Copper-Bottom Wizardry
Royal Navy Innovation in the American Revolution
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English fleet dominance helped administer and maintain control over the New World, but the demands that the conflict made on it initially limited its effectiveness. Though it seems counter-intuitive, the overwork of the fleet caused by a distant war with multiple opponents left the Royal Navy in an excellent naval position. English administrators had to deal with the six weeks and more turnaround for any communications between America and the British Isles. The global reach of the Royal Navy, improved during the Revolution by coppering ship hulls, improvements in navigation, ship handling, and manufacturing ship’s rigging, enabled Britain to fight European and American opponents far away from the “main” seat of the conflict using technological innovation that made British ships more efficient and deadly, ton for ton and gun for gun, than any others. As Europe piled on Britain one by one from 1775 to ‘83, Albion simply became more perfidious. Their ships were more likely to have sound hulls and clean bottoms, making them faster and able to withstand harsh sea conditions better, and carried some of the most sophisticated ship’s rigging in human history. By the end of the American War/Revolution, the Royal Navy used one of the most technologically advanced dockyard and ship-building systems in the world.[1]
The Problems of Naval Construction and Hull Maintenance
By 1774, naval builders were addressing technical problems that had bedeviled them since time out of mind: the effects of simply being in the water on hollow wooden hulls, the teredo worm, and the accumulation of weeds and barnacles on ship hulls. Hollow wooden structures like hulls suffered from the distorting effects of water pressure, called hogging, that literally bent and crushed the hulls. The worm attached itself to wooden ships and simply ate it, in the process turning any wood exposed to sea water into a material resembling a sponge. As the worms ate, living seaweed and barnacles attached themselves to the hulls. The weeds burrowed their tendrils into the wood, weakening it even more.[2]
No finishing material available at the time could resist the effects of the water, worm, or weed for long enough to make the cost worthwhile. Navies expected most wooden warships built before 1780 to last only about 24 months at sea without being seriously compromised by worm and weed. Because of resource availability and costs, most waited longer, which made cross-ocean cruises more hazardous. Most naval establishments expected that a third of any navy’s ships were to be laid up for hull maintenance at once, a process that itself could take three months. Thus, by the mid-18th Century most European warships were operational for only two years at a time before they practically needed to be rebuilt. Worse, not enough large drydocks were available to reapply any finish on all of Europe’s ships, which meant that the tedious and dangerous process of careening had to be used.[3]
Britain, with by far the largest fleet, was running at the edge of the availability of oak for hulls. Because of hogging, only sturdy and heavy oak was suitable for large ship construction. Centuries of deforestation fairly exhausted the British Isles of hardwood for hulls. Scandinavia was being denuded of the long, straight pines needed for spars (masts and yardarms). Canada still held magnificent stands of pine, and the American colonies had enormous stands of oak. Britain had been replanting both species in Britain, Canada and America since the late 1600s, but to reach full maturity a single oak tree needed a century, and the enormous “lodgepole” pines only slightly less. New World lumber had to be transported to Britain to be turned into ships because that’s where the skilled labor and the specialized equipment were, making those stocks far more expensive to use. Operational need and fiscal sanity demanded solutions.[4]
An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously.
Charles F. Kettering
The worst problem by far was the worm. Roman shipbuilders had experimented with lead and copper sheets on the bottoms of small boats, which at least saved the wood. But lead was heavy and soft, and making copper sheet in sizes suitable for larger vessels using Mediterranean-based technologies was impossible. English shipbuilders sometimes build small skiffs of leather and copper, chiefly as disposable boats around dockyards. By 1770, new copper alloys were hard enough to work by machine. Inventive plant owners adapted the new iron rolling machinery to roll copper sheets as long as warships. Using the copper nails and bolts that were also made possible with the new alloys, the coppering of Royal Navy hulls started in 1775, and was standard practice for all new construction by 1780. Operational efficiency of British warships soared and dockyard time plummeted. By 1800, British warships expected to have twice or four times the service life of any other European ships. The weeds and worms still stuck to the copper and even got around it, but it was orders of magnitude easier to scrape a pitted copper sheet than a porous wooden hull. With less damage caused by the worm (it is still an issue), demand for oak for repairs fell enough to increase new ship construction material availability by nearly 15% by 1800.[5]
Coppering hulls and scraping them was an issue mostly of scale. Until the 1770-90 period, nearly all the world’s fleets had to careen their ships, a laborious process that required emptying the ship of everything movable and haul the hull up on a beach. This meant that the ships had to be strong enough to withstand the dynamic stresses of being laid on its side on solid ground, which required more wood. But drydocks keep ships on an even keel and rest them on purpose-built supports, saving lumber by the acre. Drydocks (or locks) are simply drainable canals equipped with a door (lock). They had been in use since the days of the Greek republics, but were seldom-used luxuries simply because they took so long to drain. Pumping out a lock large enough for a 100-gun (first-rate) warship could take an animal-powered pump a month, but a pair of steam pumps could do it overnight. In 1750, the largest drydock in the world was at the Pool of London, capable of working on a vessel up to 600 tons and a hundred feet long, about the size of a sixth rate frigate of up to 40 guns (normally, the Pool’s drydock worked only on privately owned ships). By 1780, Portsmouth’s main drydock could handle a first-rate ship of 2,500 tons displacement and two hundred fifty feet long. By then Portsmouth—the largest of a dozen British dockyard complexes—had three additional locks, and alone could turn around fifteen third-rate (70-80 gun) ships in a year.[6]
The Problems of Sails and Rigging
Sail-powered ships are incredibly sophisticated machines that require not only acres of wood but also acres of flax for linen. One suite of sails for a first-rate ship required the harvesting and processing of nearly fifty acres of flax, and each first-rate carried at least three complete suites. The 1,500 ships on the Royal Navy’s rolls by 1750 needed a minimum of 20,000 acres of flax harvested every year just to keep up. Most of the best linen came out of the Baltic, usually traded by the Dutch.
