Agamemnon, said to be Nelson’s favourite ship, finally ran aground in the mouth of the River Plate in 1809, some 7,000 miles away from home, and broke up her wreck was found in 1993.Īll those ships from this tiny little place. The latter, a 64-gunner, was launched in 1781, saw action in the American and French revolutionary wars, again in the Napoleonic Wars, and was captained by one Horatio Nelson when he lost the sight of one eye at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica in 1794. They included three ships that fought at Trafalgar in 1805 – the Euryalus, Swiftsure and Agamemnon. Here, in the space of about 70 years from the 1740s, some 52 navy vessels were laid down. The slipways, the hards or landing places, where ships were built and launched, are still there, the old supporting timbers yet visible at low tide.
The cottages used to house the shipbuilders, the hotel was the home of Henry Adams, Master Shipbuilder between 17. Rum and roll-necks mix with day-trippers. The clink of glasses and bursts of laughter come from the Master Builder’s Hotel. Families stroll down to the river’s edge, from which the tink-tink sound of lanyards slapping against the masts of smart yachts drifts across the water. Neat late-eighteenth century brick cottages line the single, car-less, street in the tiny preserved village of Buckler’s Hard.
It is hard to imagine the bustle, noise and smells of those bygone days. Men of war that formed part of the Royal Navy’s wooden walls, when Britannia ruled the waves: vessels 150 feet, or more, in length, with 70 menacing cannons poking through gun-ports and crewed by hundreds of officers and men ships that fought Britain’s battles from the English Channel to the other side of the world. Last Updated on 10th November 2021 by used to build big ships on the New Forest’s tranquil, pretty, Beaulieu River.
0 kommentar(er)
