HMS Victory

[Poignard]

Perhaps they force you under gun point to spend £25 in the gift shops .

At home somewhere, I have a genuine Victory wood chip in a tiny glass case. Perhaps I can buy a decent Victory nail next time.

Maybe they will press you.

 

[johnalison]

The amusement was misplaced, I'm afraid. Mandarin is usually written using simplified characters; Cantonese using traditional characters. They are quite different languages and are not mutually comprehensible. Further, even when using the same set of characters there are significant differences in the way characters are used; I can't give details because I don't read or write either, but my Chinese relatives assure me that's the case, and they have changed things that I've produced using Google translate, not because it was wrong but because Google translate doesn't have Cantonese, so the translation used Mandarin usages.

Perhaps I didn’t express it fully, but the amusement was not at the expense of the Chinese or their culture but at the improbability of a tourist site in England being able to accommodate such an unusual requirement so comprehensively.

 

[capnsensible]

It’s impossible I reckon.
The latest version of the tour allows you to walk under the hull. You can see just how fragile and broken she is.
The keel is bent down both fore and aft where she was left floating for years in Portsmouth moored with tight chains.
The keel sits perfectly on a solid structure along its full length, custom made to the bend of the keel.
You can see how she’s bowing out too.
She’d fall to bits if you tried to float her.

Nah its because of all the un maintained 'windows'......

 

[RunAgroundHard]

Excellent video, very enjoyable. I was onboard Victory years ago. My wife and I were driving round Britain in an old Skoda Estelle and this was one of the things I wanted to see. Good times. My Gran bought me an Airfix model of HMS Victory for Christmas, it took an age to build, fiddly.

 

[Poignard]

I have been doing a search of museums connected with the various branches of the US Navy.

I found more than a dozen,and all offer free admission.

 

[Mark-1]

You can go into the naval dockyard for free. You just have to ask. You have to pay for some on the exhibits including to go on victory but you can have a great day out for free.

That's good to know. I'm local and I buy a family ticket every five years or so and go several times to get my money's worth but there are plenty of times between when a look around the outside of stuff would be satisfy my need for nautical military nostalgia. M33 always makes me think of HMS Ulysses (author escapes me) and Boatyard Four always soaks up my time.

This is sacrilege, I know, but there can't be much of the original Victory left. Every time I go there seem to be substantial timbers being replaced. I've got a photo of myself as a toddler with areas being replaced that I've seen being replaced recently so some of it has been replaced twice in my lifetime. The fact we're talking about high maintainance costs tells us how much gets put in the skip year on year. I can't deny when the rig is (rarely) up it gives me a warm imperialistic feeling to see it from the water.

As for the Mary Rose the artifacts are just incredible but raising the remaining fragment of the actual ship seems utterly pointless now it's finished. It isn't the Vasa.

There's another 18th/19thC ship in the eastern Solent which is surprisingly intact. I spoke to an Archaeologist who had dived on it and he brought up a coiled rope with a wooden label stating its purpose in hand written ink. It disappeared in front of his eyes when he got it to the surface.

Then there's the Grace Dieu up the Hamble. If I'm kayaking that way I always pause by the buoy. I've never been there on a low spring to see what's left.

 

[Mark-1]

Skoda Estelle

This thread is providing nostalgia by the bucketload. I had one when I was a student, mainly out of bloody mindedness. Loved it.

 

[Frogmogman]

At home somewhere, I have a genuine Victory wood chip in a tiny glass case. Perhaps I can buy a decent Victory nail next time.

Are you planning on out-doing 010169´s airfix model by creating a replica out of bits of the actual ship ?

Top work.

 

[Never Grumble]

This is sacrilege, I know, but there can't be much of the original Victory left. Every time I go there seem to be substantial timbers being replaced. I've got a photo of myself as a toddler with areas being replaced that I've seen being replaced recently so some of it has been replaced twice in my lifetime. The fact we're talking about high maintainance costs tells us how much gets put in the skip year on year. I can't deny when the rig is (rarely) up it gives me a warm imperialistic feeling to see it from the water.

I remember walking round as a new dockyard shipwright apprentice back in the late 70s even then we were told there was little original left apart from bits of the keel. I later worked as a draughtsman and in the 80s did some drawings which if I remember correctly rearranged the captains cabin area so assuming they actually made those changes what you see is more functional than original.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Perhaps I didn’t express it fully, but the amusement was not at the expense of the Chinese or their culture but at the improbability of a tourist site in England being able to accommodate such an unusual requirement so comprehensively.

It's not so unlikely; I've helped do it for a rather remote NT site in Suffolk. Chinese make up quite a high proportion of tourists!

 

[AntarcticPilot]

This is sacrilege, I know, but there can't be much of the original Victory left. Every time I go there seem to be substantial timbers being replaced. I've got a photo of myself as a toddler with areas being replaced that I've seen being replaced recently so some of it has been replaced twice in my lifetime. The fact we're talking about high maintainance costs tells us how much gets put in the skip year on year. I can't deny when the rig is (rarely) up it gives me a warm imperialistic feeling to see it from the water.

