History: The Portsmouth Chain

Protecting important harbors has been an ongoing nautical pursuit for centuries. Often it meant deploying ships and men that could be better utilized elsewhere. But England, being an island nation, was one of the first modern countries to use a more efficient and ingenious strategy.

Known as the Portsmouth harbor chain, the length of enormous metal links was stretched across the "haven" or mouth of Portsmouth harbor during the reign of Henry VIII some time in 1518 or 1519. King Hal had established the English Navy a few years prior and had declared Portsmouth, with its deep water, wide entry and dry dock built by his father, the navy's home port. The problem was that England's enemies, and France in particular, knew the strategic importance of Portsmouth harbor and had staged raids upon it throughout the Medieval and early Renaissance period.

As this article at The Portsmouth News online indicates, Bishop Fox of Winchester had written to Henry's Lord Chancellor Wolsey that "if war were intended against England, the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth are too feeble for defense" in 1518.

Bishop Fox's assessment was, of course, backed by historical data. The French sacked the town repeatedly in 1338, 1369, 1377 and 1380 with the Black Death devastating Portsmouth in between just for good measure. Henry V, whose decisive victory over the French at Agincourt put a stop to that nonsense - at least for a while - was the first English king to fortify Portsmouth harbor with wooden towers. Henry VII rebuilt these in stone and it was from these towers that the chain was strung.

The enormous metal links were obviously too huge to raise and lower by hand, so capstans were built to do the job. The chain was lowered into the water to allow ships to pass over it and raised to block entry.

Despite the placement of the chain, the French continued their attempts to sack Portsmouth. In July of 1545, one of those attempts resulted in the loss of Henry VIII's beloved galleon of war Mary Rose. The king witnessed the sinking of the ship and the loss of her 500 sailors from Southsea Castle, which he built at Portsmouth with money from all those monasteries he ransacked.

Today, as The Portsmouth News piece points out, only a fraction of the great Portsmouth harbor chain has been recovered. The search goes on, however, for the rest of this particularly English bit of nautical history. As the writer notes: "it must be somewhere."

Header: Two links of the Portsmouth harbor chain c 2011 via Wikipedia (click over to TPN article to see a picture that really shows how very large the links are)

Ships: Henry VIII's Man-of-War

As has been pointed out by scholars for some time, warfare begets technology. Either we’re inventing more efficient agents of death or we’re improving our knowledge of medicine and surgery. Sometimes, as with the Crimean and American Civil Wars, we’re doing both. Today’s ship is an example of the kind of technological leap forward that quite literally changes everything and its like would not be seen again until the rise of the ironclads. We’re talking about Henry VIII of England’s Mary Rose, a formidable ship that was named after the king's little sister.


Prior to the launch of the original Mary Rose in 1511, warships were of the cog or carrack. They featured high fore and aft castles that served as protection for first archers and later gunners who pelted enemy crews prior to large scale boardings. The idea of using cannons against another ship for anything but the killing and maiming of men did not occur and was, in fact, virtually impossible due to the lack of gun ports. Because cannon were heavy, they needed to be set low in a ship to ensure stability in the water; without water tight gun ports, such armament was not feasible.

This all changed when just such a technological breakthrough was achieved in the early 16th century. The Mary Rose was a virtual prototype for this new way of carrying and using great guns. The cannon could now be used not only against rigging and men, but also for battering and sinking ships.

Initially, Mary Rose was the flagship of Lord Admiral Edward Howard’s fleet of 20 ships which, along with a compliment of Spanish allies, blockaded the French coast from Calais to Brest. The Admiral was killed in an engagement in April of 1511 but his brother Thomas quickly took up command. Mary Rose and her sister ships were instrumental in landing English troops at Calais, but Henry VIII’s burning hatred of the French king Francois I saw the ship called back to Plymouth for a rebuild that would improve her fire and man power. Her 105 foot hull would be strengthened and, when she was again launched in 1536, she would carry 91 guns; 13 more than in her previous incarnation.

