THE ARMING AND FITTING OF ENGLISH SHIPS OF WAR 1600—1815

This book is intended to serve two main purposes. The first is to provide ship-modelers, marine archaeologists, and historian; with a guide to how English ships of war were fined out during the great age of the sailing ship. In this respect I hope it will follow in the traditions of James Lees' Masting and Riggings and Peter Goodwin's Construction and Fitting of the Sailing Man of War 1650-1850.

However, the reader will notice some differences from these works. I do not claim to have provided every piece of data on all the fittings of the years in question nor have I attempted to draw up tables of proportions for various ships and periods. Instead, in the main text, I have described the general principles which affected the design of each fitting, and in the appendices provided material from contemporary sources which have been selected largely to provide detailed information and specific dimensions. I have not attempted to interpolate from these to provide proportions which might cover other cases, preferring to leave this to the reader. The second purpose is broader: to study the development of a particular technology for its own sake.

The book is almost entirely confined to the Royal Navy, mainly because there are sources, in the form of manuscripts, plans and models, for this body, while those relating to merchant ship owners are rare, for few records were kept in the first place, and those that were have largely perished...