There are so many things to do in London I decided to keep it simple on Thursday by....by going to Portsmouth. I guess I wanted to see some more of England.
Also I wanted to see the HMS Victory.
Portsmouth is the site of the oldest continuously running Drydock - I think I have that right. I'll check the fount of all truth later........Wikipedia :P. It's also a naval base, and a museum.
I will break my dissertation into 3 different parts addressing the different ships we saw.
The first ship we went onboard was the HMS Warrior. The Warrior was the first Ironclad, essentially teak with iron plating outside. It was in response to the French building a bigger ship. The ship-building-arms-race had got to the point where wooden hulls where simply getting too big to support the sail area. They need to go to iron.
This ship started a new naval arms race that ended in the disaster of the Great War and ultimately made capital ships obsolete with the age of the carrier.
Walking around it (in the drizzle as usual) I appreciated the sheer amount of work it would take to move the thing around, the engine room was massive and it was obsolete within 10 years. That's progress...
Secondly we moved onto the Mary Rose exhibition.
The Mary Rose was Henry VIII's capital ship that sunk in the channel with 500 onboard. It was a premier example of a fighting ship of the day. They have no idea why it sunk but it wasn't because of his enormous highness. They have a statue of Henry there and he certainly was big boy.
In the 70's some mad ship hunter finally located where it was in the channel and they have spent the last 40 years, raising part of it from the depths and coating it with stuff to preserve it. It doesn't officially open until June 2013 sadly so we were too early to see the actually half ship, but we did see a lot of the items inside. They had everything from Longbows to Musical Instruments. Interestingly, they found a couple of items that they didn't even know existed at that period of history - so thumbs up for underwater archaeologists. I could have spent all day there but we had to keep moving.
Finally and the reason I went to Portsmouth we got to see the HMS Victory, in drydock and still the flagship of the First Sea Lord, thank-you-very-much. You have to love the barnacle encrusted tradition of the British Navy.
What can I say about the Victory and Nelson that hasn't already been said. Well firstly to put paid to one myth - his men did NOT drink the rum he was pickled in after he died at Trafalgar - they were too superstitious for that sort of thing. Also the decks where not painted red - that was a Victorian thing. What is annoying is the number of books I have read stating that fact. Bunch of lay -about-non-fact-checking historians. :)
We have to understand that Nelson was the premier celebrity of the day and dying at Trafalgar only enhanced his reputation. He was like the Princess Diana of the day. Come to think of it.. the French where his nemesis as well.
We saw the place where Nelson died - they have a brass plate screwed onto the deck which the hoards of school children gawked and went back to horsing around with their iphones.
It was very difficult to move around the below decks area - the average sailor size was pretty short I understand. Captain Hardy's bed (imagine a coffin on stand like a cradle - which if he died it turned into) was considered huge and it was shorter than I was.
Standing on the decks surveying the scene you could get a sense of the majesty and frailty of charging around the ocean on these wooden deathtraps.
The battle of Trafalgar happened at walking pace.. they took hours to get into position. Like a train crash between snails. It's well honoured by the exhibition there. As is Nelson - although presumably so he doesn't get a big head posthumously - we are also reminded that he was pretty nasty to his wife and actively gallivanted around with another man's wife.
Anyway, all too soon we had to train our way back from Portsmouth to London and our adventure was over. As we pulled out I reflected on another bunch of people who pulled ever so slowly out of Portsmouth - the First Fleet. In an hour or so I was going to be in Leicester Square enjoying Chinese. Those poor wretches had months before they hit the Great Southern Land...
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