Any wooden ship gets slowly rebuilt over time, and Victory was an old ship when Nelson had her - she was built in 1758/1759! So at Trafalgar, she was about 50 years old. Battle damage, refurbishment, and repairs all mean that the wood of a ship of that era was slowly replaced over time - the process has simply continued for much longer than would have been expected! Victory at Trafalgar probably had quite a substantial amount of replacement wood in her already; she had a major rebuild in 1800. Between major rebuilds, repairs to battle damage (she had already taken part in several major battles) and normal wear and tear, Victory was probably older than a lot of the wood in her at Trafalgar.

As far as the internal layout is concerned, most internal dividers would have been essentially temporary structures that would have been struck down in battle to provide an open gun deck. As far as I recall, the present custodians aim to maintain her in something like the state she would have been in up to the battle of Trafalgar, but as we don't really have detailed information about that, it's done on a best-efforts basis. But you can't say that any layout is "wrong" as the layout would have varied according to the needs of the moment. The broad concept of a great cabin across the stern would remain constant, but the layout of things like sleeping space would vary according to the preferences of the Admiral and Captain of the moment. The ship's carpenter would have made adjustments as and when required.

It's some years since I visited her, but when I last did (about 22 years ago) I was very wary of the stories given by the guides. They seemed to bear more relation to Naval tradition than to the reality of the 18th /19th-century navy, especially when harping on about the harsh discipline. Yes, discipline was harsh but a) the mutineers at the great mutinies of Spithead and the Nore did NOT demand a relaxation of discipline; they demanded the removal of bad officers and b) the crew vastly outnumbered the officers - and the Marines were more likely to side with the crew than the officers. Bad officers stood a good chance of disappearing on a stormy night, and really bad captains (e.g. Piggott of the Hermione) provoked bloody mutinies. So discipline had to be, if not by consent at least without active dissent. But on the whole, sailors of the day appreciated the need for prompt obedience to orders to keep everyone safe.

 

[14K478]

It's not so unlikely; I've helped do it for a rather remote NT site in Suffolk. Chinese make up quite a high proportion of tourists!

The two written versions of the Chinese language are “Traditional”, used in Hong Kong and everywhere outside the People’s Republic, and “Simplified”, used in the People’s Republic. Because written Chinese is ideographic not phonetic, any Chinese dialect can be written in the same way and Japanese and Korean people can communicate with Chinese people in writing but not in speech.

 

[14K478]

May I highly recommend N.A.M. Rodger’s “The Wooden World”; he’s a very well regarded Naval historian and this, an investigation into conditions in the mid-18th century Navy, was his first book. He explodes the myth about harsh conditions, comes up with the reason that Admiral Byng was executed (there was an epidemic of cowardice amongst officers) and the wonderful fact that one 18th century RN frigate Captain was black, and the son of a slave.

The reason for the Press Gangs was that in peace time the Navy offered better conditions, better pay and far better food than the merchant ships did, so the Navy was well supplied with good seamen. When a war broke out, as they often did, the boot was on the other foot with merchant ships offering far better pay than the Navy, so seamen deserted in hordes to join merchant ships. There wasn't much difference in the degree of danger, but merchant ship pay was several times higher. The Press Gangs were the RN getting its seamen back!

 

[Mark-1]

Any wooden ship gets slowly rebuilt over time, and Victory was an old ship when Nelson had her - she was built in 1758/1759! So at Trafalgar, she was about 50 years old. Battle damage, refurbishment, and repairs all mean that the wood of a ship of that era was slowly replaced over time - the process has simply continued for much longer than would have been expected! Victory at Trafalgar probably had quite a substantial amount of replacement wood in her already; she had a major rebuild in 1800. Between major rebuilds, repairs to battle damage (she had already taken part in several major battles) and normal wear and tear, Victory was probably older than a lot of the wood in her at Trafalgar.

As far as the internal layout is concerned, most internal dividers would have been essentially temporary structures that would have been struck down in battle to provide an open gun deck. As far as I recall, the present custodians aim to maintain her in something like the state she would have been in up to the battle of Trafalgar, but as we don't really have detailed information about that, it's done on a best-efforts basis. But you can't say that any layout is "wrong" as the layout would have varied according to the needs of the moment. The broad concept of a great cabin across the stern would remain constant, but the layout of things like sleeping space would vary according to the preferences of the Admiral and Captain of the moment. The ship's carpenter would have made adjustments as and when required.

It's some years since I visited her, but when I last did (about 22 years ago) I was very wary of the stories given by the guides. They seemed to bear more relation to Naval tradition than to the reality of the 18th /19th-century navy, especially when harping on about the harsh discipline. Yes, discipline was harsh but a) the mutineers at the great mutinies of Spithead and the Nore did NOT demand a relaxation of discipline; they demanded the removal of bad officers and b) the crew vastly outnumbered the officers - and the Marines were more likely to side with the crew than the officers. Bad officers stood a good chance of disappearing on a stormy night, and really bad captains (e.g. Piggott of the Hermione) provoked bloody mutinies. So discipline had to be, if not by consent at least without active dissent. But on the whole, sailors of the day appreciated the need for prompt obedience to orders to keep everyone safe.

