thenceforward to season gradually and improve in keeping year by year. The order to the Dockyard Commissioner at Chatham to get ready to take the _Victory_ in hand was dated the 13th of December, 1758. It directed Commissioner Cooper to “prepare to set up and build a new ship of 100-guns as soon as a dock shall be available for the purpose.” A sum of £3200, it also informed the Commissioner, would be set aside in the coming Navy Estimates for preliminaries. It was the custom at that time to build first-rates in a dock; they were thought too big to build on a slip. The new ship—no name was as yet officially announced for her—was to be, as we should nowadays say, an “improved” _Royal George_ (the _Royal George_ was our latest completed big ship, the same _Royal George_ that came at a later day to so unfortunate an end), and for six months the draughtsmen in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy, under the supervision of Mr. Thomas Slade (afterwards Sir Thomas), Senior Surveyor of the Navy, the designer of the _Victory_, were busy on the working plans. These were completed by the first week of June, 1759, and laid before the Admiralty. They were formally passed on the 14th of June, and a few days later the Rochester stage-waggon from London stopped at the dockyard gates to deliver the box with the duplicate plans, all ready to be laid off and chalked down in detail, each part of the ship the actual size, on the mould loft floor. Master-Shipwright Lock would then get his mould-boards and have the saw-pits set going, in readiness for the arrival of the regulation Navy Board Order to commence building. That order came on the 7th of July. The dock allotted for the building of the new ship at Chatham was that then known as the “Old Single Dock,” the dock now called “No. 2 Dock,” near the Admiral Superintendent’s Office and opposite the old yard clock and bell turret. There, on a Monday morning, the 23rd of July, 1759—an auspiciously bright and sunny morning as it befell—the keel of the _Victory_ was laid.