The _Victory_ was built in 1765. She is 186 feet long, 52 feet wide, and her tonnage is 2,162. She carried 100 guns on her three gun-decks, and is, in rig, a ship—that is, she carries three masts, spreading square sails, the mast farthest aft carrying as its lowest sail a spanker. Her head sails—that is, the sails at the bow—were jibs set between the foremast and the bowsprit, which was elongated by the addition of a jib boom and a flying jib boom. Her shape is clumsy, her sides are high, but the highly raised forecastle and sterncastle are entirely missing. A section of the bow is called the forecastle, but only the name is left of the earlier raised structure from which the name came. Astern there is a slight sign of what, centuries before, had been the sterncastle, for there is a raised deck, called the quarter-deck, in evidence. The stern itself is a highly ornamental affair, fitted with many windows and with much scrollwork, and, at least in the eyes of the present day, is anything but nautical in appearance. [Illustration: A TORPEDO BOAT _About the time of the Spanish-American War these boats were common in the navies of the world. Now they are eliminated, and their successors are the torpedo-boat destroyers, now called destroyers._ ] This high-sided, bluff-bowed craft carried about seven hundred men in her crew, although where they kept themselves is, to the average person of to-day, a mystery. They slept, of course, in hammocks, and these were lashed to their hooks between decks. So thick were they that when the crew had turned in the whole deck looked like a cave filled with strange huge bats hanging parallel to the ceiling. The guns on these ships were crude affairs. They were muzzle loaders, of course, and were generally cast of brass or iron. They were mounted on awkward wooden carriages which were set on four small wheels. But such a weighty implement mounted on wheels needed much careful attention to keep it tightly secured when the ship, once outside her harbour, ceaselessly rolled from side to side, even in an almost glassy sea, and, in a seaway, rolled and pitched and rolled again, until, should one of these wheeled monsters have broken its fastenings, it might readily have become more dangerous than an outside enemy. Victor Hugo’s powerful description of such a scene in “Ninety-three” presents a graphic picture of the danger that such a misfortune would bring with it. These heavy-wheeled cannon were made fast in their places, each with a square port through which it could fire; and a gun-deck with thirty or more of these polished juggernauts lined up along its two sides, with the decks holystoned, and with the gear of every description carefully stowed in place, had a most businesslike appearance.