I've been this year and I definitely feel I'm seeing something that looks a lot like C18th/C19th warship. When the rig was up five years or so ago, you could really see how it all worked. So no serious grumbles about "accuracy". If the internal partitions have been changed they can't really have changed much and you get the idea that it's all temporary and able to be quickly cleared. It's more the case that, like my grandfather's pick axe, I'm not really on the same ship as the guys at Trafalgar, I'm pretty much on a replica, it's just been a gradual process.

Agree the guides are a usually bit iffy. Ok for engaging the kids but really lacking in knowledge and prone to guessing the answers to questions. There was a dreadful guide on the M33. She failed to get across the whole point of the ship - something I only knew because 25 years ago I'd read a fiction book where the star was a Monitor. On the other hand there was a Guide on Warrior who had encyclopedic knowledge, could have talked to him all day. (He came out with gems like your comment about "fragging" officers - never thought about it before but it blatantly must have happened.) One of the Harbour Tour/Skippers commentators is superb, he's read up on the history of every ship new/current/scrap and puts it across brilliantly..

I shouldn't be too critical, I definitely couldn't run the place better.

 

[RunAgroundHard]

A wee bit about the history of boat building and operation in the UK.

 

[ImpImp]

Had a coffee in The Boathouse at Endevour Quay Friday. Dead opposite the Victory, which has a mast out.

When in Tommy Neilsons Shipyard at Gloucester Docks in 2015 I saw a great deal of lovely-and fragrant smelling-Oak, destined, they said, for the rebuilding of Victory's magazine.

Good to know the Flagship of the Fleet is being looked after so well.

The Flagship of the Fleet is HMS Queen Elizabeth. HMS Victory in no longer owned by the Royal Navy/MoD even though she remains commissioned.

 

[justanothersailboat]

Must admit, though it is hard to get much sense of Victory as a ship at the moment with half the skin off and a tent over her, I found the opportunity to see her with the outer planks off fascinating. I get the impression that while nearly every floor and skin plank will have changed at some point, the frames are older and have a much lower turnover rate. The inner structure behind the visible bits is so massive and so obviously old that I wouldn't be surprised if there was quite a lot of 1759 or 1800 Victory in the structure, by weight. At Chatham they found a surprising % of the frames of HMS Namur (1756) buried under a floor. You can see it, it's not much to look at, but I liked it. The condition of the timbers is very similar to the inner bits of Victory that are currently exposed during the restoration.

Never been on the guided tour as my kids always say no to them - they say they get as much guided tour from their dad as they can possibly cope with

 

[AntarcticPilot]

The two written versions of the Chinese language are “Traditional”, used in Hong Kong and everywhere outside the People’s Republic, and “Simplified”, used in the People’s Republic. Because written Chinese is ideographic not phonetic, any Chinese dialect can be written in the same way and Japanese and Korean people can communicate with Chinese people in writing but not in speech.

As you say, speakers of Chinese languages can usually communicate using the characters even though they don't understand each other's spoken language; I've often seen my late wife sketch a character in the air when talking with a Mandarin speaker (her Mandarin was not good; she was a Cantonese speaker). But even then there are differences in the way the characters are used in different languages - not vast differences, and the differences are such that the result is comprehensible to a speaker of another language, but they use different idioms. To give an English example, Americans often say "likely" where I would say "probably", and it's that kind of thing.

My wife was fairly scathing about simplified characters - she said that because they lost a lot of the detail, the logic behind the characters was lost. I understand that even on the Mainland there's a movement to restore the traditional characters for exactly that reason.

 

[14K478]

I agree with your wife. In my feeble attempts to try to read and write a tiny bit in Chinese, I find the traditional characters much easier to remember, because they are each made up of up to five “letters”, and once you know the letters you can remember the word better. The simplified versions lose this.

 

[johnalison]

As you say, speakers of Chinese languages can usually communicate using the characters even though they don't understand each other's spoken language; I've often seen my late wife sketch a character in the air when talking with a Mandarin speaker (her Mandarin was not good; she was a Cantonese speaker). But even then there are differences in the way the characters are used in different languages - not vast differences, and the differences are such that the result is comprehensible to a speaker of another language, but they use different idioms. To give an English example, Americans often say "likely" where I would say "probably", and it's that kind of thing.

My wife was fairly scathing about simplified characters - she said that because they lost a lot of the detail, the logic behind the characters was lost. I understand that even on the Mainland there's a movement to restore the traditional characters for exactly that reason.

I have only been baffled by my attempts to understand how the Chinese scripts work, but I had thought that the Korean script, although perhaps derived from Chinese, actually works as an alphabet-cum-syllabary and is therefore phonetic. Although I have a granddaughter currently in Korea studying Korean, I admit to knowing almost nothing about the subject but wonder how the Chinese/Korean linguistic exchanges work if this is the case.