ship that was made in the mid eighteenth century. How could it be automatic? H ha clever idea. So

the stove has a chimney. You have to have a chimney to vent the smoke, right, So in this chimney they placed a fan so the hot air would turn the fan. The fan was connected by pulleys to a rotating spit, so it would end up as the fan turned, it turned the spin spit, so you would actually have an automatic rotating spit to cook your delicious recently slaughtered animal on Summing vegetarian alright, so um, but no, you know, and again luxurious treat. If you're on board a ship

you usually didn't have such such luxuries. That's pretty incredible. Um. So, yeah, we had talked about the beer, we talked about the rum. The victory had seven anchors of various sizes. The two main ones were used to hold the victory's position in deep water. And we're located on the starboard side. Um and as we mentioned earlier, it could carry boats. Yeah, carried not just one or two, it carried several boats, six of them. So, first of all, no lifeboats. No

lifeboats aboard the Victory. Why because it takes too much time to lower a lifeboat down to the water. It just was not a possibility. So if if sailors were to fall off the ship, it sucks to be them. Yeah, you might get a a hammock thrown to you to make a kind of sort of flotation device. But yeah, and sailors were not swimmers. They most of them had

no idea how to swim. Yeah, pretty incredible life. Like, you are trusting your life to a vessel, and if you get off that vessel while it's a mid trip, you're pretty much doomed to die. Okay, now that's that's cool. I swim pretty well, and and I and I'm terrified of the open ocean for for the reason that it's not like solid ground, and I don't like the idea of being able to just fall infinitely, I mean not infinitely, but really just stopped for a while. Well yeah, but

at any rate, So these boats, six of them. There there were. There was a launch boat, which was the largest of all of them. It was thirty four ft long or tin point three meters. There was a barge, three cutters, and a pennace, so pennace is a very

small ship. Pirates used them occasionally, but normally they were used as tender boats, and most of these were used as tender boats, which meant that you would get people to and from land to the ship or from another ship, like if you if the admiral need to meet with captains in a fleet, they would all tender over to the usually to the admiral's flagship and have dinner aboard the flagship. But the the other neat thing was that if the winds were calm and you needed to move

the victory, what do you do? I mean, the victory didn't have oars. It wasn't like a gal a galley or anything like that. So they ended up using these boats to tow the victory. So if the victory were either too damaged like the sales had been in tatters, or if the winds had been calmed, they could use these boats, many of which did have oars, and actually tow. It's not very fast. But it does work. Now. The admiral's quarters we'd saved for last, and these were relatively

luxurious compared to everything else on board the ship. Not exactly you know, staying at the ritz, but still much nicer. So the admiral had use of the Great Cabin, which was located under the poop deck, so it's in the aft section of the ship, you know, the stern section, and it took up one quarter of the upper gun deck and had four major sections to it. So it had like a meeting room where the admiral could meet with people, had a dining room with a full dining table,

the bedroom area he had his own um toilets. On ships, they're called heads. Didn't mention the head, but yeah, if you needed to go to the bathroom on board the HMS Victory and you were a common sailor, you had to go to the bow the ship, very front, and down at the bow were two benches that had holes

in them right above the water. I've heard that this could be a little bit precarious to get down into that there was a certain amount of scrambling, a little bit of dexterity needed, so you know, don't hold it for too long, because that's just gonna make things worse. Yeah, you ended up having to uh to to to position yourself on a on a on a bench with a hole in it above the ocean and then do your

duty and then climb back up to uh finished work. Now, the the officers were allowed to use a more secluded head that was on either side of the ship that had kind of semi privacy, not a whole lot more than say the bow, but a little more. First of all, they were the only ones allowed to use them. Then the admiral had two in his quarters, one on either side of the ship. So I guess you know he could hold it for as long as he wanted to do. And I'm closest to this one, um so uh yeah

so and his was under the poop. Anyway, we we are. We are setting headshaking records in this episode. I think you know what, Chris Palette would be so proud of us right now. He would be making so many more poop jokes though if he were here. So, the admiral also had a swinging cot like he had a cut that was suspended from the ceiling. Uh that uh that he slept in it wasn't much larger than the hammocks that his men slept in, so it wasn't like he had a luxury. It's huge bed, but at least you're

not pumping shoulders with all your exactly. And as we said, even the admiral's quarters would be cleared for action if there were some sort of battle, and cannon would be rolled in there and every single space would be used for it. So sure, sure, and you had to clear everything out because because it would create extra shrapnel if something did come in through, you didn't want any any extra stuff bumping around to you know, impale you Yeah, no, no,

impaling tends to be bad. Yeah. Um. So, in around eighteen o three, the Victory had really large repair work done back at UM at Chatham, that Royal shipyard that we mentioned it was built in UM, during which a whole lot of things that we've just been talking about were implemented. She she had fallen into some amount of disrepair during the seventeen eighties or so, was refitted briefly as a hospital ship and very nearly ended up being a prison ship. UM right up until the HMS Impregnable

was not impregnable at all. UM it was. It was sank in seventeen ninety nine and the Navy decided to send the victory and for repair. If it had not then then the history would be very different. So we're going to talk about the the probably the most famous moment in the victories. UH service as a ship in the English Navy and later the British Navy. I guess we could just say it the British Navy from the

very beginning. Henry the eighth had no problem with that, although Scotland and Wales weren't always on board with it. So October twenty one, eighteen o five the Battle of Trafalgar, So this was the most famous action that the Victory played a part in. This was the one where Admiral Nelson led a fleet of twenty seven ships against Admiral

