THE NEEDLES
In the designing and building of many succeeding ships one family, Adams by name, seems to have played the most prominent part. The name of Henry Adams, who, when thirty years of age, undertook the control of the shipbuilding yards, which he directed for the lengthy period of sixty-two years, first appears in a deed dated 1801, made for the firm of Adams and Co. The success of the Surprise appears to have led to the greatest activity at Buckler’s Hard, and on the hillside above the winding river quite a small town grew, the importance of which will be more easily understood when it is remembered that at the time of its great prosperity upwards of 4,000 men were engaged in the yards.
From the sloops, which was the type of the first craft built, the designers proceeded by natural stages to frigates, and then battleships, which were towed down the river and round to Portsmouth to be fitted out and manned. The Surprise, of 1743, was succeeded by the Scorpion, of eighteen guns, three years later; and after a period of three years by the Woolwich, of forty-four guns. After this came the Kennington, Lion, and Mermaid, the second named having sixty guns. The Gibraltar followed in 1756, and on her first cruise captured the Glaneur, a handsome, swift, heavily armed, and strongly manned privateer, which was bought in by the Navy and renamed the Gibraltar Prize. The following year saw the launch of the Coventry, and the next year of a big frigate, the Thames, carrying thirty-two twelve-pounders. This latter ship saw a great deal of service and captured a large number of privateers from the enemy, but was at last unfortunately forced to strike her flag to the French owing to the enormous superiority of the attacking force. Whilst in the possession of the enemy she proved not less successful than when manned by British seamen and made prizes of no fewer than twenty English ships, but in 1796, after a great fight, she was recaptured, and fifteen years later, in company with the Cephalus, made a prize of eleven French gunboats and a felucca without loss, and a short time afterwards landed her marines in Sicily and, supported by men of the 62nd Regiment, defeated the French and captured a town.
A few years later the Europe, which was destined to be the flagship of the fleet in Newfoundland Waters under Vice-Admiral John Montagu, was launched; and other vessels of large tonnage, including the Vigilant, a sixty-four gun battleship of 1,374 tons, came from the Buckler’s Hard yards. The memory of one at least of the vessels, the Garland, of twenty-eight guns, was perpetuated in a ballad sung in those days by West Indian negroes, which ran—
You go aboard de Flag ship,
Dey ask you for to dine;
Dey give you lots of salt horse,
But not a drop of wine.
You go aboard de Garland,
Dey ask you for to dine;
Dey give you plenty roast beef,
And lots of rosy wine.
Ho! de happy happy Garland, etc. etc.
Two vessels bearing the name of Hannibal, an honoured one in the British Navy, were launched from Buckler’s Hard, but the first had the misfortune to be captured at Sumatra by the French, who handed her crew over to the tender mercies of Tippoo Sahib, and many of them died in captivity, owing to the cruelty with which they were treated. The second Hannibal was launched about the year 1810, and not much more than twenty years ago there lived at Buckler’s Hard in one of the houses which are now, some of them, falling into positive ruin, an old man who remembered being present at the launch of this fine ship when a small boy, and who received “a quart pot of sugar” from one of the men who came to take the ship round to Portsmouth to be fitted out.
But by far the most celebrated vessel which left the slips at this Hampshire shipbuilding yard of long ago was the Agamemnon, preceded by the Brilliant and the Zephyr. This magnificent vessel was commanded by Lord Nelson at the siege of Celvi, where he lost his right eye, and afterwards took an important part in many of the actions of that time. She was one of the victorious fleet at Copenhagen, and in the action off Cape Finistère. But her greatest feat was when in company with the Swiftsure and the frigate Euryalus she played a gallant part in the Battle of Trafalgar.
So important did this shipbuilding yard become that King George and Queen Charlotte came on a state visit to Beaulieu in 1789, and went over to see the Illustrious leave the slips. And such was the skill of these Hampshire shipbuilders, and so considerable the resources of the place, that it is said a seventy-four gun battleship was frequently built in less than three years, although to her making went more than two thousand oaks cut in the New Forest hard by, some hundred tons of wrought iron, and thirty tons of copper rivets and nails.