Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech stuff from house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com either everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren, and Lauren I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to uh start things up with something that
Speaker 1: we need to do more of. We absolutely do. You
Speaker 1: brought this up and you said we have got to
Speaker 1: do more of this, and I completely agree. We're going
Speaker 1: to go back a little ways to something that we
Speaker 1: used to do on text stuff all the time. And
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen, yes, I am talking about a return
Speaker 1: to listener mail. I don't know why I leaned back
Speaker 1: from the microphone, probably like that I was going to say,
Speaker 1: I'm wearing heads. I didn't do a longtime listeners of
Speaker 1: tech stuff. Realized that I used to do a big
Speaker 1: listener mail thing. But we know, and yeah, we're not
Speaker 1: We're not gonna We're not gonna subject you to all that.
Speaker 1: It's a kinder, gentler tech stuff. But we do have
Speaker 1: some amazing listener mail that we wanted to talk about.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this one was incredibly long. There were
Speaker 1: there were three big suggestions in it, and so we
Speaker 1: had to pare it down. So I'm just going to
Speaker 1: read the part that refers were actually doing for this episode,
Speaker 1: so it goes Hi, guys, thanks for making the podcast.
Speaker 1: I listened all the time at work as I drive
Speaker 1: so much. My favorite episodes are the really long ones
Speaker 1: where you really get stuck into the history of a company,
Speaker 1: like the Amazon podcast. I'm guessing you must have loved
Speaker 1: the HBO trilogy. But here goes the actual request. The
Speaker 1: HMS Victory and HMS Warrior are interesting subjects, partly because
Speaker 1: the Victory is still a commissioned ship in the Royal
Speaker 1: Navy and is the oldest commission warship in the world.
Speaker 1: The Constitution in the United States of America is the
Speaker 1: oldest still afloat, but also because the technology used was
Speaker 1: amazing for its time. The HMS Warrior had such strong
Speaker 1: armor that they used modern weapons of the time to
Speaker 1: test the armor fired at point blank range. Keep up
Speaker 1: the great work, Simon. Well, Simon, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk specifically about the Victory because as we
Speaker 1: were doing our research and building out the history for this,
Speaker 1: we realized we could not truly do justice to both
Speaker 1: subjects if we tried to cram them into a single episode.
Speaker 1: All right, because I don't know about you guys, but
Speaker 1: I was not, you know, really intimately familiar with the
Speaker 1: technical workings of warships up until I did this research.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot to them. There's so many, i mean,
Speaker 1: really cutting edge naval technology was being used to create
Speaker 1: these things, and so we really wanted to go in
Speaker 1: depth into what this thing looked like and how it
Speaker 1: was constructed. And even to do that, you had to
Speaker 1: go back and look at the history of the British
Speaker 1: Navy because the whole evolution leading up to the victory
Speaker 1: was very important to understand why those developments were so
Speaker 1: instrumental in the victory being such a powerful ship. So
Speaker 1: first things first, before we even go into the history,
Speaker 1: I think it's time for us to take a little tour.
Speaker 1: And Lauren, I'm gonna you're gonna be happy to know.
Speaker 1: Right outside the studio, I've set up an entire peer
Speaker 1: with a ship docked air so I'm going to take
Speaker 1: you on a tour of a boat so i can
Speaker 1: show you what everything is. So it's truly incredible. Is
Speaker 1: Atlanta is landlocked, but but I'm impressed by by this
Speaker 1: modern technology that you have used to accomplish this Simon's
Speaker 1: email was inspirational and I could do no less. So
Speaker 1: it's truly a beautiful day. So yes, so let us
Speaker 1: let us go, let us travel to this ship. Alright.
Speaker 1: So now, Lauren, if you take a look at this ship. Here,
Speaker 1: you see this front part where the the whole of
Speaker 1: the ship is its curving down into the water. So
Speaker 1: the front part of the ship is called the bow. Right,
Speaker 1: So everything that's toward the direction of the bow when
Speaker 1: you're on a ship is called four. So if you're
Speaker 1: walking forward exactly, so if you're walking forward towards the bow,
Speaker 1: you're walking for everything behind you is aft because it's
Speaker 1: after right. Now, the back part of the ship is
Speaker 1: the stern. So if you walk aft, you're walking towards
Speaker 1: the stern. Now you've got to learn your left from
Speaker 1: your right. Oh, I actually know this one, okay. So
Speaker 1: the left side of the ship, if you're if you're
Speaker 1: facing four, you're facing the bow, is the port, yes,
Speaker 1: and the right side is starboard. That's right. Although in
Speaker 1: the old old days, port was also known as larboard,
Speaker 1: so you had larboard and starboard. That's much better. Why
Speaker 1: did that's I mean? I okay, I guess it's a
Speaker 1: little similar when you're yelling, you're shouting pirates off the larboard. Now,
Speaker 1: then you might you know, people said, did you say
Speaker 1: starboard or larboard? Which which gun do have fire? There's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of accents in this episode. It's
Speaker 1: left right, right, right. Well, let's see, let's just call
Speaker 1: it port and it's easy to remember. You just hold
Speaker 1: up both your hands and whichever one makes the P.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, that's not right. No, no no, no, if
Speaker 1: you have a hook, it works, that's true if you
Speaker 1: do alright, So then as long as your left hand
Speaker 1: was the one that was cut off, you're in good shape.
Speaker 1: So Captain Hook not so good because his right hand
Speaker 1: was cut off. And well only in the book and
Speaker 1: the Disney movie is different. You know, we're getting a
Speaker 1: little off track. Okay, let's get back this this tour.
Speaker 1: So we've got the ports and the starboard side. Also
Speaker 1: the apocryphal story that the reason why we call posh
Speaker 1: posh is because it stands it's an acronym that stands
Speaker 1: for port out, starboard home, as in those are the
Speaker 1: sides that face. But that's that's apocryph No, but it's
Speaker 1: commonly said, so top deck of the ship, the weather
Speaker 1: deck so called because it's exposed to the elements. Uh,
Speaker 1: the you don't call them floors on a decks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can go down below decks, but there are
Speaker 1: multiple decks in warships in particular, so typically that deck
Speaker 1: has several raised areas. The front is spelled or castle,
Speaker 1: but it's pronounced forecastle. Sure, okay, just like the the
Speaker 1: person who's in charge of overseeing sailor discipline on a
Speaker 1: ship is spelled boatswain, but it's pronounced boson. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: willing to accept your word. Yeah, there's something about the English.
Speaker 1: They just like to drop entire syllables and and letter
Speaker 1: sounds out of their words until you you hear it
Speaker 1: and you think, how do you spell that? Oh, it's
Speaker 1: spelled or castle, but it's pronounced forecastle. So that's in
Speaker 1: the front of the ship. You know, it's for castle.
Speaker 1: So when you when you break it down like that,
Speaker 1: it makes sense. It's in the forward part of the ship,
Speaker 1: and it's a raised portion of the deck. So this
Speaker 1: is generally used as a place for soldiers to stand,
Speaker 1: and so if your ship is being bordered, there on
Speaker 1: a raised platform where they can fire down onto the
Speaker 1: boarding enemy. That's the ideas. Always get that elevated position.
Speaker 1: Then you have the quarter deck, which is really the
Speaker 1: last quarter of the ship that's in the aft part.
Speaker 1: This tends to be lower, right, it doesn't not necessarily
Speaker 1: raised up. You might have a waste in the middle,
Speaker 1: which is a depression in the middle of your ship.
Speaker 1: That's where you would put boats boats. By the way,
Speaker 1: I'll go ahead and say this, even though I have
Speaker 1: it later in my notes. A boat, here's how technical
Speaker 1: we get. Is a small a vessel to fit aboard
Speaker 1: a ship, and a ship is a large enough vessel
Speaker 1: to carry a boat, just like a mountain is larger
Speaker 1: than a hill, and a hill is smaller than a mountain.
Speaker 1: It's one of those definitions that is not at all useful,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad that that's extremely clear. But that's the way.
Speaker 1: That's the way it works. So then in the very
Speaker 1: after the ship, in most warships, you have another raised deck.
Speaker 1: Now this deck is the infamous poop deck, the poop
Speaker 1: I heard another possibly apocryphal tail that the reason it
Speaker 1: is called a poop deck has nothing to do with evacuation.
Speaker 1: It has to do with the fact that if you
Speaker 1: were to have visitors aboard your ship, you would probably
Speaker 1: put them on board this deck. It's in the very back,
Speaker 1: so they can see everything that's happening because it's raised up.
