The new date for completion, March, 1764, came in its turn, but again the _Victory_ was not ready. Upwards of £50,000 had by now been spent on her, and the ship was four-fifths finished, her sides planked to the upper works and the decks laid. They had slackened off considerably in regard to new construction at Chatham after the war ended. The dockyard establishment had been reduced by two-thirds and overtime stopped. General repairs were the order of the day, to make good the wear-and-tear of war service at all the dockyards, and practically a third part of the whole sea-going navy fell to Chatham’s share of mending. Another six months was then officially granted for the finishing of the _Victory_; but this time the Admiralty themselves, and the French incidentally, caused fresh delay. My Lords did their share by coming down to Chatham at the end of May, 1764, on a visit of inspection, walking over the _Victory_ and leaving suggestions for alterations to be made which would take at least four additional months to carry out. The French hindered the intended progress by a display of aggressiveness towards England over the Newfoundland fisheries question, as left arranged by the recent Treaty of Paris. That trouble at the outset looked so serious that the workmen at the dockyards were drawn off all ships building and repairing in order to get part of the Ordinary, the ships in reserve, into sea-going state at once. So the _Victory_ had her completion again put off. In the midst of this French “disturbance”—as our ancestors of that time termed international unpleasantnesses of the kind—we may conveniently take our leave of the _Victory_ on the stocks at Chatham, in the midst of a series of strange scenes the like of which, happily, have not often been witnessed in an English dockyard. The Newfoundland difficulty was still unsettled, when, at the end of October, 1764, secret information of a startling nature suddenly reached the Admiralty from abroad. It was to the effect that a plot was on foot, with the connivance of the French Government, to destroy the English dockyards by incendiarism and fire the ships of war under construction. There proved to be reason to consider the news in a most serious light, and extraordinary measures of precaution were forthwith ordered at all the yards.