By August, 1760, the hull timber-work had been put together into the outline of a ship, and was practically complete in frame, the skeleton of the future man-of-war. The workmen were then almost all called off, and the ship, according to custom, was left aside for a space, to “stand in frame” and season. She had cost so far, according to the Navy Estimates, upwards of £14,000 in materials and labour.
Two months later, on the 28th of October, the Admiralty officially named the Victory. On that day their lordships signed an order that “the new 100-gun ship building at Chatham,” as the vessel had hitherto been styled in all official documents, should take the name of the Victory. At the same time a notification was sent to the Navy Board, directing them “to cause the name appointed by my Lords to be so registered in the List of His Majesty’s Navy,” and “communicated” to Chatham Dockyard.
The name, of course, from the first had been an open secret. There were at that period seven British warship names which were tacitly accepted as set apart for first-rate ships of war. They were: Royal Sovereign, Britannia, Royal William, Royal Anne, Royal George, London, and Victory. These seven had stood at the head of the Navy List as a group by themselves, in successive ships, for some seventy years and more. The name Victory, in 1760, was the only one not appropriated to any existing ship. It had been wanting ever since the disaster of 1744, and the new 100-gun ship, as a first-rate, had a right to it in accordance with the custom of the service. Thus our present Victory man-of-war is linked directly with the old-time veterans of her name; thus, indeed, from the Armada to Trafalgar, in a line of continuous succession—
Victory to Victory ever
Hands the torch of Glory on.
But that is not quite all. In a special sense no more appropriate name could have been given to the British man-of-war laid down as the special first-rate of the year 1759. In that sense the Victory commemorates in her name the most brilliant year of warlike achievement in our annals, the most successful year for British arms that the world ever saw. In her name, in this regard, our Nelson’s Victory of to-day stands as an abiding national memorial of England’s greatest year of victory; the “Wonderful Year,” as our forefathers themselves called it, the year of Minden and Lagos Bay and Quiberon and Quebec. “We are forced,” wrote Horace Walpole, in October, 1759, “to ask every morning what victory there is for fear of missing one.”
March 31st, 1762, came—the date by which the Victory was to have been afloat. She was, though, still in frame, hardly advanced beyond that; her bottom planked over, but all above practically as yet only in skeleton, little advanced, in fact, beyond the stage at which the shipwrights had left her eighteen months before. The Admiralty’s change of plans after the French collapse at sea at the end of 1759 had put her completion off for two years. It was, however, not entirely lost time. An additional £12,000 had been laid out meanwhile for the ship in preparing and working up materials to be used in her, and seasoning them in readiness to push on with the building when work on the vessel was resumed.
THE VICTORY ON HER FIRST CRUISE
Drawn by Captain Robert Elliot, R.N. Engraved and Published in 1780.