Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 61 years old, Secretary-of-State for the Navy since 1669, has established three schools of naval architecture for...

Brest Founded in 1631 as a military dockyard by Archbishop and Prime Minister Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (†1642), the port of...

Pierre Arnoul A distinguished naval administrator, Pierre Arnoul, aged 28, is held responsible for a shipwreck so ousted from his...

Last year, a war broke out between Algiers and France at Dey Baba Hassan’s initiative. It implicitly involves the whole Barbary Coast, so the deys of Tripoli and of Tunis as well. This is a weird escalation from the usual tensions provoked by the Barbary pirates against shipping – a lasting plague. From time to time, an European nation retaliates by destroying a few pirate ships. The last expedition was a British one : with some success for just a while, Admiral John Narbor

The United Provinces and France have been at war for five years. They have been struggling for ruling the seas while the Royal Navy has fallen third. A key character, Samuel Pepys, 44 years old, convinces his peers to initiate an unexpected recovery through an extraordinary investment. Samuel Pepys A member of the Royal Society and positioned as the mainstay at the Admiralty, he became Secretary of Admiralty in 1673 and, the same year, a Member of Parliament. His influence

Jean-Baptiste Colbert The late steep rise of the French navy requires hands aboard the warships in unheard-of quantities. The French...

Jean Picard, a priest, an astronomer and a geodesist, aged 49, has measured an arc of meridian between Paris and Amiens, hence the radius and the circumference of the earth by extrapolation. He is a pupil of Astronomer Pierre Gassendi (†1655), who was also a priest and a philosopher, and as of 1623 a promoter of heliocentricism, ten years before the sentence against Galileo Galilei (†1642). Picard is also one of the 21 first members of the Académie Royale des Sciences  founde

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