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

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