As John Batchelor and Christopher Chant point out in The Complete Encyclopedia of Sailing Ships, Mary Rose’s compliment of not only arms but men speaks a lot to the sea change in naval warfare that her new design was heading up. When first launched, she carried 200 sailors, 185 soldiers and 30 gunners. By comparison, the compliment of her contemporary, Sovereign, numbered 400 soldiers to only 300 sailors and not a gunner in sight. When she was relaunched in 1536, she probably carried somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 men, with the numbers skewed toward sailing and gunnery once again.

When England’s war with France hit a fever pitch in 1545, Mary Rose was in the thick of it. Francois I planned to invade Portsmouth with a superior fleet of over 200 ships to Henry’s 60. On July 19th, the two sides engaged with the French targeting the larger Henry Grace a Dieu. A change in the wind allowed the English fleet to advance on the French and it looked as if Mary Rose might lead the charge to beat the French ships back. Historians are still debating what actually happened but the general theory is that Mary Rose’s inexperienced crew threw open her gun ports too soon, she heeled to starboard and her lower decks flooded almost instantly. She foundered and sank with the loss of all but 35 souls. One of the most interesting creatures to go down with her ship was Hatch, Mary Rose’s dog and rat catcher.

An attempt to salvage the ship was made once the French fleet had been chased back to Le Havre, but only a few cannons were raised. It wasn’t until 1982 that a large portion of the ship along with innumerable fascinating artifacts and Hatch’s intact skeleton were raised from the deep. A permanent home for the ship and museum dedicated to her and her seafaring era are still in the works. Find out more at the Mary Rose 500 Facebook page here.

Mary Rose, though she may not seem so now to modern eyes, was a technological marvel whose design would change the way all European nations approached warfare at sea. And that is undeniably impressive.

Header: Mary Rose by Bill Bishop via The Mary Rose Project

Women At Sea: The Female Shipwright

Doubtless more than a few of the Brethren have at least some passing knowledge of the famous 18th century woman known to us as Mary Lacy (or Lacey). Mary went to sea under the name William Chandler and then apprenticed as a ship builder in Portsmouth. Her story – or the parts that can be documented – is a true one and certainly shows that women were not as uncommon at sea as Victorian editing would have us believe.

Mary was born into a poor family in January of 1740. Her mother, Mary Chandler, was the daughter of a roof thatcher and her father, William, may have worked in that trade as well. Mary was the youngest of three and precocious from the get go. She freely admits to her early transgressions against her parents and the village of Ash, Kent, in her autobiography, The History of a Female Shipwright Written by Herself and, though she was relatively well educated not only for someone at her economic level but for a girl, she was put into service at the age of twelve. She continued in this form of employment for seven years.

Her book refers vaguely to an “unrequited” love that occurred when Mary was around eighteen. The small but telling interlude is probably one of the few fictions in the book. Throughout the tale Mary has a decided taste for other ladies and it seems that her publisher, Mr. Lewis, used this opportunity to sanitize later vignettes of lesbian interaction as he would again at the end of the book. In fact, girls like Mary were fair game for their wealthier, more privileged employers and the instances of young servants being exposed to lewd proposals if not out right raped is so extensive in the literature that it need not be delved into here. Mary, who seems to have been charming and witty, may very well have been prey for such predators and chose to extricate herself from the situation the best way she knew how.

Whatever the actual reason, Mary rose early on May 1, 1759 and walked away from Ash forever. When she was far enough afield she changed into a set of men’s clothes, left her women’s attire under a hedge, and marched forward. By May 10th Mary was in Chatham, one of the large Royal Navy dockyards, with no money and an empty belly. Britain was in the middle of the Seven Years War with France and very much in need of men for ships. When Mary approached the gunner aboard the 90 gun man-of-war HMS Sandwich, the man asked few questions, gave her biscuit and cheese and then sent her off to apply to the ship’s carpenter Richard Baker.

