Below you might have found the dull red everywhere a monotonous colour. But there was a reason: it prevented the human blood spilt in an engagement from being too conspicuous. So also the gun-carriage was painted the same hue. All the ports were square except on the upper and quarter-decks, where the ports were circular, and surrounded with gilt wreaths. Externally the upper works of the hull above the line of the upper decks were painted dark blue with gilt decorations. Below this the ship was painted yellow down to the lower deck ports, with a broad band of black along the water-line. Her bottom was painted white, with the anti-fouling composition. Various experiments were tried for sheathing the ships with lead, but eventually a fixed method was adopted for about a century, which consisted of hammering numerous broad-headed nails close together along the ship’s bottom, and then paying thereon a composition of tallow and resin. The nocturnal was still used for finding the hour of the night by the North Star, and the moon-dial for finding the time of high water. Spherical and plane trigonometry, the use of charts and globes, the application of Gunter’s scale and Briggs’ logarithms, the use of Mercator’s chart--these were the subjects which a seventeenth-century navigator was expected to learn if he were a genuine “tarpaulin,” and not an ignorant, swaggering land-lubber promoted by influence only. [Illustration: BUILDING AND LAUNCHING SHIPS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The vessel on the left is in process of being launched into the water. The ship on the right is still on the stocks.] CHAPTER XII THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The lot of the modern seaman is of a vastly different order of things from that of the eighteenth-century sailor. Hardships though there may be in this twentieth century, yet they are not to be mentioned when we remember the hard-swearing, bullying days of Queen Anne. Morals, both ashore and afloat, were at a particularly low ebb; irreligion and blasphemy were rampant. On board ship there was very rarely Divine worship, even on the large East Indiamen, although this neglect was certainly contrary to orders. But the managers themselves, in order to save the expense of having to carry a chaplain, used to rate their big ships as of only 499 tons, and so keep themselves within the law.