I’m reading a book by Barbara Tuchman on the American Revolution.  She talks a lot about the probloems the British had with the Netherlands, France, Spain and so on.  And of course Lord Nelson and HMS Victory.  The ship is fascinating.

First, she was almost 300 feet long.  It took 6000 trees to build her and they were the finest.  She was 90% oak.  She had a complement of, get this, around 850 men (and sometimes the men were accompanied by women, even on ships of the line).

Add that getting able-bodied seamen was difficult.  Often gangs would sweep the streets trying to find any warm male body to impress into the navy.   There was no formal training, just on-the-job stuff.

All of that is by way of pointing out that this was an enormous ship to be using sail for propulsion.  She had three huge masts, and numerous other little things.

When fighting, she had 104 main guns.  I would imagine she manned a little over half of those for a fight.  Each crew had a complement of 5 people.  Let’s say that’s 500 people.  That leaves 350 to really crew.  A bunch of them will be shooting small arms, will be prepared to repel boarders, hauling ammunition, dragging the wounded someplace else, carrying messages and so on.

I’m coming up on my point.  All those sails need to be attended, the ship has to maneuver, and there are at best 250 or 300 poorly trained, uneducated, resentful people to do that.  They would get instructions from the captain, those would be relayed, and literally hundreds of ropes, which all look alike, have to be manipulated in concert.

Now if I’m a sailor, I’m standing there looking at these ropes, and someone yells “Haul in the mizzen topmast, reef the maintopsail”,  look lively there!”

I am not going to know what to do.  I can reef, haul and barf with the best of them, but those lines, there are so many, they all look alike and it’s a mess out there.  I can’t figure out which go all the way to the top, whcich go half way.

And I’m dodging cannonballs the size of cantaloupe travelling at the speed of sound, at least as fast as I can yell “Oh Shit!”

What I’m wondering is how the hell them managed to control the sails and maneuver the ship in a fight.  And how they fed 850 people on a less than 300 foot ship (it did have about a 60′ beam).  And why people thought that going through a battle and living that way was worth it.