1719 Establishment - 1741 Proposals and Revisions

1741 Proposals and Revisions

The true state of British ship design became apparent with the start of the War of Jenkins' Ear. The capture of the Spanish 70-gun ship Princessa in April 1740 by three British 70-gun ships (HMS Kent, HMS Lennox and HMS Orford) took six hours of fighting despite one of Princessa's topmasts being missing. Her greater size (much closer to that of a British 90-gun ship than a 70) gave her stability that the British ships lacked, and her build quality allowed her to withstand the pounding from the three British ships for a long time. By way of response to the now apparent individual inferiority of British ships over their opponents, a previously abandoned update to the gun establishment was called upon to increase the firepower of the ships. With heavier guns came the need for larger ships to carry them, and so Sir Jacob made a new set of proposals for increased dimensions—slightly less conservative this time around. Additionally, the new gun establishment made some changes to the types of ships that would be on the navy list in future. The 70-gun ships would become 64-gunners, albeit with heavier guns as compensation, and the 60-gun ships were to become 58-gun ships, again with heavier guns. No first rates were built to the dimensions of the 1741 proposals, but one ship of 74 guns and two of 66 were constructed.

An additional side effect of the war was the collapse of the system of rebuilding. Until the outbreak of the war, it had been the practise to periodically rebuild ships, so as to maintain the size of the fleet without alarming parliament with requests for new ships. In reality, many of these rebuilds amounted to just that, with little or no timber from the original ship surviving into her rebuilt form. In some cases, ships would be dismantled years before they actually underwent the rebuilding process, but remained on the active list for the entire time. Rebuilding a ship was a lengthy process, more time consuming and more expensive than building a completely new one. The pressures of the war meant that for drydocks to be taken up for long periods of time whilst a ship was surveyed to determine what timber was reusable in the new ship, and what could find a use elsewhere in the dockyard, disassembled and then rebuilt was counter-productive. Ships intended to be sent to the West Indies for service in the war required the use of drydocks to have their hulls appropriately sheathed to combat such problems as shipworm, and other uses of the drydocks for servicing the fleet meant that rebuilds were given a low priority. It was at this time that the British practise of converting old ships to hulks for expanded storage space in harbours began, as instead of wasting effort and dockyard space on breaking up an old vessel that was still perfectly capable of floating, they were converted to serve the dockyards in this new capacity. Few rebuilds were started after 1739, and none at all were begun after 1742, although any that had been started were allowed to complete.