HMS Victory was launched forty years before Trafalgar

This edited article about H.M.S. Victory originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 225 published on 7 May 1966.

HMS Victory by Andrew Howat

Not everyone knows that H.M.S. Victory carried Nelson’s flag at Trafalgar forty years after she had been launched on May 7, 1765, and that she still survives at Portsmouth much as she was when Nelson trod her quarterdeck.

Nelson’s Victory, which was the third warship of that name, was so big that she had to be built in a dry dock at Chatham instead of on a slipway. She was “launched” by filling the dry dock with water and then floating her out. With a tonnage of 2,162, she was 152 feet long, 52 feet wide, and had a draught of 21 feet. Over 300,000 feet of oak were used in her construction. She was armed with one hundred guns: thirty 42-pounders, twenty-eight 24-pounders, thirty 12-pounders, and she had also twelve 6-pounders.

H.M.S. Victory was first in action in the battle of Brest in July, 1778. Three years later, she was again in action against the French, and in 1782 she led the fleet that raised the siege of Gibraltar. Victory was flagship at the great battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797 in which British fortunes against Napoleon first took a turn for the better. After an extensive refit H.M.S. Victory became Nelson’s flagship in 1803.

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and later the advent of steam warships, there was no further use for her, and for over a century she lay at anchor as flagship of the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth. In 1922 her hull was found to be in such bad condition that she was placed permanently in dry dock and completely restored.