The Sovereign of the Seas
had not been excelled by any ship of war built down to the end of
last century.[1] At a comparatively recent date, ships continued
to be built of timber and plank, and impelled by sails and oars,
as they had been for thousands of years before.
But this century has witnessed many marvellous changes. A new
material of construction has been introduced into shipbuilding,
with entirely new methods of propulsion. Old things have been
displaced by new; and the magnitude of the results has been
extraordinary. The most important changes have been in the use
of iron and steel instead of wood, and in the employment of the
steam-engine in impelling ships by the paddle or the screw.
So long as timber was used for the construction of ships, the
number of vessels built annually, especially in so small an
island as Britain, must necessarily have continued very limited.
Indeed, so little had the cultivation of oak in Great Britain
been attended to, that all the royal forests could not have
supplied sufficient timber to build one line-of-battle ship
annually; while for the mercantile marine, the world had to be
ransacked for wood, often of a very inferior quality.
Take, for instance, the seventy-eight gun ship, the Hindostan,
launched a few years ago. It would have required 4200 loads of
timber to build a ship of that description, and the growth of the
timber would have occupied seventy acres of ground during eighty
years.
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