Age of Sail ship (74) construction

[Irbis]

Where would be a good place to find out (website or book, but in that case if possible something widely available or translated) how much raw materials went into constructing a sail warship? In title, I mentioned "74" but virtually any comparable vessel would do, I can try to recalculate values, anyway. Things like nails, ropes, sail material, wood, iron, bricks, etcetera.

I'd be also grateful for information how much supplies went on board and rough breakdown of the crew (as in, I did found rough numbers how many people were on board, but information more precise than just 'sailors/idlers/officers' or raw number of people on watch would be appreciated).

Thanks in advance!

[Eternal_Freedom]

If you'd asked this yesterday I could have dug out my Trafalgar Companion which goes into this in some detail. However, from memory it was something like double-figure acres worth of oak tress for hulls and decks, plus several tens of pine trees for masts and spars. A 74 would have ~600-700 or so men aboard.

Please bear in mind that those numbers are from memory from a book I haven't read in ~6 months or so. Also that's for a British 74, French and Spanish ships were broadly similar.

[Thanas]

You will find it in a lot of specialist literature. THe best one from an English perspective is:
B. Lavery, The Ship of the Line II: Design, Construction and Fittings. Annapolis 1984. It costs however up to 300 bucks.

The best one from the french perspective is:
Jean Boudriot, Les Vaisseaux 74 á 120 canons, which costs about 153€ (http://www.ancre.fr/Search.aspx?L=FR)


Spanish perspective:
Oyarbide, Construccion naval en el Pais Vasco, siglos XVI-XIX
and John D. Harbron, Trafalgar and the Spanish navy (despite the title it is a great history of the spanish navy from 1700-1815).

I would suggest starting with Lavery, many university libraries carry it.

[Thanas]

EDIT:
Figures for HMS Victory (Nelson's famous small 1st rate):

- over 6000 trees, among them 5000 oak trees for the hull, about one hundred acre worth of old oak forest
- seven large elm trunks for the keel
- over 3000 feet of fir and spruce trees for the rigging, decks and masts
- 80+ tons of Hemp (average for use during 2-3 years, the yield of a 350 acre plantation). Total length of all hemp rope was well over 27 miles.
- 17 tons of copper (3923 pieces of 4ft by 1ft)
- 37 sails, sailcloth spanning a total of over 4 acres, + two dozen (or 23) reserve sails. Total about 6,510 square yards of sails.

Total cost: 63,176 Pounds, or about the average earning of ~640 labourers of her time.

For comparative costs see here

[Eternal_Freedom]

Damnit, I had the 6,000 figure in my head but I thought it was that many acres for all the ships at Trafalgar rather than trees for Victory.

[Thanas]

You are not that far off, considering that there were 60 ships of the line at Trafalgar and most of the British ships were smaller than the Victory...but it gets a bit more sketchy considering the french and spanish ships. The French built larger ships - though sometimes with thinner hulls and lighter wood to get more speed and maneuverability - whereas the Spanish built larger ships who were much heavier as well due to their preference for and access to tropical woods like teak. Those woods were far superior in longevity, resistance to worms and to cannonballs, but deadlier to the crews (because if they did splinter, they were more likely to cause dangerous infections). So tradeoffs once again. I would have loved to see a match between equally competently crewed ships of those three great navies. Sadly that never really happened.


Still, 6000 acres might very well be a good overall estimate (would prefer 7 or 8k though).

[Eternal_Freedom]

Well IIRC correctly from my aforementioned Trafalgar Companion, the British had great respect for French and Spanish designs and copied them frequently. Indeed, I distinctly one Captain referring to the captured French 80-gun Tonnant as "the finest ship of two decks we ever had."

And I'm now slightly annoyed about misremembering where the 6,000 figure was from since I'm usually good with numbers. Then again, now that I think of it I recall another mention if it taking ~2000 acres worth of trees to build all 60 sail of the line. Unfortunately I've just returned to Wales (where I live) from Norfolk (where my books is) so I can't check. But 2000 acres definitely rings a bell.

[Thanas]

2000 acres sounds way to low. The victory took 100 alone and the british fleet alone massed way more than 20 victories. As to the British opinion of captured designs, I got an even better quote: "I shall regret very much losing the San Josef, who is the finest ship I have ever sailed" -Lord Nelson in a letter to the admiralty after being informed he will lose the San Josef after being reassigned to the baltic.

But still, Nations copied very much each other. You can find all sorts of statements. (Some even say British ships were built better because captured Spanish and French ships did not serve very long in British service, but then again captured British ships did not serve very long in opposite navies either).

[Thanas]

EDIT: I should also mention that the above figures neglect the most important thing - cannons. One ship of the line carried more (and heavier) guns than napoleon had at his disposal during a battle. So you can see the scale.

