Shaping the Royal Navy: Technology, authority and naval architecture, c.1830–1906

By Don Leggett

The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. Britain’s warships were her first line of defence, and their transformation dominated political, engineering and scientific discussions. They were the products of engineering ingenuity, political controversies, naval ideologies and the fight for authority in nineteenth-century Britain. Shaping the Royal Navy provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It places the story firmly within the currents of British history to reconstruct the controversial and high-profile nature of naval architecture. The technological transformation of the Navy dominated the British government and engineering communities. This book explores its history, revealing how ship design became a modern science, the ways that actors competed for authority within the British state and why the nature of naval power changed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526111869

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Shaping the Royal Navy

Manchester University Press

Shaping the Royal Navy

Technology, authority and naval architecture, c.1830–1906

Don Leggett

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Don Leggett 2015

The right of Don Leggett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9028 8 hardback

First published 2015

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Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1    Authority, judgement and the sailor-designer

2    Steam and the management of naval architecture

3    Iron experiments and guaranteeing naval power

4    The Captain catastrophe and the politics of authority

5    A scientific problem of the highest order

6    The politics of management and design

7    Re-engineering naval power

Conclusion

Select bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1    William Symonds, by Edward Morton (1850), D13184, © National Portrait Gallery

1.2    Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, in the Royal Yacht proceeding to Spithead, July 15th 1845, at the departure of the experimental squadron, by J.M. Gilbert and L. Haghe (1846), PAF4884, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

3.1    HMS Warrior, artist unknown (1872), PAD6222, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

4.1    HMS Captain (c.1870), BHC3771, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

4.2    Sir Edward James Reed, by Wooyeno (1879), x128749, © National Portrait Gallery

4.3    ‘Raft in the Sea of Azoff’, Illustrated London News (11 August 1855), 165

5.1    HM Turret Ship Devastation at Spithead on the Occasion of the Naval Review in Honour of the Shah of Persia, 23rd June 1873, by Edward Cooke, NMM BHC3287, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

5.2    Diagram of Froude’s model rolling experiment, 14 May 1871. Henry Marc Brunel, Engineering notebook, 1869–1882, University of Bristol Brunel Collection DM1307/2/4, by courtesy of the Brunel Institute, a collaboration of the SS Great Britain Trust and the University of Bristol

6.1    ‘The phantom board ’, Punch (3 February 1872), 48

6.2    HMS Royal Sovereign 1st Class Battleship, by W. Fred Mitchell, PAD0309, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

7.1    ‘The First Photographs of the Model for the World’s Navies’, Illustrated London News (6 October 1906), 468

7.2    Photograph of Philip Watts, Charles Parsons and William H. White in Alan A. Campbell Swinton, Autobiographical and Other Writings (London, 1930)

Acknowledgements

Books are a lot like ships, especially the ones that are described in the following pages. They are conceived on paper, meticulously planned out until every dimension and variable is ascertained. When construction begins the designer anxiously watches the work take shape, agonising over whether the pieces will come together as intended. After years of labour the work draws near to completion, and it is time to test it in a series of trial runs. If changes are required, they are made in the hopes of improving performance. Like ships, books are also the work of many hands. Admiral John ‘Jacky’ Fisher, long associated with HMS Dreadnought and the naval reforms of the first decade of the twentieth century, may have declared ‘Alone I did it’, but in truth his position was akin to that of an author: the first name on the book perhaps, but by no means the only one. To continue the metaphor, I count myself fortunate and thankful to have received my apprenticeship under the master shipwright Crosbie Smith. He introduced me to the cultural history of technology on an undergraduate course on the ‘Tools of Empire’ and a subsequent stint as a researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Ocean Steam Ship’ project. Since the start of my doctoral work in 2006 I have found his generous support, intellectual curiosity and constructive engagement with my ideas invaluable.

This book originated with my doctoral thesis on naval architecture in mid-Victorian Britain, undertaken at the University of Kent and supported, initially, by a Maurice Crosland Scholarship in the Centre for the History of the Sciences and a Colyer-Fergusson Research Grant, and then an AHRC studentship (Doctoral Scheme Award 2007/135185). In many ways the book no longer resembles the thesis. I am grateful for the research fellowship in the School of History at the University of Kent which provided me with the time to reflect on the comments provided by my thesis examiners, Peter Mandler and Graeme Gooday. They added fresh perspective and valuable critique, and I thank them for the constructive way they engaged with my thesis in order to take it toward publication.