Speaker 1: It's in the back. You're you're out of the way
Speaker 1: of all the action because all the sailors are having
Speaker 1: to deal with the sales that are in the main
Speaker 1: part of the ship, and they would get quote unquote pooped,
Speaker 1: which I assume means amused when they would see waves
Speaker 1: coming aboard, coming over the side and dousing the sailors
Speaker 1: while whereas they're up. Yeah, stay classy, all right. So
Speaker 1: then you've got the deck below the top deck, which
Speaker 1: is commonly called the gun deck. Now there may or
Speaker 1: may not be guns on the gun deck. Typically on
Speaker 1: your ships you would have the cannon on the weather deck.
Speaker 1: So the top deck right, the gun deck might not
Speaker 1: have any guns on it at all. It may just
Speaker 1: be used for the mess, which is where you eat
Speaker 1: and also the place where you would bunk for the night,
Speaker 1: except instead of bunk, you would hammock. So or if
Speaker 1: you were in a really old ship, you had a
Speaker 1: rope that you would lean on to fall asleep. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: those were rough days. Um. Also, sometimes in older ships
Speaker 1: you would just have to sleep on the deck of
Speaker 1: the ship. So, uh, yeah, the cannons on the top deck.
Speaker 1: If it were a really sophisticated warship, there would be
Speaker 1: multiple gun decks and there would be can ends on
Speaker 1: each one. Eventually they started figuring out, hey, we should
Speaker 1: put the heavy cannons towards the lower decks because uh
Speaker 1: they provide more stability. But you can't go too low
Speaker 1: because then you're below the waterline and and you open
Speaker 1: up a port, then that's not right. You're you're a
Speaker 1: sinking your ship and being not really effectively shooting in anything.
Speaker 1: No gunpowder when it gets wet, not terribly. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: but let's let's go back up above decks and what
Speaker 1: are what are these? What are these giant poles? They
Speaker 1: seem to be masts. Those would be masts, and you
Speaker 1: typically would have multiple masks aboard these ships. You might
Speaker 1: hear of a three master or a four master. These
Speaker 1: refer to the number of masts on the ship. The mass,
Speaker 1: of course, are the poles upon which the sails hang.
Speaker 1: You have some some bars that are horizontal that are
Speaker 1: supported by the masts. Those horizontal bars are called yards
Speaker 1: So if you ever heard yard arm, that is referring
Speaker 1: to these these horizontal poles those support the sales. Of course,
Speaker 1: sales are what provide the propulsion aboard these ships. You know,
Speaker 1: you're using wind power right right. And there's a few
Speaker 1: different different types of sales, lots of different types of sales,
Speaker 1: and some of them are very specific to specific masts.
Speaker 1: So if you have let's say a three mast ship,
Speaker 1: your your first mast is the foremast. That's the one
Speaker 1: closest to the bow, so it's the one closest to
Speaker 1: the foe. You might also have a bowsprit, which is uh,
Speaker 1: an extension of the bow that goes up. So if
Speaker 1: you've ever seen one that has like a really long
Speaker 1: pole that extends out kind of like a nose on
Speaker 1: the ship, that's the bow sprint or or bowsprit, depending
Speaker 1: upon how you want to pronounce it. That may also
Speaker 1: have some sales attached to it. But then you have
Speaker 1: the foremast. Next you would have the main mast or
Speaker 1: the main mast, and then you have the mizzen mast
Speaker 1: in the very back. Uh. If you have a really
Speaker 1: big ship like a foremaster, you might also have a
Speaker 1: Bonaventure mast. Uh, these would have the sales. And like
Speaker 1: you said, there are different kinds of sales. Their jibs,
Speaker 1: which are triangular sales that are usually found in the
Speaker 1: front of the ship, attached to the bow and the
Speaker 1: bow sprit. You have square sails, which would be the topsails,
Speaker 1: the main sails, and the top gallant or to gallant,
Speaker 1: i should say, and the royal sales, which are at
Speaker 1: the very very top. So these are these are the
Speaker 1: square ones. And then you've got these other kind of
Speaker 1: weird trapezoidal shaped sails called spankers. Again, keep a classy kids, Yeah,
Speaker 1: having spankers aboard your ship, it's a good thing. Your
Speaker 1: boson might be one of them. But yeah, no, we're
Speaker 1: talking about sales here. Well, but they are at the
Speaker 1: stern of the ship. Yes they are. The spankers are
Speaker 1: by the poop. So I'm so but sure, I'm sorry. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's fine. I was. I was gonna go the same way.
Speaker 1: And it's amazing that we haven't completely fallen apart already. No.
Speaker 1: So you know, the the other big picture of of
Speaker 1: of sailing vessels, the sailor at the helm, the wheel,
Speaker 1: the ship's wheel where the sailor's gripping the wheel tightly,
Speaker 1: there's probably like some sort of storm going on into it,
Speaker 1: and then much much like car driving on TV, you
Speaker 1: just you just twist that thing everywhere. Yeah, no, okay.
Speaker 1: First of all, ship wheels were a relatively late invention
Speaker 1: as far as warships are concerned. The ship's wheel didn't
Speaker 1: come into play until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: Now that the Victory had a ship's wheel, because that
Speaker 1: was built in the mid eighteenth century, but anything that
Speaker 1: was built before the early eighteenth century did not use
Speaker 1: a wheel, used what was called a whip staff or
Speaker 1: a tiller. So this is essentially like, you know, a
Speaker 1: big tiller is like a lever that you would joystick
Speaker 1: kind of, except it was horizontal, not vertical. You would
Speaker 1: lean against it to the right or to the left
Speaker 1: in order to maneuver the ship, and the wheel was
Speaker 1: meant to emulate that, but doing it through a system
Speaker 1: of essentially ropes and pulls. So um and in fact,
Speaker 1: it took a while for them to perfect the way
Speaker 1: of creating the right tension so that you wouldn't end
Speaker 1: up with slack or too much tension with the wheel
Speaker 1: and thus you would affect the maneuverability of a ship.
Speaker 1: So that concludes our tour. We have seen the basic
Speaker 1: ship here, you know, just I guess we could have
Speaker 1: mentioned that most of the ships also had a large
Speaker 1: cabin for the captain or the commander of the vessel
Speaker 1: to stay in. That cabin typically ends up having at
Speaker 1: least one major compartment for the commander of the ship.
Speaker 1: It's a little more comfortable, it's definitely more spacious than
Speaker 1: the crew quarters. And also typically it's used in battle
Speaker 1: situations as well, So even the captain's room ends up
Speaker 1: getting cleared out for battle, and cannon will be rolled
Speaker 1: in and moved through gun ports. Yeah, so even there,
Speaker 1: every single bit of space that could be used for
Speaker 1: combat on these ships was done. So so if we
Speaker 1: want to really talk about the victory, we gotta look
Speaker 1: back to some of the earlier ships that kind have
Speaker 1: led into it's it's being built. So if you look
Speaker 1: all the way back into the very beginning of the
Speaker 1: English navy, you gotta go back to the fifteenth century,
Speaker 1: So fourteen hundreds, this is when cargo ships called carricks
Speaker 1: were becoming a really popular design in all of Europe,
Speaker 1: not just England, but you know France and Spain, lots
Speaker 1: of countries use these kind of ships that were either
Speaker 1: three or four masted ships and they had a large
Speaker 1: aft castle, so very similar to the forecastle. This would
Speaker 1: be on the aft side obviously the stern side um,
Speaker 1: and they would use a lot of cannons, but they
Speaker 1: would all be on the top deck because at the
Speaker 1: time no one can really figure out how to use
Speaker 1: cannons below decks that would not also risk the ship
Speaker 1: capsizing in the water due to due to water coming
Speaker 1: in through the gun ports. So they were all on
Speaker 1: the top decks, and uh, they were not terribly maneuverable.
Speaker 1: They were pretty top heavy with all those Yeah. So
Speaker 1: like you can imagine if you had to take a
Speaker 1: pretty dramatic turn to the to port or starboard that
Speaker 1: with that top heavy you could capsize the ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in fact that did happen, uh in one notable
Speaker 1: case that we'll talk about in a second. But those
Speaker 1: were the types of chips that were used by like
Speaker 1: like Columbus and Magellan. Absolutely. Yeah. The if you've heard
Speaker 1: about the the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,
Speaker 1: those were all carricks. Uh. They In fact, as I recalled,
Speaker 1: Columbus called one of them a cow because he felt
Speaker 1: that it steered that way. So but then we move
Speaker 1: forward into the days of good King Henry the Eighth,
Speaker 1: one of the most enlightened, uh egalitarian rulers in English history.
Speaker 1: That's what he's known for. It. Yeah, that that, and
Speaker 1: you know, being brutal and petty and uh and petulant. Yes, um, hey,
Speaker 1: look I know King Henry the Eighth. King Henry the
Speaker 1: eighth is a friend of mine, all right. So at
Speaker 1: the Georgia Renaissance Festival anyway, and the guy who plays
Speaker 1: him does it perfectly because he's like he's like a
Speaker 1: three year old having a timper tentrum all day long.
