1A navy is the very symbol of a nation. It is there to defend and protect the national territories. It is made to fight for its government and its people, and it is paid for by the state. This is true now, and it was certainly true in 18th century Europe. Then, naval vessels were not only made for fighting, they were meant for showing off, exhibiting the power of the country and especially its king. In terms of shipbuilding technology, however, the process of designing and constructing the technologically advanced naval vessel produced for the nation was in turn less national. When it comes to technology, there is no such thing as nationality. Technology travels wherever people take it or send it, and it does not care about national borders. This article will address the means of technological transfer between 18th century European shipyards and emphasise why this is important to historians and archaeologists alike.

2This article reflects the very early stages of a PhD project in naval history to be presented to the University of Portsmouth. It contains the initial thoughts and budding ideas in a process that will conclude in the autumn of 2021.

3The unstable political situation between European countries in the 18th century created an arms race that led to a significant flow of innovations. Naval shipyards being at the forefront of technological advancement, these were the hubs for innovation and the centres where technological knowledge was imported and, less willingly, exported.

4Largely based on trial and error, 18th century naval shipbuilding was a risky business: all the more reason to copy vessels that were doing well, regardless of their nationality. Being on the top of one’s game and producing state of the art naval equipment meant being innovative in the ways of gathering methods and techniques, rather than inventing the wheel all over again. Thus, the scene was set for international technology exchange in all its shapes and forms. These shapes and forms are presented in the following.

5Before proceeding to the means and methods of exchange of technology, it might be worth pointing out where these historical studies fit into a maritime archaeological conference paper and subsequent article. Other than finding evidence in the written sources of technology being transferred between nations, it is present in the archaeological record, although less explicit. 18th century shipwrecks, of which there are plenty, are concrete evidence of the technology used in shipbuilding at the time and the international relations between European navies. However, the origin of the methods and techniques are less evident unless one knows what to look for. In other words, this research of the historical sources will provide a solid foundation for the archaeo­logical analysis of the construction and design of ships, as well as providing an understanding of the inter-­European network of knowledge exchange created by conflict.

6The exchange of knowledge between allies, government to government, is indeed worth mentioning in terms of technology diffusion. The general purpose of this exchange is the streng­thening of their combined power towards a common enemy. However, this aspect will not be discussed any further here. It is a rather open, visible, and more importantly, legal exchange between governments, and thus not hard to detect from communication between allied forces. As the project focuses on conflict-­driven interactions, rather than those based on ­coherence, the importance of technology exchange between allies are recognised in terms of evidence in the archaeological record, though not included in the research.

7Three other means of technology exchange, clandestine and less so, represent the very nature of conflict, including competition, suspicion and power struggle.

8Firstly, there is the matter of prizes of war. During battle, a navy would seek to board and capture the enemy’s vessels. Routinely, the ships were taken back to a shipyard, where they were surveyed and refitted, and then put into commission. Furthermore, the lines would be taken from the ship. As well as an additional vessel, the navy would now have captured information on how the enemy constructs and designs. The survey of the captured vessel was therefore not only in order to assess the amount of prize money for the crew that had captured the ship, it was just as much to assess the quality of the construction for potentially copying the design, and matching the force of the enemy. If the vessel was found to be of technological interest and worth copying, the ship was further measured and subsequently drafted. Especially in the English dockyards of the south coast, Portsmouth and Plymouth, surveys and additional measuring were frequently carried out in order to create a construction draft of the ship. The sources also reveal that these drafts were used in the construction of new ships for the Royal Navy. Thus, plenty of French designs were ruling the waves for Britannia, and especially in the second half of the century a significant amount of prizes and copies of prizes made up the Royal Navy (Ferreiro 2007) (fig. 1).

(drawing by captain’s clerk between 1749 and 1752, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

9After the survey, captured ships in Britain were refitted and some were quite significantly altered. French vessels were built to be manoeuvrable and fast. Their hulls were narrow and long. British vessels were made for blockade. Their hulls were full and wide. Furthermore, the French ships were built light and with fewer framing timbers and generally a lighter planking. While it is hard to determine to what extent the alterations to French ships were carried out before they went into service for the British, the message from the shipyard surveyors is clear: these light and flimsy hulls have no place in the British Royal Navy. Additional planking and extra framing timbers seem to be a minimum in the refitting of French prizes. On top of that comes the general layout inside the ships, gunports not fitting the elevation of British gun carriages etc.

10For other countries, however, prizes and capturing ships from the enemy was simply not an option. For Denmark, an 80-year absence of war during the 18th century resulted in a dry spell in war prizes, leading to an urgent need to restore the inflow of shipbuilding technology from outside the Danish kingdom. The issue was resolved by intensive and rather well planned, well-administered industrial espionage. While Britain and France were competing in naval excellence on the seas, Danish naval officers, who were being trained in shipbuilding, were conducting ‘educational voyages’ around European shipyards. Hiding among the locals, trying to fit into the crowd in order not to be recognised as the threat they were in fact posing to the military secrets of the nation, they sneaked around naval dockyards. What they returned home with was an impressive amount of drawings and blueprints of ships, buildings, and miscellaneous constructions like docks and dams. The natural inflow of technology and innovation that the warfaring nations enjoyed through prizes was achieved in part through spying by the Danish. Thus, in the words of naval historian N.A.M. Rodger, the Danes were masters of espionage (Rodger 2006).

