The ship was to be afloat, according to Admiralty calculations, within thirty-three months—by the 31st of March, 1762. That meant, in the existing state of things at Chatham, working on her, at any rate during the earlier stage of getting the vessel into frame, day and night. They had two 90-gun three-deckers and two seventy-fours in various stages of building, besides the _Victory_ to take in hand; and in addition they had nearly every week extra refits or repairs to undertake for ships coming in from the fleets at sea—a complication of tasks which involved the keeping of every man and boy of the two thousand and odd hands then on the muster-sheets of Chatham yard hard at work from Monday at daylight to Saturday at dusk. Half the establishment alternately were on overtime, working on Sundays and nightly through the week, for spells of three or five hours after bell-ringing—in dockyard lingo, “double tides” and “nights.” It was the same just then in all our dockyards; the day-gangs as they worked having each man’s meals brought from home into the yard to him, to eat in the half-hour allowed, near by his job; the night-gangs all toiling on under the flaring light of cressets and links, without a break, until past ten o’clock. Amid such surroundings at Chatham they began building the _Victory_, a hundred and fifty men being employed on the ship at first, to set up and bolt together the various frames and floor timbers, and fit and fix together in place the stem and stern pieces and brackets and the huge rib timbers and beams, as fast as the converter and the sawyers could supply them. So things went on from August to the following January (1760). Then the gangs of shipwrights employed on the _Victory_ were reduced, and the rate of working allowed to slacken down. With the French Mediterranean Fleet broken up by Boscawen—one half taken or burned and the other half cut off and shut up at Cadiz—and the French Channel Fleet shattered by Hawke, and its refugee ships lying broken-backed and stranded up the Vilaine, on the sandbanks above the bar, the stress of the war was past. And there was little need to trouble for the immediate future with only M. Berryer at the Ministry of Marine. By August, 1760, the hull timber-work had been put together into the outline of a ship, and was practically complete in frame, the skeleton of the future man-of-war. The workmen were then almost all called off, and the ship, according to custom, was left aside for a space, to “stand in frame” and season. She had cost so far, according to the Navy Estimates, upwards of £14,000 in materials and labour.