ABSTRACT
The practice of coppering had hardly taken hold in the navy much before the end of the Seven Years War, but the pace of sheathing with copper was greatly increased at the outset of French involvement in the American War of Independence. The English nails were better shaped and the sheathing was more surely attached to the hulls, while they varied the thickness of the sheathing which covered different parts of the hull. The possibilities of the metal sheathing of ships were explored over the centuries. It appears to have been tried by the Romans, then by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century and subsequently in England. In one of the most remarkable pieces of military-industrial espionage of the eighteenth century Le Camus was in England in 1781 at the height of the war examining the production of copper sheets for sheathing and engaging English workers to make them.
