This development was, as might be expected, accurately reflected at the Blackwall yard, in spite of the fact that the slips and shipwrights had largely during those forty years to be employed for building men-of-war for the Navy. By the middle of the century this yard had a wet dock, three dry docks and a number of slips. It was the biggest private dockyard in the country, and only the Royal yards could rival it. Here the East Indiamen continued to be built, the direct ancestors of the great liners of to-day. In the period 1750-1752 was here constructed the East Indiaman _Falmouth_. She was a fine three-masted, full-rigged ship of 668 tons burthen, measuring 108 feet 9 inches on the keel, and having a beam of 34 feet. She carried topsails and t’gallant sails and, with her large figure-head and rather wasteful, ornate design at bow and stern, maintained her close connection with the ship architecture of the seventeenth century. [Illustration: [_By courtesy Messrs. T. H. Parker._ BRUNSWICK DOCK, BLACKWALL. Built especially for the use of the H.E. India Company’s ships, and begun in 1789. It could accommodate sixty of these vessels.] During the next thirteen years were launched such East Indiamen as the 642-ton _Osterley_, the 642-ton _Tilbury_, the _Valentine_ and _Ajax_, each of 655 tons. In 1768 no fewer than five such ships of 670 tons were constructed and fitted out, and then, a couple of years later, ships of 700 tons began to be built. The East India Company used to charter such ships practically as long as they were seaworthy; and Blackwall in those days was able to do everything that the monopolists required; for here not only were the ships built, rigged and laid up, but ashore the houses were the homes of seafaring families, shipwrights, caulkers and every trade concerned in the building of these craft. And then in 1789 was launched from this yard the big 1612-ton _Bombay Castle_, a powerful vessel of seventy-four guns, which the East India Company presented to George III. There is a picture by Dodd which shows as many as four other big ships on the slips at this time, together with four or five similar craft fitting out in the stream. It is comparable only to the Clyde in the height of its twentieth century shipbuilding.