11.
How to prevent and safeguard any Ship from such an attempt by day or night.
[How to prevent both.] Some armour or alarum is probably proposed, which should be either invulnerable, or when struck indicate the presence of the enemy’s “portable pocket engine,” intended “irrecoverably to sink the ship;” not by merely perforating a single hole, but by a powerful disruptive explosion, rending asunder all the timbers. But the whole passage is so abundantly obscure that all opinion on the matter goes for very little.
12.
A way to make a Ship not possible to be sunk though shot[4] an hundred times betwixt wind and water by Cannon, and should[5] lose a whole Plank, yet in half an hours time should be made as fit to sail as before.
Footnotes
[4]shot at. P.
[5]she lose. P.
[An unsinkable Ship.] As early as 1583, appeared “A Note of sundry sorts of Engines,” without the author’s name. The 20th and last of these is:—“To preserve a boat from drowning and the people that be therein.” See J. O. Halliwell’s Rara Mathematica.
Considering the state of ship-building in 1655, the foregoing plan must have been some very primitive scheme; but, rendering vessels unsinkable, has long been a favourite subject with inventors.