In the two years after submitting the PhD thesis I undertook further research, produced new chapters that extend the period covered, restructured the book around the ships that connect different fields of history and reframed the narrative. I had cause to doubt this course of action when, shortly after submitting the manuscript to the publisher for review, I was awarded the Young Scholar Prize of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science for the original thesis. Hopefully this book captures the best of that work, but also presents the activities of naval architects, engineers, craftsmen, physicists, naval officers and politicians in a wider context where their work was central to the making of naval power, technical authority and professional status in the nineteenth century. This had always been my ambition, and I thank Stefan Goebel for keeping me on course with his generous insights and ongoing interest in my work, from the start of the PhD to the present day.

In the course of undertaking research for this book I had the fortunate experience of passing through a number of institutions that have influenced my ideas. An AHRC/ESRC fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in the final year of my PhD helped me widen my perspective on my research and approach (Kluge Fellowship award LOC57). I am indebted to Carolyn Brown, Mary Lou Reker and the many library specialists and scholars who made my time in Washington, DC so stimulating and productive. Similarly, a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum provided the ideal opportunity to grapple with the naval dimension of the research and engage with specialists who were equally interested in finding new ways of writing the history of ships and other maritime subjects. I am grateful to John McAleer, Robert Blyth, Quintin Colville and Nigel Rigby for their interest in my research. James Davey’s interest in naval expertise helped fuel my own, and Richard Dunn taught me much as we worked on the publication of an edited volume on the re-invention of the ship in the long nineteenth century. The British Society for the History of Science has also played a formative part in my ongoing education, and the constant stream of criticisms and suggestions on papers presented at the annual meetings down the years has been greatly appreciated, and I am particularly grateful to Hermione Giffard, Jeff Hughes, Ben Marsden and Sam Robinson. I also count myself fortunate to have had a supportive base at Kent throughout these years. Colleagues, past and present, and friends in the School of History and Centre for the History of the Sciences have provided intellectual support and companionship throughout, including James Baker, Mike Brown, Neil Calver, Oliver Carpenter, Pratik Chakrabarti, Mark Connelly, Kenneth Fincham, Tim Keward, Joydeep Sen, Charlotte Sleigh, Joe Street, Jackie Waller and Alice White.

This book would not have been possible without the dedication and help of archivists and librarians at the numerous institutions where I undertook research, including the Templeman Library, Canterbury; Canterbury Cathedral Archives; Library of Congress; Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; the National Archives, Kew; the British Library Manuscripts and Rare Book reading rooms; the Institution of Mechanical Engineers; the Science Museum, London and Swindon; the Manuscripts, Rare Rooks and Official Publications reading rooms of the University of Cambridge; Churchill College, Cambridge; St John’s College Cambridge; the Rare Book and Manuscript Reading Room at Bristol University; the Borthwick Institute, University of York; the manuscript reading room at the National Archives of Scotland; Glasgow University Archive Services; Glasgow University manuscripts reading room; and the Scottish National Maritime Museum at Dumbarton. I am also grateful to Andrew Lambert, who, as well as shedding light on the politics of naval architecture in a number of conversations, helped me to examine the Baldwin Walker papers; and Larrie Ferreiro, whose knowledge of naval architecture and intellectual generosity I have been fortunate to experience. I also thank Emma Brennan, Lianne Slavin and Judith Oppenheimer at Manchester University Press, for their patience, support and expertise in bringing this book to press, along with the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their helpful comments.

A year studying early modern history at Cambridge may not have resulted in a career in ecclesiastical history, but the experience and friends remain. While in Canterbury I thank my friends who draw me away from work, and Chloë, who has offered constant and kind-hearted support, encouragement and, when necessary, distraction. Finally, I wish to thank my family, without whom all the academic endeavours that have gone into this book would not have been possible. Their love and commitment not only gave me the opportunities I have enjoyed, but continue to support me, driving me forward and providing the happy world which sustains this intellectual one. To them I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Now it is well known by anybody who has at all turned his mind to the matter, that there is, perhaps, no problem in science – no problem in mathematics – more difficult than to determine what is the best construction of a ship destined for the purposes of war. First of all, it is not very easy, on strict mathematical principles, to say beforehand what form of a solid body is best adapted to go rapidly through a fluid. It is not very easy to say how the best floating line of a ship when fully rigged, manned and equipped for sea is to be secured, and what construction of the hull will give the greatest steadiness. But all those are qualities which a man of war should have. It is not very easy to say beforehand where the centre of gravity will be, nor where will be the verrick centre, or centre of impulse which lies somewhere in the rigging; and yet these are points just as important in their bearing upon the sailing qualities of a ship as the adaptation of the hull to making its progress rapidly through the water. Your practical man cannot tell this. He may give you the results of his experience of this ship or that. He may say the ship you submit to him resembles some good sailer he is acquainted with, and seems therefore to possess what, in his view, are the requisites of good sailing; but he cannot tell you beforehand on what principle its sailing qualities depend. Again, the man of science, though he may tell you on scientific principles how he can obtain the qualities which you require; yet if not assisted by the practical sailor as to the amount and manner of stowage, and its effect on the sailing qualities of the ship, he will not be able to give you a safe model on which to ground your building system.

