Dan Snow's History Hit - HMS Victory

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

During the Battle of Trafalgar, the men on the gun decks of HMS Victory felt the heat of fire from above and from below; they dodged enemy cannon balls shot from just 2 metres away. HMS Victory was the flagship of Nelson's fleet during that historic clash with the French and Spanish on the 21st of October 1805. She is a mighty vessel to behold; at over 70m long, 6000 oaks were felled for her planking and 27 miles of rope used for her rigging. She was and still is a feat of engineering with impressive firepower-104 state-of-the-art guns and manned by a crew of over 800.Dan walks the gun decks with Andrew Baines, Deputy Executive Director of Museum Operations National Museum of the Royal Navy, who knows everything there is to know about Victory. They talk about life on board the ship, from punishment to surgery to using the bathroom and tell the story of Nelson's dramatic demise on the very spot where he was shot in battle.The reason Dan is visiting Portsmouth's historic dockyard is that there is a huge restoration project going on to save Victory and preserve it for future generations. As a wooden ship, she is inherently biodegradable so Andrew and his team are working around the clock for the next decade to restore the ship as she was at the Battle of Trafalgar. Today the ship's greatest foe is not the French but the deathwatch beetle that Burroughs into the wood ship's timbre, destroying it from the inside. Dan meets with Diana Davis, Deputy Director of the Victory Conservation Project, to talk about this nemesis and the vital, and costly, work they are doing. Now is a great time to experience HMS Victory as you've never seen her before while archaeologists and conservators work on the ship in front of your eyes. You can find out more information here: https://www.nmrn.org.uk/visit-us/portsmouth-historic-dockyard/hms-victoryProduced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm walking in to the historic dockyard in Portsmouth, one of my favourite places on the earth, where they have not just HMS Warrior, the world's first iron-built battleship, not just the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship which sunk just off Portsmouth in the 16th century, but also HMS Victory the world's greatest ship and I'm here because HMS Victory is being restored a gigantically expensive hugely ambitious project to make sure that Victory survives for decades to come I'm very excited to be meeting up with old friend Andrew Baines you've heard on the podcast before we're talking about Victory itself its history its experience during Tragar, a little bit about Nelson who died on

Victory on that famous day but I'm also meeting Diana Davis who's the head of conservation. She's going to talk me through the specific challenges of conserving this massive wooden ship exposed to the British weather and in particular she's going to tell me about victory's greatest enemy not the french but the death watch beetle enjoy no black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower. So welcome to the pod, everybody. I'm just coming around the corner now,

and I'm seeing there's HMS Victory, but I'm seeing it as I've never seen it before because the main mast is missing, and there is a gigantic tent, almost like a pavilion, to provide a safe covering for all the work that's being done. You know what? Victories had quite the life. The keel laid down. 1759, the year of victories, named that fateful year when British armies and fleets were victorious right around the world. She was launched in 1765, but there's nothing much for her to do. And so she didn't go into service until March 1778 when the American War

of Independence meant that Britain needed big battleships and plenty of them. She's basically a huge floating gun platform and I can see a few cannons sticking out of those gun ports now. There are about 104 of them at the Battle of Trafalgar. She represented one of the most intense concentrations of firepower ever assembled by humans at that point in history. And that was all powered by wind, by the giant sails that hung from the mast and rigging above the decks. 37 sails, something like 27 miles of rope required for that rigging. Astonishing. HMS Queen Elizabeth, the new aircraft carrier, is just to my left, so she's much smaller

than that. She's only about 226 feet long. Bear in mind, jet aircraft weren't expected to land on a big runway on her upper deck, so she was big for the times. I've heard she was the biggest warship in the world when she was commissioned into service in the 18th century. And she weighed about 2,000 tons. One of the things that's difficult to get your head around today, you see the cannons

sticking out the gun ports, but it's the people on board that blow your mind. Well over 800 men and boys and a few women on board served as crew. They were making sure that this, the most complex single object on earth at the time, went like clockwork. It was able to make its way around the world, it was able to fire its weapons, it was able to repair itself and keep all the crew on board healthy and fed. And although it served on frontline duty for sort of almost 50 years, really, its greatest moment, the moment that people remember it for,

the reason that we keep it until this day, came on the 21st of October 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar. You may have heard me talk about the Battle of Trafalgar you may have heard me talk about the Battle of Trafalgar on some of these podcasts before go back and check those out but HMS Victory was the flagship Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar Nelson was killed on victory its masts were blasted away 10% of its crew were killed more wounded it suffered terribly leading the British force into the French and Spanish lines on that terrible day off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805 to win a victory that echoes through the ages.

