THE prize three-decker Commerce de Marseille, handed over by French Royalist forces at Toulon in August 1793, was sailed home to England in December. She had been Frances prototype 118-gun ship, built at Toulon between April 1787 and October 1790, and was the largest ship in the world at the time of her capture. She had excellent sailing qualities, so impressing the Admiralty that they were determined to put her into commission. However, dockyard inspection showed that she was structurally too weak for the constant sea duty to which the British flagships were subjected, and reluctantly the Navy Board registered her in January 1795 as a storeship. The Admiralty planned to send her to the Caribbean in this role, but even in this capacity her structure proved deficient, and after enduring a near-fatal storm, she returned to Plymouth in January 1796, where she was paid off into Ordinary and spent the rest of the French Revolutionary War as a prison hulk in Plymouth harbour. With the end of that war, she was retired from even that role and was taken to pieces in 1802. This draught was taken off at Plymouth in September 1796. Compared with British ships, the noticeable features – apart from her great size – was the flat sheer line, upright sternpost, and a short upswept head.

For all its successes in battle, the Royal Navy did not capture an enemy First Rate until 1782, Circumstances conspired against it: in the seventeenth century, the Dutch had no three-deckers before the 1680s (and even then none that would be classed as First Rates in Britain); the French built some spectacular examples, but in the wars of 1689–97 and 1702–13 rarely committed them unreservedly to battle. There was a chance at Barfleur in 1692 when the Soleil Royal was beaten out of the line by Britannia, but Tourville’s flagship was later burned by the boats of the Anglo-Dutch fleet rather than captured; and for much of the mid-eighteenth century, First Rates had a low priority in French construction programmes (the Soleil Royal which shared a similar fate to its namesake after the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759 was, although fleet flagship, only an 80-gun ship). However, the reverses of the Seven Years War led the French navy to revive its interest in First Rates in the following decades.

One of these ships became the first enemy three-decker to fall into British hands. The French 104-gun ship Ville de Paris was captured, along with Vice-Admiral Comte de Grasse whose flagship she was, at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782, The ship, designed by François-Guillaume Clairin-Deslauriers, had been built as a 90-gun vaisseau de premier rang at Rochefort between August 1757 and May 1764, initially under the name Impétueux until January 1762 when the city authorities in the French capital agreed to fund her construction as a gift to their king. During repairs at Brest in 1778–79, the waist was filled in to create a continuous third deck, with a new quarterdeck and forecastle constructed above and fourteen 8-livre (8lbs 9½oz English equivalent) guns added to her ordnance; she was coppered in September 1780,

The ranks of three-deckers were augmented during the French Revolutionary War by the capture of three First Rate equivalents. Taken at Toulon in August 1793, and brought back to Britain in December, the prestigious French three-decker Commerce de Marseille allowed the Navy Board to examine in detail the 120-gun standard design of Jacques-Noël Sané, to which all subsequent French three-deckers would be built during the Napoleonic Wars. In French service she carried thirty-two of the French 36-livre guns on her lower deck, the same quantity of the 24-livre guns on the middle deck, and the same again of the 12-livre guns on the upper deck; she also carried twenty of the 8-livre guns, fourteen on her quarterdeck and six on the forecastle, while there were (not counted in her total rating) 4 brass obusiers (a French equivalent of a carronade, although not a direct copy) of 36-livre on the poop. The French complement was 1098 officers and ratings. In the British Navy, she was re-armed with thirty-four 32-pounders (lower deck), thirty-four 24-pounders (middle deck) and fifty-two 12-pounders (34 upper deck, 14 quarterdeck, and 4 forecastle); she also had also two 32-pounder (forecastle) and eight 24-pounder (poop) carronades, with a complement of 875.

Initially, the size and sailing qualities of the ship impressed her captors, but closer inspection revealed that she was too weakly built for British service. It was then planned to use the ship as a huge troop transport, but when she was nearly wrecked in a storm, the Royal Navy lost all confidence in the ship, which was thereafter reduced to harbour service. Her sister-ship – variously named Dauphin Royal, then Sans Culotte, and finally Orient – was destroyed by fire and explosion at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

Rather more useful were two Spanish ships captured off Cape Saint Vincent on 14 February 1797. Between 1779 and 1794 the Spanish had laid down three three-deckers to a design by Francisco Gautier, following this up with a further seven similar ships designed by Romero Landa. Six of these ships – Puristna Concepcion, Mejicano, San Josef, Salvador del Mundo, Conde de Regla and Principe de Asturias – were present with Admiral Don José de Cordova’s twenty-seven-strong fleet in this battle against Admiral Sir John Jervis’s fifteen British ships of the line, of which only two were First Rates (Victory and Britannia).

