The ArchivesThemesShip Construction and Repair
Ship Construction and Repair
The building, alteration and mending of wooden hulls between about 1690 and 1725, and the consequence that a pirate company, owning no yard and employing no shipwright, took its hulls by capture, altered them lightly and repaired them from the stores of other men's ships.
Also writtenShipbuilding; Hull repair; Refitting; Shipwrightry
This theme holds the fabric: how hulls were built, coated and mended. A pirate company owned no yard and employed no shipwright, so it took its hulls by capture, altered them with the stores of the prize, and patched them ashore. The beach work itself is recorded under careening and havens.
How a hull of this period was made
Naval building was standardised by order, the 1706 and 1719 Establishments fixing first dimensions and then scantlings and planking. The men-of-war that hunted pirates were built to those rules; the pirates' hulls to none.
The vocabulary of hulls
The words for vessel types were loose and only partly about rig. In the archive's transcription of the General History of 1724, sloop occurs 396 times against brigantine 83, galley 29 and snow 23. The count measures the book's language rather than the Atlantic's traffic; within the book the sloop leads by nearly five to one. One trap follows: in naval usage sloop was a matter of status, taking in every warship below the twenty guns at which the rating system began.1
Taking a ship instead of building one
The substitute for a building slip was the prize. Bartholomew Roberts's company took the Royal African Company's Onslow off Sestos in 1721, continued to her the name Royal Fortune and mounted her with forty guns; Johnson has them "pulling down her Bulk-Heads, and making her flush". The alterations were all of that kind: bulkheads down, deck made flush, guns added, name changed. No surviving record describes a hull built for piratical use in these years.2
Repair without a yard
The carpenter did what a company could do for itself. Pirate companies forced carpenters out of prizes and allowed the carpenter a share and a quarter under John Phillips's first article, and told off a man specially to plunder the carpenter's stores. Johnson's expedients are cannibalising and patching: Stede Bonnet's company lay almost two months over a leaky sloop at Cape Fear River in 1718 and took "a small Shallop, which they ripped up to mend the Sloop".3
What the paperwork cannot do
The administrative record is excellent for the King's ships and nearly silent for everything else. Surveys, repair estimates and dimension books survive for the Royal Navy, set out under ship plans, surveys and fitting accounts. Scale draughts are effectively absent from the English record before the early eighteenth century, and British merchant shipping was under no general requirement to be recorded until 1786. So a hull dimension printed for a pirate vessel describes her before she was one, and a name identifies nothing alone: the letters of marque of the High Court of Admiralty hold Kidd's Adventure Galley of 287 tons in 1695 and another of 18 tons in 1757.4
Repair is far better documented than construction: the pirate side of it comes through narrative, and the administrative material for building has not yet been read. The published assessment of lead hull repairs on the Queen Anne's Revenge site has not been seen; no hull-remains report for that site, and none for the Whydah, has been read; and no period statement of a cleaning interval is known, so the familiar two or three months in tropical water is left out.
What the evidence does not settle
HMS Alarm's copper corrosion
- One account: Alarm's copper was removed by 1766
Hull evidence for Queen Anne's Revenge and Whydah
- What Borrelli's 2020 artefact study establishes about the hull
- Whether a contemporary hull report survives for Queen Anne's Revenge or the Whydah
Adventure Galley's construction
- The Adventure Galley's builder and launch date
Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.
Sources for this record
Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.
- A case-insensitive count across the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1724 General History held in this archive gives sloop 396 occurrences, brigantine 83, galley 29, snow 23, pink 15, scooner 14, shallop 7, frigat 4, ketch 2, pinnace 2 and barque 1, which establishes the dominance of the word sloop in that book by nearly five to one over its nearest rival and establishes nothing directly about the frequency of vessel types in the world. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Count made over a named machine-readable transcription of a period narrative: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, London 1724, Project Gutenberg transcription
- Johnson's General History of 1724 states that Bartholomew Roberts's company, having taken the Royal African Company's Onslow off Sestos in 1721, fell to "pulling down her Bulk-Heads, and making her flush", continued to her the name Royal Fortune and "mounted her with 40 Guns"; the forty gun figure is corroborated outside Johnson by the Cape Coast indictment reciting the action of 10 February 1722, but the alterations rest on Johnson alone and are possible at best, and the only alterations attested in the sources behind this record are the removal of bulkheads, the making of the deck flush, the mounting of additional guns and renaming, no record having been found of a hull designed or built for piratical use between 1690 and 1725. Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Period narrative of contested reliability, with the armament corroborated by a printed trial proceeding: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, London 1724; the Cape Coast indictment and depositions printed in the same volume
- Repair without a yard rested on the carpenter, and Johnson's General History records pirate companies forcing carpenters out of prizes, allowing the carpenter a share and a quarter under John Phillips's first article, telling off a man specially to plunder the carpenter's stores, and mending by cannibalising and patching, Stede Bonnet's company lying almost two months over a leaky sloop at Cape Fear River in 1718 and taking "a small Shallop, which they ripped up to mend the Sloop". Possible Consistent with the evidence, not established. Period narrative of contested reliability: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, London 1724
- The technical record of this period is administrative and textual rather than graphic and covers the King's ships far better than any other shipping: hull surveys, defect reports, repair estimates, dimension and progress books, building contracts and yard pay books survive in the Admiralty classes, scale draughts in the modern sense are effectively absent from the English record before the early eighteenth century, and there was no general compulsory registration of British merchant shipping until the Shipping and Navigation Act of 1786, so that a pirate vessel's dimensions can only be taken from her earlier life in other men's papers and a ship's name identifies nothing on its own, the letter of marque registers holding both Kidd's Adventure Galley of 287 tons in 1695 and a wholly different Adventure Galley of 18 tons in 1757. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Archival finding aids and catalogue records: The National Archives, Admiralty and High Court of Admiralty classes ADM 106, ADM 180, ADM 95, ADM 49, ADM 42 and HCA 26, as described in the archive's record on ship plans, surveys and fitting accounts