HMS Victory

HMS Victory (1685) — Woolwich-built, second of her name on the Royal Navy register, design-cousin to the Royal James from Anthony Deane's first-rate line. One hundred guns, second-rate by the Navy List, first-rate by displacement when fully provisioned.

HMS VICTORY — Master Gunner’s Account of Battery and Broadside One hundred guns married to a hull of oak and wrath. That is the mathematics we tend each watch, and the mathematics that wins line-of-battle. Four tiers she carries them — two full gun-decks below, the quarterdeck above, and the forecastle fitted for chasers. Thirty guns to a side on the gun-deck proper; twenty-eight on the middle gun-deck; twelve on the quarterdeck in twelves and sixes; four long nines on the forecastle that can throw shot near two miles when the captain calls for it and the sea lies flat. The aggregate weight of our broadside — when we fire every larboard gun in succession — is near six tons of iron leaving the hull in the space of thirty seconds. It shakes the ship as if she breathes out cannon-fire instead of air. The lower gun-deck, where my gunners live half their lives, runs hot even in calm weather. Ninety men to a crew there, naked to the waist in summer, powder-monkeys darting between the gun-captains with cartridges in leather cylinders bound tight. Each gun crew numbers twelve — captain, first and second loader, sponge-man, rammer, two sailors on tackle, two on powder-hoist, a boy on match, and the powder-monkey himself. They work in the dark between decks, lit only by the glow of slow-match smouldering in the tubs and the pale shafts of gun-port light when we’re run out. The guns themselves run hot enough to cook meat if you pressed flesh to bronze. I have seen a man’s hand blackened in seconds from touching the breech after a hard action, the skin peeling like birch bark. We have buckets of seawater standing between every gun-pair — for fire as much as for cooling flesh. The middle gun-deck carries lighter pieces — twenty-four-pounders mostly — and serves a different art. Those crews can reload faster, and we use them for punishment-work, harassment fire when the enemy’s too far to rake but close enough to sting. I keep three gun-captains there who were powder-monkeys themselves twenty years past; they know the hunger of that deck better than any officer fresh from Portsmouth. Our standing tactic — the one Captain Becker drums into us at gunnery — is to close under the enemy’s stern or raking angle until we lie within two cables’ length, then rake her from ahead or astern if fortune smiles. A full rake from either end means our broadsides pass the length of the enemy’s hull, and every shot finds men or mast. We drill for it monthly, the gun-captains calling their crews through the motions like a psalm. But in close line-of-battle, when ship lies alongside ship in smoke so thick you cannot see the powder-monkey’s face, we fire for the masts and rigging at gun-deck level and the hull itself where it counts — below the waterline, where no repair at sea will save her. Each deck knows its murder. Captain Becker’s standing order rings in my ears before every action, delivered in the gun-room with the same iron tone whether the sea is smooth or running: “When the drums beat to quarters, you will deliver every shot true. The man who fires before the gun-captain’s word will hang. Speed and accuracy are not enemies — they are twins. Tend them both, or I will replace you.” We know it by heart. We live it.