Nautical Research Journal
Researching eighteenth -century warships in the British archives By Doug Tolbert
“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” [In the fi elds of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.] Louis Pasteur, Lecture, University of Lille, 7 December 1854
Even with a prepared mind, choosing a new ship model project can be a challenge. To their consternation, modelers can fi nd themselves more or less limited by the selection of commercial kits and construction plans available in the marketplace. With the exception some of well-known vessels, kits can be scarce or inaccurate, and scratch-build construction plans speculative or simply unavailable.
So, what do you do if the ship that strikes your fancy has never been worked up into a kit or set of construction plans?
I found myself in exactly this position. I wanted to see if a model of the ship that intrigued me was possible. To this end, I have been on a multiyear journey, assisted by friends and some old-fashioned dumb luck, to learn as much as I can about an obscure mid-eighteenth-century Royal Navy 70-gun third rate ship of the line whose career spanned the Seven Years War and American Revolution. My end goal is still an accurate model of the ship, but along the way, my ship model project became a history project as well. Who knew?
T e amount of information available about my
obscure warship has proven to be truly stunning. To date, during six weeks of on-site work in the British archives, I have identifi ed 334 separate contemporary
documents; taken, with helping
friends, more than 10,000 photographs of document contents; discovered thirteen plan drawings and three art pieces relevant to design and construction; extensively photographed two contemporary models
from archive storage; and consumed a small library of contemporary and modern secondary sources about sailing warships, the Royal Navy, and life in eighteenth-century Great Britain.
(In this historical context, a “contemporary document,” sometimes “primary source,” refers to documentary artifacts created by eye witnesses to the described events. For sailing navy vessels, examples include ship logs, letters, reports, and the like. “Secondary sources” are created by (perhaps) knowledgeable non-participants at
later times.
Some secondary sources may themselves be based on earlier primary sources, and those created closer in time to the actual events can sometimes have better credibility than later secondary sources. Much depends on the skill and training of secondary authors.)
T e full story of this ship will be published elsewhere, and it is not my goal to describe the results of my search here. Rather, my purpose is to document my search journey, report helpful discoveries I made along the way, and share considered recommendations as a friendly guide should you one day fi nd yourself silly enough to consider doing the same thing for your favorite ship.
The British archives
With only rare exceptions, all of the contemporary documents about Royal Navy sailing ships are located at T e National Archives (TNA) in Kew or at the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich. Your principal interfaces to the collections are the archives’ websites, which provide access to their on-hand collections and references to documents stored in some 2,500 other archives across the United Kingdom. You can fi nd the TNA web site at
http://www.nationalarchives.
gov.uk/, and the NMM web site at https://www.rmg.
co.uk/national-maritime-museum
For eighteenth-century Royal Navy documents, you can explore the archive websites from home, but you cannot use the websites as a substitute for traveling
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