I'm getting up close to it now, towering above me, and you forget it was all made out of wood. 6,000 oak trees went into the building of Victory. It was one of several huge ships to dominate the world's oceans, ordered by Pitt the Elder during the Seven Years' War, but that war came to a successful conclusion and Victory wasn't required. It was so big the dock gates weren't wide enough for Victory to float out of the dry docks. The dock had to be expanded as well. It was built in Chatham, in Kent, as anyone who lives in Chatham, in Kent, will tell you. They are furious that it's here at Portsmouth but it ain't going anywhere

anytime soon. It's interesting you get a glimpse of the metal plating, brand new in the Seven Years War, copper sheathing that protected the hulls of these ships. This was cutting-edge technology, super secret, they didn't want the French to find out. A product of Britain's Industrial Revolution at the time meant that technology that could be accessed by the Royal Navy was outstripping that of its rivals and so they worked out that thin copper sheets on the bottom made the ship travel faster through the water because it attracted less seaweed and sea life, barnacles, on the bottom of the hull and it was much easier as well to scrape down so it'd spend less time in refit. So

that's good to see those metal plates there. Cutting edge at the time. Oh, hello, Andrew. There he is. There's the man himself. Every time I come here, something big is going on. This is a heck of an operation. You've got a white tent the size of a reasonably sized building over HMS Victory. Yeah, that's what three million quid with the scaffold looks like.

And that's to give us that weather-tide envelope to stop the rain getting into the ship and to give us a good access point to get to the ship's side and execute the works we need to do. So before you even start work, you have to spend three million pounds building a protective shield. Yeah, and as you might imagine, putting a building over a first-rate line of battleship is not an easy thing to do. Andrew, why is it worth going to all this trouble for an old ship? Well, Victory is the only surviving line-of-battle ship from the age of sail, so there's a tick in that box.

But I think it's something more fundamental around if you want to understand who you are as a people, as a nation, you've got to understand where you have come from. You've got to understand your history, the good, the bad and the indifferent. And I think getting on board Victory and walking her decks gives you a perspective that it's impossible to get in any other way. You sold me. Okay. I agree. I agree with that. How much of what we're seeing ahead in front of us now would have been there at the Battle of Trafalgar, let alone when the ship was launched in the middle of the 18th century?

Well, a ship in many ways is like a person. You know, there's one of these famous factions that every cell in the human body is replaced every 12 years or so, even heart cells. A wooden ship is like that. Victory is built between 1759 and 1765 at a cost of £63,000. The war's over, so she goes immediately into reserve and she sits really there for the best part of a decade and a half doing nothing. And from time to time they dock and repair and in that time about 15% of the ship needs to be replaced. Already? Before it's ever fired a shot in anger?

Fired a shot in anger or indeed a crew stepped on board and taken it to sea. She's inherently biodegradable. So by the time she gets to Trafalgar, she's effectively been rebuilt twice. There's a very extensive repair between 1814 and 1816. And she's smashed up at Trafalgar terribly. Pretty badly, yes. And that costs about £6,000 to repair the Trafalgar damage. They'd spent £70,000 rebuilding the ship between 1800 and 1803.

So that puts in perspective, when you read that list of damage from Trafalgar and how much it cost to fix, 10 times that much spent repairing the ship prior to that. So very, very capital intensive works. Then she goes through another century of repair in dockyard hands really until she's docked down in 1922. And between 1922 and 1925 they

return her to her Trafalgar appearance and then that only lasts about 30 years from 1955 to 2005 the ship is taken through a massive repair and what we've ended up with is a ship where the outsides the higher up you get in the ship and the closer to the weather you get the newer the material the closer you get to the centerline and the lower down you get in the ship and the closer to the weather you get, the newer the material, the closer you get to the centre line and the lower down you get into the ship, the more you have that material that Nelson would have been walking around on. So the lower gun deck, the all-up deck where Nelson died, parts of the stern structure, the keel itself. The keel, the backbone.

The absolute backbone, these date from Trafalgar and before. Nice. Shall we go take a look? Okay, well we're up close next to Hull now. This is amazing for me. I've seen this ship a hundred times, but I've never seen it with the plankings off. So you've got exposed the much bigger chunks of oak, almost like the ribs of a ship. Absolutely. Victory derives its strength from the backbone, then off the backbone on each side we've got

140 odd frames so a colleague of mine who was on here the other day said victory now is almost like a giant whale carcass being stripped of its blubber to give you some idea of we're taking that outer skin off the outer planking and we are left with the frames which are about the foot square in sections to 25 centimeters by 25 centimeters incredibly strong to you know this ship has to take 104 guns and 821 crew out across the atlantic in hurricane season so she's an incredibly strong structure and that's how people being able to shoot gigantic iron cannibals absolutely so those guns put a lot of stress into the um, which is why the frames have to be so close together.