[LaCroix]

Re nails - Ship planks were nailed with wooden dowels - usually black locust, to save on oak. The hole would be drilled only half-way into the frame timber below the plank, and the dowel's base slitted. Into that slit, they inserted a wooden wedge. Once driven home, that wedge would spread the dowel base, making it a permanent bond.

[LaCroix]

I read somewhere that the British also had a law about "shipmast"-variety black locust trees being reseved for the Royal Navy and cutting them for any other reason was punished.

They grow 20+m high, but straight like a pine - they aren't thick enough for planks, but would make extremely sturdy masts and spars.
(I was researching the suitability of black locust for shipbuilding purposes...)

[Eternal_Freedom]

2000 acres sounds way to low. The victory took 100 alone and the british fleet alone massed way more than 20 victories.

Good point. Like I've said, this was a book I read months ago so take my memory with a grain of salt.

As to the British opinion of captured designs, I got an even better quote: "I shall regret very much losing the San Josef, who is the finest ship I have ever sailed" -Lord Nelson in a letter to the admiralty after being informed he will lose the San Josef after being reassigned to the baltic.

That is a good one, I'll make a note of that.

But still, Nations copied very much each other. You can find all sorts of statements. (Some even say British ships were built better because captured Spanish and French ships did not serve very long in British service, but then again captured British ships did not serve very long in opposite navies either).

Interesting, I hadn't read anything about how long captured vessels stayed in service, with the exception of Tonnant and San Josef but they are clearly exceptions.

[Sea Skimmer]

Captured vessels tended to end up being poorly repaired from whatever damage they took being captured, and then broken up when that became a problem. It made little sense to engage in great repairs during the Napoleonic Wars, it was easier to build a new ship and put the crew and guns of the old one on it, thus sparing the time of out service and keeping up numbers at sea. More then a small number of new built ships didn't last that long either because of construction issues. Really not surprising, as the same thing would happen over and over again in later wars, and no doubt, has taken place since the purpose built warship first existed. Why care? A well built wooden ship could last for decades if you were willing to pay to put a lot of new planking on it, but everyone knew the surges of war built ships would not last in peace, before the late industrial revolution nobody had a very large active duty navy. It was just too expensive. As much as possible was laid up in reserve.

Also both sides inflated the qualities of the others ships at times, because it meant more prize money and more excuses for losses. In reality quality varied considerable in time and place, many later French ships of the line post Trafalgar in particular rotted apart without ever setting sail. Obviously the French could do better, but not after Napoleon ordered them to massively increase construction rates without waiting for a vast stock of green timber to dry out. Even slightly green timber will ruin a ship every time.

if anyone is looking for information on design and construction of ships like this I strongly suggest checking out google books, just filter it via 'free google ebooks' because that way you'll only be getting all the old stuff they have scanned. A considerable trove of books on this topic from the 1820s and 30s are online, content earlier then that is a bit sparser but not much really changed in ship designs in this period except a tendency to build more of the bigger types. 50 gun frigates and 120 gun ships of the line and all that, instead of 38s and 90s.

[Thanas]

Sea Skimmer, given that background, would you think it a valid statement that outside of a few heavily built ones, most ships were good for only one or two hard-fought battles?

[LaCroix]

quick read on ship construction

Given that a broadside would literally "shiver your timbers" (as in "shake the whole internal structure of the ship beyond safety margins"), I'd say after a couple of hits, you'd have to at least beach (if not outright drydock) a ship after battle to repair the broken planks, patch up a couple of timbers/ribs, and replace all the caulking around that area.

If you get to "Normal" damage, you could have a huge problem, as you can see in the above document, there are a ton of timbers/"ribs" all along the hull - you basically had as much of the planking directly covering a rib as being unsupported, gaps usually less than a foot. What wasn't torn to pieces by the ball would've been shaken/pried loose, and need to be refastened or the ship would start leaking like a sieve once the sea got a bit rougher. You can get quickly to the point you have to tear half the planking off to repair that kind of damage.

If the keel timber seams were affected and loose, the ship would be broken up (if you could even make it back to the coast before it takes too much water) - you just couldn't repair that kind of damage without basically dismantling and rebuilding the ship.

So even if you only got "little" damage, and nary any visible holes - given the sheer time needed to check everything, drill the old dowels out of the still OK ribs to tear the rest of the split planking off, replacing a few timbers, and then peeling most of the caulcing out and replace it, you are looking at at least a couple of weeks to get the ship seaworthy again - but with only limited warranty, as you can't check everything more thoroughly than mk1 eyeball and a good whack with a mallet to see if it moves.

