Читать книгу The Sailing Frigate - Robert Gardiner - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTorrington’s new frigates were built in anticipation of a strategic situation that would be very different from what had gone before. Recent experience had been confined to war with the Dutch, a maritime trading nation like England, that had to bring their considerable commerce home through the narrow seas around the British isles. To achieve this the Dutch battlefleet could not avoid fighting its English equivalent, and the wars became a series of hard-fought slogging matches, usually in coastal or confined waters. Both navies had some small craft not committed to the line of battle, but more often than not these sloops and pinnaces were designed to serve the fleet as auxiliaries and not for the attack or defence of trade, which tended to be moved in large convoys screened by the battlefleets. As a result even commerce warfare was on a relatively large scale, typical examples being the unsuccessful assault on a 70-strong Dutch convoy sheltering at Bergen in 1665 or the infamous ‘Holmes’s bonfire’ – the destruction of 150 Dutch merchantmen in the Vlie anchorage – the following year. These were squadron actions where even the close escorts were usually small line of battle ships or whatever could be spared from the main fleets. In such circumstances there had been no call for specialist cruising ships.
SLR0393 This model of a Sixth Rate has ‘1706’ and ‘B.R.’ engraved on the supporting brackets, the initials of Benjamin Rosewell, who was appointed Master Shipwright at Chatham in that year. No ship of this type was built in 1706, so if the model was a celebration of his achievement, it probably represents a vessel he was associated with earlier in his career. One contender is the Flamborough of 1697 built at Chatham while Rosewell was jointly Assistant Master Shipwright with William Lee. The ship was lost at the end of 1705 after an epic battle with a French 54-gun ship, so it would be an appropriate memorial. Although this is pure speculation, William Lee is thought to have been a keen modelmaker, and he himself became joint Surveyor in 1706, so given the highly personal nature of the apprenticeship system, such a present to a friend or protégé is not unlikely. The model itself is similar in most important respects to the Lizard, the major difference being one less main deck port and rather less decorative work – both possibly the result of a more recent refit.
Those in England who had considered the nature of any future war with France expected Louis XIV’s expensive new battlefleet to be carefully husbanded, while the principal strategy became one of commerce warfare. Against the Dutch, England had been the predator, and in terms of merchant ships gained or lost, the net winner by a large margin. Now the boot was on the other foot: England, and its new ally the Netherlands, offered the tempting target of the world’s largest carrying trade, and although France initially confounded the experts by attempting a battlefleet strategy, the crushing defeats of Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692 put paid to this short-lived ambition, and heralded the beginnings of the obsession with commerce warfare that was to dominate French maritime thinking for two centuries.
Besides a novel strategic situation, the Royal Navy of the 1690s also faced new geographical challenges. The Dutch wars were largely fought in the Channel and North Sea, in coastal waters often so shoal that fleets would anchor to sit out the effects of an adverse tide; while damaged ships were assured of a friendly port at no great distance. However, the French war brought the prospect of operations off the wild and inhospitable Biscay coast, since the main French Atlantic base was at Brest. Furthermore, both British and Dutch trade in what a later era called the Western Approaches would be very exposed to flank attacks from French commerce raiders for large parts of its voyage, both outward and homeward bound.
Torrington’s innovative ships were clearly intended to meet the new circumstances. The emphasis was on all-weather capabilities (the 7ft freeboard to the gunports), habitability (a clear, well-aired lower deck to give the crew more reasonable conditions), and sailing qualities (the lower deck was set at the waterline to reduce the height of side, to make them more weatherly). They also had a high length-to-breadth ratio for speed, but were not as long as the three ‘galley-frigates’ built previously that were optimised for rowing; these were built specifically for operations against North African corsairs, and had a specially large crew of oarsmen (originally recruited from very reluctant Thames Watermen). It is tempting to see these ships as the inspiration for Torrington’s concept, since they were generally similar in layout – but so were most large merchantmen of the time, with a gunport or two fore and aft on an otherwise clear lower deck. The new frigates were equipped for rowing, but they had only half the number of oar ports and were never allocated an enlarged crew, so this was an auxiliary function, useful to give the ship some movement in flat calms and to manoeuvre in confined waters.