Viscount Palmerston exhibits his knowledge of hydrodynamics in an 1845 speech in the House of Commons.1

To many readers, Viscount Palmerston’s speech on the problems that faced Britain’s warship designers will be as surprising as the Victorian Prime Minister was informed. It should not be so. Naval construction and ship design were frequently the subjects of parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles and periodical essays. Shipwrights and naval officers were the groups most immediately connected to the problems of naval architecture, but the connection between ship design and British naval strength was such that the topic excited interest from across the political, naval, engineering, scientific and press communities. Levels of knowledge differed widely, together with the types of knowledge that communities privileged, i.e. that derived from experience, experiment or mathematical analysis. The questions they sought to answer, however, were much the same: what types of ships ought to be built for the Navy? How should the success of those ships be judged? Who would be entrusted by the state to undertake design work? Responses to these questions gave rise to controversies throughout the nineteenth century. John Henry Briggs, a secretary to the Board of Admiralty, believed that there was ‘no subject more difficult to deal with than the construction of vessels for the Royal Navy or one upon which more mistakes have been made, more party spirit enlisted, or public money wasted’.2 Similarly James Graham, who co-drafted the Great Reform Act and served as First Lord of the Admiralty for the Whig Party on two separate occasions in the 1830s and 1850s, quipped that ‘except religion, he knew no subject that excited so much bitter controversy’.3

Between 1831 and 1906 the British government spent over £935,000,000 on the Navy. In 1831, the £5,300,000 gross naval spending was 10.21% of the total public expenditure. In 1850 the £6,200,000 represented 11.17%, in 1875 the £10,500,000 represented 14.38%, and in 1906, the year HMS Dreadnought was launched, the outlay of £33,300,000 represented 22.65%.4 There were also one-off outlays for warship building, most notably the £21,500,000 guaranteed by the 1889 Naval Defence Act. The British government did not spend such large amounts of public money without taking a great interest in the design, construction and behaviour of its warships. The Royal Navy was Britain’s foremost military institution, supported by an extensive engineering infrastructure of dockyards. Palmerston was evidently informed about the limits of knowledge concerning ship design, the difficulties involved in a purely mathematical analysis of hull form and the tensions that existed between practical shipwrights and those highly educated in mathematics and hydrodynamic theory – not to mention naval officers and men of science.

In the nineteenth century the Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a complex machine: a system of mechanical technologies controlling propulsion, navigation and firepower. The 1840s saw the first steam warships, the 1860s the first made of iron and in the 1870s the first without masts. As the century drew to a close the size of warships substantially increased, as did their offensive power and speed. These were highly contested and controversial changes to the fabric of Britain’s naval defence. They became topics in popular politics, due in part to the public interest in the Navy during the nineteenth century.5 In Birth of the Battleship (2001), John Beeler ascribes a great deal of power to politicians and senior naval officers in the direction of ship design without illuminating the ways in which speeches in the House of Commons were linked to work in the dockyards.6 A lot of naval history has failed to complicate this relationship, preferring instead to treat technology as a factor. This book places the actors, institutions and practices involved in ship design into the contexts which made the Navy’s ships so ripe for political, naval and engineering debate. It challenges our understanding of technological change and maps the authority of different approaches to ship design.7