Speaker 1: He's jovial and and angry. Yeah, that's terrific. At any
Speaker 1: moment he could, he could demand for your head on
Speaker 1: a pike. But Henry the seventh. So, Henry the Eighth's
Speaker 1: father was the first king to really start to establish
Speaker 1: an official navy. Although although most of his naval ships
Speaker 1: were converted merchant ships, yes, that's exactly right, they weren't
Speaker 1: designed to be warships. He was essentially saying, hey, that boat,
Speaker 1: you have it belongs to the crown now and merchants
Speaker 1: will be like, alright, I guess I work for you now,
Speaker 1: all right, you're paying the checks. So yeah. So Henry
Speaker 1: the eighth decided to start commissioning actual warships to be
Speaker 1: built for the English Navy, and one of the first
Speaker 1: ones was called the Mary Rose, named after one of
Speaker 1: Henry the Eighth's siblings, a beloved sister of his who
Speaker 1: did not lose her head. No, no, Mary Rose did
Speaker 1: not lose her head. Um. Yeah, So the mary Rose
Speaker 1: was a pretty phenomenal ship. They managed to do a
Speaker 1: couple of different things. First of all, it was one
Speaker 1: of the first ships of the English Navy to have
Speaker 1: a carvel hull. So there are two major types of
Speaker 1: holes at the time that this ship was built. There
Speaker 1: was the carvel style and the clinker style. The clinker
Speaker 1: style was older and it was done by overlapping boards,
Speaker 1: so that think of it like shingles on a roof.
Speaker 1: So that's what the hull was like. It wasn't smooth.
Speaker 1: It was the shingle depends like the opposite of water dynamic.
Speaker 1: It was hydrodynamic, yeah, exactly. It was not as maneuverable.
Speaker 1: It also had lots of other problems. You could end
Speaker 1: up having leaks as well. Carvel was a way of
Speaker 1: having these be end to end. That's where you get
Speaker 1: that smooth ship appearance and uh and it was kind
Speaker 1: of a revolutionary way of building ships and it also
Speaker 1: made them even sturdier. Actually, the way that they came
Speaker 1: to build these and put them together. You had a
Speaker 1: keel that that's the backbone of your ship, and then
Speaker 1: you put a frame on it, and then you would
Speaker 1: lay out the boards to side by side and watertight
Speaker 1: that's an important part. Yeah, they put a lot of
Speaker 1: calk in there to keep it watertight. Good. So yeah,
Speaker 1: otherwise your ship is not so much a ship as
Speaker 1: it is a collection of boards is going to get
Speaker 1: you very wet very soon. So then another innovation that
Speaker 1: came about was due to Henry saying, hey, I want
Speaker 1: more guns on this thing. Henry had a lot of
Speaker 1: enemies in Europe. He did not make friends easily. I
Speaker 1: can't imagine why. Actually made friends pretty easily, but he
Speaker 1: forgot them really easily too. So yeah, he he decided
Speaker 1: that he wanted to have gun ports cut into the
Speaker 1: side of the hull in order to have more cannons aboard,
Speaker 1: and shipbuilders were not excited about this idea. As we
Speaker 1: discussed earlier, cannons were typically kept on the top decks
Speaker 1: at the time because they were afraid of I mean,
Speaker 1: anytime you've got extra holes in the side of your chip, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got a place where water can come in, especially
Speaker 1: during stormy weather. That was the big one, uh, the
Speaker 1: actual weather phenomenon, not the song. So they wanted to
Speaker 1: have some way of having these gun ports used without
Speaker 1: sinking the ships. So they the shipbuilders ended up coming
Speaker 1: up with an innovation for special gun ports that had
Speaker 1: these covers, these heavy lids that could slam down in
Speaker 1: place and were water tight when they were closed, but
Speaker 1: then could be opened for action or battle so that
Speaker 1: the cannon could be wheeled out on these big gun carriages.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about those in a little bit in the
Speaker 1: second half. But then you could you know, wheel the
Speaker 1: guns out and fire. And this would allow you to
Speaker 1: have guns still above the water line. Obviously you can't
Speaker 1: go below it, but it would also provide ability to
Speaker 1: have more stability at the base of the ship. Not
Speaker 1: that it helped out the Mary Rose. You see the
Speaker 1: Mary Rose, well, she was a pretty spectacular ship. Her
Speaker 1: her full crew component was supposed to be around four
Speaker 1: hundred men. That's a big, big shop. I mean, most
Speaker 1: of the boats I've been on, like even even the
Speaker 1: ships I've been on have been schooners, which would never
Speaker 1: have supported like maybe maybe a crew of a dozen
Speaker 1: would be right, but four hundred now on a rating party,
Speaker 1: Like if you wanted to go and invade, say France,
Speaker 1: which you know Henry wanted to do that all the time,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to do that, then that number could
Speaker 1: swell up to seven people aboard this one ship. And
Speaker 1: keep in mind it was it was shoulder to shoulder
Speaker 1: if you had four hundred, so crew quarters were incredibly
Speaker 1: tight if it was completely full like that. So in
Speaker 1: so we're talking more than thirty years after she had
Speaker 1: been launched, the Mary Rose sank and it might have
Speaker 1: been because she was too top heavy. She was it
Speaker 1: was on a mission to blockade some French ships too.
Speaker 1: It was during an actual altercation with France, and as
Speaker 1: she was taking a turn, the story is that she
Speaker 1: took a bad wind. The wind hit her at just
Speaker 1: the right angle just as she was making a tight turn,
Speaker 1: and she was so top heavy. Yeah, she started to
Speaker 1: turn over and then those those lids were opening up
Speaker 1: and that was allowing water in through the gun ports
Speaker 1: and then sank. Hundreds of scale atins have been recovered
Speaker 1: from this, uh, this wreck at least I think it's
Speaker 1: something like a hundred and twenty nine so maybe not hundreds,
Speaker 1: but more than a hundred um so, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: The wreck has been largely recovered. It was I think
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies rediscovered pretty phenomenal. So this style
Speaker 1: of ship ended up being the style of choice during
Speaker 1: Henry's reign and for the first part of Elizabeth's reign
Speaker 1: as well. Keeping in mind we had a couple of
Speaker 1: monarchs in between the two. But then Elizabeth also began
Speaker 1: to look at a different type of ships. So in
Speaker 1: seven you had Sir Walter Raleigh commissioning the h M
Speaker 1: s arc Rally. It was a galleon class ships, so
Speaker 1: no no longer carricks and uh galleon from the old
Speaker 1: French word galleon are meaning little ship to me and
Speaker 1: really freaking huge ship, yeah, because that's the way language works.
Speaker 1: The Spanish were really well known for their galleons. The
Speaker 1: Spanish fleet was mainly of galleons. But this one was
Speaker 1: and I used the term loosely by Queen Elizabeth the
Speaker 1: First in seven for five thousand pounds. Yeah, yeah, bought
Speaker 1: because well Rally was was constantly in debt. Was Yeah,
Speaker 1: he owed the crown a lot of money. So really,
Speaker 1: by bought, she just cut his debt by five thousand pounds,
Speaker 1: and I guess he didn't really have anything to say
Speaker 1: about that, which, okay, let's let's be clear here. Elizabeth
Speaker 1: the First was no Henry the Eighth, but she inherited
Speaker 1: some of Hank's you know, attitude. Yeah, she was, can
Speaker 1: I can I call she was? She was determined, you know,
Speaker 1: she was absolutely determined, and in every way that is
Speaker 1: great because she was able to maintain her stance and power.
Speaker 1: She was able to maintain England's sovereignty. She she made
Speaker 1: the hard choices that needed to be made. She did,
Speaker 1: but she is probably the worst possible words. She didn't
Speaker 1: that power and capacity as as she said in black Adder,
Speaker 1: she had the constitution of a concrete elephant. Uh but yes,
Speaker 1: So anyway, this galleon class huge improvement over the Carrot class.
Speaker 1: So it had two gun decks. At an upper gun
Speaker 1: deck the weather deck and a lower gun deck which
Speaker 1: was actually one deck down. Uh. It had a double forecastle,
Speaker 1: a quarter deck, and a poop deck. The two gun
Speaker 1: decks were incredibly effective. The helmsman controlled the ship via
Speaker 1: tiller on the poop deck, so the poop deck was
Speaker 1: elevated enough so that the helmsman could navigate and see
Speaker 1: over the forecastle, because otherwise you're kind of looking at
Speaker 1: your looking at a ship and you're thinking like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know I need to steer it, but I can't
Speaker 1: see any landmarks. Not like they had a video screen,
Speaker 1: so yeah, you couldn't pull it. There's a Spanish galleon
Speaker 1: off the port, bell bring it up on screen. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't work. You couldn no make it. So back in
Speaker 1: this day, but the galleon class again big leap forward.
