There were plagues, revolts and executions aplenty. Some of those trees were over 400 years old, their lifetimes spanning the reign of kings great and small, Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe and the burning of the Spanish Armada. Ninety per cent of it was oak, some of the timbers more than half-a-metre thick. It’s estimated it took 6,000 trees to build the ship. It took a year to come up with a name that, some say, commemorated Britain’s victory over the French in Quebec that September. Shipbuilders laid the keel of Nelson’s own HMS Victory, arguably the most famous warship ever to sail the seas, in July 1759 at the RN’s Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway in Kent.
Historians and tree experts estimate that number of vessels would have required at least 1.2 million of the best oak trees Britain and Europe could harvest. In 1790, shortly before the legendary admiral embarked upon more than a decade of successive victories at sea that cost him vision in his right eye, his right arm and, in 1805 at Trafalgar, his life, the Royal Navy’s entire sailing fleet consisted of some 300 ships. That’s equivalent to 3,750 city blocks of optimum-density oak forest for a vessel that, on average, sailed for 12 years. JMW Turner/Wikimedia For almost two centuries through the American Revolution, the War of 1812, wars with France, wars with Spain and dozens of other wars, conquests and explorations, Britannia ruled the waves thanks largely to the mighty oak.Īt the zenith of Horatio Nelson’s navy in the late-1700s into the 1800s, it took about 4,000 oak trees, or up to 40 hectares of forest, to build a single 100-gun ship of the line.
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