Now, nothing you are looking at here now, that hull planking, those frames are older than you or I. These are all late 1980s to early 1990s. Where we've got the older material, that's not the problem we have now. That older material, it's the new stuff. It's the stuff that was done in the second half of the 20th century. So this project, 35 to 40 million pounds in 10 to 12 years, we are not taking away any of

what we would term the significant material. That's material that has been in Victory since before 1955. It's all focused on that newer stuff. So shall we wander along close to our midships and we'll get a Nelson eye view almost of what it was like joining Victory in September 1805. See here we're directly underneath the entrance port so this is more or less the view minus the planking that Nelson had when he was rowed out to Victory at Spithead on that morning. Just off Portsmouth? Just off Portsmouth. Now we've already removed the planking, we've removed the steps that are on the ship's side that he would have climbed up, and you can see here we've exposed some really pretty

catastrophic rot in the frames underneath. Yeah, that is looking pretty terminal, one of those big frames there. Yeah, it's about as bad as it gets to us now. So this is wild-grown teak. This should be good for 60 years, basically as a stake hammered into the ground before it begins to rot. And we've hit about 35 years here before it's just effectively ceased to exist. Do you ever think this was a big, huge, wooden, biodegradable object that was designed to float on water and have only a life of a few decades?

Yeah. And we're trying to keep it alive in a concrete pit in during english winters forever we we are attempting to defy the laws of nature i think it's uh fair to say but i think our view is as we've talked about given the ship's significance that it's absolutely worth it and what's cool andrew we're just walking along the starboard side of victory now is you managed to turn into a museum as well as anything else. This feels like a visitor attraction. If you're visiting Victory

as you would have been used to doing in the past, very little has changed once you're inside the ship. You've still got the visitor route, you get on the upper deck, and even when it's raining, it's a nice place to be because it's protected. But for us, a key part of our responsibilities in a museum is not just preserving an object, but

it's sharing the object and the stories it can tell. These views, the way we're opening Victory up, she's not been seeing like this, we think, for at least 206 years, possibly a little longer. And once we get to the end of the drying process in this area, which is about another four or five months, we think, the scaffolding, the working platforms, the other side of these viewing screens will come down and visitors will have a full view of that central section of the ship across four stories that has all the planking removed, the frames exposed,

and then we'll be able to watch us replank and move up and see the shipwrights working and the conservators working, the archaeologists. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. More after this. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass

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wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So this is exciting, we've just come on board Victory now, we're on the gun deck. Obviously on this gun deck I am, you and I are both crouched over, what's the headroom here about five foot you'd say? Yeah if you're in the right place, not too bad if you're six foot but pushing that you you'll be above it once you get onto the lower gun deck we're all going to be uh close to bent double really it's called a gun deck because stretching away from us in either direction are the big cannon that fire out at 90 degrees to the direction of the ship and the descriptions of

battle in these spaces are like nothing i've ever read like an inferno sort of nightmarish if you want to understand what it was like, then you need to read the account of one of the Marine lieutenants on board and there's a man called Lewis Rotley who says to stand on the middle gun deck and experience a battle at sea on the middle gun deck is like nothing. It defies description. There's fire from above, fire from below, fire from around. It's a fantastic account of what it was actually like

for the the men that were on this deck at that time and it would have been smoke smoke very interesting deafening noise it's a very very difficult place to be to be operating so that's why drilling gun crews so they're not relying on the instruction of an officer of the quarters they're not really relying on the instruction of an officer of the quarters they're not really relying on the instruction of the captain of the gun they simply are relying on that muscle memory you know formula one pit stop of each day they're on autopilot actually because your ability to clearly control someone on this deck is almost non-existent you've got iron cannibals being fired from french ships from two meters range, smashing through this thick oak, sending shards and splinters flying through the air.

