If the French could have a vessel of such gun power and dimensions there was no reason why the English should not, so the _Caledonia_, of 2,602 tons, was ordered in 1794, and was to be the largest and most powerful yet built in England. Her main deck guns were to be 32-pounders, because of the greater ease with which they could be handled. On her lower deck she had thirty-two of these guns, on the middle deck thirty-four 24-pounders, on the main deck thirty-four 18-pounders, on the quarter deck sixteen 12-pounders, and on the forecastle four 12-pounders. Her officers and crew numbered eight hundred and seventy-five. Her length was 205 feet, breadth 54 feet 6 inches, and depth of hold 23 feet 1 inch. She was the favourite ship of Lord Exmouth. At first she had a square stern, but when the rounded sterns were shown to be better in every way she was altered to the new mode, and her armament was revised. She afterwards became the hospital ship at Greenwich under the name of the _Dreadnought_. The model of her at South Kensington shows that her rigging was probably unique. Her royal masts were fidded, that is, built above the topgallant masts instead of forming one long pole with them, as is the custom, and there were also peculiarities in the arrangement of some of her running rigging. This ship was launched at Devonport in 1808. [Illustration: THE “CORNWALLIS,” 1812. _From a Model in the Museum of the Royal United Service Institution._] The defeat of the Danes at Copenhagen, the battle of the Nile, the “glorious first of June,” the battle of Trafalgar, the duels of the American War, and the battle of Navarino, united to give a splendid termination to the career of the wooden warship as a fighting unit. That of Trafalgar was the last in which great fleets of the best “wooden walls” that human skill could devise opposed each other in manœuvre and counter-manœuvre. That of Navarino, fought in a bay, almost in a dead calm, with the ships hardly moving and some even at anchor, was the last conflict in the world’s history in which the wooden battleships of the East and the West lay alongside each other and blazed away with every available weapon at a range so close at times that they could not possibly miss.