HMS Victory

Victory was ordered in 1758, when Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder requested twelve new ships, and her keel was laid on 23 July 1759 in Chatham's Old Single Dock — since renamed Victory Dock. Sir Thomas Slade, Surveyor of the Navy, designed her, copying the lines of the 100-gun HMS Royal George. The name was chosen in October 1760, in the shadow of the Annus Mirabilis of 1759, the year of Quebec, Minden, Lagos and Quiberon Bay.

Around 6,000 trees went into her, 90 per cent of them oak, assembled by 150 men with six-foot copper bolts holding the frame. As built she measured 186 feet along the gun deck and displaced 3,500 long tons, costing £57,748. Because Quiberon Bay had broken French naval power there was no urgency, and she stood on the stocks for nearly three years — extra seasoning credited with her extraordinary longevity.

When she was floated on 7 May 1765 the dock gates proved at least nine and a half inches too narrow; shipwright Hartly Larkin had every available shipwright cut the gates back with adzes to let her pass. Afloat, she sat so deep that her lower gunports stood only 4 feet 6 inches above the water, and her sailing instructions ordered them shut in rough weather — though in practice none of her actions were fought in rough seas.

First commissioned in March 1778 after France entered the American war, Victory wore Admiral Keppel's flag at the First Battle of Ushant on 23 July, opening fire at about 11:45 on the 110-gun Bretagne. The action ended inconclusively when Sir Hugh Palliser's mauled rear division failed to renew the pursuit, and both admirals faced courts-martial. In December 1781, flying Kempenfelt's flag, she led twelve ships of the line against a Brest convoy and captured fifteen sail before retiring from de Guichen's superior escort.

In October 1782 she was Admiral Richard Howe's flagship for the relief of Gibraltar, leading the convoy in through storms and difficult currents. Leaving the Mediterranean, the fleet met a superior Franco-Spanish force off Cape Spartel on 20 October; the enemy fired from a distance, most of the shot fell short, and the British, under orders to return home, did not bother to reply. The engagement cost the British 61 dead and 108 wounded — none of them aboard Victory. It was her last action of that war.

In the French Revolutionary War Victory served the Mediterranean Fleet as Hood's flagship, co-operating in the occupation of Toulon in 1793 and the invasion of Corsica in 1794. At the Battle of the Hyères Islands in July 1795 she helped force the French 74 Alcide to strike, at the cost of her running rigging, topgallant mast and yardarms shot away, and saw off two French frigates that came to tow the prize.

On 14 February 1797, with 15 ships against a Spanish fleet counted through the fog, Admiral Sir John Jervis cut off his flag captain's tally at 27: "Enough, Sir. No more of that. The die is cast and if there are 50 sail, I will go through them." Victory split the Spanish divisions, raking ships ahead and astern; Jervis recalled that her broadside so terrified the 112-gun Principe de Asturias that she "squared her yards, ran clear out of the battle and did not return".

Nelson, wearing out of line in the 74-gun Captain to head off the Spanish main body, made the manoeuvre that brought the battle to a conclusive end: four Spanish ships taken, against 73 British dead. Aboard Victory a cannonball narrowly missed Jervis and decapitated a sailor beside him — her only fatality. She went home in 1797 so weakened that Jervis wrote that a man's step on the poop ladder "made her whole stern frame shake".

Condemned to hospital-ship work in the Medway, Victory was reprieved when the wreck of HMS Impregnable in 1799 left the fleet short of a three-decker. A reconstruction begun in 1800 ballooned from an estimated £23,500 to £70,933, raised her armament to 104 guns, coppered her magazine, closed in her stern galleries and gave her the black-and-yellow paint scheme later called the "Nelson chequer". Vice-Admiral Nelson hoisted his flag on 18 May 1803, with Thomas Masterman Hardy soon her captain.

After the long pursuit of Villeneuve to the West Indies and back, the fleets met off Cadiz on 21 October 1805. In light winds Victory broke the enemy line between the French flagship Bucentaure and the Redoutable, firing at such close range that the flames from her powder singed the French flagship's windows; her port broadside raked Bucentaure, dismounted her guns and struck down between 300 and 450 of her people almost immediately.

At 13:15 a musket ball entered Nelson's left shoulder and lodged in his spine; he died at 16:30, his last order — to anchor the fleet — countermanded by Collingwood. Victory lost 57 killed and 102 wounded and was so shattered that HMS Neptune towed her to Gibraltar. She carried Nelson's body home, and he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral on 9 January 1806, after lying in state at Greenwich.

Relegated to second rate, Victory served Saumarez as Baltic flagship from 1808 to 1812 — convoy protection, the evacuation of Romana's 12,000 Spanish soldiers, the Corunna evacuation of Moore's army — then wound down through harbour roles at Portsmouth. An 1831 Admiralty order to break her up was stopped by public outcry, and Princess Victoria's visit in 1833 helped swell civilian visitors to 12,000 a year. By 1886 a flag captain could "literally run my walking stick through her sides in many places".

Rammed by the ironclad Neptune in 1903 and saved from scrapping only by Edward VII's personal intervention, she was finally dry-docked in 1922 amid the Save the Victory campaign backed by shipping magnate Sir James Caird. Portsmouth's No. 2 dock, her home since, is now the oldest dry dock in the world still in use. Restoration to her Trafalgar appearance, interrupted by a Luftwaffe bomb that broke her keel in 1941, was completed in 2005 for the Trafalgar 200 celebrations.

A First Lord called her "the central shrine of our great naval tradition", and she has drawn figures from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Winston Churchill, who came aboard after the Portsmouth air raids of January 1941. She helped shape Master and Commander and stood model for the Dauntless in Pirates of the Caribbean. Flagship of the First Sea Lord since October 2012 and in her 248th year of service, she remains the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission, drawing around 350,000 visitors a year.