Speaker 1: So we start seeing an evolution in various ship building
Speaker 1: and ship classes over this time. Now for large part
Speaker 1: they are just improvements over existing types of ships. By
Speaker 1: the time you get to the eighteenth century, you start
Speaker 1: seeing a new type of ship and it's all based
Speaker 1: upon the same kind of stuff that Henry was concerned with.
Speaker 1: See the reason why Henry really wanted to have those
Speaker 1: extra gun decks so that they could do a maneuver
Speaker 1: called broadsides. Broadsides where you present the broad side of
Speaker 1: your ship, so you know you're not coming straight at
Speaker 1: your enemy. You present the broadside because that's where all
Speaker 1: your cannons are. Yeah, that's the useful bit for you,
Speaker 1: and especially if you can catch another ship as it's
Speaker 1: coming straight on heading towards you, you can fire very
Speaker 1: effectively at them before they have time to really fire you. Right,
Speaker 1: So laying on broadsides means you just fire all the
Speaker 1: guns on that side facing the enemy vessel, and you're
Speaker 1: bound to do some pretty major damage. So with that
Speaker 1: tactic in mind, it started to guide shipbuilders in the
Speaker 1: way they wanted to build warships. So by the UH
Speaker 1: the early to mid eighteenth century, the the Board of
Speaker 1: Admiralty began to order new ships of the line and
Speaker 1: a ship of the Line was designed speci typically for this.
Speaker 1: The battle tactic was that you would line up all
Speaker 1: of your ships in a column, so you would have
Speaker 1: your various ships of the line built for war one
Speaker 1: behind the other, and then ideally when you came upon
Speaker 1: your enemy, you would maneuver in such a way where
Speaker 1: your entire line of ships can all lay on broadsides
Speaker 1: in a in a sequence against your enemy, and it
Speaker 1: was devastating. So if you made a mistake in that
Speaker 1: maneuvering phase, it was game over. It was almost guaranteed
Speaker 1: to end up causing uh, you know, failure. So they
Speaker 1: ordered twelve of these in seventeen fifty eight, and uh
Speaker 1: one of those would be the HMS Victory. And they
Speaker 1: wanted to have big gun decks. They wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to withstand a lot of damage, and so it
Speaker 1: had to be, uh, something really really spectacular. And this
Speaker 1: was also the same year that a particular person who
Speaker 1: ends up being incredibly important in the history of the
Speaker 1: HMS Victory was born, Lord Nelson. So Lord Nelson very
Speaker 1: important figure in history. This is sort of the coming
Speaker 1: a stuff you missed in history class episode. But you know,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot more to say, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk specifically about the Victory and what made her so
Speaker 1: special in just a moment. But before we do that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, and now it's seventeen sixty five and the
Speaker 1: HMS Victory is ready to launch. It had been prepared
Speaker 1: in the old single dock in Chatham's Royal Dockyard, and
Speaker 1: she was pretty useful ship. They she she saw action
Speaker 1: and lots of engagements, not just not just the most
Speaker 1: famous one which everyone remembers, the Battle of Trafalgar. I
Speaker 1: mean I remember it there well, you know, not personally,
Speaker 1: but I've I've seen I've seen statues and I've read
Speaker 1: about it. But also she was used in the American Revolution,
Speaker 1: not by the Americans obviously, also the French War of Independence,
Speaker 1: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic War, clearly, you know that's
Speaker 1: another one. And then it was the flagship of Vice
Speaker 1: Admiral Nelson, So she would end up being recommissioned in
Speaker 1: eighteen o eight. We'll talk specifically about that in a
Speaker 1: little bit. But also then was serving in the baltic Um.
Speaker 1: She switched to harbor service eventually, which meant that she
Speaker 1: was kind of used for dignitaries. It was a residence,
Speaker 1: it was a tender boat like. It was kind of
Speaker 1: the English Navy's way of saying, we're really proud of
Speaker 1: this particular ship. She has served us. Well, we don't
Speaker 1: want to scrap her. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of out
Speaker 1: to pasture, but not in the dead way. And the
Speaker 1: look at this really beautiful old cow, right, yeah, she's
Speaker 1: she's she's a good old cow. She's a good old cow.
Speaker 1: And as far as I know, no one ever described
Speaker 1: her as a cow. Um. She actually steered quite well.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what went on with the construction
Speaker 1: of this thing. I mean, it was a massive undertaking.
Speaker 1: This was not as big a ship as some of
Speaker 1: the ones that Henry had commissioned back in his day,
Speaker 1: but was so sophisticated and so well put together that
Speaker 1: it required a lot of work. So the construction crew
Speaker 1: of HMS Victory was a sizeable one of around two
Speaker 1: hundred fifty men. And according to the resources I was
Speaker 1: looking at, they looked at a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of wood. Yeah, like like a hundred acres of forest.
Speaker 1: That's some six thousand mature oak trees. Um were used
Speaker 1: to provide the wood for the ship, along with some
Speaker 1: fur almond, pine um. Mostly all taken from the forests
Speaker 1: of Kent and Sussex, which is good because if it
Speaker 1: taken in from the hundred acre wood Winnie the po
Speaker 1: would be homeless. Now at that time, trees were selected
Speaker 1: carefully for their size, right, they had to. They had
Speaker 1: to sit there and look specifically like, well, we need
Speaker 1: this size to make these certain planks, and only that.
Speaker 1: But there were certain natural parts of trees that became
Speaker 1: in really useful. Yeah. Yeah. The the largest of them
Speaker 1: were like these oaks that were thirty ft high. Others
Speaker 1: were forked or had these special y shaped branches that
Speaker 1: would allow for particular bits to be made from a
Speaker 1: single piece of wood, thus making it stronger than it
Speaker 1: otherwise would be. Right, instead of having to make a
Speaker 1: joint between two pieces of wood, the natural joint of
Speaker 1: the y shaped oak meant that they didn't have to
Speaker 1: to engineer that. It was already built into it, so
Speaker 1: they didn't have to worry about that being a weak point.
Speaker 1: It was pretty phenomenal. So they built the keel first,
Speaker 1: That of course, is the backbone. That's the part that
Speaker 1: runs along the very bottom of the ship. Yea. And
Speaker 1: then they've built the frame. And normally what you would
Speaker 1: do is you would season the wood for the ship,
Speaker 1: and by season we mean dry it out. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: want to get all the moisture out. You want to
Speaker 1: you want those boards to shrink as much as they
Speaker 1: can possibly shrink, because what does shrink as it looses moisture?
Speaker 1: And if you and if you shrink it after it's built,
Speaker 1: then you've got that loose collection of planks that's gonna
Speaker 1: get you very wet. You get a leaky a leaky bill.
Speaker 1: And also, you know, this would also mean that they
Speaker 1: ship itself would be more resilient to damage, it would
Speaker 1: be stronger. So normally you would season would over several
Speaker 1: months because you don't want to take too long. Usually
Speaker 1: these ships when they're being built, they're being built for
Speaker 1: a specific purpose. Yeah, yeah, you've got an order out
Speaker 1: and so it kind of needs to be filled in
Speaker 1: a certain period of time. Maybe maybe war is going
Speaker 1: on or war is imminent, and so there's a there's
Speaker 1: a very strong incentive to get this thing built. But
Speaker 1: in this case, the wood wound up being seasoned over
Speaker 1: a period of several years. Yeah, because peace broke out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's so irritating. You're sitting there, you're like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: twelve ships of the line. Peace breaks out, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly everyone's like, well, a bunch of workers just ticking
Speaker 1: the desk. No need for us to build that. There's
Speaker 1: no no rush now, might as well just leave that
Speaker 1: wood under the canvas. So it's seasoned for three years
Speaker 1: as opposed to six months. So it was well and
Speaker 1: truly seasoned by the time the Victory construction started up again,
Speaker 1: and it meant that the ship, when it was fully built,
Speaker 1: was much more resilient than it would have been if
Speaker 1: they had just been seasoned for a few months. So
Speaker 1: it ended up being a great thing for the ship, um,
Speaker 1: even though I'm sure the people who were designing it
Speaker 1: and building it and paying for it were a little irritated. Now,
Speaker 1: the upper deck has a lot of nails in it.
Speaker 1: You know, you gotta you gotta hammer down all the
Speaker 1: planks so that it's a sturdy place for people to
Speaker 1: people and cannons to travel across. So that means that
Speaker 1: you had to have a lot of nails. And I
Speaker 1: thought was fascinating that the if you were to take
Speaker 1: all the iron and copper nails out of the upper deck,
Speaker 1: first of all, the British would be so mad at you,
Speaker 1: super super man, like you just took the top of
Speaker 1: our boat. Uh, your ship. I know it's a ship,
Speaker 1: but it would be two tons of iron and copper
Speaker 1: nails just just for that upper deck now the bottom
Speaker 1: of the hole here. Yeah, it's coated in more copper sheeting.
