Why so many HMS Victories? Apparently Nelson had a good PR guy. These 100 gun sailing barges are not blessed with attractive hull lines. They needed very full lines to carry all that weight, and Trafalgar was a hammer and tongs battle in barely enough wind to move them.
If you must build a Royal Navy sailing warship with its rows of cannons, how about something that fought at Quiberon Bay? That battle had huge impact on the outcome of the Seven Years and involved chasing the French Fleet into a rock filled bay in the teeth of a full gale. Real seamanship!
Roger
or how about the biggest first rate ever built there are drawings as well as archaeological data to reconstruct the ship as a model
HMS St Lawrence was a 112-gun
first-rate ship of the line of the
Royal Navy that served on
Lake Ontario during the
War of 1812. Built on the lake at the Royal Navy dockyard in
Kingston, Upper Canada, she was the only Royal Navy ship of the line ever to be launched and operated entirely in fresh water, Constructed in 1814, the ship's arrival on the lake ended all naval action and
St Lawrence finished the war having never gone into battle. Following the war, the vessel was laid up, eventually being sold in 1832 to private interests. The ship later sank and is now a recreational dive spot.
Description
Master shipbuilder John Dennis and nearly 200 shipwrights built
St Lawrence in under ten months, although several sources credit master shipwright William Bell as the designer and builder. Unlike sea-going ships of the line,
St Lawrence was constructed without a quarterdeck,
poop deck or
forecastle. This gave the vessel the appearance of a
spar-deck frigate. Furthermore,
St Lawrence was not expected to make long ocean voyages and did not have to carry the same amount of stores and provisions. This allowed the designers to make savings in the vessel's capacity.
[2] The shipwrights constructed a vessel larger and more heavily gunned than the
flagship of
Horatio Nelson at the
Battle of Trafalgar, HMS Victory
