Pritchard, James; From Shipwright To Naval Constructor - Iowa State ...

12 James Pritchard
sional knowledge is cumulative, and junior grades of sous-constructeur
and eleve-constructeur accompanied Maurepas's important reform. Formal
technical training, however, still remained a matter of apprenticeship.
No strong intellectual component, generally acknowledged to
be a crucial criterion of professionalism, yet existed.3 Nevertheless,
naval shipwrights were entering the world of the professions based on
the application to daily life of organized, taught, rationally apprehended
knowledge.54
Coincidentally, the most important innovations in warship construc-
tion during the 18th century appeared at about the same time. The
first of the famous French seventy-fours had been laid down in 1719,
but Le Terrible, the first to mount twenty-eight 36-pounders on her
lower gun deck, appeared in 1737.55 Four years later, "the first modern
frigate," La Medee, the first single-decked vessel to mount twenty-six
guns of a single caliber (8-pounders), came off the ways at Brest.?6 And,
in 1744, Le Tonnant, the first eighty-gun ship to mount guns of a single
heavy caliber on each of two continuous decks, was launched at
Toulon.57 No direct causal relation is claimed between shipwrights'
improved social status and innovative shipbuilding. For one thing, the
latter had been going on for a long time. The French discontinued
building their old fifth-rates, two-decked frigates having up to thirtysix
guns, as early as 1695 and introduced new demi-batterie frigates of
thirty to thirty-six guns early in the new century before finally developing
La Medee.58 Naval shipbuilding was clearly no hit-or-miss affair or
even a question of simply finding best practice among known recipes
for tracing ship plans or routines for determining proportions and
dimensions.
During the second quarter of the 18th century, when major innova-
tions in ship design appeared, French naval shipwrights began to
escape the ambiguity of being viewed as both professional experts and
social inferiors. Despite complaints that some were rude and unfit for
polite society, the presence of shipwrights seated among senior naval
officers at councils of construction in the dockyards-and their ability
53A. M. Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, "Professions," in Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, ed. E. R. A. Seligman (New York [1933] 1967), 11:476.
54Parsons, "Professions" (n. 49 above), 12:536.
55Lavery (n. 1 above), 1:81.
56Jean Boudriot, "L'Evolution de la fr6gate dans la marine francaise 1660-1850," in
Five Hundred Years of Nautical Science 1400-1900, ed. Derek House (Greenwich: National
Maritime Museum, 1981), pp. 231-33.
57E. Taillemite, "The Golden Age," in The Great Age of Sail, ed. J. Jobe, trans. M. Kelly
(New York, 1967), p. 149.
58Boudriot, "Evolution," pp. 230-31.