308 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

selves for holding their own against any human adversaries en voyage

by the invention of opening up gun ports between-decks.1

'What is so remarkable about these ships is their wonderful develop-
ment. They do not stand so very far distant in point of general structure
and rig from the ships of Nelson's day;'2

and, by the same token, what is so remarkable about the half-century of
acceleration in the Western arts of shipbuilding and navigation circa
A.D. 1440-90 is that it was followed by three centuries of hardly less
conspicuous retardation.

'[The] smug complacency [of the majority of British shipowners at the
time of the revision of the Navigation Acts in A.D. 1845] had devastating
effects on the shipbuilding industry itself, as well as disclosing an inertia
that was out of step with the changing times; for we were passing, as a
nation, out of an agrarian order into an industrial one, which made far
greater demands on transport. How much progress had been made in
naval architecture in the past two centuries? Certainly there had been
many innovations and important improvements in the construction and
the rig.3 Labour-saving appliances, too, had been invented. But, if we
confine ourselves to essentials, especially in respect of the hull, the pro-
gress is almost negligible. After all, there was little incentive towards better
ship-design while there was little competition. . . .

'Builders were content to pursue the well-tried methods, and there is
small evidence of creative originality. The Dumer's draughts of ship-
plans for 1680 . . . show a method of ship-building which does not differ
very appreciably from that employed a century later. The standard work
on the architecture of the wooden ship was written by Frederick Hendrick
Chapman, who became Chief Constructor and Admiral Superintendent
of the Swedish Naval Dockyard at Karlskrona. This great designer, born
in 1721, came of an old English family from Deptford, from whom he
inherited his skill and enthusiasm for naval architecture. His Architectura
Navalis Mercatoria and his Treatise on Shipbuilding, an amplification of
the former work published in 1775, were freely quoted from in the official
report of the Chatham Committee of Naval Architects of 1843-44.4
There could be no more conclusive evidence than this of the "mark-time"
in shipbuilding and ship-design. . . .

'The ordinary standard of merchant ships was not creditable. They
were slow, unhandy, ill-equipped, and inferior in workmanship. Can one
say they reflect two centuries of progress ? Ship-design, like a spinning-
top, rotated on a point. The opening of the nineteenth century saw no

1 See Parry, op. cit., pp. 27-28; Bowen, op. cit., p. 14.

* Bassett-Lowke, J. W., and Holland, G.: Ships and Men (London 1946, Harrap),
p. 48.

3 The mam innovation, in the course of the three hundred years A.D. 1500—1800 had
been the Dutch invention of the fore-and-aft rig, which was 'an immense advance upon
the lateen for beating to windward". In the non-square-rig part of the rig of big ships
(as distinct from the small craft in which the fore-and-aft rig had been first developed),
fore-and-aft sails were substituted for lateen sails by the Dutch towards the end of the

formation of the cumbersome lateen mizen into the fore-and-after "spanker^ * (ibid.,
p, 186).—AJ.T.

+ 'Vessels were built to the patterns laid down under the Stuarts right down to the
death of George III, even to the start of Victoria's reign* (Abell, W.: The Shipwrights
Trade (Cambridge 1948, University Press), p. 103).—AJ.T.