Perhaps most importantly, at about 105ft by 27ft and 360 tons they were small enough to be built in large numbers, and around thirty of these ships were to see service by the end of the war. They were the mainstay of the cruiser force, but in 1693 a modest programme of new Sixth Rates was put in hand. These were more conventional than the half-battery Fifths, and little original thought seems to have been given to their design. On 7 July 1693 the Admiralty requested ‘with all speed, a small, light, good sailing frigate … of the 6th Rate, to carry about 20 guns …’ The Navy Board committee on their design consisted of the Surveyor, the Comptroller and one other Commissioner, Capt Willshaw, and they came up with a wholly conventional single-decker, much like those that had been built for the past twenty years, armed with twenty sakers (approximately 6pdrs) and four 3pdrs. In total eighteen were built between 1693 and 1697, and there is no evidence that they varied in any substantial way one from another.
Their appearance as built is beyond doubt, since the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has a well-documented model, apparently of the Lizard, while a contract specification for the Swan confirms the details. However, the main features of this type can be seen in model SLR0393, which, although dated 1706, represents earlier practice.
In terms of the sea war, the conflicts of 1689-97 and 1702-12 might be seen as one long struggle against what the French called the guerre de course, the war on trade. Although this involved privateers – state-licensed private corsairs – and individual warships, what proved most difficult to counter was the hiring out of medium-sized warships to privateer consortia, who operated them in squadrons, sometimes in conjunction with naval forces proper (in convoy attacks the navy tackled the escorts while the privateers snapped up the merchantmen).
This had come about because the French battlefleet was largely laid up after 1692 and the state of French finances was parlous – as it usually was after a few years of war. This was a cheap form of maritime warfare, using otherwise idle assets; it was also nearly impossible to defeat by conventional means since the Anglo-Dutch navies could not spare enough ships and most of those available were not powerful enough to withstand these squadronal attacks. Having failed at both close blockade and hunting down the most notorious privateers, the allies responded with desperate ingenuity, attacking the ‘vermin’, as one naval officer put it, ‘in their holes’, trying amphibious assaults and a string of bombardments of privateer ports using bomb vessels and explosion boats – where the new Fifth Rates, with their ability to manoeuvre under oars, proved very useful in inshore support roles – but it was all to no avail. By the end of the first war, nobody in the allied admiralties believed the problem had been solved.
Nor did anyone believe the peace would last, so it was important to implement any lessons that could be gleaned. The half-battery Fifth Rates had suffered heavily in combat, so they were largely replaced after 1700 by more powerful fully two-decked 40-gun ships. Many losses had involved boarding, a tactic encouraged by the larger crews on French warships and privateers, whereas the English were more inclined to rely on gunnery. However, ships with open waists could not fight their guns while repelling boarders, so it was decided to build future cruisers ‘with a deck over the guns’, the idea being that the main battery might drive off the enemy ship even as its boarders fought for possession of the deck above. This was not the official reason, as given in the August 1702 order for Sixth Rates, the first of the newly declared war. These were to be ‘such a vessel as the Swan [of 1694] … the said ship to have 24 guns and to have a slight deck over the guns in the waist, as well to prevent any dangers which may happen from shipping seas, as for keeping the guns clear from the rigging which may fall upon the deck in time of action …’. However, there is evidence that a major preoccupation of the time was with ways of making the cruisers ‘defensible’ against boarding – one of the more bizarre involved spring-loaded explosive devices that could be fired from below to clear the upper deck, and this was actually tested on two ships in the 1690s.
