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OUR FIRST DREADNOUGHT

From a Contemporary Print kindly lent by Mr. Wentworth Huyshe. (The “Dreadnought” is shown as she appeared when serving in the “Ship Money” Fleet of Charles the First:—circ. 1637).

These are other things about the ship that would strike the Deptford visitor of that day. The square-headed forecastle is low and squat in appearance, compared with the piled-up, narrow poop right aft, looking over from which a foreign visitor to the Queen’s fleet once declared that “it made one shudder to look downwards.” The bottom of the ship is coated with “tallow and rosin mingled with pitch.” The square-cut, wide portholes, out of which the guns will point when they are on board—the Tower lighters will bring them down for mounting in a week or two—were the idea, they say in the yard, of Master Shipwright Baker’s father, old James Baker, many years ago King Harry’s shipwright, improving on the original French style. It was old Baker too, they say, who “first adapted English ships to carry heavy guns.” The Reformers wanted to send the old man to the stake for “being in the possession of some forbidden books”; but King Harry could not afford to let them burn England’s best naval architect even for the benefit of Protestantism.