Perhaps one of the most interesting places in the College is the Painted Hall, a part of Wren’s edifice, known as King William’s Quarter. The ceilings of this double-decked dining-hall—the upper part for officers and the lower for seamen—and the walls of the upper part are decorated most beautifully with paintings which it took Sir James Thornhill nineteen years to complete. Around the walls hang pictures which tell of England’s naval glory—pictures of all sizes depicting our most famous sea-fights and portraying the gallant sailors who won them. Naturally Lord Nelson is much in evidence here, and we can see in cases in the upper hall the very clothes he wore when he received that fatal wound in the cockpit of the Victory—the scene of which is depicted on a large canvas on the walls; also in cases his pigtail, his sword, medals, and various other relics.
The Museum is a fascinating place, for it contains what is practically a history of our Navy set out, not in words in a dry book, but in models of ships; and we can study the progress right from the Vikings’ long-boats, with their rows of oars and their shields hanging all round the sides, down to the massive super-dreadnoughts of to-day. Most interesting of all, perhaps, are the great sailing ships—the old “wooden walls of England”—which did so much to establish and maintain our position as a maritime nation—the great three-deckers which stood so high out of the water, and which with their tall masts and gigantic sails looked so formidable and yet so graceful. There in a case is the Great Harry—named after Henry VIII.—a double-decker of fifteen hundred tons burden, with three masts, and carrying seventy-two guns. She was a fine vessel, launched at Woolwich Dockyard in 1515, and was the first vessel to fire her guns from portholes instead of from the deck. In another case is the first steam vessel ever used in the Navy (1830), and a quaint little craft it is.
This is indeed a splendid collection, and we feel as if we could spend hours studying these fascinating little models.
The Royal Observatory.
On the site of Duke Humphrey’s tower in Greenwich Park is the world-famous Observatory. If you take up your atlas, and look at the map of the British Isles or the map of Europe, you will see that the meridian of longitude (or the line running north and south) marked 0° passes through the spot where Greenwich is shown. This means that all places in Europe to the right or the left—east or west, that is—are located and marked by their distance from Greenwich; and, if for no other reason, this town is because of this fact a very important place in the world.
The Observatory was founded in the reign of Charles II. This monarch had occasion to consult Flamsteed, the astronomer, concerning the simplifying of navigation, and Flamsteed pointed out to him the need for a correct mapping-out of the heavens. As a result the Observatory was built in 1695 in order that Flamsteed might proceed with the work he had suggested.
The Duke’s tower was pulled down, and the new place erected; but it was left to Flamsteed to find his own instruments and pay his own assistants, all out of a salary of one hundred pounds per annum. Consequently, he became so poor that when he died in 1719 his instruments were seized to pay his debts. His successor, Dr. Halley, another famous astronomer, refitted the Observatory, and some of his instruments can be seen there now, though no longer in use, of course.
Few people are allowed inside the Observatory to see all the wonderful telescopes and other instruments there; but there are several things to be seen from the outside, notably the time-ball which is placed on the north-east turret, and which descends every day exactly at one o’clock; also the electric clock with its twenty-four-hours dial.