This book examines these reconstructions of the Navy, restoring them to the flows and currents of nineteenth-century history without treating them as simple products of contemporary politics and strategy. A surface-level investigation of technological change can yield only a weak analysis in which the Navy simply exploited technologies as they became available. In Robert L. Connell’s study of the rise of the battleship, the screw propeller ‘presented itself’ as a solution to employing steam at sea, while ‘the enormous advantage to be gained by substituting ferrous metals for trees quickly silenced conservative opposition’ to iron warships.8 Underpinning his analysis is a peculiar and unquestioned model of the ‘evolution of technology’. Such a model is to be found in much naval history, and nineteenth-century British history generally.9

It has become convenient for British historians to leave unexamined the role of human actors in technological change. It is not uncommon to read about how railways changed the perception of time, how cheap newspaper presses forged national consciousness and how telegraphy made the world a smaller place. So far as naval technology goes, the act of removing matériel from the sites of its conception and construction – or paying only cursory attention to conventional narratives – will skip over a great deal of historical context and contingency.10 New forms of propulsion, building materials and weaponry required extensive and careful experimentation, trials and deployment. Examining the history of these processes involves more than emphasising the role of inventors. It is about how large institutions deal with technological questions: how do they manage a vast engineering enterprise? What authority do they give to engineers? What are the agreed-upon processes whereby a new technology is deemed credible?11 Even technical histories of the Navy, so called by naval historians, with their descriptive narratives of technologies and reforms to engineering practices, fail to engage with these wider contexts that shaped technological change.12 Technologies, as understood by many historians, may conveniently appear ready for application, but this book deals with technologies in the making, which involve networks of actors negotiating risk, speculation, anxiety, fragile credibility and competing interest groups.13

The other side of the coin, so to speak, is technological determinism. If the notion of ‘evolution’ is an unsatisfactory means for understanding technological changes, technological determinism is its companion for understanding the ways technologies affect the course of human history. Reducing technology to a ‘factor’ that explains events is problematic. Sticking to the example of the screw propeller, Eric Grove writes in his history of the Royal Navy that ‘[w]ithout this, steam could never be more than an auxiliary to the main fighting fleet’.14 The same conceptual issue applies as before: there is an absence of human actors in this analysis. Historians of technology have sought to reveal the extent of technological determinism in history.15 While many historians are simply unaware, or uninterested in opening the mechanical boxes in the histories they research, in military history technological determinism has become a positive explanatory tool. Jeremy Black writes that ‘[m]uch of the scholarly work on military history has adopted an explanatory model of change that centres on the impact of new military technology’ as ‘a method that can be used both to cover the entire world and to explain shifts in the relationship between different parts of the world.’16

The purpose of an actor-driven history of technology is not to question the importance of technologies like the screw propeller, but to reveal the contingencies on which their success or failure depended.17 With the ground cleared of technological evolution and determinism, interesting human histories are given space to flourish. In this study the matériel transformation of the Navy is shown to take place through networks of shipwrights (and naval architects), naval officers, administrators and other diverse groups.18 These actors used naval spectacles, debates at learned societies and fierce pamphlet controversies to project and defend their work. These activities were intimately connected to their work and status as they shaped the Royal Navy. All this activity had two themes in common: the making of claims about techniques and technologies, and the competition between actors for authority. Politicians exerted power and control over naval policy and expenditure. Naval officers grew anxious over losing control of the ship to engineers, both in the dockyard and at sea. Shipwrights struggled for influence in the design process, and then faced a challenge from more highly educated colleagues who referred to themselves as naval architects. Men of science sought a role within the fiscal-military state. And finally, a British public became increasingly concerned by the naval threats reported in the newspapers. With all these concerns, the difficulties facing those who shaped the ships of the Royal Navy were manifold, involving questions far more complex and wide ranging than what type of iron armour or boiler to fit in a new ship.

Tracing a network of actors, exploring their concerns and dealing with the contingencies of technological change produces a fresh approach to the history of naval technology. Since the 1990s naval historians have made a concerted effort to re-evaluate the claim that the Navy remained conservative in the face of technical innovations. The initial presumption of technological conservatism, argue Roger Morriss and Andrew Lambert, can be traced back to the memoirs of naval administrators and engineers who saw countless inventions and petitions for Admiralty support rejected.19 For example, Admiralty secretary John Henry Briggs described the Admiralty Board of the early 1830s as financially and professionally loath ‘to introduce those changes which scientific progress has rendered imperatively necessary’.20 Morriss’s response has been to examine closely dockyard practices, from which he has argued that the Admiralty encouraged ‘attempts to improve sailing-ship design’ and ‘introduce the latest technology into the navy’s steamships’. Therefore the problem was not in how the Admiralty approached technology, but with the technology itself: ‘[p]rogress was inevitably hesitant … [and] it was natural and necessary to adhere to what was known to be effective’.21 Historians are doubtless right to question the reliability of nineteenth-century memoirs, but it may be time to move the parameters of this historiographical debate away from the extent to which the Admiralty was ‘conservative’ toward technological change.

