asylum for the artificer and shipwright;' that if a portion only of this branch is lost to the mother country, (that is to the half dozen establishments on the Thames,) the shipwright must be driven to the necessity of abandoning his native country, and a large emigration will necessarily take place.' We well recollect that the same kind of lamentation was loudly sounded from the ports of Liverpool and Bristol of the misery and wretchedness which that valuable class of men, the shipwrights, would be doomed to suffer, in consequence of that impolitic and pernicious measure, the abolition of the slave-trade. To ward off, in some degree, the terrible calamity about to befall these celebrated sea-port towns, the Navy Board was directed to contract for the building of two or three frigates at each; and notice was given that all such shipwrights and artificers as wished to enter into His Majesty's dockyards would be received therein; no frigates, however, were contracted for, no emigration of shipwrights followed, no application for employment was made, and Liverpool and Bristol have continued to flourish as they did before.

Thus also with regard to the shipwrights of the river Thames. In spite of all the black ships' that have been built in Indianotwithstanding the great demand for shipwrights in the king's yards, amounting, we believe, to many hundreds-notwithstanding the encouraging prospects offered in the king's service, of a provision in old age, when unfit for further labour, which they have not to look up to in the merchants' yards-we do not understand that many have applied for employment. The present enjoyment of a few additional shillings a-week, earned by excessive exertion, a mode of employment where less restraint and control are exercised than in the king's yards, and a reliance on parish relief when worn out, render them insensible or at least indifferent to the superior advantages held out in His Majesty's dockyards. The truth is that artificers, of all others, are least disposed to emigrate, or, if they can avoid it, to change their place of abode. There are always, and in all places, so many other trades and manufactures of a similar nature to their own, that an ingenious artificer finds no difficulty in transferring the labour of a shipwright, for instance, into that of a millwright, a wheelwright or a house-carpenter. But at any rate it would be far more beneficial for the public to pension off the whole of the shipwrights employed in the king's yards, on the return of peace, than to send them to the asylum' of the merchants' yards, on the condition of employing those yards to build ships of the line on the breaking out of the next war.

This assistance, which the private yards afford to the king's yards in time of war, is in fact the main argument on which the shipbuilders of the Thames ground their claims for consideration.

< No less than 570 ships of our present navy have been constructed in the private yards,' says one of their advocates: 'the number now building,' say the collected body, in private yards, is three times that which were building at any one time before.' This immoderate share of employment serves to explain at least the difficulty of entering shipwrights for the king's yards, and sufficiently points out a speedy method of removing that difficulty; and we trust that ere long it will be completely removed. Nay, we are willing to cherish a hope that we shall never again see a single ship of the line set up on the stocks of a private yard, and few frigates. At any rate let them be contented with building frigates, sloops, and smaller vessels. Our wishes, in this respect, arise from no other motive than a firm conviction of the ruinous effects resulting from the practice of building large ships by contract-a practice which nothing but absolute necessity can justify-which occasions a wasteful expenditure of public money, a vast consumption of timber, and which has produced in return an inefficient and rotten navy. We shall have no difficulty in making good these

assertions.

Without adverting to the well known fact that there is scarcely a single ship built of late years in merchants' yards which has not required to be rebuilt in six or seven years, and many of them to be paid off after four or five years service, we believe it is a common computation among builders, that the superiority of the ships built in the king's yards is to those built in private yards at least as 4 to 3; and the reason is obvious. A private builder cannot be supposed to keep on hand, as a dead capital for three or four years, a stock of timber fit for a 74 gun ship which he may never have an opportunity of building, as he must know that the public will only have recourse to him in time of necessity. He therefore contracts to build while the tree is growing in the forest; and the timber is commonly reared into the ship before the powers of vegetation are extinct, The workmanship is avowedly inferior, being wholly performed by task and job, and not examined with that degree of care which the officers in the king's yards, for their own credit, are in the habit of exerting. By way of drying the dripping wet timbers, stoves with charcoal are placed in various parts of the ship. The pent up heat, acting upon the moisture, soon brings forth plentiful crops of mushrooms; hence the origin of the new and fashionable disorder named the dry-rot, unknown in former days in ships of war, but which has produced, in our times, as many doctors and remedies, as the fanciful diseases of the human body.

It is evident that the seams of every part of the ship, put together in this unseasoned state, must open by the shrinking of the wood; that every piece of timber, by contracting its dimensions, must close

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close upon its fastening, whether of iron, copper or wood; and that these refusing to give way, must cause the planks and timbers to split, when the water gets in, the metals rust or corrode, and the wood rots. We could illustrate these fatal effects by numberless examples, but we shall content ourselves with two. The Rodney* was launched in 1809; she had scarcely put to sea when, owing to the unseasoned state of her timber, all her fastenings became loose, and it was necessary to bring her home from the Mediterranean in 1812 to be paid off. The next example is a very deplorable one; it is that of the Dublin. This ship was launched in February, 1812, put in commission in the following August, sent upon a cruise towards Madeira and the western islands in December, from which she returned to Plymouth in February, 1813, in so dreadful a state, that she was ordered to be paid off; she has since been repaired at an expense not much less, we believe, than £20,000. These are no new cases. We can find their parallel nearly half a century back. In the journal of Lord Sandwich's visitation of the dockyards in 1771 the following passage occurs: Went on board the Ardent, found her in a total decay, her timber and plank rotted almost universally. This ship was built at Hull in the year 1764, and never was at sea, her prime cost was about £23,000 and her repairs are now estimated at £17,000; the cause of the great decay of this ship is attributed to her being hastily built with green timber.' His lordship adds, No more large ships to be built at Hull.' He ought to have said-No more large ships to be built in private yards. We have now,' he observes in another place, a fleet of 123 effective line-of-battle ships, which in my opinion may be augmented, and without any addition of expense, if means can be found to procure a sufficient supply of timber, so as to enable us to have three years' stock in hand, which would give it time to season, and when used would prevent the immense expense of giving a thorough repair almost as soon as the ships are built.'

