The three-deckers have multiplied lately. They also tend to inflate up to tremendous sizes. Their design and building remain quite intricate though. Ironically, this year, four giant vessels have been launched, one in Sweden and three in France, in two countries which have not developed blatant competencies in shipbuilding so far. They have even hired foreign shipwrights to build warships. Six years ago, if we leave aside the surviving English galleons heightened twenty ye

King Charles II The second Anglo-Dutch war goes to an end after two years. ‘In all things, in wisdom, courage, force and success, the Dutch have the best of us and do end the war with victory on their side.’ Samuel Pepys, clerk to the Navy board ‘Don’t fight the Dutch, imitate them.’ Charles II, king of England Pepys, 34, a complete naval administrator, and King Charles, 37, keen on scientific and naval matters, are fine observers. Effectively, the Dutch have held the strai

England has enacted a new Navigation act which reinforces the constraints of the previous one (1651). In short it imposes to its trade, home and colonial, import as export, to be carried by British ships handled by British crews for the three quarters of their hands. This is a blatant reaction to the hegemony of the merchant fleet of the United Provinces, three times the tonnage under the English flag which is second in the world. This is also an expression of the policy of

The Cannon Shot England has been the most advanced country on questions of ordnance for more than a century. Ordnance is even a domain reserved to specialists, organized as a distinctive body ruled by a Master from 1415 onwards. This year, William Compton, 36, general at the age of 23, praised by Lord protector Oliver Cromwell for his gallantry and his skills, a royalist though, has been appointed Master-General of Ordnance. He is not a man who takes a job as a sinecure.

The great three-decker Sovereign of the Seas  reappears as the Royal Sovereign after her rebuilding in the same Royal dockyard of Woolwich where she was originally built and launched in 1637. She has grown by a foot in breadth and by a hundred tons to be a 100-gun vessel, the largest in the world as she has ever been since her first day. ¤ Her original name claimed the rule over the seas for England. Under the Republican Commonwealth (1649-60), she briefly became Commonwe

René Descartes ‘Les siècles n’ont rien produit de tel… Ce qui a surtout recommandé sa philosophie, c’est… qu’il a osé substituer des causes qu’on peut comprendre de tout ce qu’il y a dans la nature.’ Christiaan Huygens, natural philosopher, 31 years old, expressing scholars’ debt to René Descartes (†1650), figurehead of Rationalism Twelve outstanding natural philosophers , as we call the ones who study nature, a team of men bound by scholarly debates for years, held a landma