11Danish espionage led to some quite interesting ship designs in terms of origin. Returning from England in 1745 with a copy of the constructional draught of HMS Augusta, the construction committee in Copenhagen decided to copy the design. It was a success: the 50-gun ship Fyen was then copied further. This time, however, the construction committee in charge of Danish naval shipbuilding decided to change the upper works of the ship. Everything above the waterline was then a copy of vessels built after French methods, also gained from espionage, naturally. Furthermore, the committee fancied a stern like that of a Swedish prize captured 40 years previous. The result was the 50-gun Grønland (fig. 2), with a hull copied from an English ship, French inspired upper works and a stern angled like a Swedish war prize. For the purpose of keeping the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway safe, paid for by the king and sailing under Danish colours, it was indeed Danish. In regards to the technology within, it was a result of clandestine international relations.

12France was also highly active in industrial espionage. Throughout the 18th century, French naval officers and scientists were sent to England to spy on the dockyards. Several written reports remain wherein the French comment on and compare the Royal Navy to La Marine Royale (Bradley 1992, 2005; Llinares 1994). The French naval constructor Blaise Ollivier was responsible for France building its first heavily armed 74-gun ships after his travels around English and Dutch dockyards in the 1730s (fig. 3). His report, translated and published in 1992, is one of the most important sources on English and Dutch shipbuilding from a French perspective today (Roberts 1992). It is a French interpretation of shipbuilding in England and Holland, and though the report is very thorough, we can only assume that Ollivier reported on whatever he found interesting and relevant to the French shipbuilding industry. Between the lines, the report is a reflection of the state of French shipbuilding at the time.

13While industrial espionage was more common in peacetime than during war, it was perhaps carried out in the absence of conflict, but not in the absence of political tension. Industrial espionage infers a pending and potential conflict, for why else spy on your neighbours if they are not potential enemies? Furthermore, espionage was not only in the absence of other means of technological inflow, but a common practice in all countries with a potential enemy right on their doorstep, as was indeed the case in Europe of the 18th century. Naval industrial espionage of this century between England and France is only covered in detail by a few historians (Harris 1998; Bradley 1992, 2005). It remains an aspect of naval history that is still somewhat in the dark and yet to be researched.

14From espionage, we can move along to the last of the three means of technology exchange: migration. It is a term that is rather hard to define and thus a historical issue that is even harder to detect. When are we talking about migration, and when are we talking about educational travel, or espionage trips? When are we talking about migration and when are we talking about plain tourism? There is indeed an overlap.

15In any case, migration, the movement of people, led to techno­logy and knowledge travelling with them. It meant that a French shipbuilder could bring his ideas to Denmark, or an English shipbuilder could introduce his knowledge to Sweden. Obviously, these are not examples taken out of thin air: they happened. The Sheldon family was the main shipbuilding dynasty for quite some time in 17th and 18th century Swedish shipyards. Born and originally trained in England, the first Sheldon, Francis, brought ideas from his homeland in 1659 into this Scandinavian naval power that was in a continuous struggle with its neighbour, Denmark, over the supremacy of the Baltic. Between 1672 and 1677 he was back in England, then returning to Sweden. After a stopover in Denmark, he once again went back to England. The last well-known Sheldon, also named Francis, was the third ­generation of the Sheldon family to be born in Sweden. His father Gilbert and his grandfather Charles had all followed in Francis the Elder’s footsteps, and it was natural that little Francis should become a shipbuilder too (Harris 1997, 1999). The migration and the knowledge that went with it, had now morphed into the rather old-fashioned arrangement of master and apprentice, and the knowledge exchange stops here, for the Sheldons at least. Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, the Swedish naval constructor and the pride of naval shipbuilding in late 18th and early 19th century Sweden was trained in England as well as in France before he came back to Sweden and introduced the scientific approach to shipbuilding (fig. 4). He outshone the Sheldons (Gilbert and Francis the Younger with whom his work overlapped) with his modern approach to shipbuilding and anything technological and mechanical related to this profession (Harris 1998).

16The Danish navy hired the French shipbuilder Laurent Barbé in 1740. It was never to be a success. Otherwise determined to nationalise the shipbuilding in terms of labour force, Denmark was forced to seek expertise from outside the kingdom (Bjerg, Erichsen 1980). Little is known as to Barbé’s background, but his methods were considered old fashioned and rigid by the leaders of shipbuilding in the construction committee. His stubborn and arrogant nature did not improve relations between himself and the committee, and he was sacked in 1746. In a time of scarcity in terms of Danish shipbuilders, the navy was willing to import the expertise. Unfortunately, it was not the expertise they had hoped for.

17Migration between England and France might have been more intensive than we know of because of religious persecution in both countries. How many Huguenot shipbuilders came to work in English shipyards during the 18th century is very hard to say, but the flow of Protestants to England and Catholics to France must have contained people from the shipbuilding industry as well. Furthermore, scientists from England and France frequently met, especially in the case of determining the Paris/Greenwich longitude meridian, which caused astro­nomers to work closely together (Bradley 2005). Though with no relation to shipbuilding technology, such an example emphasises the fact that science frequently crossed national borders and national pride.

18In conclusion, the technology used in European shipyards of the 18th century was far from national. It was used for a national purpose and gathered by national people, paid for by the national state, but for the most advanced machine in the pre-­industrial world, a vast part of the technology came from without, not from within national borders (fig. 5).

19In terms of maritime archaeology, this project seeks to emphasise the complex nature of ships’ designs and construction, and thus the importance of the international relations between the European nations that are represented in 18th century shipwrecks.

20This PhD project will study the events of technology exchange throughout the 18th century and the results of the international relations created in a time characterised by poli­tical instability and subsequent arms races and a high motivation to stay on top of the technological innovation game.