On the other hand the horizontal lines of our ships were (in the absence of science) cleverly moulded. The after lines in particular were well suited for supporting the stern and at the same time allowing a free run of water to the rudder; other nations, overlooking the importance of this part of the vessel, adhered to the old-fashioned square tuck and stern which was a chief but unappreciated factor of the resistance to the passage of the vessel through water.
When war actually broke out in 1689 the balance of material between English and French was much the same in character as it had been between English and Dutch. Our fleet was once more in a seaworthy and efficient condition. Our guns were generally shorter and of larger bore than those of the French; our ships were narrower and less able to bear out their ordnance, but their sides were thicker, and better able to withstand the racket of gun fire. Once more, at La Hogue, the British squadrons showed that they possessed the offensive and defensive qualities which favoured victory in close-quarter fighting; and the end of the century found the prestige of the navy at a level as high as that to which Cromwell and Blake had brought it.
In the decade which ended in 1689 the navy had passed, on its administrative side, “from the lowest state of impotence to the most advanced step towards a lasting and solid prosperity.” In Pepys’ rare little Memoirs the story of this dramatic change is told. We read how, after five years’ governance by the commission charged by the king with the whole office of the Lord High Admiral, the navy found itself rotten to the core; how in ’85 the king resolved to take up its management again, helped by his royal brother; how he sent for Mr. Pepys; how at his instigation new, honest, and energetic Commissioners were appointed, including among them the reluctant Sir Anthony Deane; how Mr. Pepys himself strove to reorganize, how new regulations were introduced, sea stores established, finances checked, malpractices exposed, the navy restored both in spirit and material.
Mr. Pepys claimed to prove that integrity and general knowledge were insufficient, if unaccompanied by vigour, assiduity, affection, strictness of discipline and method, for the successful conduct of a navy; and that by the strenuous conjunction of zeal, honesty, good husbandry and method, and not least by the employment of technical knowledge, the Royal Navy had been rendered efficient once again.
The following extract from an Essay on the Navy, printed in 1702, is here quoted for its general significance:
“The cannon (nearly 10,000 brass and iron) are for nature and make according to the former disposition and manner of our mariners’ fighting (whose custom was to fight board and board, yard-arm and yard-arm, through and through, as they termed it, and not at a distance in the line, and a like, which practice till of late our seniors say they were strangers to), they are therefore much shorter and of larger bore than the French, with whom to fight at a distance is very disadvantageous, as has been observed in several fights of late, their balls or bullets flying over our ships before ours could reach them by a mile....” etc., etc.
§
In Laputa, early in the eighteenth century, the people were so engrossed in the mathematics that the constant study of abstruse problems had a strange and distorting effect on the whole life of the island. Their houses were built according to such refined instructions as caused their workmen to make perpetual mistakes; their clothes were cut (and often incorrectly) by mathematical calculation; the very viands on their tables were carved into rhomboids, cycloids, cones, parallelograms, and other mathematical figures!
To most Englishmen of that time any attempt to apply science to shipbuilding must have appeared as far-fetched and grotesque as these practices of the Laputans. Ship design was still an art, veiled in mystery, its votaries guided only by blind lore and groping along an increasingly difficult path by processes of trial and error. The methods of applied science were as yet unknown. The builder was often a mere carpenter, ignorant of mathematics and even of the use of simple plans; the savant in his quiet study and the seaman on the perilous seas lived in worlds apart from each other and from him, and could not collaborate. Such speculative principles as the shipbuilder possessed were almost wholly erroneous; no single curve or dimension of a ship, it is said, was founded on a rational principle. Everything was by tradition or authority. Knowledge had not yet coalesced in books. Men kept such secrets as they had in manuscript, and their want of knowledge was covered by silence and mystery. Preposterous theories were maintained by the most able men and facts were denied or perverted so as to square with them. “Forgetful of the road pointed out by Lord Bacon, who opposed a legitimate induction from well-established facts to hypothesis founded on specious conjectures, and too hastily giving up as hopeless the attainment of a theory combining experiment with established scientific principles, they have contented themselves with ingeniously inventing mechanical methods of forming the designs of ships’ bodies of arcs of circles, others of ellipses, parabolas, catenaries—which they thought to possess some peculiar virtue and which they investigated with the minutest mathematical accuracy. So they became possessed of a System. And, armed with this, they despised all rivals without one; and, trusting to it, rejected all the benefits of experiment and of sea experience.”[20]
The intervention of the philosophers had not had any appreciable effect. Sir William Petty had indeed projected a great work on the theory of shipbuilding; he had carried out model experiments in tanks, and had invented a double-keeled vessel which, by its performances on passage between Holyhead and Dublin, had drawn public attention to his theories.[21] In his discourse before the Royal Society on Duplicate Proportions, he had opened out new and complex considerations for the shipbuilder; inviting him to forsake his golden rule, or Rule of Three, and apply the law x varies as y² to numerous problems in connection with his craft. But it could soon be shown, by a reference to current practice, that this new law could not be rigidly applied. And the shipbuilder, realizing his own limitations and jealous of sharing his professional mysteries with mathematicians and philosophers, was willing to laugh the new theories out of court.