Reducing the relationship between the Navy and technology to a dichotomy of attitudes, either conservative or progressive, is immensely restrictive. It conveys a sense that there was a baseline pace for technological innovation in the nineteenth century. This is very much in line with the evolutionary model of technological change, in which technical specialists are treated as a monolithic group who could either be sped up or slowed down according to the level of support shown to them by an institution. Morris is not alone in this treatment. C.I. Hamilton assigns ‘conservative’ and ‘forward looking’ attitudes to specific actors in the Navy in order to understand their management of technology.22 Roger Parkinson writes that technological changes repeatedly posed the Navy with challenges and problems, especially in the last decades of the century when ‘accelerating changes in naval technology helped feed national anxiety’.23 The main weakness of this approach is that ‘technology’ is treated as somehow external to the Navy, changing at its own pace. This is a major misconception that has developed within naval historiography (and British historiography generally), rendering an analysis of technology that deals in impacts and effects that seem to drive history by forcing historical actors to respond.24 We need only remind ourselves that the naval dockyards were among the largest sites of engineering activity in the British Isles. The work that went on there was deeply connected to the Royal Navy, its administration, operations and concerns.

A more productive way of understanding the relationship between the Navy and technology would be to place greater emphasis on how actors linked to the production of ships operated within the naval state, ranging from the ways shipwrights made knowledge and how they sought to establish its credibility, to the frameworks within which naval officers judged a ship’s qualities and shaped design priorities. The Navy shaped technology on many levels, from the members of the Board of Admiralty and dockyard superintendents who set shipbuilding policy and managed the day-to-day work of shipwrights, to the naval officers who championed specific technologies and naval architects who produced ship designs.25 With such a variegated relationship with technology, we need a better model than we presently have. Instead of a reductionist explanatory focus on conservative and progressive attitudes to technology within the Navy, we can treat the Navy as a site of extensive technical action that simultaneously shaped naval architecture, naval power and the status of engineering professionals.

The state of the art

New perspectives become possible by reconstructing how scientific and engineering activity was deeply embedded in the work of the Navy. For example, instead of focusing on the acceptance of new technologies by the Admiralty we might instead examine the Admiralty as an agent in the changing relationship between craft and science in nineteenth-century engineering and ship design. This relationship has generally been understood as a source of tension, controversy and opportunity for campaigning. Within the scientific community there were many critics of craftwork, or rules of thumb. T.H. Huxley considered them to be the ‘idol’ that practical men worshipped. His criticism had more to do with the estrangement of theory and practice in some arts and manufactures. Such estrangement was not reconciled by the dichotomous tone that writers like Huxley took, claiming that the perception in arts and manufactures was that ‘science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice have nothing to do with one another; and that scientific habit is an impediment, rather than an aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs’.26 Writing about naval architecture in 1863, the natural philosopher William Snow Harris, made a similar criticism:

It was contended, for example, that the sailing and other qualities of a ship were not reducible to any known laws of form, or the resistance of fluids, to any dependable kind of science; that naval architecture is not to be pursued successfully by means of any sort of systematic education; but that the whole sort should be trusted entirely to persons having a practised eye and a sort of intuitive power, by which they are enabled to construct ships without regard to any general knowledge of physics …27

Harris had strong scientific credentials as a member of the Royal Society, and had worked closely with the Navy on lightning rods and the collection of meteorological data.28 His essay conveyed a sense that within the Admiralty and Navy there was little faith that science was of use in ship design.

