Posted on 02/01/2009 4:24:28 PM PST by PotatoHeadMick
Wreck of HMS Victory 'recovered from Channel' The shipwrecked predecessor to Lord Nelson's HMS Victory, which is thought to contain millions of pounds' worth of gold, is thought to have been found at the bottom of the English Channel. The ship, the fourth of six HMS Victories, sunk with its 1,150 sailors in October 1744 around The Casquets, a group of rocks off the Channel Islands. Among other valuable artefacts, it is thought to contain 100,000 gold coins.
After months of secrecy, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a US company, is expected to confirm on Monday that the ship, codenamed "Legend", that it found in the area in May last year is in fact the Victory.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
For your attention.
Could get England 2% out of their debt load.
Wow! AWESOME!!!
Thanks for posting!
Screw the UN. Bring the contents to the surface. Thanks for posting the interesting story.
The thing which surprises me is that a ship of that era had well over a thousand sailors on it.
Yeah, I question that also. That sound really high unless they were transporting soldiers. It does not take that many men to sail a ship and if it did, they would be all over each other.
ping
Ship of the Line. It took that many men to man the guns and yes, they were all over each other.
Which is why they had cabin boys.
That alone gets you to 600 men and boys(powder monkeys).
You would need that many to fight the ship. A hundred gun ship, assuming that the just found ship was a first or second rate ship of the line, would need a crew of 7-8 to serve each gun, plus more to sail the ship, etc., and the Marines on board. Warship crews were very large. Still are I expect.
Ditto.
Could almost see it for one of those overseized Spanish Men of War but even then...
Figure it out. 110 guns each requiring 8-16 men, to man half of then takes c.650 crew. Officers, midshipmen, Warrant/petty officers, ships boys adds 100-150. Some men are presumably still needed for ship handling during battle.
You’d think something with that much gold on it would have been found a lot sooner. It’s enough to make me take up scuba diving.
Nelson, pickled in a barrel of rum. About ready to be tapped?
“Navy’s ‘first rate’ ships
A ship’s ‘rate’ was basically decided by the number of guns she carried, from the largest 120- gun First Rate, down to Sixth Rate 20-gun ships. The smaller ‘unrated’ vessels (sloops, brigs, bomb vessels, etc) were commanded by more junior officers (Commanders, Lieutenants) but a ‘rated’ ship was always a Captain’s command and always ship rigged, that is with three square rigged masts.
First Rate: The biggest ships of the fleet, with their gun batteries carried on three decks, were generally used as flagships and fought in the centre of the line-of-battle. They were armed with a minimum of 100 heavy cannon, carried a crew of about 850 and were over 2000 tons Builder’s Measure (a formula for calculating the capacity of the ship, not the displacement of the ship as is the practice nowadays).”
You can see that on a First Rate ship, if you add a contingent of Marines, ( a very common practice in the British Navy) you can see how the crew can easily be over 1000 men.
It takes a lot, and I mean A LOT of manpower to run a ship like “Victory”. Just servicing one gun took the combined efforts of about five men or more depending on the size of the gun, and it was the requirements of the number of mounted guns that drove the size of the crew.
boodmark
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