Absolutely. And if you have a look in the Victory Galley, we've got a section of the ship's foremast that has been punched through by a nice, neat hole of a French round shot at the battle. And it's cleared for action at the moment, you might say. The guns are in position, sticking out of their ports but there's also a living space absolutely so 821 men on board the ship and everything about victory is actually dictated by the number and the type of guns she carries that gives you the length of the ship because you need a set space between each gun to operate it it gives you um the number of dates

you carry then it creates the underwater hull form because you've got to make it it gives you the number of decks you carry then it creates the underwater hull form because you've got to make it float and then the real last consideration is where are you going to put the people that then need to operate and they slot in around the guns so this area the middle gun deck is traditionally where the rail marines on board would have been based the lowered gun deck is where the seamen were on board after us here we have the ward room for um the commission and some of the warrant officers and nelson's quarters were on the deck above which isn't an accommodation deck because it was open to the weather in large part and so they're in hammocks they're slinging hammocks over the guns absolutely they're eating in tables in between

each gun so you you eat in a mess here which is is your social group, which is four to eight people. And that really, you've got free choice on. So you can change messes if you don't like the people you're with, but it's your little social unit. But every other aspect of your life on board is very heavily regulated. So where you sling your hammock on this deck

is carefully planned out. You have to sling it in the same place every night. The younger people, members of the crew, tend to be out closer to the ship's side where there's less room and you really are cramped in. The senior, more experienced of the crew would be close to the gangway, the walkway that we have through the ship here,

which is a little bit more air. And if you need people on duty quickly, then those with most experience, a bit longer in the tooth, are the ones you're going to need so they're going to be able to get out of their hammocks and on deck more quickly as well and then we've got the heads the front of the ship because the age-old question where's everyone going to the toilet if you're not the officers you've got to climb up onto the upper gun deck you run along to the front of the ship out through a door climb over some netting and then sit

yourself on a plank with two holes cut in it enjoy the scenery and straight into the ocean straight into the ocean yeah if you are tempted you're in your hammock and you're tempted to have a little pee in the corner a dark space what happens to you you are going to get in a lot of trouble you're going to be up before the commanding officer and for something like that the very least is you're going to end up in bill bowls leg chains unlikely you'd get the cat for that unless you were a repeat offender which tended not to happen very often because joking it's like cleanliness famously on british ships you read nelson's letters and they're all going to be about in brilliant strategy and tactics

not so much it's about water and food and keeping clean the fundamental thing to remember about nelson is above all, he's an administrator. As an Admiral, he's got to make sure that he's got his 30-odd ships of the line and his 20-odd thousand crew in the right place at the right time to fight a battle. To fight a battle, they've got to be in good health. The ships have got to be well maintained. And to be in good health, that means you need food and you need water for your ships to maintain, you need that constant supply of equipment coming out from the UK.

So the administrative burden is absolutely enormous. When he arrives with the fleet at the end of September 1805, he's spending 14 hours a day on administration every day. And all of Nelson's correspondence is about exactly that, keeping the ships clean, keeping the men well-fed if there's a letter from Nelson that comes up to auction it's from September 1805 nine times out of ten it's about where you can find onions he thinks onions are a great anti sclerotic so that's his emphasis really and it's a mark of that quality that on

the morning of October 21st 1805 Victory does not have anyone on the sick list. All of these people are in a fit, healthy condition to fight at sea. And that's not an easy thing to have achieved when a few months previously we're crossing the Atlantic and scurvy had kicked in because your fresh food supplies had run out. How many people on Victory of those over 800 that you mentioned, how many would be injured or killed by the end of that day? So there's 90 dead.

If not by the end of the day, then shortly thereafter. And actually those who died of the wounds, some of them are pretty horrendous. I think the last one to die of wounds dies in January of 1806. So very, very painful. There's good surgical provision on board. Mr Beattie, the ship's surgeon, is really quite competent and he's got two good assistants with him and they are pretty effective at the operations

and the survival rate is reasonable. Mr Beattie, Nelson waves him away. There's nothing you can do for me. Absolutely. Ten to the others. My dad told me that when I was a kid. Never forgotten it. Right, what now?

Well, let's go and have a look at the spot where he was shot. Okay, perfect. Look at that. This is where Nelson was shot. Absolutely. See, for Nelson, once battle is joined, his job really is done. Like on the gun deck, you can't rely on instructions

to make sure people are doing the right thing. As far as the fleet's concerned, he's issued his Trafalgar memorandum telling them how he wants them to fight the battle. If they don't understand that, they've got that last instruction, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside the enemy and that kind of thing. So Nelson is actually dictating his post-battle report.