Breaking it apart for parts for a new ship once it's worse than "lightly" damaged would make much more sense.

[Thanas]

Then again, ships that suffered a lot of damage in battle went on to have long careers after that.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I wonder if that might be due to superstition of some form, the feeling that "this ship got us through this deadly battle, clearly she's built for greatness" encouraging navies to repair a ship they might otherwise have scrapped.

[LaCroix]

Then again, ships that suffered a lot of damage in battle went on to have long careers after that.

Yes, because a ship that earned fame would be rebuilt for propaganda reasons, and because you were in need of hulls after a costly battle, so repairing it for a year instead of waiting 3-6 years for a new build made sense.

Also, since you had to take it apart, anyway, to repair all the damage, they usually used that occasion to upgrade them to the newest standards, apart from the usual rebuilds after 20-25 years...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dartmouth_%281698%29 - three "refits", each with significant increases in size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_%281678%29 - another couple of "rebuilds"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Royal_Oak_%281674%29 - the same.

So basically, they tore them apart and build a bigger ship out of the scrap, re-using the name.

[Thanas]

That only applies to the british, who were pretty much the only nation that rebuilt those ships. Meanwhile however, we got the Ocean having huge careers after having been a sloughterhouse, or the Santissima trinidad...

[Sea Skimmer]

Sea Skimmer, given that background, would you think it a valid statement that outside of a few heavily built ones, most ships were good for only one or two hard-fought battles?

Depends on where you took your damage. It was pretty damn typical to aim for the upper works, which were much easier to damage, and also only repairable via complete replacement anyway. They were also just easier to hit as they made up a higher percentage of the target profile. If you aimed low you increased the chance of your fire striking the water.

Masts and spars were not integral parts of the ship, and indeed normally removed when ships demobilized. So all of that was just entirely repairable, and the planking on the upper works tended to be thin and easily replaced A heavy battering of the lower hull could be almost impossible to repair fully because of frame damage, even if the planking were totally replaced, but this was not typical damage. Such ships also then stood a non trivial chance at sinking. Side issue is also that many ships quoted as being in multiple battles may not have actually done very much in most of them, as it was more typical then not that only part of a line would closely engage, and gunfire over about 700-1000 yards range was incapable of doing serious hull damage.

Ships only riddled in the upper works were often considered heavily damaged in records, because they were and they'd have many men killed or wounded, but it just wasn't the same thing as having the lower hull pounded. You could replace framing, but this is where how much money do you spend comes into play as it is far more involved work and involves taking a lot of the ship apart.

A lot of it comes down to how much money was invested in repair work anyway, which was immensely variable. Navies of the age of sail were just not administered and funding the way the fleets of the industrial age came to be. Far more seat of your pants, work to a set and arbitrary appropriations sort of effort. It isn't for nothing that admirals and even captains often paid out of pocket to equip ships, and then hoped they got reembursed later. Course then, prize money gave them a incentive to be fit to sail even at personal cost. Flagships often saw a lot of hard action, but also had an admiral onboard to make sure they got fully repaired. Admirals got a share of all prizes taken in the fleet too.

As noted, you could if you wished rebuild ships to an insane degree via taking the framing and decks apart completely and then rebuilding. This took place for propaganda reasons in some cases, but also for administrative ones such as money having been allotted only to repair ships but not build new ones. USS Constitution being an awesome example of this where we have now discounted the 'lift ships bell insert new ship' theory of her reconstruction, but figured out that oh.. about 20% of the lower hull is original. This is based on actual wood sampling now, as anal records examination failed to resolve it. Everything else was rebuilt with completely new material.

Congress refused to fund new ships, but did still buy wood and material for repairs. But that was also peacetime. In wartime resources for repair and rebuilding could be much scarcer, and then in the end some ships were just far better built then others even of the same class. Do remember that someone literally DREW these ships full scale, then someone else cut the wood to fit the giant paper molds made. And they had no exact means of measuring the moisture content of the wood. Problems then compound from this point forward. In principle every ship of a class would be based on copies of the original moldwork done by the first yard, in reality this didn't always work out so precisely.

Meanwhile in service wooden ships needed heavy refits every 3-5 years of service even if they saw no combat, skimping on this multiple times could undermine the overall quality of even a well built ship. Ships that performed well in service had a better chance of being well looked after, while some just never sailed right or otherwise underperformed and might be neglected.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yes, because a ship that earned fame would be rebuilt for propaganda reasons, and because you were in need of hulls after a costly battle, so repairing it for a year instead of waiting 3-6 years for a new build made sense.

