With this state of affairs, it is no matter for surprise that much of the new construction of the period was of small value. “Sir Joseph Yorke produced a set of corvettes, longer and narrower than brigs, none of which answered; and they were sold out of the service. Then came the ‘Forty Thieves,’ a small class of 74’s; but in justice to the designer, Sir H. Peake (who copied them from a French ship), it must be added that his lines were altered by the Navy Board, and the vessels were contract-built. Lord Melville built half a dozen ‘fir frigates,’ which neither sailed nor stood under canvas. The 22-gun and 28-gun donkey frigates ‘could neither fight nor run away’; it was dangerous to be on board them; and the bad sailing of such vessels was the chief cause of our ill success in the American War. The old 10-gun brigs, or ‘floating coffins,’ as they were significantly styled, were equally dangerous and unsightly. They had no room to fight their guns; no air between decks, which were only five feet high; extra provisions and stores were piled above hatches; and the fastest of them sailed no more than eight or nine knots.”[33]
The merchant service was in even worse plight. The tonnage rules had had a deplorable effect upon merchant shipping. The ancient method of assessing a ship’s burthen was by measuring the product of its length and breadth and depth, and dividing this by a constant number, which varied, at different periods, from 100 to 94. Early in the eighteenth century, however, a simplification was innocently made: the depth of the average ship being half the beam, a new formula was approved—length multiplied by half the square of the beam, divided by 94.[34] The result might have been anticipated. Dues being paid only on the length and breadth, vessels were given great depth of hold, full lines, and narrow beam. Absolved by the convoy system from trusting to their own speed for self-protection, English merchantmen became slugs: flat-bottomed, wall-sided boxes, monstrosities of marine architecture of which it was said that they were ‘built by the mile and served out by the yard.’
To raise the skill and status of our builders, the Committee of Naval Revision of 1806 presided over by Lord Barham advised the establishment of an official school, in which the more highly gifted apprentices might study the science involved in naval architecture. In 1811 the school was opened at Portsmouth, with Dr. Inman, a senior wrangler, as president. Ships were designed by Dr. Inman and his pupils excellent in many respects, and generally on an equality with those of the Surveyor and the master shipwrights. Yet still they were very imperfect. The official designs were hampered, not only by the hereditary prejudices and dogmas and by the cautious timidity of the builders themselves, but by the restrictions still imposed by the Navy Board, who insisted on a certain specified armament in combination with a totally inadequate specified tonnage: who laid down incompatible conditions, in short, under which genius itself must fail of producing a satisfactory result.
The chains were broken in 1832.
In that year, when the whole administration of the navy was in process of reorganization, the office of Surveyor was offered to and accepted by a naval officer, Captain W. Symonds, R.N.: accepted by him on the condition that he should be given a free hand in design and allowed to decide himself of what tonnage and dimensions every ship should be. Sir Robert Seppings was superannuated. The school of naval architecture was abolished. The sensation produced was powerful. “Except on matters of religion,” said Sir James Graham, when the appointment was being debated in the House of Commons some years afterwards, “I do not know any difference of opinion which has been attended with so much bitterness—so much anger—so much resentment, as the merits of Sir W. Symonds and the virtues of his ships.”
These violent differences and resentments have long since been composed, and Sir William Symonds has been accorded the position due to him in the history of naval architecture. His opponents, those who had resented his appointment as against the best interests of the service, rejoiced that he had freed ship design from the traditional restrictions under which it had stagnated; his chief admirers were led in the course of time to agree in the desirability of having as Surveyor a man thoroughly grounded in the scientific principles underlying the motion of bodies through water, their stability in water, and all the forces acting on a ship at sea.
In the year 1821 Lieutenant Symonds, while holding an appointment at Malta, had designed and built for himself a yacht which he called Nancy Dawson. Yachting had at this date become a national sport, and the interest of influential patrons in sailing matches was already acting as a stimulus to the study of ship form. The chief cause of the beneficial reaction from the indifference of former generations, says his biographer, was the establishment of the Yacht Club, after the peace of 1815, and the interest which men of rank and fortune henceforth took in shipbuilding, and in procuring the best native models.[35] So great was the success of the Nancy Dawson, that (in his own words) he was led to believe that he had hit upon a secret in naval architecture; while experiments on other sailing boats seemed to confirm him in his principles. Great breadth of beam and extraordinary sharpness—in fact, what was described as “a peg-top section”—were the characteristic features of his system, with a careful attention to stowage, the stand of the masts, and the cut and setting of the sails.
“Upon this most slender basis was the whole fabric of Sir William’s subsequent career built. The yacht gained him the notice of noblemen and others, then followed a pamphlet on naval architecture (in which the defects of existing ships were pointed out, and great breadth of beam and rise of floor advocated); then came a promise from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville, that he should build a sloop of war on his plans, which he did, the vessel being called the Columbine (promotion intervening); then further patronage from the Duke of Portland and the Duke of Clarence, the latter of whom, when he became Lord High Admiral, ordered him to lay down a 40-gun frigate (promotion again intervening); then the building of the Pantaloon, 10-gun brig, for the Duke of Portland, from whom the Admiralty purchased her; then the patronage of that most mischievous civilian First Lord, Sir J. Graham; then the order for the Vernon, 50-gun frigate; and then, in ’32, the Surveyorship of the Navy.”[36]
To Sir Edward Reed and other shipbuilding officers the appointment of this brilliant amateur to the supreme control of the department seemed an act of war, not only on professional architects, but upon naval architecture itself. They admitted the success of the Symondite ships in speed and certain sailing qualities, but denied the correctness of his principles and strenuously resisted his innovations. A great breadth of beam was particularly objectionable to the scientific builder; not only did it imply a large resistance to the passage of the ship through water, but it contributed to an excess in metacentric height, abnormal stiffness, and an uneasy motion. “For a time his opinions triumphed; but after a while the principles expounded by his subordinates (Creuze, Chatfield, and Read) were accepted as correct, while not a single feature of Sir William’s system of construction is retained, except certain practical improvements which he introduced.”[37]