Baker took the person he knew as William Chandler on as his servant but he was no gentle master. If Mary did not jump too quickly enough he would kick and beat her with very little remorse. For the next ten days, though, Mary was housed at Baker’s home in Chatham and the carpenter’s wife was kind to her making her a suit of clothes and a red nightcap. By the time Sandwich weighed anchor, Mary writes that she looked like a sailor “every inch of me”.

Sandwich, under the command of Richard Norbury, joined Admiral Hawke’s squadron off Ushant in the Bay of Biscay. This notoriously stormy bay was a school of hard knocks for Mary. Though she was a quick study and well liked by her peers – despite one scrap with Rear Admiral Geary’s “young gentlemen” that she managed to win – Mary’s young body betrayed her early and often. She began to suffer from rheumatoid arthritis that at times made walking impossible. As the mother of a daughter with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis, I have to wonder if young Mary wasn’t another stoic survivor of that same disease which most often affects the lower extremities of girls and women.

One flair of arthritis was so bad that Mary found herself in the Naval Hospital at Portsmouth. She was there until the autumn of 1760 but when she was finally released Sandwich had gone back to Ushant without her. Though her book does not make comment on this situation, I have to believe that at least a few of Mary’s mates knew she was not William Chandler by this time. Certainly the hospital staff must have had a clue, but no one spoke up it seems. Either that or a woman in men’s clothes aboard a Royal Navy ship was nothing to bat an eye at.

Mary joined the company of HMS Royal Sovereign as a supernumerary. She was aboard her new ship, on guard duty off Spithead, for over a year without shore leave. She was befriended by many of the men and made close contacts with the ladies aboard. Mary was particularly attached to a woman who was on board with a foremast jack named Grant. The fact that these two weren’t married, and that Grant was not even a petty officer, speaks volumes about the number of women to be found on any given ship. Grant became jealous of this relationship and began beating his mistress at every opportunity, although he seems not to have confronted Mary.

Mary suffered a severe head injury due to a fall in late 1762 or early 1763 and she returned to Portsmouth Dockyard, perhaps to spend a bit more time in the hospital. By March of 1763 she had been accepted as apprentice to William McLean, a carpenter, who was working on the refit of HMS Royal William. Mary clearly wanted to become a shipwright for her next seven years were an endless round of toil, servitude, deprivation and the indignity of being passed from one “master” to another as payment for debts. Her wages went to the carpenter to whom she was apprenticed. Her hours were long, sometimes up to twelve a day, and she was expected to run errands, cook and wait at table for the carpenter as well. Given her previous infirmities, only an iron will to succeed could have kept her going.

That, and the help of friends. Mary writes of the women who helped her through and, it seems, loved her. There was Sarah How, with whom she was “very free and intimate”, Sarah Chase, a girl that Mary’s mates imagined “William” would surely marry, and a prostitute named Betsey of those delineated by name. While Mary’s prose does not spell out the relationships she had with these women, and assuming is always a bad idea, one can imagine what “very intimate” meant.

Mary received her shipwright’s certificate in 1770 making her a valid ship’s carpenter who could legally set up shop at any Royal Navy dockyard. Unfortunately the hard work it took to finally achieve success came back to haunt her. She was again hospitalized with arthritis and, though she tried to return to work, she could not. This time she applied to the Admiralty for a pension. It is particularly interesting that Mary makes no pretense as to her gender in this legal document. Neither does the Admiralty in their consideration and reply. Through out, Mary Lacy is referred to by her given name and as “she” and “her”:

Resolved, in consideration of the particular Circumstances attending this Woman’s case, the truth of which has been attested by the Commissioner of the Yard at Portsmouth, that she be allowed a Pension equal to that granted to Superannuated Shipwrights.

