Dan Snow's History Hit - British Ship Building

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

In this episode, Dan chats to British naval historian and maritime artist, Richard Endsor, about seventeenth century ship building. It was the developments of this period that would enable Britain to extend it's maritime reach across the oceans, eventually encompassing territory on every continent.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We had some great great pods out recently. Kevin Fong talking about Apollo 13 isn't a classic, you've got to go and listen to that. Also interesting pods over the weekend about the House of Byron, that was a good one, please go and check that out as well. This podcast is a look at 17th century shipbuilding. I know how much you guys love that. Richard Enza is the 17th century shipbuilding oracle and I wanted to ask him about what happened in this funny little island of Britain. Why did the ships that were being produced here start to evolve? How did it change? Why was Britain able to extend its reach, its maritime reach across the oceans eventually onto every continent?

And the story starts in the 17th century. So enjoy this podcast. If you want to watch naval history, then the place to do it is historyhit.tv, my digital history channel. You can go, you can listen to all the back episodes of the podcast, you can go on there, you can listen, watch hundreds of hours of documentary. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and then you get a second month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So please go and check that out in the

meantime enjoy Richard Enza. Richard thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure Dan it's good to talk to you again. Well it is good because you are my mad aunt in the attic because I am a big fan of Georgian maritime history, Georgian sea power. And I like to say that the modern world was built from 1690 to 1815 by wooden ships, the Royal Navy. And every time I let that little voice tell me that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the 17th century. And actually the real action is probably there and it's worrying. So I'm going to open the atticth century, and actually the real action is probably there, and it's worrying. So I'm going to open the attic. This metaphor doesn't work. I'm opening the attic, and I'm addressing you now face-to-face.

Tell me about the revolution that goes on in the period that you're writing about. I just love the 17th century Navy. I write books about them because they're so little known. Why is this period so important? It's where the Royal Navy really began to dominate the world. Up to the 17th century, we were just another naval power. But as you know, following the great 30 shipbuilding program of 1677, we began to dominate the world's seas right up until the end of the days of sail.

So it's the ships, the way they developed and were built in the 17th century that really take my interest, why they became so good and so powerful. What happened in England? What I find fascinating, what happened in England in the 17th century that transformed England and then when it became Britain in the early 18th into a globally hegemonic sea power, given that the 17th century was a totally chaotic time in England and indeed in the Isles. We have a couple of civil wars. We have a king.

We have an experiment in republicanism. We have a catastrophic war of the kingdoms. We have another king deposed, another illegitimate son of a king rising up and fighting a rebellion against his uncle. It's a crazy century. And yet something's going on in the dockyards. How is that all happening? Well, I believe a lot of it is down to the king himself. As we all know, he was famous for his pleasures we're talking charles ii here yeah indeed uh famous for his pleasures and his number one pleasure funnily enough was a royal navy spent more time at admiralty board meetings than any other member

of the admiralty he spent an awful lot of time there he knew personally all the master ship rights he knew most of the people in the yards themselves and he certainly selected all his officers so took an enormous interest in the navy promoted it and i think a lot of it comes from him plus the fact of course he established things like the royal society it promoted technology was always happy to engage and talk to people about it. And it's promotion of shipbuilding and shipwrights, as well as officers, that made us, I believe, a great naval power. Apart from taking an interest, what is he actually doing? Is the money coming in? Is it expertise?

It's not all just about battlefield bravery. Navies are something that take years or generations to embed. After the Third Dutch War, the Navy was in a pretty poor state. And he, of course, had Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty, also a Member of Parliament, persuaded Parliament to vote for £600,000 to build this vast fleet of 30 new ships. And they were all incredibly well designed the design of

the 23rd rates would remain pretty unaltered for about the next 40 years and added to that were were nine second rates three deckers and on top of that the great first rate Britannia and it was this series of ships that really began to dominate the world stage. They fought a defensive battle at Beachy Head in 1692, of course. They defeated the French at Barfleur-le-Haut, which up until Trafalgar was regarded as the greatest naval victory ever. This £600,000 was a special tax that was put on and which paid for those ships. Great difficulty collecting the money. This is before the Banquet of England, as you well know.