Speaker 1: Well okay, originally it was coated in a mixture of
Speaker 1: oil and brimstone, and this was in order to keep
Speaker 1: stuff like barnacles off of the sides of the ship
Speaker 1: to prevent damage to it um. Eventually, in sight that
Speaker 1: would be replaced by a coating of copper sheeting to
Speaker 1: to really keep the um the ship worms out of it,
Speaker 1: which aren't worms at all, but rather burrowing so saltwater clams. Yeah, nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody wants that. No, that's that's bad news. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I end up being a little bit, a little bit
Speaker 1: on the expensive side. Uh. In the time that was built,
Speaker 1: it cost sixty three thousand, one d seventy six pounds sterling,
Speaker 1: which is now close to about twenty million pounds, which
Speaker 1: is almost thirty four million in US dollars as of
Speaker 1: this afternoon's exchange rates. Wow. Yeah, so not not a
Speaker 1: cheap boat ship. So let's talk about how how how
Speaker 1: she measures up. So she's she's two hundred twenty seven
Speaker 1: feet long, which is uh sixty nine and she's fifty
Speaker 1: one ft ten inches wide at our widest point, which
Speaker 1: is nearly sixteen meters. And if you wanted to completely
Speaker 1: deck out this ship, like you wanted every single post filled,
Speaker 1: how many people would would it be? Eight hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty one? That one would be the captain ah or
Speaker 1: Nelson for when it was his fly ship. But yeah,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and twenty one. So that means that you
Speaker 1: would actually divide that up into UM two four hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty men for a shift, and then the rest
Speaker 1: would be taking care of the ship. So we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that in a little bit too. Because the life
Speaker 1: aboard a ship was special, y'all. So she was designed
Speaker 1: to carry one hundred cannons on three gun decks, so
Speaker 1: doing doing one better for him. The eighth ships three
Speaker 1: gun decks, So you had the weather deck, the top deck,
Speaker 1: that one had some guns, then you had the next
Speaker 1: deck down the mid gun deck, and then next the
Speaker 1: one down was the lower gun deck. And they also
Speaker 1: if you looked at the gun decks, the heavier guns
Speaker 1: are on the lowest gun deck. Yeah, except for the
Speaker 1: two heaviest of them all, but I'll talk about those
Speaker 1: special in the second. So total, she had a hundred
Speaker 1: four guns during the battle at Trafalgar, So she had
Speaker 1: the the you know, the hundred cannons plus four. Her
Speaker 1: first broadside during that battle would have weighed one point
Speaker 1: twenty five tons. So if you added up all the
Speaker 1: shot that came out of that broadside, that's how heavy
Speaker 1: it would be. And it was actually a greater armament
Speaker 1: on board that ship than was used by the entire
Speaker 1: British army during the Battle of Waterloo. So if you
Speaker 1: looked at all the artillery that they used, that was
Speaker 1: dwarfed by what was on this one ship. Okay, but
Speaker 1: you said that there were different types of cannons on it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you often will hear about cannons being referred to
Speaker 1: as as a certain like number and then called pounder.
Speaker 1: And that's not the pound weight of the cannon at all,
Speaker 1: because I mean, because some of them are like thirty
Speaker 1: two pounders. Yeah, pounder. You're like, well that that cannon
Speaker 1: doesn't sound I could carry a thirty two pound cannon. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: thirty two pounder refers to the weight of the shot
Speaker 1: being used, not the weight of the cannon. So the
Speaker 1: cannon was weighing more like three point five tons now
Speaker 1: that you put them on a carriage. So they would
Speaker 1: actually be on a on a thing that has wheels, right,
Speaker 1: it would have like two wheels in it or four wheels,
Speaker 1: and be on this carriage, and the carriage it's off
Speaker 1: would be secured to the ship by giant ropes. Because
Speaker 1: here's the thing. When you fire a cannon, you get
Speaker 1: that opposite reaction and the cannon rolls backward, right, So
Speaker 1: the ropes have to be there otherwise the cannon rolls
Speaker 1: all yeah, yeah, you just lost half your crew because
Speaker 1: you fired a gun. Um, So the thirty two pounders
Speaker 1: were firing thirty pound shot. Those were on the lower
Speaker 1: gun deck. So your mid gun deck had twenty four
Speaker 1: pounder guns and the upper deck had the twelve pounder guns.
Speaker 1: But then you had the two biggins. They were smashers.
Speaker 1: These were sixty eight pounders. They fired shot that weighed
Speaker 1: sixty eight pounds. They were meant to be used at
Speaker 1: the very four of the ship when you were amy
Speaker 1: like you were heading toward a ship, so that you
Speaker 1: could just completely decimate that thing before you even get there.
Speaker 1: And I know, decimate means that I would only really
Speaker 1: eliminate ten percent of the ship. They would colloquially decimate,
Speaker 1: thank you. So shooting one of these guns was an
Speaker 1: incredibly complex affair. You had had a crew of six
Speaker 1: per cannon, and each person on that crew had a
Speaker 1: very specific duty, and they would be numbered actually numbers
Speaker 1: one through six rather than names, because in battle you
Speaker 1: really can't hear a whole lot, so you wanted to
Speaker 1: simplify things as much as so. Number one would be
Speaker 1: the person whose job it is to aim and fire
Speaker 1: the cannon, and then you had people whose job it
Speaker 1: was to raise or lower the barrel of the cannon
Speaker 1: with a spike. Uh. They would be on either side,
Speaker 1: and one of them would be number two and the
Speaker 1: other one would be number five because you numbered them
Speaker 1: by the by going around the cannon, So two and
Speaker 1: five they were in charge of adjusting the height of
Speaker 1: the barrel, and they had to use spikes to do
Speaker 1: it because otherwise, you know, you have to have the leverage.
Speaker 1: You would never be able to lift this on your own.
Speaker 1: Then you had a person whose job it was to
Speaker 1: sponge the gun so or well, actually number three technically
Speaker 1: would be the person loading it, so they'd be loading
Speaker 1: it with the shot and with the powder. But then
Speaker 1: number four would be sponging the gun. Sponging means that
Speaker 1: you would use a wet sponge to plunge down the
Speaker 1: barrel of the cannon after you had just fired it.
Speaker 1: The reason for this would be to extinguish any still
Speaker 1: burning gunpowder, because you want to load the next powder
Speaker 1: in for the next shot, and if you did it
Speaker 1: while there was still something burning there, you could prettymaturely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so then you just lose that powder. Plus you could
Speaker 1: possibly end up seriously injuring or killing someone on your crew.
Speaker 1: So this was a very important part of it. And
Speaker 1: then you had the powder monkey. Powder monkey was usually
Speaker 1: a kid, usually one of the youngest members of the crew,
Speaker 1: usually small and quick, and their job was to run
Speaker 1: down to where the all the all the the the
Speaker 1: powder was kept exactly so that was their job, was
Speaker 1: to make sure that the cannon was still having enough powder.
Speaker 1: And it didn't, then they had to run down and
Speaker 1: grab some more. So, yeah, you would fire this this cannon,
Speaker 1: you would actually uh, it would rock it back. After
Speaker 1: it was fired, you would have the sponger sponge it
Speaker 1: really quickly to extinguish anything. You would have the loader
Speaker 1: loaded up and then you would have to have the
Speaker 1: whole crew pushing this three and a half ton carriage
Speaker 1: to move it back into position out the gun ports
Speaker 1: so you could fire it again. Now, if you were
Speaker 1: on the top deck, the weather deck, you didn't have
Speaker 1: to move and over it. At a gunport, you just
Speaker 1: had to get it over, get it to the starting point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you would still have to move it, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be like trying to aim for the little gunport anymore.
Speaker 1: And these different types of shot, yeah, including cannonballs. Yep.
Speaker 1: That's so do damage to the whole of the enemy
Speaker 1: ships or possibly a fort if you're aiming at that
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Bar shot, Yeah, that's to take
Speaker 1: out rigging. So rigging is the stuff that I think
Speaker 1: of it like tension wires that help hold a mast up.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen the stuff that people are quickly
Speaker 1: climbing up and it looks like a little like a
Speaker 1: cargo net type thing, that's the rigging. And the rigging
Speaker 1: is designed so it distributes the forces that are put
Speaker 1: against a mast, particularly when the sales are unfurled, so
Speaker 1: that it doesn't snap in half. So yeah, that that
Speaker 1: bar shot destroys rigging and sales too. Shot as well.
