ABSTRACT
Captain Edmund Gardiner Fishbourne could only lament in closing his address that ‘Till we possess the result of more observations and experiments worthy of the name, naval architecture, to a great extent, must remain sheer empiricism’. A parliamentary report on Manning the Navy, published two years later in 1859, quickly led to the British Naval Reserve Act. Life in the Royal Navy was still very hard. Daily provisions were state paid and therefore minimal. The main challenge here was not material but political coping with the expression of the feelings of the country at the expense of the lessons of the past, and the necessities of the future. The War Office was therefore prepared to risk the future within limits only those being the conventional forms of not just warships as weapons platforms but their function as units of an incredibly diverse naval force which had just emerged from a major European war.