But nevertheless, this money was all found and paid for this great fleet of ships. And what about the technical spec? Are these ships different to what's being built elsewhere in the world? Has Britain got a secret technological edge at the moment? and climbs, we had a rather conservative approach to the strength of our ships. And they did survive very well storms, and they survived a long time. They could be repaired, didn't fall apart under the stress of the sea. So they were pretty well designed and pretty well respected amongst their crews and their opponents. I mean, what about the dockyards that were able to build these ships are they they're some of the most you know important places in English history now that sadly no longer have the kind of maritime

tradition well that's right uh just looking back at that time um I've just written a book um called Master Shipwright's Secrets um which it goes right into the heart of what these shipwrights had to do to design their ships. It's often been thought that they, Pepys says that some of these shipwrights designed their ships by eye alone, and nobody really believed that, and there's one or two treaties written, and while I was researching for a previous book I was in the Bodleian library in in Oxford as you know the place well and going through Pepys's Rawlinson collection and there I found um I found an interesting little treatise by uh the master shipwright of Deptford Dockyard and it's the dimensions of a ship and it's little trees he written specifically for Samuel Pepys as it's

addressed to him and the first few pages are just lists and lists of dimensions of a ship the length of the gun deck, the height between the decks and the size of the gun ports all the usual stuff but then at the very back of this treaty was lists of column of figures and it's digital information describing the outside lines of a ship pure digital so they didn't rely on even just a draft Describing the outside lines of a ship. Pure digital. So they didn't rely on even just a draft. It's no good just scaling from that draft.

You needed this digital information to build this ship. And I thought, my goodness me, you know, how advanced is that? Because that's the very technique we use to build aircraft today. Digital information. So I used that as a template to to write a book about um just exactly what the master shipwriters did to create these ships so they weren't just i've always thought that there was there was an element of just looking at it by eye and so you think they were measuring everything out and and looking at performance and then making adjustments and

building the next one better yeah absolutely they did very very technical now you imagine you've got a draft of a ship um and in front of you 148 scale which has been drawn by a master ship right now people think that's what they built exactly the ship to now you get out your scale rule and measure off see how wide the ship's got to be on that piece of curve where that frame is and well you're going to be inches out aren't you by the time you you measure that and put it in the ship so they didn't rely on this they relied on actual digital information calculated by a formula for they used a formula to create a curve a geometric formula to create in a curve could be a true art maybe but they used geometric calculations to for the

position of a frame on every piece of the curve so they knew exactly where this frame should be when they built it and exactly the shape when they marked it out to uh to cut the frames so yeah incredibly technical and it astounded me just how technical this was. This guy, John Shishu, wrote this treatise. He doesn't explain the formulas he used to actually create the curves. Anthony Dino also wrote a treatise for peeps. He did. He had the formula. And he just used simple curves just to make the explanation simple. But Shishu, he gave actual results of the calculations and the formula without actually saying what the formula were.

Now, being incredibly lucky working in the aircraft industry, I was able to work back from his results to actually find the formulas he used. I did this by simply writing the loop, putting a test formula inside a loop, doing the calculations in an instant, and comparing the calculations created by the computer with Shish's figures, I was able to come up with exactly the formulas Shish used. Wow, that was a eureka moment when I could discover this. And, yeah, really, that's the basis of this new book I've just written. this new book I've just written. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into

feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. So you've discovered the secret formula. Who were these shipwrights? Were they regarded as much

as you might regard the radar and specialist or the code and cipher specialist in the Second World War? Were they highly prized? Well, I don't think they really were. There's a famous incident where the members of the Royal Society, with their expertise and all the people who were in there,

they were the famous mathematicians, which we all know about, and they decided they would design the shape of the hull because they knew better they knew about fluids and all things like that they came up with a with a design of a ship but it didn't sell very well and the master shipwrights had the great pleasure of having to widen it and use their expertise to put the thing right and Samuel Peep said, these shipwrights, it's more of an art form than a science form. But you needed an awful lot of understanding to know just how wide a sailing ship should be to carry her weight of sails. The involvement in that, of course, is very scientific.

It's worth remembering that in this period, there's still terrible mistakes getting made. I mean, the Vasa sweden in the 17th century just sails away from the key and capsizes immediately so a lot was at stake yes it was well i think i think the vasa um she's got the same size guns on her gun deck as on the upper deck um 24 pounders so she was rather top heavy and um english ships were not built like that on the lower deck the ship guns nearest the water they would have vast heavy cannon um ships like the london for instance or nearly all major warships

had guns weighing two and a half tons the same size guns as are those on the victory and on the upper deck the next deck above they were much lighter they were only between a ton and a ton and a half and so on we we were very careful in placing guns like that now the other thing about the ships of the 17th century this fleet of 23rd race that peeps and charles had built they had 32 pounder guns on the gun deck which is the same size as as nelson's victory and very powerful guns. But these ships were very small. It's the same size ship as the ship in Hartlepool, the Trinca Mali. That is a six-rate, carries tiny guns,

but it was the same size overall dimensions as these ships built during the 17th century. So the 17th century ships, they were solely designed to carry huge weights of armament. And that's why sometimes they had to be girdled, made wider to carry their guns, because it never occurred to them that if the ships were not too stable because of all the guns they carried, they never thought to take any of the guns off. They just made the ship a little bit bigger one way or another. What other secrets? Because you mentioned other secrets that you've uncovered come on tell me about the secrets of these ships apart from working out a formula that shish or other master shipwrights used to design

