Diagram of a sailing ship

This illustration, familiar with show the rigging and interior setup of very first- and third-rate Brit ships of war, starred in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia, published in 1728. The guide had been one of the primary English-language encyclopedias, and inspired Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's much more popular project, posted in France in the century.

The curators associated with Royal Museums Greenwich explain that boats like these developed during an occasion of fairly continual naval dispute, between your First Anglo-Dutch War in 1652 and Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. When you look at the seventeenth century, the Royal Navy standardized its vessels, generating something called the Establishment of Dimensions. A third-rate ship, such as the one whose rigging the most notable drawing right here outlines, held between 64 and 80 guns. A first-rate, such as the one cross-sectioned in bottom drawing, carried between 100 and 120 guns. Both sizes of ship would-have-been large enough to be involved in naval battles, in which boats prearranged and fired at one another; these types of vessels were called “ships associated with line.”

Chambers informed his readers your diagrams will give them “an Idea of the Several components and Members of a Ship, both Internal and External, with their particular Denominations within the Sea Language.” For readers without naval knowledge, the drawings—which depicted the vessel stripped bare along with all parts perfectly assembled, its individual arms absent—represented the ship as an elaborate and amazing device.