Mary was given 20 pounds per year for life, a tidy sum for someone of her class. Her book ends with her convenient marriage to one Mr. Slade, with whom she settles down in Deptford. In fact, according to historian Margaret Lincoln, “Mr. Slade” was probably Elizabeth Slade with whom Mary cohabitated in a house on King Street as of 1777. According to Lincoln, Mary took her friend’s last name and they lived as sisters, keeping a shop in town until Mary’s death in 1797.

Mary’s autobiography was popular not only in Britain but in the U.S. as well, where it was published in 1807. Her story, even with the obvious attempts to make it more palatable to the audience, is remarkable. But, perhaps, not quite as remarkable as we of the modern era would like to believe.

Header: Portsmouth Point by Thomas Rowlandson c 1811

History: Left Behind

The perils of the sea are easily spoken of in terms of the men and women who faced them. High seas, storms, enemy fire and the taking of prizes, disease, want and just plane hard work are discussed over and over until they’ve been so minutely picked at that a new way of approaching them has to be found. Hopefully, that’s what I’m doing here at Triple P. All that being said, there is one form of abstinence, want and heartache that is too often overlooked in writings about the sea: the misery of those left behind.

There may be a number of reasons for the fact that the people left by land don’t show up frequently in historical tomes. The first and foremost may be that they were not thought much of in their own time when almost everyone had it hard and the absence of a relative or other loved one was a virtual daily occurrence. Only extreme cases of neglect or poverty would come to light in such societies. Either that or easily embraced stories of those who sacrificed their own comfort for a people’s hero. Then there is the fact that we know very little about how common people got on in history, much less about what they thought or felt. It is only relatively recently that reading and writing have become available to practically everyone, so most of our world’s life stories went to the grave with the individual, or at best their children’s children. Finally, and perhaps most unfortunately, the glaring reality is that those who waited for men to return from the sea were women. Though the field of women’s history has expanded incredibly just in my lifetime, it surely has not caught up with what has been missed.

Of course men went down to the sea in ships from the time they could build boats. The Ancient Sea Peoples, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all travelled and battled on the seas and oceans but in all fairness it was not until the Viking culture burgeoned in the early current era that Indo-Europeans ventured far afield. A Viking woman might watch her husband head out on a raid with trepidation but, as with so many cultures that followed, the voyages of exploration must have caused the most fear. The intent to settle new lands was always there but the man generally went ahead and then either returned or sent someone back for their families. The woman, whether she was the wife of a chief or a sailor, would simply have to wait. Though many cultures never resolved the problem of just how long it was reasonable to wait for a man to return from the sea, the Vikings handled this in their usual straight forward way. Unless otherwise stipulated by the couple prior to parting, a year and a day was the extent of the woman’s (or man’s) obligation. It is tempting to imagine that some people simply did not return and found greener pastures elsewhere, but that is probably putting a far too modern spin on the agreement.

Eastern cultures also put out to sea, but the kind of voyages made by Zheng He of China, which took his large flotillas all the way to Africa, were unusual. The Polynesian culture thrived on exploration, however, and women frequently accompanied their men on these voyages. This must have alleviated a lot of stress for everyone, at least to some degree. And the success of this policy shows in the numerous areas of the world that can now rightly be proud of their Polynesian ancestry.

By the great age of sail the pattern we generally espouse today was established: the sailor husband went off to sea and the dutiful wife stayed at home to tend hearth and children. The myriad complications with the system are too numerous to discuss here, but it is worth noting that most systems of pay were incredibly flawed, particularly in the great navies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Pay for any sailor was not in hand until the ship ended her commission which might be anywhere from six months to a number of years. In the U.S. Navy after the War of 1812, as an example, a foremast jack made approximately one modern dollar every month. This was a good, living wage by land but certainly impossible for a woman left in Baltimore with a small home to keep up and three children to feed. Though some men received an advance when they signed on, this was usual only during war time and would amount to no more than three months pay.

