Yep he got it right; that's how it was done

prettiest ships and guns imo

If it's the building i think it is, the very long one indeed, then the last time i went in there was four years ago and they make the guard rails for the ships in there now. I know they do some rope work still but only in a very small area as you'd expect as times certainly move on. Great dockyard to explore 11 years in the Navy up in a few months. :-(

Must have been a great experience..

It must have been really exhilarating to be up in the rigging of a ship

Justin Case - You must be a few years older than me, but I also grew-up in Pompey. Thank you for that powerful description. I never got the opportunity to "get behind the scenes of The Ship, so I envy you, although, clearly it was very hard work. Easy to forget the foul nature of the water coming inboard on those cables, with 1000s of men on ships and perforce relieving themselves into the harbour. One has to imagine that the smallest cut could easily end up infected. Given the need to cut away seizings etc, a knife was pretty much standard equipment. Given the angst that knife crime causes today, I wonder how today's generation would react to the salty bit of advice I heard from time to time, "Would you come on deck in harbour without your trousers, well don't come on deck at sea without your knife."

@@ross.venner Wonderful reply Ross. As adventurous lads, we would investigate every nook and cranny of the Victory and that was my undoing. Fumbling in the dark I found no decking under my feet and down I went being saved bar that caught the crotch of my overalls and I ended up swinging like a pendulum. I managed to scrabble to the decking to be met with whoops of laughter and a helping hand. The advantage of working in the dockyard was the experience of dangerous and dirty work sometimes in freezing weather gave young hands and backs the taste of real hard work and something that held me in good stead when I joined the army. Today with the advance in lifting aids has reduced much of the need for manhandling. As much a cliche' as it is, it helped make a man out of me, and following my father's footsteps, I retired still working for the military.

Screw “A couple dozen”, Jack Sparrow and William Turner managed to sail one all the way to Tortuga

@@Jess-pe8bq To be fair, the Interceptor is more akin to a frigate than a ship-of-the-line. Also, you are forgetting one thing. He's Captain Jack Sparrow. Savvy?

@@joshcain1032 It isn't even a fregate. It is a sloop of war with 16 guns (so 8 broadside) and two swivels. (That being said, PotC armaments are usually nonsense. Particulary Flying Dutchman has way to heavy guns for a ship of her size.) Interceptor was played by Lady Washington... which has usually 12 men crew. And 2 3 pounder "guns".

Sailing the ship would be possible, fighting the ship another matter.

@@josynaemikohler6572 no quotations needed. A cannon is a true gun. Rifles and handguns are just that, rifles and hand guns

I used to work on the Cutty Sark! She's a lovely ship and museum.

superactiongeneral so many good shanties in ac4, one of the best soundtracks on a game ever.

Especially Spanish Ladies, I've read about it in Arthur Ransome books, but never heard it until then.

Haha! I knew someone had to mention Black Flag regarding the shanties. They were one of the best features in the game.

No sea shanties allowed on Navy ships.

I know your post is 2 years old but I wonder if you've heard the shanty/pub song "Drink Till I Die" by the Poxy Boggarts. It's totally a killer to sing with the boys.

superactiongeneral that was actually very simple hammer wood over holes and get the nearest port and get the ship in a dry dock where over a series of weeks the hull would be repaired and painted while the crew took leave or left the navy entirely and more people were pup-ganged then the ship was relaunched

superactiongeneral now that’s a good question. Some holes in the hull would’ve been too big to hammer 1 piece of wood into and call it a day.

Rarely. A supersonic cannon ball 6 inches in diameter will make a hole in oak that is too small to stick your fingers into. That's because the wood fibers rebound back into the hole.

Ships were almost never dry-docked. Which was fine because battle damage was all at or above the waterline. They could just shift some ballast if necessary and access everything.

I believe that once they drydock the ship it is disassembled and rebuilt with fresh timber replacing the damaged ones, hence the astronomically long repair times it took to repair heavily battle damaged ships and the huge expense such repair costs... Its not like in TV shows or Movies or Games where you patch cannon holes on the fly and fully repair yourself while at sea, no this is a labor intensive process that takes days, weeks, or months to repair based on the type of damage, location of the damage and how long it'll take to strip down and repair, plus the funding and manpower of the shipyard the damaged vessel has been placed in...

Here's a little fun fact about the video: that was in the video.

SOT got me looking into these videos too.

And they would cut it with a saw, or axes, not a single swing of a cutlass...