Speaker 1: Chain shot super nasty. So imagine two balls with a
Speaker 1: chain connecting them. It would fly out and hit things
Speaker 1: like a mast and end up splintering the masks. So
Speaker 1: you can knock a mass down in a single hit
Speaker 1: if it was aimed just right, or you know, cut
Speaker 1: like three or four sailors in half. That could happen
Speaker 1: to Yeah, grape shot was it was the other great
Speaker 1: thing for killing a lot of people. Yeah. It's essentially shotgun,
Speaker 1: a shotgun blast, and it's just for a cannon, so
Speaker 1: you've got lots of little, little bit little bits. Uh.
Speaker 1: These are also what those smashers that I talked about,
Speaker 1: they would often be loaded with grape shot because you're
Speaker 1: on the forecastle. Yeah, you're at a good high angle
Speaker 1: you at down to the other ship and you just
Speaker 1: wipe out the people who are on it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I mean, it's war. It's a brutal business. So yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely tough stuff. So uh so, okay, so down in
Speaker 1: those sleeping quarters, yeah, uh so, I mean did they
Speaker 1: have enough room to have everyone, I mean, all eighty
Speaker 1: one people asleep in there at the same time. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, the admiral has his own room, right, No,
Speaker 1: they did not. That's a good question, but no, they
Speaker 1: did not. Know. What they would do is they would
Speaker 1: sleep in shifts. Uh yeah, and most you would have
Speaker 1: four hundred and sixty people asleep there. When they were eating,
Speaker 1: you might have six hundred people in there. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the gun decks served as the crew sleeping quarters. So
Speaker 1: you didn't have any room to waste on one of
Speaker 1: these ships. So the crew did not have dedicated rooms
Speaker 1: to sleep. Yeah, it was not like a little well
Speaker 1: here's your state room, that wasn't it. And and there
Speaker 1: was a huge scramble to to get everything out of
Speaker 1: the way. Whenever you had to roll the cannons, you
Speaker 1: had to clear the decks. You had to immediately clear him.
Speaker 1: So the way it would typically work is that if
Speaker 1: you wanted to go to sleep and it was your
Speaker 1: time to sleep, you would sling your hammock on the
Speaker 1: gun deck and you were allotted twenty one inches for
Speaker 1: your hammock and no more. So don't complain about cruise ships, y'all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no talk about And then these were all interconnected type
Speaker 1: hammocks too, so you were like shoulder to shoulder with
Speaker 1: people next to you. Um. Also, there's no ventilation down there, uh,
Speaker 1: and very little light, so dark, stuffy, filled with men
Speaker 1: on in hammocks. If if Pirates of the Caribbean is
Speaker 1: sounding less and less sexy to you, it should non
Speaker 1: accurate representation of what naval life is really like. Um. Also, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way you could. You'd have to have a
Speaker 1: crew like three times the sides of any of these ships.
Speaker 1: But anyway, very few of them were Johnny Depps. Yeah no,
Speaker 1: and even the Johnny Depp ones, they were just Johnny
Speaker 1: Depp for that time, much lower standards back then anyway. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you would have this really close space, closed in
Speaker 1: space where all of them would be sleeping at a time,
Speaker 1: like the all of them being four and sixty of them,
Speaker 1: or if it was time to mess to eat, you
Speaker 1: would have six hundred at a time. You would have
Speaker 1: messmates that would be about eight to twelve crew members
Speaker 1: that you would count. Those are the people you eat with,
Speaker 1: And the duty of the person to cook would rotate
Speaker 1: through the messmates. So on a particular day, it might
Speaker 1: be your day to cook for your messmates, and the
Speaker 1: ship's cook would oversee all of that. So the ship's
Speaker 1: cook's job was really to make sure that nobody messed
Speaker 1: with the galley and burned down the ship, because anytime
Speaker 1: you're using any kind of heat on board the ship,
Speaker 1: and yeah, so not not comfortable, not luxurious at all.
Speaker 1: Now that the admiral's story a little different, but we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that in a second. If you happen to
Speaker 1: get injured, uh not sick, they did have a sick
Speaker 1: quarters area, which was not a popular place to be
Speaker 1: when you were sick. You didn't get your rum ration
Speaker 1: for one thing, so a lot of people when they
Speaker 1: got sick wouldn't report to Yeah, you know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to get out of your rum so well, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean. And the thing was that that you know
Speaker 1: you you didn't get water on chips, no, because water
Speaker 1: would go bad. I mean they would. They would keep
Speaker 1: water as much as they could, but they would have
Speaker 1: to freshen it all the time because the water would
Speaker 1: get scummy and nasty. So they end up using beer
Speaker 1: most of the time instead. So each say there was
Speaker 1: given a ration of a gallon of beer a day
Speaker 1: and about um, I think a half pint of rama day.
Speaker 1: But you would get it like a quarter at a time,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, at that point in history, a
Speaker 1: lot of people were drinking more alcohol than water because
Speaker 1: it was a much cleaner way of getting a nutrients
Speaker 1: and be liquid. Yeah. So if you need to have surgery,
Speaker 1: you have surgery, you go to the or lop deck.
Speaker 1: Surgery was pretty much which limb do you need lopped off?
Speaker 1: That was pretty much the extent of surgery. Um. Picture
Speaker 1: is so romantic. Yeah, but then you're able to tell
Speaker 1: your part from the starboard. Uh, and then you had
Speaker 1: the the the actual construction of the ship. But she
Speaker 1: had three masts and a bow sprit, so each mast
Speaker 1: required seven trees to put one mast together. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were bound together with these iron hoops and hundreds
Speaker 1: of yards of ropes. Originally they were um, they were
Speaker 1: larger than that. They weren't seven trees bound together. But
Speaker 1: this was a construction that was implemented later on in
Speaker 1: the ship's life. And I understand that the tops of
Speaker 1: the mass were actually made of a different type of
Speaker 1: wood very specific reason. Yeah, fur and pine, because they're
Speaker 1: so light and springy, so they wouldn't snap in the
Speaker 1: heavy winds. They would they would bend with them. You
Speaker 1: had twenty seven miles of rigging that's that supportive rope
Speaker 1: structure I was talking about earlier that keeps the masts
Speaker 1: UH safe by distributing those forces across the deck of
Speaker 1: the ship. And then we can talk about the sales.
Speaker 1: Have had a lot of sales for for acres worth
Speaker 1: of canvas. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of sales. And
Speaker 1: this was all hand woven, y'all. Yeah, it took something
Speaker 1: like I read that one sale, one of the largest sales,
Speaker 1: took twelve hundred man hours to finish sewing. So that's incredible.
Speaker 1: They had um so thirty seven sales total six thousand
Speaker 1: five D square yards or five thousand four D square meters.
Speaker 1: An additional twenty three brought on board just in case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you might have to replace a sale, you
Speaker 1: have to repair one or swap one out, so you know,
Speaker 1: anything could happen, So twenty three extra sales, lots of
Speaker 1: canvas on board that ship. They also had twenty six
Speaker 1: miles of rope. Although when you're on board a ship,
Speaker 1: you don't call it rope, you call it line. You
Speaker 1: pick up that line, you don't pick up the rope.
Speaker 1: I once got yelled at we're talking about coiling rope
Speaker 1: and that's not rope, that's line. But I often use
Speaker 1: the wrong lingo in whatever situation I'm in. So I
Speaker 1: am a land lover. I mean I love boats and ships.
Speaker 1: I love all the lingo. But I'm certainly no sea salt. No.
Speaker 1: I just just just someone who appreciates it. So, the
Speaker 1: largest rope or line aboard this ship was built for
Speaker 1: the anchor, which makes sense, right, So you want that
Speaker 1: to be pretty strong shirt, Yeah, like a like Hulk
Speaker 1: Hogan's pythons. It was nineteen inches in circumference. It's a
Speaker 1: big rope. Continue. Yeah, So what you're gonna do when
Speaker 1: the HMS Victory's anchor line goes wild over you? I
Speaker 1: guess not everything works in Hulk Hogan type of metaphors.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you wonder how big nineteen inches
Speaker 1: is in metric, we're talking for cimes. Now, if you
Speaker 1: wanted to go to full sale where you're unfrolling all
Speaker 1: the sales necessary to go as fast as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: by the way, you don't under correct wind conditions because
Speaker 1: you don't want to just do that at any old time,
Speaker 1: because because the thing is is that if you catch
Speaker 1: too much wind in your sails, you're going to potentially
Speaker 1: damage your masts or or the rigging that's supporting the mass. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily like to go faster. It all depends
Speaker 1: upon what the situation is. You don't necessarily need to
Speaker 1: unfroll every single sale and then you go faster. It
Speaker 1: doesn't work that way. All depends upon the strength of
Speaker 1: the wind and the winds direction. But if you wanted
Speaker 1: to go full sail, so however you want to interpret that, Um,
Speaker 1: that was a big deal. I mean if you're especially
Speaker 1: if you're going from you know, complete standstill the full sale.