SLR0397 The best example of the new pattern Sixth Rate with the ‘slight deck’ – in effect, a spar deck – over the battery is a model in the Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario that probably represents one of the first, the Nightingale of 1702. It shows the spar deck to be comprised of grating, a throwback to the early seventeenth century when the waist was often covered in this way. However, the Greenwich collection includes this model, which because of the number of gunports is usually catalogued as a 30-gun ship. In fact, the eleven main deck ports and light spar deck show it to be a Sixth Rate, although none of the Navy-built ships matches the detail. In December 1706 the Deptford officers were sent to look at a new private-venture building at Blackwall, and reported that the ship ‘… can carry 24 guns like the other Navy 6th Rates, but may conveniently have ports for 28’. She was purchased as the Aldborough and armed with only 24 guns. This model is made to a smaller than usual scale and at 1/64th (3/16th of an inch to the foot) the dimensions are a close fit to the Deal Castle, similarly purchased from a merchant builder. It may not be a firm identification, but it is certainly the right kind of ship – and it underlines the fact that most ships of this time had more gunports than guns.
The pink stern as shown off in a model of a Sixth Rate from about 1702, which also features the other innovation of the period, the spar deck over the gun battery. This suggests that a Sixth Rate of this design was seriously contemplated although none was actually built; the Fifth Rates that were built must have looked like scaled-up versions.
HHR13 US Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland
The search for improvement was to throw up a number of ingenious, if not downright odd, suggestions. In April 1702 the Lord High Admiral and the Navy Board met to discuss ‘a model lately made by the Surveyor of a 5th Rate Frigate with a deck over her guns, pink fashion, and the same being very well approved of’ the Navy Board was then ordered to build one at Woolwich ‘according to the said model’. The ship became the Tartar and two similar vessels, Falcon and Fowey, were also built. Other Fifth Rates ordered at this time were conventional 40-gun ships, but these were half-battery 32s, identical in layout and armament to those built previously, with the exception of these two noteworthy features. The deck over the guns has been dealt with, but what was meant by ‘pink fashion’?
This referred to a very narrow ‘pinched-in’ stern, the shape of which is perfectly illustrated by an exactly contemporary model in the US Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis [HHR13]. The advantages of the pink stern are demonstrated by this model in a way that no document could reveal. Unlike the framing of a square stern where the transom timbers are rather weakly connected to the main framing, the pink has almost a repeat of the bow timbering. Furthermore, instead of the traditional wide, largely glazed stern gallery that was such a good target for raking fire, the pink offers a very narrow prospect indeed. The disadvantages, though, do not take much searching out: the ship is so fine aft that the lack of buoyancy – ‘bearing’ as it was called at the time – would have made her very vulnerable to being pooped in a following sea. In fact, the Tartar’s captain had to apply for the replacement of the six lower deck demi-culverins (9pdrs weighing 24cwt each), four of which were carried aft, with 3pdr minions of 6cwt, the same calibre as the ship carried on the quarterdeck presumably for this very reason. His letter describes the ship, accurately, as built ‘in a different manner from’ any other Fifth Rate in the Navy.
SLR0400 The new Sixth Rates of 1710-12 were very low (note the highly unusual feature of sideways-opening gunports in the waist), virtually no rails or bulwarks to quarterdeck and forecastle, no spar deck, and no way of unofficially augmenting the 20 guns the new ships were established with. In fact, the Navy List of this period makes a clear distinction between the older 24s, with guns on the upperworks and a total sometimes exceeding 24, and the new 20s; even the Ordnance records for the period confirm that these ships did not carry more than 20 guns, under any circumstances. The model even lacks a figurehead, perhaps suggesting that it was still a matter of debate when the model was produced.
SLR0419 SLR0382 It used to be said that official Admiralty or Navy Board models were made as part of the design SLR0382 process, but as the more elaborate examples would take as long to build as the ships they depicted, this was manifestly untrue. There is plenty of documentary evidence that ‘models’ were produced at the same time as plans, but the references are to ‘solids’ – either full-hull block or half-models that could be carved quickly. Among the oldest that survive are these two, which represent opponents in the trade warfare of the conflict over Spanish Succession. Ludlow Castle (1707) was one of the 40-gun two-deckers built to replace the half-battery 32-gun ships, whereas Triton, a French 42-gun ship of 1697 captured in 1702, was typical of the threat they were built to face. Although the ships carried a roughly comparable armament, at 660 tons to 530, the French ship was 25 per cent larger. The larger tonnage went into a finer hull form, which usually meant better sailing qualities – indeed, a higher ratio of armament to tonnage became a feature (and, some said, a besetting sin) of British warship design in the eighteenth century. The model records the French ship’s very sharp lines, and is an early example of the Royal Navy’s consistent policy of analysing ships taken from its enemies in detailed surveys, plans and, in some cases, models.
