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Age of sail
Earlier this month, I visited HMS Warrior – one of the fascinating exhibits in Portsmouth’s Historic Naval Dockyard, learnt a lot of interesting facts (did you know that the principles of rifling were discovered and first used by medieval archers?) and took loads of pics – some quite artistic.
When she was launched in 1860, Warrior was technologically state-of-the-art iron-clad and steam powered, although still carrying a fully complement of sails – the Hyundai of her day.
Gun deck
The strange thing is that, below deck, she still looks and feels like the Victory. More spacious and certainly more headroom – even baths and washing machines – but the basic layout and functionality is the same. The gun decks, where sailors still ate and slept; the carpenter’s workshop and the on-board smithy; the rows of cutlasses and muskets would be familiar to Nelson’s crew.
Age of steam
It’s only when you reach the Stygian depths of the ship with it s engines, coal stores and greedy boilers that you find yourself unambiguously in the age of steam.
More pics on Flickr: HMS Warrior
Of the four ships (five if you count the submarine in Gosport) it is arguably the most interesting of the four. As H says, it’s on the cusp of the new technology. If you visit the four in the correct order “Mary Rose” (16thC), HMS Victory (18thC), HMS Warrior (19thC) and HMS 33 (early 20thC) you see the transition, but you also see the similarities, “messing” (eating) with your group, sleeping in hammocks, and the transition from breech loading guns, to muzzle loading guns, back to breech, muzzle, finally breech loading – for a whole host of technical reasons.