Speaker 1: It took a hundred and twenty crew members in order
Speaker 1: to do it. But but but an experienced crew could
Speaker 1: do it in six minutes. Reportedly, that's pretty incredible. It's
Speaker 1: it's kind of like their gun crew the HMS Victory
Speaker 1: was really proud of their gun crews who were able
Speaker 1: to fire and reload a cannon in nineties seconds, which
Speaker 1: is when you think about how complicated that that whole
Speaker 1: processes and how much you have to do, it's pretty
Speaker 1: impressive to them and a half between shots a long time. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I also read that they could um that they could
Speaker 1: clear the decks and prepare the cannons for firing, and
Speaker 1: a dead ten minutes. That's pretty incredible too, because you're
Speaker 1: talking about having to move everything else all the way. Now, Graham,
Speaker 1: when you were done sleeping, you had to put your
Speaker 1: hammock up before you went on duty, you know, it was,
Speaker 1: and some of the hammocks would be put up in
Speaker 1: the rigging, which could actually help protect some of the
Speaker 1: various parts of the ship should you come under fire.
Speaker 1: But then you had the galley, which had a single stove,
Speaker 1: one stove, and it wasn't a really big stove. You
Speaker 1: don't want a huge stove. You don't want to again,
Speaker 1: you don't want to have a big source of fire exactly.
Speaker 1: It had an automatic rotating spit for roasting animals, which
Speaker 1: was not done frequently. You could, if you were an officer,
Speaker 1: be allowed to bring a certain number of animals aboard
Speaker 1: to be slaughtered at your command to be served up
Speaker 1: for dinner. Because usually you'd be eating uh, salt packed meat,
Speaker 1: so it would be really dry and tough and you'd
Speaker 1: be eating hard take. Yeah yeah, Hartech biscuits with lots
Speaker 1: of weevils in it. Yeah, well, I mean the weevils
Speaker 1: are extra protein. Right, Yeah, well you always choose the
Speaker 1: lesser of two evils, but the the don't blame me.
Speaker 1: Patrick O'Brien wrote that joke. So the spit, you might say, well,
Speaker 1: how was it an automatic spit? I mean, we're talking
Speaker 1: about a ship that was made in the mid eighteenth century.
Speaker 1: How could it be automatic? H ha clever idea. So
Speaker 1: the stove has a chimney. You have to have a
Speaker 1: chimney to vent the smoke, right, So in this chimney
Speaker 1: they placed a fan so the hot air would turn
Speaker 1: the fan. The fan was connected by pulleys to a
Speaker 1: rotating spit, so it would end up as the fan turned,
Speaker 1: it turned the spin spit, so you would actually have
Speaker 1: an automatic rotating spit to cook your delicious recently slaughtered
Speaker 1: animal on Summing vegetarian alright, so um, but no, you know,
Speaker 1: and again luxurious treat. If you're on board a ship
Speaker 1: you usually didn't have such such luxuries. That's pretty incredible. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we had talked about the beer, we talked about the rum.
Speaker 1: The victory had seven anchors of various sizes. The two
Speaker 1: main ones were used to hold the victory's position in
Speaker 1: deep water. And we're located on the starboard side. Um
Speaker 1: and as we mentioned earlier, it could carry boats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: carried not just one or two, it carried several boats,
Speaker 1: six of them. So, first of all, no lifeboats. No
Speaker 1: lifeboats aboard the Victory. Why because it takes too much
Speaker 1: time to lower a lifeboat down to the water. It
Speaker 1: just was not a possibility. So if if sailors were
Speaker 1: to fall off the ship, it sucks to be them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you might get a a hammock thrown to you to
Speaker 1: make a kind of sort of flotation device. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and sailors were not swimmers. They most of them had
Speaker 1: no idea how to swim. Yeah, pretty incredible life. Like,
Speaker 1: you are trusting your life to a vessel, and if
Speaker 1: you get off that vessel while it's a mid trip,
Speaker 1: you're pretty much doomed to die. Okay, now that's that's cool.
Speaker 1: I swim pretty well, and and I and I'm terrified
Speaker 1: of the open ocean for for the reason that it's
Speaker 1: not like solid ground, and I don't like the idea
Speaker 1: of being able to just fall infinitely, I mean not infinitely,
Speaker 1: but really just stopped for a while. Well yeah, but
Speaker 1: at any rate, So these boats, six of them. There
Speaker 1: there were. There was a launch boat, which was the
Speaker 1: largest of all of them. It was thirty four ft
Speaker 1: long or tin point three meters. There was a barge,
Speaker 1: three cutters, and a pennace, so pennace is a very
Speaker 1: small ship. Pirates used them occasionally, but normally they were
Speaker 1: used as tender boats, and most of these were used
Speaker 1: as tender boats, which meant that you would get people
Speaker 1: to and from land to the ship or from another ship,
Speaker 1: like if you if the admiral need to meet with
Speaker 1: captains in a fleet, they would all tender over to
Speaker 1: the usually to the admiral's flagship and have dinner aboard
Speaker 1: the flagship. But the the other neat thing was that
Speaker 1: if the winds were calm and you needed to move
Speaker 1: the victory, what do you do? I mean, the victory
Speaker 1: didn't have oars. It wasn't like a gal a galley
Speaker 1: or anything like that. So they ended up using these
Speaker 1: boats to tow the victory. So if the victory were
Speaker 1: either too damaged like the sales had been in tatters,
Speaker 1: or if the winds had been calmed, they could use
Speaker 1: these boats, many of which did have oars, and actually tow.
Speaker 1: It's not very fast. But it does work. Now. The
Speaker 1: admiral's quarters we'd saved for last, and these were relatively
Speaker 1: luxurious compared to everything else on board the ship. Not
Speaker 1: exactly you know, staying at the ritz, but still much nicer.
Speaker 1: So the admiral had use of the Great Cabin, which
Speaker 1: was located under the poop deck, so it's in the
Speaker 1: aft section of the ship, you know, the stern section,
Speaker 1: and it took up one quarter of the upper gun
Speaker 1: deck and had four major sections to it. So it
Speaker 1: had like a meeting room where the admiral could meet
Speaker 1: with people, had a dining room with a full dining table,
Speaker 1: the bedroom area he had his own um toilets. On ships,
Speaker 1: they're called heads. Didn't mention the head, but yeah, if
Speaker 1: you needed to go to the bathroom on board the
Speaker 1: HMS Victory and you were a common sailor, you had
Speaker 1: to go to the bow the ship, very front, and
Speaker 1: down at the bow were two benches that had holes
Speaker 1: in them right above the water. I've heard that this
Speaker 1: could be a little bit precarious to get down into
Speaker 1: that there was a certain amount of scrambling, a little
Speaker 1: bit of dexterity needed, so you know, don't hold it
Speaker 1: for too long, because that's just gonna make things worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you ended up having to uh to to to position
Speaker 1: yourself on a on a on a bench with a
Speaker 1: hole in it above the ocean and then do your
Speaker 1: duty and then climb back up to uh finished work. Now,
Speaker 1: the the officers were allowed to use a more secluded
Speaker 1: head that was on either side of the ship that
Speaker 1: had kind of semi privacy, not a whole lot more
Speaker 1: than say the bow, but a little more. First of all,
Speaker 1: they were the only ones allowed to use them. Then
Speaker 1: the admiral had two in his quarters, one on either
Speaker 1: side of the ship. So I guess you know he
Speaker 1: could hold it for as long as he wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And I'm closest to this one, um so uh yeah
Speaker 1: so and his was under the poop. Anyway, we we are.
