Men of Honour by Adam Nicolson

worm which destroys ship timbers in the tropics.
    This immensely solid hull was then bridged internally with the heavy deck beams, huge oak timbers, each one placed beneath a gun, cambered slightly to meet the curve of the deck (cambered so that water would run off it) and fixed with grown-oak knees—cut from the curving part of a tree—which held the beams in place in both the vertical and horizontal plane. Over that was laid the deal deck planking, each plank two inches thick and 12 inches wide. The final element was the hull planking, several layers of it: particularly thick timbers known as wales fixed under each row of gunports, further thickening timbers above and below the wales, a mass of exterior planking, four inches thick, followed by interior planking of the same density,and on top of that, still further timbers known as riders and standards to give yet more internal strength. The construction method is more like that of a tank armoured in oak than a seagoing vessel. A first-rate ship like Victory might take ten years to construct. At their thickest, its walls would be three feet thick.
    That was only the beginning: steering systems, capstans, anchors and pumps, the captain’s great cabin or in the greatest ships the admiral’s apartment, the galley, the sick room, the powder magazine—42,000 lbs of gunpowder in 405 barrels aboard Victory —the water storage and the iron ballasting, the pens for the bullocks, pigs, chickens and sheep that were kept on board, the stores for bread, salt meat and the all-important lemons and limes (18,000 for one ship at a single loading) all had to be fitted out for this 850-man war machine to operate.
    Above all that, of course, was the rig. Nothing looks more complicated or more idiosyncratic than the maze of lines, canvas and timber that stretch skyward above these ships. Victory is 186 feet long on her gundecks, 51 wide at her widest point. The poop is already 55 feet above the keel. The truck on the mainmast, the very highest point of the ship, is another 170 feet above that. Every cubic yard of space above those decks is put to work but in a system whose essence is clear and plain. There are three masts and each carries four square sails: the ‘course’ at the bottom—the mainsail, whose name means ‘the body’; the topsail above it, its name deriving from the time when it was simply the upper of two sails; the ‘topgallant’ above that, and above that the ‘royal’. The bowsprit, protruding 100 feet from the bow, carried four jibs. Between the fore and the mainmast and between the mainmast and the mizzen, still further fore-and-aft staysails—attached to the stays holding up the masts—could be set. Extra studding sails could be hoisted, attached to special boomsrun out on each side from the yards from which the usual sails hung.
    In all, a ship like Victory could carry 40 sails, with about 1,000 blocks through which the rigging was led, the whole assemblage weighing about twenty tons and covering an area of more than two acres. Although no element of these extraordinary constructions would have been unfamiliar to anyone alive in 1805—no special materials; nothing different in the hemp and canvas, iron and timber, blocks and pulleys from those found on land—the man-of-war, as complex as a clock, as large as a prison, as delicate as a kite, as strong as a fortress and as murderous as an army, was undoubtedly the most evolved single mechanism, with the most elaborate ordering of parts, the world had ever seen.
    That was the striking fact. One witness after another described the overriding sensation they had on the morning of Trafalgar: the sense of beautiful order; the knowledge of preparedness; of the soundness of hull and spar; of standing and running rigging fully knotted and deeply spliced; of the rope work wormed, served and tarred; of the roundshot in their wooden cups stacked behind the great