What one man can invent, another can discover.
Arthur Conan Doyle
English flax production increased by orders of magnitude when the flax/cotton/wool blend that was the best known sailcloth in the 1770-1815 period, was first made in Woolwich in 1765. This material, made by steam-powered spinners and looms that were state secrets until the middle of the 19th Century, is stronger than pure cotton canvas and lighter than pure flax linen. Though some of these techniques had reached Sweden via commercial trade by 1810, and the best linen still came from there, Britain made superior sails to any other fleet.[7]
Holding, hauling and controlling the sails needs miles of cordage. Rope-making, then made from several species of hemp, was a cabalistic art that became the first truly mechanized fiber product. The best of Europe’s limited hemp came from Italy. Arab rope-makers worked longer and stronger fiber hemp from the East Indies as early as the 1500s. To avoid any Mediterranean blockades, English rope-makers tried several materials in the 18th Century, including the stuff of sailcloth, but eventually settled on the “manila” hemp of the Indian Ocean rim and the Philippines.[8]
Britain also developed an innovative (and secret) rigging tackle manufacturing technique by the time the Amercan War broke out. The rigging needed to work sailing naval vessels also needed acres more wood for blocks (pulleys and sheaves) and other rigging hardware, including belaying pins. Before 1770, the blocks for a single fifth-rate frigate required a thousand artisans nearly a year to make. In that year, the Deptford dockyard began using what is now called an automatic chucker—a type of lathe—to make the wheel portions of ship’s blocks without handwork. By 1780, Deptford was producing the blocks for half the Royal Navy’s total annual requirements—new construction at a rate of about thirty ships a year and repairs for over a thousand more—with ten machines and fifty workers operating only nine months each year.[9]
Handling sails is a matter of geometry and distribution of stress. British ships with more, cheaper blocks could rig their ships to sail nearly into the eye of the wind, and needed fewer men to handle the lighter, stronger sails. The American coastline is a notorious “lee shore,” with prevailing winds that come in off the sea and inland, which makes for either a great number of wrecks and stranded ships, or very skilled captains. By 1780, most Royal Navy captains stationed in the Americas could sail out of any situation that they couldn’t fight their way out of, and could still handle their vessels safely in weathers that kept their enemies in port.[10]
Other factors, including improved iron founding and the invention of the steam-powered rolling mill, innovations in horizontal gunnery, streamlined administrative procedures and more efficient methods of financing privateers also had a cumulative effect, but without controlling worm damage, reducing ship maintenance time and increasing handling efficiency none of them would have mattered; the capacity to spread out thin resources was more important than guns or money. Coppering the ship’s hulls, reducing the labor, material and time needed to handle and construct them, and cutting down on maintenance time improved Royal Navy effectiveness enough so that, even though Britain ultimately lost the American colonies, she could still control the sea lanes with the bases she had, and remained the supreme naval power until the 20th Century.
[1]. Roger, N.A.M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004).
[2]. Lavery, Brian (Ed.), Shipboard Life and Organization, 1731–1815 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998); Padfield, Peter, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, 1788–1851 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005).
[3]. Woodman, Richard, The History of the Ship: The Comprehensive Story of Seafaring from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Lyons Press, 1997).
[4]. Brown, DK, Before the Ironclad: Development of Ship Design, Propulsion and Armament in the Age of Sail, 1815–60 (London: Conway Maritime Press Ltd., 1990); Buel, Richard, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
[5]. Roe, Joseph Wickham, English and American Tool Builders: The Men Who Created Machine Tools (Chicago: Lindsay Publications Inc. [Reprint], 1916); Roger, N.A.M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004.
[6]. O'Brien, Patrick, Men-of-War: Life in Nelson’s Navy (New York: WW Norton & Sons, 1974); Roger, N.A.M. , The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004).
[7]. Padfield, Peter, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, 1788–1851 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005); Woodman, Richard, The History of the Ship: The Comprehensive Story of Seafaring from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Lyons Press, 1997).
[8]. Padfield, Peter, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, 1788–1851 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005).
[9]. Buel, Richard, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Roe, Joseph Wickham, English and American Tool Builders: The Men Who Created Machine Tools (Chicago: Lindsay Publications Inc. [Reprint], 1916); Roger, N.A.M., The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004).
[10]. Woodman, Richard, The History of the Ship: The Comprehensive Story of Seafaring from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Lyons Press, 1997).
This Redhead: The Dialogues
Like the Royal Navy’s advances, This Redhead is an innovative way to tell a story: using only dialogue, relying on the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.
While my storytelling innovation isn’t as notable as coppering a hull, some readers find the story of Red and Blondie both entertaining and stimulating.
Coming Up…
Downside of Prosperity
Unknown Gettysburg
And Finally...
On 19 April:
1775: British troops and colonial militias clashed at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge in Massachusetts. Though called by most scholars the first battles of the American War/Revolution, others suggest the troubles started with the burning of HMS Gaspee in July 1772.
1993: The prolonged “siege” of the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas ends. Fifty-one days earlier, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to serve a search warrant; four agents died. The assault by Federal agents killed 76 Branch Dravidians, including their leader.
And today is NATIONAL OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING COMMEMORATION DAY, remembering the lives lost at the Murrah Federal Building on this day in 1995, said to have happened because it was in the Murrah that law enforcement planned the Waco assault.