Heart-of-Oak

Is the story of Ship Materials

This is the continuation of Naval History from: "The Frigate"

There is one thing common of all the ships, whether merchant ships or warships, round ships or line ships, battleships or frigates-the material of which they were made. They were all built of wood; and, in an overwhelming majority of cases, of one kind of wood-Oak.

No history of the Navy, however brief, can afford to omit altogether some account of that valuable sunstance; and more so because the course of the oak story did not always run smoothly, and the problem of the oak supply often assumed the dimensions of a crisis, effecting our naval policy, and our national security.

The story of Oak for Ships is a queer kind of delayed-action history with a permanent time-lag of a century or so. This was Nature's doing, not Man's.

It happens that it does not take very long to extract iron-ore from the soil and to put it through a variety of treatments which turns into steel. But it always took a very long time to turn an acorn into a keel, the sternpost or one of the great knees of a three-decker.

It took at least a hundred years. Also, for every acorn which produced such out-sized timbers, many hundreds had to be written off as failures. it happened that the right supply of oak trees for such purposes was always restricted. Those responcible for them would be obliged to have a very long term policy for this timber.

This is why the history of ship building oak is really the century-before history of a commercial forest, and bringing it under the juristriction of forest law for the purpose of ship building.

If, for instance, we would explain the shortage of suitable trees at the close of the Seven Years' War, we have to enquire, not what Peter Pett had done about it, or even Warpole; we must find what, Cromwell had done?

The Frigate

Forestry

For a very long time no one knew much about the Science of forestry, and the importance of that branch of knowledge. It was not brought home to anyone because there was no great shortage. The Oak is indigenous in England, and the natural stocks in our great virgin forests showed no signs of failure during the middle ages.

THough there were complaints in the Tudor period that wood suitable for the biggest and most awkward ship-timbers was hard to find, there was nothing like a crisis, and even in so busy a shipbuilding age as that of Queen Elizabeth no one seemed to have seen the red light.

The Commonwealth Government appears to have been the first to put a serious strain upon our immence national resources. It built over 200 ships of all sizes, and it secured the wood, from the estates of its domestic enemies the Cavaliers. Their great parks were the principle source of supply, the sprawling forests of an earlier day having been greatly reduced.

Where the Cromwellians went wrong was in failing to replenish the stocks. They were as shrewd and far-sighted a set of men as one could hope to find in that age, but the length of a man's forsight is always governed by his past experience.

They did not see the danger of the wood-shortage. With the further inroads on the parks and forests to meet the Stuart ship-requirements, some faint glimmerings of concern as to the future length began to appear. To this must be added the fact that the Restoration was a period of very considerable scientific stirrings in all branches of life and thought.

Arboriculturist John Evelyn

So it came about that the age produced our first considerable arboriculturist-John Evelyn. This worthy man, with the patronage of the newly founded Royal Society, published in 1664 Sylva or a Discourse of Forest Trees, the first important book on the subject, which showed that only a very long-term policy of planting could ensure supplies for future generations.

It was a good start, but it came to late to be effective, that is, after the fatal oversight of the Commonwealth Government. The great series of wars with France was then well underway, and our shipbuilding program was already on a scale corresponding with a war which was rapidly becoming world-wide.

It was in the interval between the Seven Years' War and that of American Independence that the oak situation became for the first time really critical. All Britons knew-and were never tired of saying or singing-that British Oak made the best ships.

The "Victory," was laid down in 1759. It was still the most sought-after flagship in 1805, while the "Royal William," launched in 1719, went without any large refit until 1757, saw hard service in three major wars, and semi-retired in 1785, she remained a guard-ship for two more years and lasted well into the nineteenth century.

The British Admiralty, under the guidance of Lord Sandwich, for the first time had to look outside these islands for its timber. They went to Germany and purchased what was known as "Stettin Oak"-trees floated down river to the port. Sandwich protested later, that "Stettin Oak" had not the qualities of our own trees, and the ships built of it lasted barely a quarter as long?

A treacherous product of Order

The ship building crisis we were in was fueled even more when, all our old sea-rivals, France, Spain and Holland, took this opportunity to combine their forces against us. This treacherous product of the Order was not, the only cause that brought us to the verge of disaster and lost us our first empire, but it was certainly one cause, and a major one.

But then John Evelyn intervened to save us. He had already been dead for some seventy years, but that is how the "Oak story" goes. The acorns of the Sylva era were now ripe to furnish the keels of the ships that faced Revolutionary France. And the world knew-and knows-what good keels they were.

This war, together with the Napoleonic War which was really part of it, lasted for twenty-two years and made far greater calls upon our naval power than any other previous conflict.

Even worse when evelyn was no more, his words of timely warning were to a great extent forgotten, this time by those who, having experience behind them, should have remembered. The result was another serious Oak shortage during the later stages of the Napoleonic War.

We did not repeat the disaterous Stettin experiment, and the problem was faced in a more scientific spirit than before. But the fact remained that there was not enough British Oak for our needs, and ships built from all sorts of different timbers-mahogany and other South American hard woods, deal, spruce, teak-were turnedout in the yards.

It is to this period that the famous story of Collingwood belongs. That most lovable of Admirals, he was accustomed to carrying a pocket full of acorns which he scattered whenever he walked through the country-side, determined that never again should Britain run short of her "Heart-of-Oak."

There is a certain sadness in this story, for Collingwood was showing unusual and commendable forethought. Yet, once again, like Evelyn more than a century before, he was too late; this time for another reason. When his acorns were grown to be ripe for a keel and sternpost, his great-great-grandsons, were busy building the "Nelson" and the "Rodney," and they no-longer needed them.

The continuation of this Naval History will be: "Northern Invention"

Heart of Oak Northern Invention

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