New ships really didn't take 3-6 years to build if you had any priority in the matter. One year flat was possible. Anything much longer involved deliberately slow work, which was not untypical of course due to funding and manpower restraints. The most silly example of how fast you could do things is I suspect HMS St Lawrence, built by a small yard on Lake Ontario in ten months in 1814. She was 130 gun ship of the line!

The US managed to crap out a large frigate in about the same timeframe on the great lakes at a site which was not even a shipyard at all, just by sending several hundred shipyard workers out to march to the lakeshore and start building. Began working on two 130 gun ships right afterwards too, though they were not finished by the time the war ended. The USN then roofed them over on the slipway and kept them on the navy list until 1882!

Cases exist of ships of the line taking twenty years to finish, but this would be because work entirely halted for protracted periods from lack of funds. After all this was an era in which wars often ended for no other reason then both sides went bankrupt. The rise of the British Empire was in no small part linked to the British simply figuring out better ways to ensure reliable funding and ability to take on sustainable debt, then plow it all back into a huge navy. It also helped make it possible to fund the early industrial lead the British got, thus self compounding things as that enlarged the economy and the navy even more and the navy made possible more colonial markets...

Of course if a navy was well funded and well planned, it didn't need to push anything and had a constant flow of new ships appearing, at which point it wasn't so important how fast any single one was built.

[Irbis]

Thank you for replies, everyone. I have found some of the numbers above, but the extra data and explanation of reasoning between a few things greatly helped. I have a few more questions, but I have to consult a few more details to make sure I got the right ones.

Thanks again!

[LaCroix]

Of course, you could rush things (especially if you're British), but it usually took much longer than a year. HMS St Lawrence was certainly never intended to be a lasting thing, built just to secure hold of the lake for the time of war. It never saw action and was decommissioned the very moment the war ended. Whether that ship would have been fit for blue water is highly questionable.

Going through the list of British ships of the line from wikipedia for simplicity's sake:

HMS Royal James - Ordered: 22 April 1669 - Commissioned: 18 January 1672 -> 3 years
HMS London - started sometime before or during 1668, launched in 1670. -> 2+ years
HMS Prince - Ordered: June 1667 - Commissioned: 15 January 1672 -> 5 years
HMS Royal Charles - Ordered: 26 April 1671, Commissioned: February 1673 -> 2 years
HMS Royal Oakstarted in 1660, launched in 1664 -> 4 years
HMS St Andrew was laid down somewhere before March 1668, and then completed by Jonas Shish, and launched in 1670 -> 2+ years

mid 17XX
HMS Victory Laid down: 23 July 1759, Launched: 7 May 1765 -> 6 years
HMS Royal Sovereign: Laid down 7 January 1774 Launched: 11 September 1786 -> 12 years
HMS Royal George Laid down: June 1784 Launched: 16 September 1788 -> 4 years
HMS Queen Charlotte: Laid down: 1 September 1785 Launched: 15 April 1790 -> 5 years
HMS Queen Charlotte: Laid down: October 1805 Launched: 17 July 1810 -> 5 years
second rate ships:
HMS Sandwich&her class - 3years each
Barfleur class - 5-6 years each

No significant change in build time, and that's the data for the British, who were much better organized and funded than other Navies.
So, in theory - having a ship built in 1 year was possible, but a well-built ship took about 3-6 years from keel to service, or 2 years, if it went really fast.

[Borgholio]

The US managed to crap out a large frigate in about the same timeframe on the great lakes at a site which was not even a shipyard at all, just by sending several hundred shipyard workers out to march to the lakeshore and start building. Began working on two 130 gun ships right afterwards too, though they were not finished by the time the war ended. The USN then roofed them over on the slipway and kept them on the navy list until 1882!

Link? I'd like to read more about this.

[LaCroix]

I have a link for lake erie - http://www.history.navy.mil/library/onl ... e_erie.htm

It was at Sackets Harbor, the responsible builder was Henry Eckford.

Most of the vessels they built were probably not considered safe to operate - since that shipyard basically started from scrap and suddenly "vomited" ships into the lake, I would assume that most were built using green wood. As far as I know, they also had parts prefabricated and sent to them, too.

Alas, each and every one of their ships was laid up as soon as the war ended - to me, an indicator that noone trusted these things to stay afloat. Most were sold off or rotten to pieces ten years after the war, another indicator of poor quality, and quite possible the reason why they never continued with the two first rates they laid down just before the war ended.

They had the USS Madison laid down at the start of the war ( which was in June) and launched it in November 1812. It had a couple of engagements, but a reputation of not being a good ship.

They built the 32 gun USS Superior, USS General Pike, each in about 3 months, and managed the USS Mohawk in just a month, with is an amazing feat. There also were a couple of corvettes and sloops.

The ships of the line would have been the USS New Orleans (90) and USS Chippewa (106).