Читать книгу Champions of the Fleet. Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire онлайн

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The marshmen and labourers at the dockyard began their digging, “working upon ye opening of ye dockhedde for ye launchynge,” during the first days of November. That was the first of the preliminaries, necessitated by the primitive arrangements of those times. The dock at Deptford in which the timbers of the Dreadnought were put together was of the crudest type: practically an oblong excavation in the river bank, the sides and inner end of which were shored up and kept from falling in by wooden planks. The outer end, or river end, was closed and sealed when a ship was inside by a water-tight dam of brushwood-faggots, clay, and stones filled in and rammed down between the overlapping double gates of the dock. An “ingyn to drawe water owte of ye dokke,” worked by relays of labourers, pumped out the water inside the dock after it was closed. Before the dock could be re-opened the stones, faggots, etc. of the “tamping” or stopping had to be dug up and removed. Then at low water the gates would be swung back, and the water from the river flow in as the tide rose for the launch or float-out of the ship into the river.