Coppering the Fleet

When Keppel met d’Orvilliers off Ushant in the summer of 1778, Britain had a handful of copper-bottomed ships at sea, none bigger than a 32-gun frigate. By late 1780 most of the ships of the line had been sheathed with copper and, by the end of the following year, so had most of the fleet. This huge, complicated and expensive undertaking absorbed all the King’s dockyards; for several months, coppering took precedence over all other work. For soon after taking office, Middleton recognized that mobilizing every serviceable frigate and ship of the line in the Navy would still not allow Britain to challenge the Franco-Spanish supremacy at sea. ‘We were still deficient in strength’, he later wrote. ‘The enemy outnumbered us upon every station. Further exertions were still wanting to prevent our being overpowered by numbers.’ ¹ The coppering program was an attempt to counter by technological innovation the Franco-Spanish superiority in numbers. Coppering the fleet was Middleton’s proudest achievement. He championed the idea from his first days as Controller, overcame the doubts of skeptics, held down costs and pushed the work to completion. But the program was not the unqualified success he remembered in later years. ² In the interests of hurrying as many copper-sheathed ships to sea as quickly as he could, Middleton set aside the time-consuming techniques that had emerged from more than a decade of experiments with copper bottoms. At length, however, the Controller’s short cuts threatened the seaworthiness of the ships in question; at great expense his methods had to be abandoned.