Women in such situations did what needed doing. Sailor’s women were frequently laundresses and/or seamstresses, at least before the factory systems took their ability to do these jobs at home. Those who did not have the care of children or, in more cases than is generally written about, the care of an elderly parent or in-law, might go into domestic service. Many wives took in boarders and the running of taverns in any port town on either side of the Atlantic was almost exclusively the business of women attached to sailors. Prostitution was an option that either appealed to or was the only out for many. In the 1821 census of the city of Portsmouth in England over 4,000 women residents were counted to a surprisingly low 2,879 men. There was no pretext about the fact that a large number of the women calling themselves single were also widows, probably of seaman, and that many of them had turned to prostitution for a living.

Men on the other side of the law, freebooters, pirates and privateers, also made attachments and married. Pirates’ women frequently joined in when a ship returned to port, helping to sell the goods plundered. The famous Pirate’s Alley in New Orleans, which is not far from Jackson Square, is so named because it was reputedly the sight of a Sunday market where women up from Laffite’s Barataria hawked wares of questionable origin while their men sat in coffee houses planning their next voyage.

The faith of a woman, or a man, could be tempted after a long time away. The historical records show that more than one seaman returned home to find a child that could not mathematically be his own. David Porter, the first Commodore of the New Orleans Station, hero of the War of 1812 and successful pirate hunter, grumbled later in life that his wife, Evalina, had not been faithful. He swore that some of their eight children were not his, but he would not reveal which ones. Evalina denied the accusation stringently and struck back, accusing him of insanity. Conversely, the second wife of Renato Beluche, then living in Porto Cabello Venezuela and having waited two years for her husband’s return, appears to have given up. She put an add in a local paper that she was selling off all of her furniture with the intent of taking her three children back to New Orleans. Commodore Beluche returned before Mizelle had a chance to carry out her plan. One wonders if he mentioned the twenty-something girl he spent months with in Panama, leaving her pregnant when he sailed back to his wife.

Death, more often from disease or the whim of the ocean than in battle, dogged the sailor and his woman. Men came home to find wife or child or both buried in the local churchyard. Countless wives probably never knew what happened to their men but simply went on, year after year, finally remarrying if possible. At home they were a great asset to their local economies in many aspects. Whether their men fished, whaled, freebooted or explored, the ladies ashore did the tasks that rarely come up in scholarly histories: goods were sold, livestock tended, butchered, cooked and eaten, gardens tended, cloth woven and made into clothes and sails, fishing nets mended, roofs patched, homes kept clean, children raised, the list goes on and on. All this with the nagging anxiety of when would the husbands return.

Some moments and emotions are too great for words and I feel justified in falling back on a picture to explain. The painting above, “A Hopeless Dawn”, was done by Frank Bramley during the 1880s when he was living in a fisherman’s a village in Cornwall. Bramley experienced the despair of women whose men would not come home from the sea and he translated it brilliantly to canvas through paint. The emotions shared between wife and mother (or mother-in-law), both of whom knew what it was to love a sailor, are clear to anyone who can see. After that, there is nothing left to say.

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Dock

We all know what a dock is, don’t we? It’s that long thing made out of worm-eaten wood that allows you to walk out over the lake/bayou/ocean/sea, sit down and fish. Or maybe jump off and go for a swim. Or just tie up the family dory. That is the experience that most of us have had. For me, a dock is a welcoming place of solitude and communion with the water. Or it’s a place of so much bustle and energy that the air fairly crackles.

In the great age of sail, and to men who went to sea in ships, it was more often the latter. A dock proper is a receptacle for ships where they can quite literally park to take in cargo or to refit. A dry dock, where ships could be built and/or repaired, was usually a deep trench with strong flood gates at one end. The ship, depending on size and the capacity of the dry dock, could be towed in, the water let out, the flood gates closed and work begun. By the end of the 18th century most blue water navies had large dockyards to support their fleets. Some of the most famous are Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans and San Francisco in the U.S., Deptford, Sheerness, Chatham and of course Plymouth or Pompey (from whose wonderful website the above picture of HMS Warrior comes) in the U.K. France had Dunkirk, Brest and Marseilles while Spain had Gibraltar and Malaga and Cartagena. Algiers, Tripoli and Sale kept things up on the Barbary Coast.

