Visit to the Victory

While in the UK over Christmas Redington , Vicki, and I took a day trip to Portsmouth home of the Royal Navy Museum. The object of the visit was to see the HMS Victory dry docked there.



The Victory was Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Redington and I had read the Horatio Hornblower series together and so were big fans of this fictional series based on the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars.

This is the Royal Navy dockyard where the Victory is dry-docked as seen from Google Earth.

Here we are posing outside the Victory. It has 104 guns of 12, 16 and 32 pounds. It carries 6000 sq yard of sail and sailed as fast as 12 knots one of the fastest ships of its day.
The Victory was built using the wood of 8000 oak trees of a size and age unavailable in the UK today. The ballast consisted of pig iron and shingle (gravel). The powder magazine stored 3 tons of gun powder. The magazine is lined with copper sheeting to fight static electricity and plaster to make it fire proof.

The tour was fascinating and we saw the place on the quarterdeck where Nelson was shot by Fench marksmen and where he died in the orlop. As near a sacred placein Britain as one might wish to find.

Because Nelson wished to not be buried at sea the surgeon pickled him in brandy in a barrel for the 6 week trip back to London for his funeral. It was interesting to note that the 200th aniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar coincides with the same aniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. That such different events were happening at the same time boggles the mind.

Also at the museum was the Mary Rose a ship that sailed at the time of Henry VIII. Redington is amused at the fiberglass replica of a Tudor cannon.

Redington has been studying the Tudors in school which he finds intensely boring. I thought he might find some interest if he posed beside his buddy Henry VIII. Though Redington is more amused in expression than Henry I can't help but think there is a likeness.