In recent historiography there has been an effort to reclaim the importance of artistry within scientific practice, and craft skills in the design of technologies. The former area has seen fruitful examination of the labour, instruments and routines involved in performing experiments;29 the latter a reconsideration of manual drawing, working with materials and tacit knowledge.30 Greater sensitivity to these concerns is essential for sketching the state of the art in ship design around the first half of the nineteenth century. The Georgian Navy was built within a craft environment where Admiralty administrators directed the labours of shipwrights trained largely by apprenticeships. Ship design was shaped by tradition, experience at sea and intellectual piracy (made easy by the capture of enemy ships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars). If the lines and proportions of a ship were found to make for a fast, responsive and stable vessel, they were made the blueprint for future designs.31

William H. Thiesen, in one of the few histories of naval architecture to show a sensitivity to craftwork, writes that ‘English ship design included both high art and a folk art ’, the former rooted in the drawing and mathematics emphasised by French shipbuilders, the latter a ‘more conservative’ tradition which included modelling design features on ‘forms found in nature’ and using ‘frames and structural timbers from disassembled ships as templates’. All these craft traditions ‘used little more than basic measurements’ to guide the design and construction process.32 Similarly David McGee, writing about craftwork in early modern design, challenges whether the traditional perspective of craftwork as a trial-and-error process, and ‘consequently not scientific ’, is a secure basis for analysis. He defines three traditions in naval architecture: the craft tradition, in which there was no recourse to drawings, and design took place immediately on materials; the mechanical tradition, which did feature drawings; and the architectural tradition, in which designers used ‘multiview’ plans.33

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, British ship designers tended not to employ precision instruments but, rather, visual observations. These played a central role in the design and judgement of ship design, both in the dockyard and at sea. It was by visual interrogation that design features like ‘cod’s head’ were understood. This term referred to the practice of placing the widest point on the ship forward of the midsection, roughly imitating the shape of a cod’s head when placed on its side. This idea, although much older than the turn of the nineteenth century, was generally supported by visual observations made by Fredrik Chapman in Sweden and experimenters like Mark Beaufoy operating in Britain that suggested that ships essentially forced water out of their path. It is noteworthy that Beaufoy did employ precision tools in the model experiments that the Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture (SINA) had commissioned him to undertake.

Established in 1791 by John Sewell, the Society and its largely anti-labour members sought to improve the art of ship design by elevating the work of Enlightenment savants who would generate experimental knowledge and instruct labourers how to design more effective vessels.34 The Society fuelled the perception that French warships were faster and more powerful, ‘diagnosing this as a result of state support for academic hydrography’.35 The research undertaken by natural philosophers and experimenters like Beaufoy tended to remain isolated from the craft-culture of shipbuilding. There is little evidence that the particulars of Beaufoy’s experiments were received and considered within the Admiralty and naval dockyards.36 The impact of the SINA was ultimately remote, given that the Society closed in 1799, in part due to its failure to excite the interest of naval shipwrights. A similar story is found in William Ashworth’s study of Samuel Bentham’s programme for dockyard reforms. Employing ideas that were later made famous by his brother Jeremy Bentham in the panoptican, Bentham introduced managerial reforms to enact ‘a distinct and powerful regime of economic calculation’. Ashworth brings powerful insights to understanding the social contingencies of Bentham’s sense of accountability, but the analysis ultimately pays less attention to how administrators at the Admiralty received the plans for reform.37 It is with this critique in mind that this book begins the process of mapping authority in nineteenth-century Britain, paying attention to the interactions of politicians with spaces of craftwork and science (or natural philosophy), and vice versa.

A cursory analysis of maritime research topics in the history of science reveals the importance of the Navy as a site of science in the first half of the nineteenth century. In hydrography the Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy and Cambridge-trained mathematician William Whewell published a number of papers on tides and the behaviour of waves. Michael S. Reidy has written that their work, together with that of other astronomers and natural philosophers, ‘gave rise to a new conception of the ocean’ as a space for science.38 Airy, for instance, examined the effect of ocean waves on ironclad ships and compass navigation in order to devise a system of magnetic corrections that served to compensate for the compass deviation experienced by iron ships during ocean travel. His work brought him into conflict with William Scoresby, a well-known ship’s captain and evangelical clergyman, whose vivid and dramatic accounts of Atlantic waves contrasted with Airy’s scientific treatment of the ocean.39 Alison Winter’s study of the Airy–Scoresby controversy reveals an important insight, namely that its nineteenth-century audience identified the proponents through the oppositional categories of ‘practical’ (Scoresby) and ‘theoretical’ (Airy).40 Airy’s approach to hydrodynamics may have been well received within the Royal Society and Section A (Astronomy and Physics) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), but shipwrights and naval officers remained more receptive to visual observation and the work of ‘practical men’.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the key site for the interaction between the art of ship design and those who campaigned for the use of natural philosophy, mathematics and experiment was not in places where the audience consisted of natural philosophers, like the Royal Society, but the dockyard and the drawing room. Simon Schaffer has argued that the Royal Navy’s place at the heart of the ‘fiscal-military state’ makes the dockyard ‘a remarkable site for historical reflection on the relation between knowledge and skill in the epoch of industrialization’.41 Schaffer explores how terms such as ‘reason’, ‘theory’ and ‘experiment’ had particular politically and socially contingent meanings in Georgian Britain that served to distinguish the groups who contended for power over the dockyard.42 William Shubsole, a labour campaigner, believed that shipwrights made discoveries and ‘savings’ in shipbuilding without the aid of mathematicians, and so they rightly sought to be ‘recompensed’. SINA members, in contrast, sought to raise their profile through claims that reason and experiment provided a means of ordering large construction projects.