An entire language and culture sprang up in and around dockyards that was separate from but cousin to the culture of the sea. Dock dues were monies paid to the commissioner of a dock for use. Dockers were the inhabitants of a dockyard’s wider area. This term sprang up in England around the town of Plymouth in particular with a docker being anyone who had a residence between the dockyards proper and the town. Baltimore and New York also had “dockers”. In France they were known as diminuers – “diminishers”.

This derogatory sounding epithet may have stemmed from the distrust and sometimes outright hatred sailors felt toward dock workers. Dockyard duty was almost always the purview of a ship’s lieutenant or midshipman who commanded a gang of his mates ashore. They would be stationed at dry dock with their ship to keep an eye on the men working on her, frequently called “dockyard maties”. The artisans in particular – wood and metal workers – were considered dishonest and prone to steeling. Fights sometimes broke out between ship’s men and dockyard “artificers” that could end in serious injury or even death.

A ship is said to dock herself up when she has eased onto an underwater bed making her temporarily stationary. Docking a ship can occur elsewhere than a dock yard. A good example would be careening where in a ship is literally hauled up onto a beach or other shoreline and laid on her side for “breaming”. This is the process of getting the muck off her bottom by melting the tar and paint on her keel with fire which in turn removes seaweed, grass, lipids and worms from her bottom.

Though helpful for his ship the dockyard was generally no friend to a sailor, who felt he had to keep his guard up and an eye on his beloved ship at all times. The only exception being, it perhaps goes without saying, the taverns and the ladies. There at least, a seaman could find welcome and a good time.

Ships: The Hero Of Trafalgar

HMS Victory, or the one that is docked at Portsmouth today, is the seventh ship in the British service to carry that fortuitous name. No sailor would argue with the good sense of giving a ship a moniker that identifies her as a winner right out of dry dock. That’ll bring you luck, sure.

As is typical of her class, Victory was an enormous floating world that could hold a crew of over 800 men and an almost unfathomable variety of guns. When she fought the Battle of Trafalgar she carried two 68 pounders (remember, that is the size of the ball the gun could discharge), twenty-eight 42 pounders, twenty-eight 24 pounders, twenty-eight 16 pounders and sixteen 6 pounders. She displaced 2,160 tons.

Victory, a first rate line-of-battle ship (or “ship of the line”) was designed by Sir Thomas Slade and built at Chatham Dockyard. She was launched in 1765. At that time, however, she was still incomplete and she was not properly commissioned until 1778 when France declared her intention to lend her fighting strength, including ships and sailors, to the American Revolution. Victory entered her first engagement that July as the flagship for the Channel Fleet, fighting in the Battle of Ushant.

She returned to Ushant in 1780 where she earned fame by capturing a French convoy off the coast. Admiral Howe chose her as his flagship in 1782 when he led a flotilla to relieve the siege of Gibraltar. The next year saw the end of British/French aggressions and Victory returned to Portsmouth, where she sat “in ordinary” (with her spars and masts taken down and only a skeleton crew to maintain her) for eight years.

By 1793 she was back in service, this time as the flagship of Admiral Sir John Jervis at the head of the Mediterranean Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. On February 14, 1795, Jervis intercepted a large Spanish convoy and engaged them at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. He took two Spanish flagships and three smaller Spanish ships during the battle with the loss of only 9 British lives. The efforts of an as yet relatively unknown Captain by the name of Horatio Nelson had a great deal to do with Jervis’ resounding success.

Though Victory was put up as a prison hospital ship in 1800, she was soon missed and rebuilt. In 1803 Captain Thomas Hardy took command of her and she returned to the Mediterranean where she became the flagship of now Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson’s fleet. She cruised the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean on the hunt for French Vice-Admiral Pierre Villeneuve’s fleet which had the potential to invade England. The animosity between the two brilliant Admirals came to a head off Cadiz at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805.

