Anatomy of the Ship: HMS Beagle Survey Ship Extraordinary

130 Pages·1998·67.46 MB·English

by  Karl Heinz Marquardt

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THE AUTHOR

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£25.00
ANATOMY OF THE SHIP

HMS BEAGLE

Survey ship extraordinary

KARL HEINZ MARQUARDT

G Masts and Spars
G1 FULLY-RIGGED SHIP

G1/2 Survey ship fullyrigged as barque,
after 1825

Scale in feet
ee
HMS BEAGLE

Survey ship extraordinary

PeebeeerW ES H | P

HMS BEAGLE

Survey ship extraordinary
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4
© Karl Heing Marquardt, 1997 Opposite title page: 01/2 Plan (alao printed to

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by @ large scale on the reverse of book jacket)
Conway Maritime I

an imprint of B UK) Ltd, Title page: ‘His Beagle in Sydney Harbour, 1839";
33 John Street, "|
London WCIN 2AT pencil sketch by Conrad Martens.

id F z . ee (Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Weles)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A record for this title is available upon request from the British Library
ISBN 0-85177-703-1

All rights reserved. Unauthorised duplication by any means contravenes
applicable laws.

Karl Heinz Marquardt has asserted his moral right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be indentified as Author of this Work.

Designed by Peter Champion
Printed and bound by Redwood Books, Trowbridge
Lightning conductors.
Rudder
Poop.. sam
Main deck

Pumps ..
Gun ports
Windlass. . .
Anchor, chain and other cables.
Armament ...
Figurehead. . .
Chronometers
Sepping’s improvements

Rae eeeeescre en reeermeentrerrennasnerstoort 35

INTRODUCTION,

THE PHOTOGRAPHS .....:sceccersveeees Al

‘THE DRAWINGS
General arrangement
Hull structure. .
External hull.
Internal hull .. .
Fittings
Armament . .

AT“ TOVBAOOWS

Ship’s boats .

Sources.

Bibliography
...wherein we afterwards found good anchorage; it was named Beagle

Bay, and may serve hereafter to remind the seamen who benefit by the
survey in which that vessel bore so conspicuous a part, of the amount
of his obligations to the Government that sent her forth, the skill and
energy that directed her course, and the patient discipline by which,
during her long period of active service, so much was done for the

extension of our maritime knowledge.

Admiral John Lort Stokes

(Midshipman, Mate, Lieutenant and Captain of HMS Beagle)
ITH the weapons silenced in Europe’s giant struggle for

domination and dusk approaching the great era of global
discoveries, the nineteenth century heralded a new age. Peace and Pax
Britannica instilled a sense of security on the high seas. No longer
needing to defend their nation’s honour with blazing guns, the navies
of the world’s powers loaned more of their resources to the expansion
of world trade, to guard the merchant shipping against piracy, to
suppress slavery, and to science, in particular the science of protecting
man from the sea itself, hydrography.

Since the dawn of seafaring, hydrography, the art of nautical
surveying, was essential for mans survival on that fast and sometimes
turbulent element, the sea, and therefore always on the mind of
mariners. The ships of the ancient world were originally guided by a
verbal collection of landmarks and celestial constellations, but by two
thousand years ago the knowledge of coastal outlines had already
advanced to such an extent that a work appeared during the second
century AD which was to change the face of surveying entirely.
Created in Alexandria by Claudius Ptolemaeus, an Egyptian of Greek
descent, the Geographical Treatise listed 8,000 locations, and was
published alongside an atlas of the known world, creating in it a good
picture of most of Europe, Arabia and parts of Asia. Early ship masters
were obliged to hand over their observations, usually contained in a

‘Rutter’ (an early log book) to be added to the cartographic works of

their forebears. Jealously guarded as ‘State secrets” these early charts
and written information of anchorage, sailing instructions and of
sketched coastal appearances provided a better understanding of
distances across the oceans, the shape of their coastlines and of danger
points on those voyages - thereby developing more and more into a
reliable navigational tool.

