Portsmouth Naval Museum

Alas, gentle reader, I’ve fallen behind in my posting. I’ve been trying to write about our museum and gallery experiences in Oxford and London, but the task is challenging. The buildings and holdings are so varied and impressive—and the photos so few.

So, I am setting that story aside and moving on to write about our trip to Portsmouth Saturday. We traveled with a group of students and were not expecting much—a naval museum of three old warships. We were pleasantly surprised. It is a wonderful museum, really well organized and informative. And the ships and the stories were captivating.

Portsmouth is still a large base for the Royal Navy and an active harbor for ferries, cruise ships, and commercial vessels. We went on a harbor cruise, passing by various navy ships, including a “stealth” destroyer (in the picture, a Brittany ferry is pulling out of the harbor past it).

The harbor—or harbour —was dug out by Napoleonic war prisoners. A huge undertaking, and the boat tour passed by Rat Island, officially Burrows Island, a tidal island where the dead prisoners were tossed and the rats feasted. One hundred plus years later it was the home for the carrier pigeons that flew messages back and forth to occupied France.

The Dockyards and Naval Museum consist of at least a dozen buildings and three big, old warships from different periods. For the earliest, the Mary Rose, it is really the remains, which are housed in a very modern, beautifully designed building. The Mary Rose was a prize possession of Henry VIII (yes, it’s always about Henry) that unexpectedly sank, but settled in a bed of silt that kept the ship remarkably intact until it was recovered in 1982 after an elaborate naval archeological project. The museum displays a huge assortment of everyday objects—from shoes to medical instruments to bones—that were preserved. Much of the ship is intact as well and kept in a special atmosphere-controlled chamber, with many windows from which you can see the remains of decks, hull, and masts. It was fascinating, and our time seeing it was too short. http://www.maryrose.org/discover-our-collection/story-of-the-ship/

 

Next to the Mary Rose Museum is the HMS Victory, the oldest commissioned warship still operating, well only technically operating since it is in drydock and I can’t imagine it sailing. Still, it is the flagship of the Second Sea Lord and used for various ceremonial occasions—e.g., the Queen awarding medals. The Victory is famous for being the flagship of Admiral Nelson’s during the Napoleonic wars.  Lord Nelson was a heroic figure, who had risen through the ranks and had lost and eye and arm in previous battles. He was also short and vain--just the right adversary for Napoleon. He was killed on board the Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar, which fortunately ended with a decisive victory for the British and a rout of the French and allied Spanish fleet. Nelson lived long enough to hear the news. His body was then pickled in a barrel of brandy so that he could be brought home and  buried in St Paul's Cathedral. The Victory is convincing evidence of why the British ruled the waves during the era of sail. The ship has been in Portsmouth harbor since 1812—good thing it was there then rather than the Baltimore harbor, otherwise we might not now be singing that “banner might wave.” The Victory might have blown it to bits. 

We took a tour of the Victory and learned much about sea life two hundred years ago. Not for the claustrophobic, but impressive in how well space was used. The officers each had their own room, but one brought new meaning to the idea of having a gun by your bedside.

 

 

The differences in the lives between the officers and the sailors were revealed in all sorts of ways.  The officers had rooms, small as they were, while the men had little hammocks in tight rows. The officers had a dining room with crystal and silver, the sailors ate off square wooden plates wherever they were (eating “three square meals a day” comes from this). The officers had uniforms, the sailors wore whatever clothes they had. There were few officers and hundreds of men; order was strict and discipline brutal.

HMS Warrior Captain's Quarters

HMS Victory Admiral's Quarters

The third ship was the HMS Warrior, an armor-plated, iron-hulled warship launched in 1860. It was a technological breakthrough, a game changer that "never fired a shot in anger," partly because the U.K. was not fully-engaged in wars at the time, but mostly because no other ship was so foolhardy as to challenge it. Its combination of armament, wrought iron hull, steam and sail power made other warships obsolete. However, in a time of technological change that reminds us of our own, it was obsolete in about ten years with the development of mast-less steam ships. It was illuminating to see it next to the Victory. Only about fifty years separate these ships—they are very alike in some ways especially reflecting life at sea and the culture of the Navy, and very different in their size (relatively short and stubby vs long and sleek) and their lethal firepower. With the Victory, the idea was to get close to the enemy ship and board her. With the Warrior, you just blew the other ship apart from afar. No comment about warfare today.