An early capture, achieved mainly by Captain Cuthbert Collingwood’s 74-gun Excellent around 3 pm, was the Salvador del Mundo, following closely upon the surrender to Excellent of the 74-gun San Ysidro. Soon afterwards Collingwood’s long-term friend, Commodore Horatio Nelson in the 74-gun Captain, achieved even greater success by personally boarding and seizing the 80-gun San Nicolas, and then capping this by sending further boarders across the two-decker to proceed to take the 112-gun San Josef, which had become entangled on the far side of the San Nicolas, It was this double success – popularly acclaimed as ‘Nelson’s Patent Bridge’ – which solidified the Commodore’s growing reputation as a national hero.

The French Prizes of 1782 and 1793 – history, and dimensions in feet and inches

The four Spanish prizes were commissioned as British warships and retained on the Lisbon station for service there until the autumn. They arrived at Plymouth on 5 October, and the two three-deckers were registered as First Rates on 4 December Both were re-armed with British guns – 32-pounders on the lower deck, 24-pounders on the middle deck, 12-pounders on the upper deck and 9-pounders on the quarterdeck and forecastle; their complement of men was fixed at 839. The second ship – the San Josef – mounted two extra 32-pounders on the lower deck to make her a 114-gun ship, but was otherwise armed/manned as the Salvador del Mundo.

The Salvador del Mundo spent most of her British service as a receiving ship at Plymouth, but the San Josef was more highly regarded, and proved to be the most durable of the prizes, Edward Brenton, who on retirement produced a Naval History of Great Britain, wrote that ‘her lower ports were higher out of the water (with all her sea stores in) than was ever known in any other ship of the line; she could carry her [lower deck] guns run out when few British ships would have ventured to open a port; she stowed 500 tons of water and we had nothing that compared with her as a ship of war.’ In fact, Brenton confirms this freeboard amidships as being 5 feet 10 inches (on a draught of 25¾ feet forwards and 27 feet aft) compared with 5 feet 6 inches for the Caledonia and 5 feet 2 inches for the smaller Queen Charlotte. Only with the Victorian era designs did this improve – the later Queen (ex Royal Frederick) having a freeboard of 6 feet 6 inches. She was refitted between June 1799 and the beginning of 1801, seeing active service almost continuously, often as a flagship, until 1807 when she underwent an expensive two-year Large Repair, followed by more service in the Channel and Mediterranean until the end of the war. The ship was thought worth keeping in good repair during the post-war decades, although she never again went to sea; her final commission in 1837 was in the role of a stationary gunnery training ship, and she was not finally paid off until 1846. When taken to pieces in 1849, the ship had enjoyed a lifespan of 66 years – matching that of many famously long-lived British equivalents, and a testimony to the quality of Spanish shipbuilding.

Two more of these Spanish 112-guns ships were destroyed by the Royal Navy off Gibraltar in 1801 – the Real Carlos and San Hermenegildo. An even larger – but older – Spanish three-decker was to be destroyed in the same vicinity just four years later, at the battle of Trafalgar; the Santisima Trinidad had been Spain’s most famous sailing warship and their first three-decker, designed and built at Havana in 1769 by Irish-born shipwright Mateo Mullán; she had been substantially rebuilt in the mid-1790s with the waist between quarterdeck and forecastle filled in and armed (thus making her technically a flush four-decker) with a total of 130 guns’ The conversion made her an extremely poor sailer and unsuccessful as a gun platform, but she was present at Trafalgar and fell into British hands, but had to be abandoned during the storm that followed the epic battle and was wrecked.

The Salvador del Mundo and San Josef (Spanish Prizes of 1797) – history, and dimensions in feet and inches

The last enemy three-decker to be destroyed in action by the Royal Navy was the 118-gun Imperial. This French vessel was a modified version of the Commerce de Marseille design, launched at Brest in 1804 as the Vengeur but renamed in 1805. She was driven ashore and destroyed at San Domingo in February 1806.

THE 112-gun Salvador del Mundo was designed by the Spanish naval architect Romero Landa and was launched at the Ferrol shipyard in 1787. In British service she was rearmed at Plymouth with fifteen pairs of 32-pounders on the lower deck replacing the original Spanish 36-pounders. She also carried sixteen pairs of 24-pounders on the middle deck, an equal number of 12-pounders on the upper deck, a dozen 9-pounders on the quarterdeck and six of the same calibre on the forecastle.