Well, it all takes time! Thank you!

IIRC, the Nimitz has motorized capstans--a great convenience, one supposes, compared to having to wrangle 300 men at once for many hours at a time.

Agreed! Thank you for commenting.

Absolutely! I think to get into the real nitty-gritty with these sorts of topics would take an awful lot more time than a simple KZfaq video usually allows. I’m always amazed at how complex the naval side of things was in comparison to the army side.

You can't really compare anchor of a brig to an anchor of the 1st rate though.

Yes, using the anchor to pull yourself off a shoal was called 'kedging.'

IIRC a so-called donkey engine was used to turn the capstan, which was used for hauling up sails as well as anchors. Idk when they were introduced, but it's very likely the first steam-and-sail ships didn't have them. Pretty sure the late 19th/early 20th century windjammers had gasoline ones.

@@donjones4719 there were definately steam donkeys too. But they still had traditional capstan for backup.

@@mancubwwa even today, an electric windlass on a sail boat has a manual option. Just in case.

I think it would be would be one-tenth of a mile, Based on it being called an anchor cable, and a cable being a unit of measurement equivalent to a tenth mile or 8 chains, may be wrong as it's also called a hawser, although I think that term related to the layup.

James McEwan thanks

My reading suggests a Cable-length is 600 feet, as a standard.

That's about right, a cable measurement on land is less as its a tenth of a land mile. A see mile is 6076 feet. The measurement is still used in the Shell channel pilot book, and in Reed's nautical almanac. Seems to stay in use due to it being difficult to judge distances much more accurately at sea.

James McEwan thanks

I'd say it depends on the size of the ship

You never know when the responsibility of lifting an anchor will fall to you!

I forgot to mention. Thank you very much for sharing this nice vedio.

a large tackle from the 'cathead', huge beams jetting out from the ships side at the bow, was hooked to the ring of the anchor once it pierced the surface of the water. Then it was worked to raise the ring to the cathead. after that, a tackle was fastened to the tip of the anchor, and it was pulled up. Everything tied into place so as never to move, done. 'easy' !

Sure you could, make the axle hollow with a spiral groove forcing a bolt with spring loaded lugs to rise until it reaches the top where thd lugs are depressed into a vertical slit that allows the bolt to drop to the bottom of the spiral. Only question is: why would you?

OK, This process is known as "catting and fishing" the anchor. It requires a little bit of terminology I have tried to explain as well. There is a heavy timber aft of the Stem of the ship called a cathead, the cathead has built-in sheaves or pulleys (usually, three) and a chain called a cat-head-stop or cat-stop. The rope used to "cat" the anchor is called the cat-fall and is rove through both the cathead sheaves and a block called the cat-block. The cat-block has a hook on it called the cat-hook. Once the anchor is hauled up to the hawsepipe(the anchor rope opening in the ship), the ring end of the anchor is hooked by the cat-hook and hoisted up to the cathead, where the cat-stop is rove through the ring of the anchor and the cat-hook unhooked, the anchor ring is now secure and the anchor is now "catted". After "catting the anchor", you must secure the flukes, or hooks, of the anchor. Aft of the cathead is a spar called a fish-davit or anchor-davit, which traverses the deck or gunwale on a piece of hardwood called a shoe-piece and bends out over the rail and is secured using guys (like guy wires for a tower). At the outer end of the davit is hung, by its strap, a large single block; through which is reeved the pendent(a rope with a tackle, or two blocks working together, is attached) with a large iron hook spliced in the lower end to hook the anchor within the flukes; then, to the inner end of the pendent, is made fast a tackle, by thrusting a toggle through an eye in the blockstrap; after that has passed through an eye in the pendent, the other block of the tackle is hooked in an eye-bolt in the fore part of the quarter-deck; the effort of the tackle is communicated to the hook, by means of the pendent, by men’s bowsing on the tackle-fall. So they pull on the rope and the direction changes from an easy to pull angle for the men, to a point higher than the rail to lift the anchor one tackle up and down, one towards the rail. Thus the flukes of the anchor are raised and placed on the gunwale, where it is made fast by the shank-painter chain(painter is a term for a rope attached to the bow of a ship, it's tied to the shank of the anchor). A good reference is The Boy's Manual of Seamanship and Gunnery by C. Burney in Google Books for images and a Q and A regarding this topic.

Those shanties were the only saving grace from that title!