He's pacing back and forth with Hardy, and the quarterdeck feels quite an open space today. But of course, these guns were manned and were in use, and were recoiling back and being pulled back to where we've got these ring bolts in the deck, which reduces the width of space to Nelson by about two-thirds. So he's in this relatively narrow corridor, about seven feet wide, 20 feet long, pacing back and forth, and it's whilst he's pacing that he's shot by a probably a French sailor in the mast of Redoutable from a distance of about 15 meters so we're looking really probably up there

on the scaffolding where one of those red stickers are it's not far away Redoutable of course is a deck lower so the top in that mast is commensurately lower people talk about snipers and they have that kind of Stalingrad view of someone from mile and a quarter away. This is really close when Nelson's shot. There's some argument about is it a direct hit or did it ricochet off the mast? But what we do know is a ball of lead smashes through his left shoulder blade,

passes through his left lung, severing a branch of the pulmonary artery, passes through his spine, breaking his back, and lodges in muscle underneath his right shoulder blade. And he's fallen to the deck, and Hardy rushes over to him at this point. The captain of HMS Victory. Captain of Victory, and Nelson exclaims, they have done for me at last, Hardy. My backbone is shot through. He knew it was over instantly. He knew it was over. Hardy, I always think, was probably a bit more skeptical because he'd been with Nelson a long time. He knows that every time Nelson's wounded, he tends to exclaim something similar.

Related. Very sadly, this time it is true. So he's carried below to the oar lock to be seen by Mr. Beaton. Yeah, the bottom of the ship, way below the waterline, yeah. Okay, so we're now off to meet Diana, Diana Davis, who's the Head of Conservation for the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and is leading the work on some of the more scientific aspects of this project. Andrew thanks as ever thanks for coming on buddy. My pleasure. I really appreciate that.

Dinah it's good I'm warming up thank you for having me inside the building. Victory is looking you've done a lot of work to her haven't you? Yes the project's in full swing now. And what is your main kind of interest? Is it what's doing the damage? How to mitigate that in this reconstruction? From my perspective we're sort of thinking about all the issues that Victory has now that have caused the problems but also how to manage those problems after we've got a new hull because the ship still sits in an open environment it still has all the same risks as it

did previously so we'll be reconstructing the hull and keeping out a lot more of the water but it's still at risk from all the same things it was before. Can you use like modern things or do you have to do all those things whilst being true to the original design? We're trying to be as authentic as possible but I think we're aligning modern methods and materials with that, with the traditional craft skills to get the best of both worlds. So you've got water as an enemy. What about the beetle? The fresh water is probably the one thing that causes everything else. So that invites fungi and different types of rot into the ship.

Wood-boring beetles are a sort of secondary wave of attack after that. So they prefer to live in timber that has been pre-digested by different types of fungi. So they burrow through timber that's already been weakened by fungal. Yeah, that's what we think at the minute. We've got quite a lot of research going into the beetle at the minute because there isn't actually that much known about them. So we've had to answer a lot of our own questions. So will I actually see these beetles when I am able to take part in taking planks off and stuff?

You'll certainly see some life, yes. So one thing that we started doing was we've got an integrated pest management strategy for the ship now. And the first thing that we did was to investigate all the different species we had on board there are quite a few of them when it comes to wood boring beetles the biggest issue we have is the death watch they're one of the largest wood boring species there are and they're they're about sort of three to six mils as an adult so you will see them but probably more likely if you come back in the spring when they start to emerge from the ship that's the time when you can hear their little tapping noise as well their mating call and so they eat the wood or they live in it what's yeah the larvae are eating the timber it can take

up to sort of 10 years for larvae to reach an adult in death watch depending on the environmental conditions that's our best knowledge at the minute. For those eight to ten years, whatever it is, they're eating their way through the ship. They're creating little tunnels through the oak. And then when the beetle becomes an adult, really it's only got probably a matter of weeks to live. What they want to do is lay their eggs and then they die. They spend ten years reaching maturity and then die almost immediately?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's not that uncommon with pests like this. Was the planter placed like everything or just the bits that looked too bad? We're not aiming to make the ship complete necessarily. For everything we take away we don't have to put it back because the way Victory was built it was kind of over engineered and you know it was very very strong it was built to take a kind of over-engineered. It was very, very strong. It was built to take a few cannonball hits at sea and still make it home. We don't need that anymore. It sits still and it's plenty strong enough, to be honest,

even with the rot that's in it at the minute. But we will remove all the rot and anything that's posing a risk to the rest of the material there. And when might you see Victory with its yards cross, masts Marsup rigging on? I don't like to put a date on that. The rigging will go up after the hull is complete. I would maybe come back in 10 years. Well I certainly will. Thank you very much then. Thank you. That's all from me and HMS Victory and the team at the Historic Dockyard folks. You've got to come down here and check it out there's something remarkable happening here. For everyone listening abroad,

very close to international airports. You can whiz over. Well, that's it. Hope you enjoyed the pod. you