Pierre Charles Villeneuve. Villeneuve had thirty three ships, so twenty seven verses thirty three, and Nelson very um optimistically said that the numbers didn't matter at all and he expected to take at least twenty of Villeneuve's shots in this action. So Nelson was given like every opportunity to protect himself UH and decided not to do it. Nelson was told, hey, you know, you can come and join this other ship and we can watch the battle happen, like we can

plan everything out, but you can come join me. Yeah, we'll hang out and we'll see how it goes. And Nelson said, nope, I'm gonna be in the thick of it. And said, well, tell you what, why don't you put the victory behind this other ship and let the other ship be the first one into battle and us take the brunt of the damage, and then you'll follow right up behind and that way. No, Nope, victory is going to be right in the very front. We're gonna, you know,

always go straight at him. That's another Patrick O'Brien quote attributed to Admiral Nelson. So he took command of the victory. He was on on deck, and they closed with the other ships. The other ships began to fire upon the Victory as soon as it got into range, and the Victory took several hits. Uh withstood them. I mean it was fine. Uh. They did start killing a lot of his men, though his clerk died almost immediately, his assistant

clerk died shortly thereafter. R and then Nelson ended up being shot by a sharpshooter on one of the other on the redoubtable I believe was was the ship where the sharp shooter was. And and they the guy also that Nelson was told by the way, you don't need to wear your coat that has all of your your metals on it, because that makes you a target. Yeah, and he said, no, it's too late to shift coats, and plus these are military orders here, so I'm wearing it.

He got shot in the chest. It hit his spine. He was taken to the orlop deck with a surgery deck, where he said that he expected he would die because he said he could feel blood every time his heart beat, he could feel blood starting to fill up his chest cavity. Uh, he was. He lost all feeling in his legs and he was getting very weak. He was feeling hot and thirsty, so they fanned him and brought him essentially lemonade and

wine for him to drink. And he kept on asking about how the battle was going and uh so the battle continued above decks and uh and he held on for three hours after being shot. Um still wasn't entirely sure how the battle was going to come out. He had made his arrangements, telling uh, telling his crew to leave all of his things to his mistress back home, and then he died and the victory ended up being victorious. Along with the other British ships, they won that battle

despite the overwhelming odds. Nelson was revered as an incredible hero. He was his his loss was mourned throughout the British Navy. People went on about how this, this man who had shown great bravery through multiple engagements, had died so heroically. Some people might say it was a little cavalier, that he had a lot of opportunities to perhaps have a more prudent approach, But it certainly doesn't make as heroic a story. And I don't mean to disparage Admiral Nelson.

He was clearly a military genius, and I am not uh he was. He was, and I ultimately you could say he was not willing to put his men through

something that he himself was not willing to do. Sure, sure, there's certainly something to be said for that, And who knows what the outcome of that battle would have benefit had not been for for that decision of putting that really amazing warship on the very front of the line if nothing else, I mean, you could inspire your your men by the fact that you are you're so well, yeah,

so pretty incredible. So uh we said that. In eight o eight it was refitted again for service in the Baltic It was then retired as a harbor service vessel for quite some time, and then in nineteen twenty two, after more than more than a century of being in service in one form or another, the HMS Victory was placed into dry dock permanently. And what that means is that it's it's placed up on scaffolding um and no

longer in the water. The usually dry dock is where you bring a ship to to do repairs, to scrape off barnacles, to make sure that all the paint is smart as they would say, smartest paint um. But now she's a museum. You can go and visit the HMS Victory. You can walk the decks and explore it and see what the conditions were like. You can see how low the ceilings were on the gun deck and the fact that you had to watch your head or else you bonk it. You know, we are a little bit taller

than they were back then. But right, but um, but yeah, yeah, she and and as Simon said in his email, she is the oldest commissioned warship in the world. Yeah, pretty impressive. So if you ever have the opportunity, you should definitely go and visit the HMS Victory. One of the really interesting, uh you know, warships of history and certainly one that I would love to visit. I have not been aboard the Victory. I've been aboard some other famous warships, uh,

the Constitution, for example, but not not the Victory. So I'm hoping one day I'll be able to visit it. Yes, and if if you do want to do that visiting, I recommend that you go to the historic dockyard at Portsmouth in the UK. That's where you can find her. It would be cool of us to send you there, and she wasn't there. We would never do that. No, we wouldn't do that to you. All right, So that that wraps up this discussion. So yeah, you might wonder, well,

how did that have to do with technology? But truly, I mean this, this technology, this, this naval technology is what shaped world events. And yeah, it might not be an iPhone or a uh you know, an IBM computer, but it still falls in that realm. We love being able to tackle some of these historical ideas once in a while, So Simon, thank you so much for the suggestion. Yes, yes, especially when they involve Jonathan getting to do pirate voices.

That's really so yeah, guys, if you have. By the way, I know that the quote unquote pirate accent is not what they sounded like. That's thanks to Treasure Island. But anyway, why don't you send in any ideas you might have in future episodes of tech Stuff if you want to do that and come on and thenute you've always been too. So here's what here's what you gotta do. You gotta send us an email that addresses text up at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or

Tumbler or handle it. All. Three is tech Stuff H. S W. And we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works. Dot Com