PEPYS’S NAVY: SHIPS, MEN & WARFARE 1649-1689

Every once in a while I come across a book that I genuinely can’t put down. Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men & Warfare 1649-1689, by J. D. Davies, is one of those books.

Pepys’s Navy is a large, handsome book, with lots of informative illustrations (diagrams, drawings, reproductions of old prints and paintings) in both black and white and color. It focuses on what happened to the British Navy over a forty year period during a rather messy part of English history, starting with the execution of King Charles I in 1649, the establishment of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, the remaining years of Charles II’s rein, and a bit beyond. One of the important figures in the British Navy during this period was Samuel Pepys (most famous for the personal diary he kept). Pepys was, for a time, Secretary to the Admiralty and played a central role in some of the reforms that were implemented in the British Navy during the period the book looks at—hence his name in the title.

The above might make is seem that Pepys’s Navy is a history book. It isn’t, really. History plays a role, of course, and you might say this this books tells the story of how the British Navy was professionalized. But what it really does is tell the story of the ships—everything about the ships.

Davies’ knowledge about those ships is impressively encyclopedic.

Here is a partial list of the chapter headings:

Types of Ship

The Principles of Ship Design

Shipbuilding

Ship Construction
Fitting of Ships
Masts, Sails and Rigging
Armament

The Work of the Ship

Organization and the Ship’s Day
Seamanship
Gunnery and Fighting
Navigation

Shipboard Life

Discipline
Mutiny and Desertion
Medicine and Health

Tactics and Battle

Fighting Tactics: The Evolution and Development of the Line of Battle

To provide the details for all of this—and there are lots of details—Davies uses various methods, including a series of instructive charts, like the one below which includes types of cannons used aboard seventeenth century British ships, the number of men required to operate each type, the types of ships, the number of each type of cannon per ship, and the total number of men required to operate the cannons. The different sizes of cannons have names like “Cannon,” “Demi-cannon,” “Culverin,” and “Saker” (see Part 1 of the three-part Cannons series of posts here in this blog, in the Background section, February, 2018, for details about seventeenth century cannon types). The cannons are listed in the chart below in descending order of size. The ships are classified as First, Second, and Third Rates. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the British Navy began classifying its warships into six types (called “Rates”), from First (the largest and best armed) to Sixth (the smallest and lest well armed). First Rate warships could be over 200 feet long, with a crew of 850 or more, and carry well over 100 cannon. Six Raters were around 100 feet or less, with a crew of up to 100 or so, and carried up to a couple of dozen cannons. Only the first three Rates are listed in the chart below.

Here it is:

Types of Cannons & men needed per cannon	FIRST RATE No. guns No. men	SECOND RATE No. guns No. men	THIRD RATE No. guns No. men
Cannons; to each, 8 men	26 208
Demi-cannons; to each, 6 men	26 156	26 156
Culverins; to each, 5 men	28 140	26 130
12-Pounders; to each, 4 men			26 104
Sakers in the 2^nd deck; to each, 3 men	28 84	26 78
Sakers on the forecastle; to each, 3 men	4 12		4 12
Sakers on the quarter deck; to each, 3 men	12 36	10 30	10 30
3-Pounders; to each, 3 men	2 4	2 4	4 8

Charts like this are a very useful way to let you get a sense of relative sizes and numbers.

Imagine the organized chaos during a fight at sea, for instance, when (according to the numbers in this chart) no less than 640 men are all scrambling frantically about on the decks of a First Rater trying to fire off 126 cannons in some semblance of order—and in controlled broadsides.

Davies also uses other methods to get across the details. One of the most effective is quotes from first-hand sources—men who were sailors aboard the ships. Here is a quote from the “Working the Sails” section of the Seamanship chapter that gives a vivid sense of what it was like to be a working sailor:

_____

…often we were called up before we had slept half an hour and forced to go up into the maintop or foretop to take in our topsails, half awake and half asleep, with one shoe on and the other off… and in stormy weather, when the ship rolled and tumbled as though some great millstone were rolling up one hill and down another, we had much ado to hold ourselves fast by the small ropes from falling to the board; and being gotten up into the tops, there we must haul and pull to make fast the sail, seeing nothing but air above us and water beneath us, and that so raging as though every wave would make a grave for us: and many times in nights so dark that we could not see one another, and blowing so hard that we could not hear one another speak.

_____

Davies also makes very effective use of old prints and paintings to convey telling details. The quote above is accompanied by an image (a section of a painting). You can see this image below. It gives you a sobering sense of scale.

In this image, we are looking at a large warship from the stern. Such ships had three masts: the Mizzenmast (the mast closest to the ship’s stern), the Mainmast (the mast amidships, that is, in the middle of the ship), and the Foremast (the mast closest to the ship’s bow). The large lower sails in the image are the mainsail (the lower sail on the Mainmast, the lower sail in the foreground of the image that is already partially furled) and the foresail (the lower sail on the Foremast, the lower sail in the background of the image). The upper sails are the Mizzen topsail (partially furled) in the close foreground, then the Mainmast topsail (the middle upper sail in the image), and then the Foremast topsail (the upper sail in the background of the image). The yardarm (the wooden spar to which the sail attaches) for the Mainmast topsail has been lowered—yardarms could be raised or lowered as desired—to facilitate bringing in the sail. The yardarm for the Foremast topsail hasn’t yet been lowered, which is why the upper background of the image is filled with a large sail (the Foremast topsail). The mainsail is in the process of being furled.

Being called “up into the maintop or foretop to take in our topsails” meant doing what the men in this image are doing: climbing 80 or 100 feet up into the air to perch on the yardarms and haul up a mass of heavy canvas. The men in the illustration are doing it in calm weather, and since those bringing in the Mainmast topsail have lowered the yardarm, they don’t have to climb so high. Imagine doing what the men in this image are doing, but doing it at night, in a storm, clinging as best you can to a wet, wildly gyrating yardarm, the better part of 100 feet up in the air, while you heave away at a hanging mass of unyielding, rain-soaked canvas billowing in the wind.

Notice the guy straddling the Mainmast topsail yardarm. When we think of sailors on old sailing ships climbing aloft to take in the sails, we imagine them perched on footropes strung along under the yardarm to give them purchase—so they could stand on the footropes and lean over the yardarm and haul up the sail. Such footropes did not come into common use until the latter half of the seventeenth century, though. Before that, sailors bringing in the topsails (or any sails) had to sit astride the yardarm, balanced precariously way up above the deck—as the guy in the image is doing.

Not a job for the fainthearted.

As you can see, the strength of Pepys’s Navy isn’t just in the details, but in the way those details come across to allow the reader to get a sense of what it was actually like to sail in these ships. The book is a window into the past.

Pepys’s Navy is probably not the sort of book that most people would sit down and read from cover to cover. But it is a wonderful book to dip into. Davies writes clearly, knows his subject extremely well, organizes the material effectively, and covers each topic thoroughly. This makes accessing a particular topic easy. It also means there’s some new piece of revelatory detail on pretty much every page.

If you’re at all interested in seventeenth century sailing ships—especially English ships—this is a truly fascinating and rewarding book.