Speaker 1: We are setting headshaking records in this episode. I think
Speaker 1: you know what, Chris Palette would be so proud of
Speaker 1: us right now. He would be making so many more
Speaker 1: poop jokes though if he were here. So, the admiral
Speaker 1: also had a swinging cot like he had a cut
Speaker 1: that was suspended from the ceiling. Uh that uh that
Speaker 1: he slept in it wasn't much larger than the hammocks
Speaker 1: that his men slept in, so it wasn't like he
Speaker 1: had a luxury. It's huge bed, but at least you're
Speaker 1: not pumping shoulders with all your exactly. And as we said,
Speaker 1: even the admiral's quarters would be cleared for action if
Speaker 1: there were some sort of battle, and cannon would be
Speaker 1: rolled in there and every single space would be used
Speaker 1: for it. So sure, sure, and you had to clear
Speaker 1: everything out because because it would create extra shrapnel if
Speaker 1: something did come in through, you didn't want any any
Speaker 1: extra stuff bumping around to you know, impale you Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: impaling tends to be bad. Yeah. Um. So, in around
Speaker 1: eighteen o three, the Victory had really large repair work
Speaker 1: done back at UM at Chatham, that Royal shipyard that
Speaker 1: we mentioned it was built in UM, during which a
Speaker 1: whole lot of things that we've just been talking about
Speaker 1: were implemented. She she had fallen into some amount of
Speaker 1: disrepair during the seventeen eighties or so, was refitted briefly
Speaker 1: as a hospital ship and very nearly ended up being
Speaker 1: a prison ship. UM right up until the HMS Impregnable
Speaker 1: was not impregnable at all. UM it was. It was
Speaker 1: sank in seventeen ninety nine and the Navy decided to
Speaker 1: send the victory and for repair. If it had not
Speaker 1: then then the history would be very different. So we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the the probably the most famous
Speaker 1: moment in the victories. UH service as a ship in
Speaker 1: the English Navy and later the British Navy. I guess
Speaker 1: we could just say it the British Navy from the
Speaker 1: very beginning. Henry the eighth had no problem with that,
Speaker 1: although Scotland and Wales weren't always on board with it.
Speaker 1: So October twenty one, eighteen o five the Battle of Trafalgar,
Speaker 1: So this was the most famous action that the Victory
Speaker 1: played a part in. This was the one where Admiral
Speaker 1: Nelson led a fleet of twenty seven ships against Admiral
Speaker 1: Pierre Charles Villeneuve. Villeneuve had thirty three ships, so twenty
Speaker 1: seven verses thirty three, and Nelson very um optimistically said
Speaker 1: that the numbers didn't matter at all and he expected
Speaker 1: to take at least twenty of Villeneuve's shots in this action.
Speaker 1: So Nelson was given like every opportunity to protect himself
Speaker 1: UH and decided not to do it. Nelson was told, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, you can come and join this other ship
Speaker 1: and we can watch the battle happen, like we can
Speaker 1: plan everything out, but you can come join me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll hang out and we'll see how it goes. And
Speaker 1: Nelson said, nope, I'm gonna be in the thick of it.
Speaker 1: And said, well, tell you what, why don't you put
Speaker 1: the victory behind this other ship and let the other
Speaker 1: ship be the first one into battle and us take
Speaker 1: the brunt of the damage, and then you'll follow right
Speaker 1: up behind and that way. No, Nope, victory is going
Speaker 1: to be right in the very front. We're gonna, you know,
Speaker 1: always go straight at him. That's another Patrick O'Brien quote
Speaker 1: attributed to Admiral Nelson. So he took command of the victory.
Speaker 1: He was on on deck, and they closed with the
Speaker 1: other ships. The other ships began to fire upon the
Speaker 1: Victory as soon as it got into range, and the
Speaker 1: Victory took several hits. Uh withstood them. I mean it
Speaker 1: was fine. Uh. They did start killing a lot of
Speaker 1: his men, though his clerk died almost immediately, his assistant
Speaker 1: clerk died shortly thereafter. R and then Nelson ended up
Speaker 1: being shot by a sharpshooter on one of the other
Speaker 1: on the redoubtable I believe was was the ship where
Speaker 1: the sharp shooter was. And and they the guy also
Speaker 1: that Nelson was told by the way, you don't need
Speaker 1: to wear your coat that has all of your your
Speaker 1: metals on it, because that makes you a target. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he said, no, it's too late to shift coats,
Speaker 1: and plus these are military orders here, so I'm wearing it.
Speaker 1: He got shot in the chest. It hit his spine.
Speaker 1: He was taken to the orlop deck with a surgery deck,
Speaker 1: where he said that he expected he would die because
Speaker 1: he said he could feel blood every time his heart beat,
Speaker 1: he could feel blood starting to fill up his chest cavity. Uh,
Speaker 1: he was. He lost all feeling in his legs and
Speaker 1: he was getting very weak. He was feeling hot and thirsty,
Speaker 1: so they fanned him and brought him essentially lemonade and
Speaker 1: wine for him to drink. And he kept on asking
Speaker 1: about how the battle was going and uh so the
Speaker 1: battle continued above decks and uh and he held on
Speaker 1: for three hours after being shot. Um still wasn't entirely
Speaker 1: sure how the battle was going to come out. He
Speaker 1: had made his arrangements, telling uh, telling his crew to
Speaker 1: leave all of his things to his mistress back home,
Speaker 1: and then he died and the victory ended up being victorious.
Speaker 1: Along with the other British ships, they won that battle
Speaker 1: despite the overwhelming odds. Nelson was revered as an incredible hero.
Speaker 1: He was his his loss was mourned throughout the British Navy.
Speaker 1: People went on about how this, this man who had
Speaker 1: shown great bravery through multiple engagements, had died so heroically.
Speaker 1: Some people might say it was a little cavalier, that
Speaker 1: he had a lot of opportunities to perhaps have a
Speaker 1: more prudent approach, But it certainly doesn't make as heroic
Speaker 1: a story. And I don't mean to disparage Admiral Nelson.
Speaker 1: He was clearly a military genius, and I am not
Speaker 1: uh he was. He was, and I ultimately you could
Speaker 1: say he was not willing to put his men through
Speaker 1: something that he himself was not willing to do. Sure, sure,
Speaker 1: there's certainly something to be said for that, And who
Speaker 1: knows what the outcome of that battle would have benefit
Speaker 1: had not been for for that decision of putting that
Speaker 1: really amazing warship on the very front of the line
Speaker 1: if nothing else, I mean, you could inspire your your
Speaker 1: men by the fact that you are you're so well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so pretty incredible. So uh we said that. In eight
Speaker 1: o eight it was refitted again for service in the
Speaker 1: Baltic It was then retired as a harbor service vessel
Speaker 1: for quite some time, and then in nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: after more than more than a century of being in
Speaker 1: service in one form or another, the HMS Victory was
Speaker 1: placed into dry dock permanently. And what that means is
Speaker 1: that it's it's placed up on scaffolding um and no
Speaker 1: longer in the water. The usually dry dock is where
Speaker 1: you bring a ship to to do repairs, to scrape
Speaker 1: off barnacles, to make sure that all the paint is
Speaker 1: smart as they would say, smartest paint um. But now
Speaker 1: she's a museum. You can go and visit the HMS Victory.
Speaker 1: You can walk the decks and explore it and see
Speaker 1: what the conditions were like. You can see how low
Speaker 1: the ceilings were on the gun deck and the fact
Speaker 1: that you had to watch your head or else you
Speaker 1: bonk it. You know, we are a little bit taller
Speaker 1: than they were back then. But right, but um, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: she and and as Simon said in his email, she
Speaker 1: is the oldest commissioned warship in the world. Yeah, pretty impressive.
Speaker 1: So if you ever have the opportunity, you should definitely
Speaker 1: go and visit the HMS Victory. One of the really interesting,
Speaker 1: uh you know, warships of history and certainly one that
Speaker 1: I would love to visit. I have not been aboard
Speaker 1: the Victory. I've been aboard some other famous warships, uh,
Speaker 1: the Constitution, for example, but not not the Victory. So
Speaker 1: I'm hoping one day I'll be able to visit it. Yes,
Speaker 1: and if if you do want to do that visiting,
Speaker 1: I recommend that you go to the historic dockyard at
Speaker 1: Portsmouth in the UK. That's where you can find her.
Speaker 1: It would be cool of us to send you there,
Speaker 1: and she wasn't there. We would never do that. No,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't do that to you. All right, So that
Speaker 1: that wraps up this discussion. So yeah, you might wonder, well,
Speaker 1: how did that have to do with technology? But truly,
Speaker 1: I mean this, this technology, this, this naval technology is
Speaker 1: what shaped world events. And yeah, it might not be
Speaker 1: an iPhone or a uh you know, an IBM computer,
Speaker 1: but it still falls in that realm. We love being
Speaker 1: able to tackle some of these historical ideas once in
Speaker 1: a while, So Simon, thank you so much for the suggestion. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: especially when they involve Jonathan getting to do pirate voices.
Speaker 1: That's really so yeah, guys, if you have. By the way,
Speaker 1: I know that the quote unquote pirate accent is not
Speaker 1: what they sounded like. That's thanks to Treasure Island. But anyway,
Speaker 1: why don't you send in any ideas you might have
Speaker 1: in future episodes of tech Stuff if you want to
Speaker 1: do that and come on and thenute you've always been too.
Speaker 1: So here's what here's what you gotta do. You gotta
Speaker 1: send us an email that addresses text up at Discovery
Speaker 1: dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or
Speaker 1: Tumbler or handle it. All. Three is tech Stuff H.
Speaker 1: S W. And we will talk to you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: because it how stuff works. Dot Com