Schaffer’s study of the military and monetary organisation of the Georgian dockyard draws out the social and spatial politics that shaped sites of experiment and the distribution of knowledge and control over the shipbuilding process. He reveals how science in the dockyard was ordered, where its boundaries (cultural and geographical) lay and whether skilled labourers, Enlightenment savants or administrators controlled it. Such an analysis helps to define the cultural processes through which knowledge of ship design was made and organised. Through this analysis Schaffer puts ‘reason’, ‘theory’ and ‘experiment’ back ‘in the places where politicized languages of art and practice provided their peculiar forceful sense’ – as opposed to their modern meanings.43 This is an important lesson for studying the century as a whole. A term like ‘experiment’ had specific meanings within different groups that must not be taken for granted. Similarly, the authority attached to a ‘science’ could vary greatly.

The nineteenth-century politics of art and science in ship design may be reconstructed by examining how master shipwrights talked about them. The master shipwright worked at the head of the dockyard constructive branch, and in 1851 John Fincham, master shipwright at Portsmouth Dockyard, described the traditional separation of art and science:

It was not only during the earliest ages of the employment of ships, that the art of building them had to be carried on separately from the aid of science in their construction; but this state of things has marked almost the entire course of history … The development of art never waited for this basis; necessity impelled it onwards; and, gathering on the side of truth, and rejecting on that of error, a long course of experience produced ships of a high order of excellence, and capable of fulfilling the objects of their respective periods, before any theory of naval construction existed[.]44

Fincham thought that much of the ‘science’ of naval architecture was of no benefit to those craftsmen who designed and fabricated Britain’s ships of the line. In his view, science could never offer ship designers the practical lessons that could be learnt from experience – but science did have a place. Master shipwrights like Fincham are vital to our understanding of the reception of work originating with natural philosophers and experimenters. Along with the various surveyors, chief constructors and directors of naval construction, they were the gatekeepers who shaped the ‘science’ that was employed within the naval state. Without them, the study of hydrodynamics, however interesting, becomes divorced from the design of ships and the history of naval power.

Fincham’s struggle with ‘science’ came down to the difficulty he experienced in reconciling experimental work and treatises written by natural philosophers with the dockyard work he was expected to undertake within a largely craft-orientated environment. This did not mean, however, that he denied that there was a scientific dimension to his work. From time to time he talked of a science of ship design, but this meant something very particular within the context of dockyard work. For example, he supported efforts to ensure mathematical training for shipwrights because it added to the tools with which shipwrights could assess hydrodynamic theories. He saw Pierre Bouguer, professor of hydrography at Le Croisic and author of Traité de Navire (1746), as the role model for shipwrights who wanted to walk a path between theory and empiricism:

he distinctly acknowledges the insufficiency of abstract reasoning to reach the end he had in view, whilst he had proof enough of the inadequacy of knowledge derived simply from practical sources. ‘Experience would be the best means of perfecting naval architecture, if the thing were possible; but it is plain enough that practice is insufficient in many cases. It is certain, that if this alone is capable of rendering some parts perfect, it has need, in an infinity of others, to be aided by the light of theory.’45

Thus Fincham understood the value of ‘science’ through its theories that could suggest ways of improving dockyard work. He admired a ‘well-constructed theory’ which could be universally applied to and help decision making, but saw what he perceived to be the ‘extreme difficulty of applying abstract principles to so complicated a machine, with the conditions of its proper element so little understood’.46

Fincham believed that the ‘common aversion in practical ship-builders to have recourse to theory’ – an aversion which marred the ‘difficulties and discouragements of science’ in ship design – was unlikely to change until theory was