SLR0406 There is an Admiralty draught of the Success, of 1712 with resembles SLR0400 very closely, except that it shows eleven ports a side and the channels have been raised to the mid-point of the gunports. Therefore, it is likely that the later Sixth Rates of the 1710-12 group looked more like this model – certainly after peacetime fitting out. It was a common phenomenon for ‘habitability’ to become a greater priority for cruising in peacetime, and the more extensive quarter galleries certainly suggest more concern for the captain’s comfort.
None of these expedients made a significant impact on the guerre de course, where French success put increasing pressure on the Admiralty to find a solution to mounting losses among the merchant fleet. In terms of cruiser design, they vacillated: after the pink-sterned experiments, they returned to two-decked 40s; these were widely criticized for poor sailing qualities, so there was a brief reversion to half-battery 32s, then back to 40s again; even the Sixth Rates were now considered over-built, and by 1710 the Surveyors of the Navy were instructed by the Admiralty to consider ‘what may most properly be done for her Majesty’s ships of the 6th Rate to render them better sailers’. The Surveyors proposed reducing the weight of their tophamper – especially the rigging – and recommended that in any future refit ‘all superfluous weight in their upper works’ be reduced, and for new construction the scantlings and room and space be ‘abated in many parts’ – in other words, they were to be more lightly constructed, with more space between the framing.
This was formalized the following year when the Admiralty, in setting out the pressing need for more ships of 40-guns and 20-guns, informed the Navy Board ‘that it was our opinion the 6th Rates should be built with one deck only and a small, low forecastle; that the 5th Rates ought to be made somewhat larger; and that neither the one nor the other should carry any guns on their quarterdecks; and that instead of a lion on their heads, it may be more convenient to place some very light figure thereon, or a painted board … ’. Among other things, this meant the end of the spar deck over the guns. The NMM model SLR0400 is a perfect depiction of the resulting ships.
The Navy’s official shipwrights are often accused of ultra conservatism, but English cruiser design is also indebted to at least one eccentric, wayward and amateur genius. Peregrine Osborne, Lord Danby was at times a spendthrift, a quarreller and a womaniser, but his overriding passion was ship design. His life-long enthusiasm for speed under sail began at an early age and his expensive hobby exposed his father, the Duke of Leeds and a leading minister in William III’s government, to satirical comment:
I must needs tell you he’s at great charges
For his son Danby’s Yachts and Barges.
However, his yachts and barges were successful enough to attract real admiration. Danby pursued a career of mixed success as a naval officer, but he was renowned in the fleet for his Bridget Galley, described by Sir Cloudesley Shovell as ‘an incomparable sailer’. Nominally a tender to his command, the 70-gun Resolution, the galley was operated by Danby as a speedy and highly successful privateer. Even his captain’s barge – again to his own design – was the envy of flag officers.
Exploiting his connections at Court, he went on to design the Royal Transport, a fast yacht for the king’s personal use which so impressed Czar Peter the Great during his visit that it was presented to him. There is a model in the naval museum in St Petersburg which claims to be this ship, but it is a nineteenth-century identification, and has none of the capacious accommodation the Royal Transport is documented as possessing. Furthermore, the rig of the model – sometimes described as the first identifiable schooner rig in history – is at odds with the evidence that at least one mast was square rigged.
SLR0394 Originally in the Mercury Collection, by tradition this model was known as the Carolina, a yacht converted from Danby’s Peregrine Galley. Although it is very heavily decorated, with a lot of accommodation aft like a royal yacht, this identification was dismissed by R C Anderson, who first catalogued it, because the dimensions did not fit, and plans and paintings attested to the yacht carrying a ship rig, whereas this model has only two masts. No other royal yacht fits the model’s characteristics either. However, John Franklin, an expert on Navy Board models, has since proved beyond reasonable doubt that official models used many other modelling scales besides a quarter-inch to the foot. In fact, this model has the proportions of 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.