The outcome of the battle was, of course, a decisive win for the British and the end of any real naval threat to England from the French. Nelson was shot by a French sniper while commanding on the deck of Victory. Taken below, he expired once he was told that 15 French and Spanish ships had been captured and that the British would surely win the day. Packed in a barrel of rum, Nelson’s body returned home aboard Victory. She achieved Sheerness on December 22nd, having lost 57 of her crew (including Nelson) with 102 wounded.Victory, though she has never been decommissioned, almost instantly became something like a floating shrine to the great British hero that Nelson had already become. She was eventually docked at Portsmouth, where she sits today as part of the Portsmouth Maritime Museum which also includes the Tudor warship Mary Rose. Here she can teach generations about a time when Britain ruled the waves. A fitting retirement for one of the greatest ships in British history.

Pictures: Painting of HMS Victory in Battle by Chris N. Wood; photo of Victory today via bbc.co.uk

Sailor Mouth Saturday: Boom

The word boom as we use it today – sonic boom or explosion noise for instance – descended unquestionably from its original use at sea. Boom migrated to land with the use of artillery, but remained at sea in its original form. A modern sailor and demolition export speaking of “booms” are talking about two very different things.

Boom originally came from the Dutch language where it meant pole or tree and that is essentially its meaning aboard ship as well. Very simply a boom is a long pole attached to a sail, usually at the bottom. The idea of the pole, technically known as a spar, is to extend the sail outward from the ship as in a jib-boom (pronounced “jiboom”), a spanker boom or a studding sail boom. The picture at the header (click to enlarge and really appreciate it) nicely illustrates the use of studding-sails on a schooner around the year 1900. The studding-sails fly out over the water on either side like wings, taking full advantage of every last breath of wind.

A boom can also be a chain or cable stretched across the mouth of a harbor to keep enemies out (see the post on Portsmouth for an example). From this comes the term boomage which means a duty or tax that covers harbor dues, anchorage and soundage.

A boom boat (not a bum boat) carries spars from shore to ship. A boom cover is a tarpaulin that covers said spars. The booms is the space where these spare spars are stowed. On large ships the boat known as a launch is frequently stowed between the spars.

A boom-brace pendant is a rope attached to the outer end of a studding-sail spar and fixed on deck to counteract the pressure of the sail on the boom. In large ships, such as men-of-war, a boom-jigger is added. This is a tackle for rigging out and running in the top-mast studding-sail booms.

The word booming arose out of the use of cannon aboard ship. As in modern English it referrs to the sound of the gun firing. Originally it referred to cannon fire at a distance but eventually morphed into it’s modern meaning of the sound of any explosion.

Finally there is the boomkin (also bumkin or bumpkin). This is a short spar at the bow on either side which assists in extending the lower corners of the foresail. Because this arrangement gives a ship rather an awkward silhouette (and was never favored among man-of-war’s men) it became a derogatory epithet meaning an uncouth person to which the descriptive “country” was later added.

So call that gawky cousin of yours a "boomkin" and let me know what comes of it. I'm always curious about people's reactions to the original uses of words. Good times. Happy Saturday, Brethren. See you tomorrow for Seafaring Sunday.

Home Ports: Going Down To Pompey

The ancient and inimitable port of Portsmouth, England was at one time the largest ship building and repairing harbor in the Western world. Teaming with people and outfitted with numerous wet and dry docks for ships of all shapes and sizes Portsmouth – or Pompey as she was known colloquially – was the prize of the Royal Navy. In other times, though, she was raided by Vikings, used by smugglers and merchants and a target for more than one enemy of Britannia.

Located on the English Channel southwest of London, Portsmouth by its very nature is a perfect natural harbor. Passing Spithead, one must go through a narrowing channel to arrive and the large, deep Portsmouth Harbor proper. Easily fortified both by land and sea, only the advent of airplanes made breeching Portsmouth’s defenses anything but laborious at the very least.