The advent of printing in the sixteenth century, and subsequent
reproduction of charts from engraved copper plates, eliminated not
only copyist’s errors but improved manufacture of charts which
appeared in greater numbers and at a cheaper cost. It also broke down
the taboos of secretive trade routes and gave everyone a better
understanding of our worldly habitat. One of the great innovations of
that century, the projection of longitude and latitude, initiated by
Gerardus Mercator, was widely adapted for navigational use during the
following century. The invention of more precise measuring
instruments in the seventeenth century also led to increasingly accurate
cartography. Rapid advances were made in the eighteenth century
with John Hadley’s invention of the quadrant in 1731, which twenty-
five years later became the sextant, and John Harrison’s first marine
timekeeper for finding longitude in 1735. Such instruments in the hands
of navigators with excellent surveying and cartographic skills, such as
James Cook and Louis de Bougainville, produced excellent results.

The demand for a larger number of more accurate charts,

7
instigated by France, led to the founding of the Académie Royale des
Sciences in 1666 for the government-inspired training of ‘Ingenieurs
hydrographes’; and in 1720 to the establishment of a national centre for
the collection and examination of uncollated hydrographic material,
the Depét des Cartes et Plans de la Marine. The Danish Navy created a
Hydrography Department in 1784 and Britain concentrated their
various hydrographic activities in 1795 by creating the Hydrographic
Office of the Admiralty. The first commissioned Hydrographer to the
Royal Navy was Alexander Dalrymple, who brought to that Office a
wealth of experience as a cartographer and as the East India
Company’s first official Hydrographer, an appointment he had held
since 1779 and during which he had published more than 400 charts.
He continued in this dual duty as Hydrographer to the Royal Navy
and the East India Company until a few weeks before his death in
1808. His new office at the Royal Navy, staffed with two draughtsmen
and two engravers, produced its first Admiralty chart in 1801. With
3,089 charts offered by the end of that century, the Hydrographic
Office rose during its first hundred years to the position of being the
world’s largest publisher of sea charts.

Dalrymple’s successor, Captain Thomas Hurd (who took on the
role from 1808 to 1823), was the first senior naval officer to head this
Office. He concerned himself very much with making hydrography a
Royal Navy service with specially built ships and trained men. The first
special survey ship for home waters, a small 121-ton brig named HMS
Investigator, was launched on 23 April 1811 at Deptford dockyard and
remained in survey service until 1836. Another, the only 83-ton
schooner-rigged paddle steamer Congo, was designed in 1816 by Robert
Seppings, ‘for the purpose of exploring the interior of Africa by the
River Congo’ Intended to be the first paddle steamer in the Royal
Navy she was, however, found not to be strong enough to carry steam-
propulsion and went under sail to Africa on a disastrous expedition. In
1817 the Admiralty established a corps of surveying officers, adding a
special rate of pay as an incentive. All nautical surveys thenceforth

became the responsibility of the Hydrographer, who subsequently

8

always carried the rank of a senior naval officer. Permission was
granted in 1819, by the Lords of the Admiralty, for Admiralty charts to
be also made available to merchant shipping.

British colonial expansion and growing spheres of interest all
around the globe required a worldwide Royal Navy presence. The
Hydrographic Office, with its special ships and personnel, had the
arduous task of providing safe sailing instructions for those guardians
of the British Empire. Systematically measuring the depth of ocean
floors and following every inlet of barely-charted inhospitable
coastlines with their boats, those hydrographic vessels produced, and
improved, charts from every nook and cranny of the world’s oceans.

As they were usually required to be away from civilisation for
years, especially dedicated men were needed to crew such ships and
persevere for the benefit of mankind in that not illustrious, but so
necessary, job of painstakingly adding details to earlier discoveries. Not
even very well known to their contemporaries, those men in their small
schooners, brigs and barks would now only be a footnote of history
was it not for a request by Commander Robert FitzRoy to have an
unpaid naturalist accompanying HMS Beagie’s second survey voyage to
South America.

It was standard naval practice to combine hydrographic work with
general scientific observations on land and to collect rare or unknown
flora, fauna and geological species for the betterment of scientific
knowledge. His restricted interest in these fields made FitzRoy pledge

after returning from his first command:

... if I ever left England again on a similar expedition, I would
endeavour to carry out a person qualified to examine the land;

while the officers and myself would attend to hydrography.

Again commissioned to command HMs Beagle on a second survey
voyage, FitzRoy’s request for such a person was met (on the suggestion
of the Navy’s Hydrographer, Captain Francis Beaufort) by a frustrated
twenty-two year old Bachelor of Arts with studies in medicine and