their ships which to be honest can be a bit boring for most people so i've kept a chapter on that very short the other thing is mold making now you imagine when you've got the ship's plans and you want to actually carve them out on the on the timbers you need the molds and a very technical thing to be doing and there's no i can't find anywhere where there's clear explanations of how these molds are made all the contemporary old books they don't use drawings and when you read a description of how a mold was made and all the technical words that go into it it's absolutely it's numbing to try and read and understand it but um i spent considerable amount of time reading spending countless hours trying to read and understand this stuff but eventually with help of contemporary works, works from 1717 and slightly later works,

eventually come up with the idea of just how these moulds are made. Now I love drawing this stuff and rather than try and describe them as previous authors have done, I've got a drawing of each stage of making these moulds and it's so much clearer when you've got a drawing showing this stuff rather than just a written explanation. Were these English ships effective in battle? Yeah, it's a number of things. To start with, we need a powerful battle fleet, of course, to see off, first of all, the Dutch and then the French.

There's also tremendous developments made because we had a problem with ships in the Mediterranean. A lot of our trade was being taken by Barbary corsairs and Charles II received the base at Tangier as part of his dowry when he got married and he used this as a base to put Royal Navy ships to protect our trade ships from the Barbary pirates. Quite amusing really because first of all he thought, we'd do what all other nations do in the Mediterranean, and we'll purchase a proper galley with hundreds of galley slaves to row, because, of course, sometimes there's no wind. That was a disaster because the Royal Navy wasn't used to having slaves, didn't know how to use them. The ship never went to sea, and Tangier was faced with the prospect of a few hundred mixed Moors,

even Red Indian slaves and some captured Greeks, people like that who were supposed to be galley slaves, but they never actually pulled an oar. Caused lots of problems by burning wood and things like that. The Muslim Moors wouldn't eat the Royal Navy provisions of pork, insist on eating beef. So that was a disaster. The ship went rotting and never went to sea. Charles II then came up with the idea of galley frigates. This was very slim, lightly armed ships, no guns on the main deck. Instead, it had oars and only guns on the upper deck he produced two of those ships the uh the charles galley and the james galley they proved very successful but when they took a large uh ship i think it was an

algerian ship they couldn't harm the men below decks the crew of the ship fled below decks and couldn't be harmed they had to take this ship by boarding a lot of casualties so that was a bit of a disaster so then Charles came up with the idea of building the Tiger which was a ship with all ports between the gun ports and it's a very amusing story on how King Charles developed and built this ship the Tiger because she was one of the casualties of the of the third dutch war and when she came back to be repaired she was in such an appalling state they couldn't really repair her so eventually she fell apart but charles insisted on keeping the ship on the books so this gave him an opportunity to keep a crew of warrant officers and their servants,

which he used as a benevolent fund for people he thought worthy, you know, injured old seamen, people like that. And also their servants or apprentices would be their carers. He went on like that for a few years. But with the popish plot, Charles fell out with the admiralty and did things entirely himself he more or less run the navy for himself and he had out of the budget for repairs to rebuild a new ship called the tiger this was a whole new ship which the admiralty thought was just a repaired ship and it was a great surprise to them when a totally new ship turned up. So Charles II used all sorts of devious means

to circumvent all his own rules to build the ship that he wanted. Richard, that was a tour de force. Thank you very much for allowing me to question you about the 17th century shipbuilding. You're not just a writer, but you're actually trying to get, you're trying to get one day a 17th century ship reconstructed which would be the best thing ever weren't it just yeah yeah yeah um there's a huge development going on at the old historic deptford dockyard site and the locals down there the locals themselves want to build a replica ship they're having a lot

of problems because the developer isn't doing anything at all and of course before they start doing anything um it means that the the the people at deptford can't start building their replica ship either you know i'll just give them all the support i can and um when they do start to build their ship um it'll be great fun it'll be being just a quarter of a mile a short walk away from the Cutty Sark, seeing an actual ship built in exactly the 17th century style will be a great tourist attraction.

It should be very successful. It would be the best thing ever, Richard Goodlight. How can people find out about, well, tell them about your book and then also how they find out about that project? I've just finished this book, just been published, The Master Shipwright's Secrets. It contains lots of information concerning how they built ships in the 17th century,

things that haven't been discussed before. And it also relates to, and it certainly is a great help to the people of Deptford who want to build a replica warship of the 17th century to commemorate the great Deptford who want to build a replica warship of the 17th century to commemorate the great Deptford dockyard that was originally founded by Henry VIII. And if people want to find out more about the Deptford Dockyard Project where do they go? Yeah if they go online and type in build the Lennox they will find this L-E-N-O-X. Build the Lennox everybody, words to live by.

Thank you very much for joining us, Richard. Okay, Dan. Lovely talking to you. Hi, everyone. It's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts

and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free.

Come on, do me a favor. Thanks. you