There have been people living in the area since Celtic times but the actual city of Portsmouth was granted its Royal Charter in 1194. By the second decade of the 13th century, the harbor and town had become an important mercantile port with goods going out including wool, grain and cheese and goods coming in almost too numerous to delineate. Portsmouth was a jumping off point for the rats that carried the Black Death and plague and other diseases, well, plagued the community for centuries.

During the same period, from 1335 to 1380, Portsmouth suffered heavily from the continuous wars between England and France. The city, built largely of wood, was burned down four times over the course of 40 plus years. Finally, as the 100 years war drew out to its anticlimactic end, Portsmouth was fortified. By 1420 the Round Tower with its cannons had been erected. Following this, an enormous chain was stretched across the mouth of the harbor. Through the use of a capstan the chain could be raised to keep out unwelcome ships.

With the defeat of the House of York in the War of the Roses, Henry VII turned his warrior attention to outside threats. In 1494 he ordered expansion of Portsmouth’s fortifications and had a dockyard built. Within a year, Portsmouth had official become a naval port. Henry VIII took up where his father left off, enlarging the dockyard, turning local monasteries into armories and naval barracks and opening four breweries to supply his privateer navy with good English beer.

Elizabeth I launched ships built at Portsmouth to defeat the Spanish Armada and the port was a favorite hangout for sea dogs like John Hawkins and Francis Drake. The Elizabethan peace and the internal turning of politics under King James saw a decline in the port. Ships were not as important as witches and Bibles to the Scottish king and Portsmouth languished. King Charles I began to reenergize ship building but the city, which was largely Parliamentarian in sympathy but held under a Royalist Governor, suffered again during the Commonwealth.

1650 saw the launch of the locally build ship HMS Portsmouth and the city came into its own. The vast wharfs, dockyards, storehouses and mast ponds that still exist today began to crop up. The population boomed with men and women who worked in and around seafaring hurrying to the city to take advantage of the jobs available (and the sailors’ money that sailed into the harbor almost daily). The Naval Academy was opened in 1733, establishing Portsmouth as second only to London in the eyes of the Admiralty. By this time to say one was “going down to Pompey” was synonymous with joining the Royal Navy.

Portsmouth in the early 19th century was amazing even to old salts who had seen their share of harbors. The grandfather of nautical fiction, Frederick Marryat, wrote in 1834 in his book Peter Simple:

When we arrived there, I was quite astonished at the piles of timber, the ranges of storehouses and the immense anchors which lay on the wharf. There was such a bustle, every body appeared to be so busy, that I wanted to look every way at once.

In 1814 the dockyard employed more than 4,200 individuals. There was also the Naval Academy, the Weevil Victualling Yard, the Gunwharf for ordinance and the Haslar Naval Hospital, not to mention countless inns, taverns and small businesses that catered to all this press of humanity. No wonder young Simple was overwhelmed.

Throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries, Portsmouth continued to grow. She was important for ship repair in both World Wars and a target of Nazi bombing during the Blitz. The area was rebuilt but the dockyard as an employer began to wane in the 1960s with other industries taking its place.

Portsmouth Dockyard is still in use today and it is also a much loved historical site that preserves not only the history of the people and places that supported the seafaring industry but the ships themselves. Here you will find the Tudor man-of-war Mary Rose, a museum dedicated to the memory of D-Day, HMS Warrior, Britain’s first iron warship and, of course, HMS Victory, which left Portsmouth bearing Nelson to glory and death at Trafalgar.

And why, you may ask, is Portsmouth called Pompey? Unfortunately, no one knows for certain. This short article gives a few theories for you to consider. (Many thanks to Pompey Dockyard’s #askacurator feature for the link. Follow them on Twitter here.) Personally, I like the Roman connection of theory number three. It just feels right, somehow.

Header picture “Nelson Hoists His Flag Aboard Victory” by Bernard Finnegan Gribble.