It was still the custom at Bath to announce the arrival of lords and ladies and “nabobs” with peals on the Abbey bells and serenadings by the Assembly band. Brighton was hardly on the map as yet; it was merely Brighthelmstone, a Sussex fishing village, just beginning to be visited for sea bathing by the handful of people who had heard of it through Dr. Russell’s pamphlets. Old London Bridge still had houses on it. Traffic in imported merchandise throughout the country was still carried on by pack-horse. One coach—or “machine”—a month, ran between London and Edinburgh, and took a fortnight on the road. A similar conveyance between London and Portsmouth took, under the most favourable conditions, two whole days. The mails went by postboy, and hardly a week passed without people failing to get their letters, because the local postboy had been stopped by a highwayman. Gibbets, indeed, with the bleached bones of these gentry in chains, stood on every main road out of London. Pirates were still from time to time publicly borne from the Old Bailey down the Thames in boats, heavily chained, to be hanged at Execution Dock and gibbeted at Galleons Point—on the average half a dozen a year. Just as the Admiralty draughtsmen were outlining the plans of the _Victory_, the news of the hour for nine people out of ten in England was the committal of Eugene Aram to York Castle for the murder of Daniel Clark. [Illustration: AT PORTSMOUTH POINT _Thomas Rowlandson._] [Illustration: IN PORTSMOUTH HARBOUR _Thomas Rowlandson._] On the day that the _Victory’s_ keel was laid two men were pilloried in Cheapside for blackmailing a City merchant, and a bad egg accidentally hitting the Sheriff’s officer in charge of the proceedings led to a riot and fighting with drawn swords. On the day before the _Victory_ was launched, one Mary Norwood, an unfaithful wife, condemned at Taunton Assizes for poisoning her husband, was publicly strangled in the market-place of Ilverston, her home, and her body tied to the stake and burned before several hundred spectators. So far back does the life-story of our “old” _Victory_ take us, touching at either end the middle of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, directly linking King George the Second with King Edward the Seventh. HOW THEY BUILT THE _VICTORY_ AT CHATHAM This is the story of the building of the _Victory_ at Chatham Dockyard, and how, why, and when the order to set to work on this particular first-rate man-of-war was given. On the 20th of September, 1758, Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, after commanding at sea on Special Service off the coast of France all the summer, arrived in London to resume his duties on the Board. Nine days later, in the old parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was born into this world the infant boy to whom six days later was given the name Horatio Nelson. The two dates are a coincidence of interest in our story of the _Victory_.