"This great ship", goes on the account, "cumbered Scotland to get her to sea." By the time she was afloat and fully equipped she was reckoned to have cost the King from thirty to forty thousand pounds. She carried a heavy battery, and if her cannon were as formidable as their names, they must have been most effective in action. "She bore many cannons, six on every side, with three great Bassils, two behind in her dock, and one before, with three hundred shot of small Artillerie, that is to say, Myand and Battered Falcon and Quarter Falcon, Slings, pestilent Serpentines and Double Dogs, with Hagtar and Culvering, Cross-bows and Hand-bows. She had three hundred mariners to sail her: she had six score of gunners to use her artillery, and had a thousand men of war by her, Captains, Skippers, and Quartermasters." A "basil" or "basilisk", it may be explained, was a gun throwing a ball of 200 pounds weight, a much heavier projectile than any used at Trafalgar. Space forbids further details as to the "menagerie" of other pieces that armed the decks of the _Great Michael_, but you will find more about these and other old-fashioned cannon in another chapter. As soon as she was afloat the King had her fired at to test the resistance of her tremendously thick sides, but, says our old writer, "the cannon deired hir not"; that is to say, could not penetrate her. This is the oldest experiment of the kind of which we have any record. But the most remarkable thing about the _Great Michael_--at least to my mind--is her size. According to the old account from which I have quoted, which, by the way, was written by one Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, she must have had almost the exact dimensions of the _Duke of Wellington_, one of the last and finest of our steam three-deckers. Now I have a perfect idea of _her_ size, because I had the honour of serving on board her for a couple of years. She was in the "sere and yellow leaf" then, her masts had gone, her engines had disappeared, and she had a roof which made her look much more like Noah's Ark than a battleship, but I can remember her in all her glory when she carried the flag of the commander-in-chief at Portsmouth. I was only a boy then, but I recollect that her appearance was fine in the extreme. In reckoning the beam of the _Great Michael_ we must remember to add 20 feet for the thickness of her sides, since Pitscottie only gives us her internal width. Having done this, I will put down the dimensions of the two ships for comparison-- _Great Michael_, length, 240 feet; beam, 56 feet. _Duke of Wellington_, length, 240 feet, 7 inches; beam, 60 feet, 1 inch. Now if Pitscottie's figures are correct, either the _Michael_ must have been almost incredibly bigger than any ship of her day, or, as I have before suggested, the old war-ships of that and earlier centuries were in reality a good deal larger than contemporary representations and records of "tunnage" would lead us to expect.