Based on his findings, many considered 18th and 19th century English shipbuilding a major cause of deforestation in the British Isles.īritish historians subsequently re-evaluated the subject and shifted the consensus. He dubbed it “the timber problem.”Īlbion went on to become the first professor of oceanic history at his alma mater, Harvard, and his work inspired two generations of maritime historians. In it, he hypothesized that the RN’s huge demand for timber to build and repair wooden ships stripped the landscape of trees. Albion’s doctoral dissertation, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862, was published in 1926. The ship saw much action and numerous repairs and refits-consuming even more trees-before it was, for all intents and purposes, retired from seagoing service at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.Īmerican historian Robert G. Work resumed in 1763 and Victory, a triple-decker equipped with 100 guns and manned by up to 875 sailors, was launched in May 1765 at a total cost of about £63,000, or approximately C$80 million today. With the Seven Years’ War coming to an end, the ship’s assembled frame was covered and left to season for three years-a major reason, it is said, that the vessel remains so well-preserved at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. Huge elm trunks formed Victory’s keel fir and spruce were used for decking, yardarms and masts, each mast requiring seven trees. It all demanded ships, and ships demanded timber. London was ravaged by the Great Fire, Shakespeare authored some of history’s greatest plays, and English troops fought Scottish clans at the Battle of Culloden.īut, for the trees, it was the onset of exploration, discovery, trade and conquest that changed everything. There were plagues, revolts and executions aplenty. Some of those trees were over 400 years old, their lifetimes spanning the reign of kings great and small, Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe and the burning of the Spanish Armada. Ninety per cent of it was oak, some of the timbers more than half-a-metre thick. It’s estimated it took 6,000 trees to build the ship. It took a year to come up with a name that, some say, commemorated Britain’s victory over the French in Quebec that September. Shipbuilders laid the keel of Nelson’s own HMS Victory, arguably the most famous warship ever to sail the seas, in July 1759 at the RN’s Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway in Kent. Historians and tree experts estimate that number of vessels would have required at least 1.2 million of the best oak trees Britain and Europe could harvest. In 1790, shortly before the legendary admiral embarked upon more than a decade of successive victories at sea that cost him vision in his right eye, his right arm and, in 1805 at Trafalgar, his life, the Royal Navy’s entire sailing fleet consisted of some 300 ships. That’s equivalent to 3,750 city blocks of optimum-density oak forest for a vessel that, on average, sailed for 12 years. JMW Turner/Wikimedia For almost two centuries through the American Revolution, the War of 1812, wars with France, wars with Spain and dozens of other wars, conquests and explorations, Britannia ruled the waves thanks largely to the mighty oak.Īt the zenith of Horatio Nelson’s navy in the late-1700s into the 1800s, it took about 4,000 oak trees, or up to 40 hectares of forest, to build a single 100-gun ship of the line.
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