HMS Victory: Stuck in the Dock Gates, Trafalgar, and a War on Beetles

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HMS Victory, the oldest commissioned warship in the world, began as a troubled project at Chatham Dockyard in the late 1750s. The first rate ship of the line took roughly 6,000 trees, mostly oak, but Britain's run of victories in 1759 ended the urgency, and her frame sat unfinished for nearly three years. That delay seasoned the timber and is a key reason she survives. At her 1765 launch she was almost 10 inches too wide for the dock gates, and workers chipped away stone to squeeze her out. She listed to starboard, sat so deep that her lowest guns were about four and a half feet above the water, and after costing over 57,000 pounds she spent more than a decade in reserve on the River Medway. Her 24 foot draft kept her out of shallow North American waters, but France and Spain joining the war brought the fight to the Channel, and in 1780 nearly 4,000 copper sheets on her hull defeated barnacles and shipworms.

By the late 1790s she was so worn that a sailor's footsteps shook her stern, and she became a hospital ship for prisoners of war. When HMS Impregnable was wrecked in 1799, a refit costing over 70,000 pounds gave her 104 guns and her black and yellow paint. At Trafalgar in October 1805, as Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship, she crept into enemy fire for nearly an hour before raking the French flagship Bucentaure through her stern. Nelson was shot by a sniper and died hours later, and the shattered Victory was towed home.

• Her crew kept her afloat after Trafalgar by fothering, hauling a sail smeared with oakum and manure under the hull to plug holes.
• She sprang a leak and sank at her moorings in 1854 and was rammed by an iron warship in 1903.
• A 500 pound Luftwaffe bomb damaged her keel in dry dock during World War II.
• She now rests on 134 adjustable props that stop her hull from sagging, a process called hogging.
• Scientists are sequencing the DNA of deathwatch beetles to stop them eating her timbers without harsh chemicals.