It was my introduction to the AC series. In that regard, I enjoyed it as a game on its own merits--as long as you don't go into it expecting some kind of sailing simulator, which it certainly is not :P

In the time of Nelson and before, I think there was no chain attached to the anchors, yet.

@@lutzderlurch7877 Smaller boats, probably. However, larger vessels most likely did use a chain rode. It helps prevent the chain hawser getting snagged or chafed by rocks.

@@kleinjahr I have never seena period illustration, book, text or model ever show hint or reference a llength a chain, even on the largest ships, in the age of Nelson and earlier. A piece of chain would, I imagine, totally destroy the hawse holes, which are made of oak with a flimsy lead sheet lining against water. Not to mention a rope can be pulled smothly through that hole (relatively speaking, with such a thick cable) but a chain will snag at every singly link and be almost impossible to pull through the hawse hole with menpower.

Metal was expensive, heavy, and, with the manufacturing technology availiable at the time: unreliable. The quality varied too much in a metal fitting compared to their ropes, lines and cables.

@@SonsOfLorgar I'd assume it'd uickly wear out the cable

In most cases, the flukes are hooking into whatever it is, the stock lying flat on the sea floor. As the cable (always handed out to multiple times the depth) is gradualy brought in, the cable begins to pull on the anchor itself no longer horizontally, but a begins to pull up. Which uses the body of the anchor as a leve to turn it up and break it out. It is not unheard of to have an anchor stuck, in which case you could try to relocate and go at it again, hoping to pull it from a different direction. But without diving gear etc. it's hard to know what snags the anchor, if it doesnt work, and ultimately, you may just cut it off.

600 feet would be typical, enough to drop anchor near enough to the shore that you can get there readily by longboat, but far enough away that you don't risk running aground if something goes wrong. The term "cable" is even used as a (somewhat antiquated) unit of measure; on land it means one-tenth of a mile, but at sea it's the aforementioned 600 feet.

Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge!

Prior to Nelson's dashing attack at The Nile the conventional wisdom was NOT to attack a ship at anchor because "every hand is a gunner." meaning that you didn't have to split your crew between working the sails and working the guns. Guns could be worked faster. An example of this reluctance comes during the Penobscot Expedition of the American Revolution. Upon arriving off Castine ME, Continental Commodore Saltonstall flat out refused to attack the much weaker RN force at anchor in Castine harbor. This even after the Continental Marines launched an amphibious raid, and captured the primary battery protecting the anchorage. (them Marines sure like doing that kinda stuff!) This led, in the end to the complete collapse of the mission, loss of all Continental ships, capture of many men, and the Cowardly Flight of Cpl. Paul Revere (who was supposed to be the commander of the Continental artillery on the expedition - and why the history books leave him out after his more famous horseback ride.)

Very interesting! I had assumed that the ships at anchor would be less maneuverable and therefore more vulnerable to raking fire from enemy ships passing astern of the anchored vessel.

They would pass an anchor out the stern of the vessel. In a situation like The Nile, the French used the fore and aft anchors to hold themselves in line. While the van and rear ships took a beating, everyone else was protected. Alternately, particularly if its a single vessel, or just a couple of vessels, they would use a long boat to carry the stern anchor out some distance perpendicular to the ship. With use of the capstan, heaving in or paying out, the vessel could turn to some degree, and also be held steady against the vagrancies of the tide and wind.

There would be far, far too much cable for that!

@@BrandonF I understand, but you could also put it around a couple of times for grip and then throw it in the hatch.

@@robox91 the cable itself is much thicker than the messenger. and after a short time in the water, made very stiff. It would not 'bend' around the capstan. The cable was such a thick and stiff rope, that it was not spliced or fancifully knotted to the anchor itself, but tied with a few rather simple, giant knots, which were then further reeinforced with wrappings of smaller rope.

According to a historical fiction book set in the time, porridge with dried goods, dried fruits, vegetables and meat. Also they supposedly drank in large part watered down rum. I can't say how accurate that is but the book is correct about a lot of other historical details, so ...

Bob Bobson, I'm looking for a more detailed answer like what's on "Townson" You Tube Chanel. The BBC Historical show that I watched showed them eating stews but how do you cook on a wooden ship?

They used a galley, a large metal stove and kitchen. In earlier days, they had a tiny kitche, with the cooking fire are lined with bricks and the rest of the room lined with copper sheets..

This is not medieval

Ropes.