It never will nor can be otherwise as long as we continue to build in merchants' yards. No private builder, as we have just said, can afford to keep a stock of timber on hand fit for the building of ships of the line. His object naturally and necessarily is profit, and with a view to that object he will go the cheapest way to work in procuring materials, and take advantage of the public necessity in making his contract; and hence the sum actually paid for one of these miserably built ships has been found to exceed that of one of the same class built in the king's yards, in the proportion at least of 8 to 7. We doubt whether the precise cost of building any ship has been accurately ascertained in the king's dockyards,

Built in Barnard and Co.'s yard.

† Built in Brent's yard.

but

but it is estimated, we understand, for a 74 gun ship, at about £28: 10s. a ton; the contract price in private yards is £33: 10s. a ton; it follows, on these data, that the price of a common sized 74 gun ship built in a private yard is more than one built in the king's yards by £8,500, and the value of it less by £15,000; and if the principles of this calculation be correct, there has been thrown away in the last eight years, by the building of forty-two ships of 74 guns in private yards, the enormous sum of £630,000, and a perfect waste of 50 or 60,000 loads of timber; and all this has been occasioned by a mistaken notion of economy in not keeping up the fleet to its proper and effective standard;-when once let down below that standard, it is no easy matter to recover it.

But neither the lavish expenditure of money nor the enormous waste of timber is the most serious part of the consideration. The fleet so built, which the policy, we might say the safety, of this country requires to be equal in strength and efficiency to the united fleets of the whole European world, can at no one moment be considered either as strong or efficient. So very different is the real state of the case, that, should a seven years' peace take place, not a single ship of the two and forty recently launched from the merchants' yards would be worth repairing at the end of that period; and that our nominal fleet of two hundred sail of the line and upwards, if so built, would not produce above seventy or eighty ships which it would not be most advantageous to the nation to break up or dispose of by public sale.

Nor are we yet arrived at the extent of the evil of building greentimber ships in the merchants' yards. The constant state of damp, and the oozing drip,' as Mr. Pering emphatically calls it, which prevail in these unseasoned and crazy ships, occasions sickness and want of every comfort among the seamen. The Dublin returned to port in so sickly a condition as to be wholly inefficient for sea service. One hundred and fifty of her crew were sent to the hospital with dysentery, occasioned by the humid state of the ship, in consequence of the leaky condition of her upper works and decks. When therefore the private builders are commiserating the hard condition of the shipwrights of London, surely some share of their pity may not improperly be extended to the brave seamen who fight our battles: the least we can do is to make their situation as comfortable as circumstances will allow.

What an extraordinary contrast with the Dublin does the late Royal William afford! This ship was broken up about three months ago in the ninety-fourth year of her age. All the upper works and those parts of her that were exposed to the alternations of the weather were, as might be expected, found to be decayed; but the floor-timbers, the first futtocks, and all those parts which externally

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externally were immersed in water, and internally kept pretty nearly in the same degree of moisture and uniformity of temperature, were as sound and perfect as when first put into the ship; the fibres of the wood had in those parts suffered no decomposition nor any diminution of strength. The treenails too were generally sound and perfect; not more than every twentieth in a state of decay: but they were not the sort of treenails described by Mr. Pering, thicker at the ends than in the middle in order that they may drive the easier. We are now persuaded that this species of fastening when well turned, well seasoned and carefully driven without splitting, into wood of the same seasoning, is as effectual and durable as metallic fastenings, perhaps more so.

The breaking up of the Royal William was an object of considerable curiosity. Various reasons had been assigned for her extraordinary durability. It was supposed that her timber had undergone some artificial seasoning, that the plank and thick-stuff had been burnt instead of kilned, the ends and surfaces of the various parts charred, and that the process of snail-creeping, or gouging out, in crooked channels, the surfaces of the timbers and planks, was made use of to give a free circulation of air. We understand, however, that no symptoms appeared of charring, burning, or snailcreeping, and that there was no reason to think her timbers had undergone any other than the natural process of time and the weather, Nothing more than this, we are fully persuaded, is required; but we are farther persuaded, that it never can be effected until the practice of building line-of-battle ships in the private yards is wholly discontinued. Then would the large timber be exclusively in the hands of the Navy Board, and such quantities of it might be collected as would allow them to give three or four years natural seasoning to all naval timber before it was set up in the ship. Then would our ships of war perform three times the length of service which is now got out of them, and consequently the consumption of naval timber would then be only one-third part of what it is at present. We should then hear no more of green-timber-built ships

This ship has always attracted a considerable degree of notice. On visiting Portsmouth in 1771, Lord Sandwich learned the following particulars respecting her: That she was built in 1719 by Mr. Nash; that a great part of her frame is now (1771) sound and good; that Mr. Nash took particular care in building her with seasoned materials; that he was a most ingenious and able shipwright; that a great enmity or jealousy subsisted between him and Sir Jacob Ackworth; that Sir Jacob in all things endeavoured to lessen the merit of Mr. Nash, and whilst he lived would never let the Royal William be employed, and once procured an order for her to be made a hospital. Thus,' adds his lordship, that ship which has proved to be of as good qualities as any ship that ever was built, was lost to the public for many years, and had like to have been condemned without ever being tried, owing to a jealousy and ill-will between two officers; this is too frequent, and ought to be discouraged by every means possible, for the public service always suffers thereby.'