[Subnuts]

Dug this review out of my archives and edited it a little. Enjoy!

Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-Gun Ship Victory
John McKay
1987

After Brian Lavery's frustratingly inconsistent take on the Bellona in 1985, two new draughtsmen new to the series published volumes on historic
English wooden fighting ships in 1987. The first was by the Canadian architectural draughtsman John McKay, whose four "Anatomies" are probably the most consistently good out of the 38 published titles. His subject was the HMS Victory, Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, and the last surviving First Rate fighting ship in the world. The introduction provides some background information on the role of the First-Rate ship in the Royal Navy, and a brief service history and time-line of the ship's career. This section also includes details on the hull construction, general arrangement, armament, fittings, masts, and rigging. 20 photographs are included, most of them from the 1950s and 60s, depicting details of the exterior and interior of the ship undergoing restoration.

The drawings (which I'm assuming are the reason you're thinking of buying the book, unless you read Playboy for the articles) took 3,000 hours to create over a five year period. For General Arrangements, we get side, bow, stern, and sectional views of Victory at 1:192 scale, followed by views of each deck. Section B is devoted to the ship's structure overall views of the hull framing, the arrangement of the keel, and the layout of the inner construction. This part includes detailed plan views of the structure of the stern galleries, the bow, and each deck, along with six perspective views of the hull structure, showing the keel, frames, planking, beams, decks, and finally the completed hull.

Section C has 33 transverse sections through the hull, while section D covers some of the external details, such as the beakhead bulkhead, stern davits, side railings and channels, and the entry port on the middle deck. Section E focuses on deck fittings and opens with views of the fittings around the fore and main masts, before detailing the hawse holes, riding bitts, capstans, anchors, steering gear, stern lanterns, and boats. Section E details the armament, and includes views of six types of guns and their carriages.

Section G covers the masts and yards, and will probably be the most useful section for model builders. Each of the masts and spars are depicted in detailed dimensioned drawings, with numerous plan, profile, and cross-section views of details as small as mast caps, cross-trees, and the driver boom jaws. The final section depicts Victory's rigging. The standing and running rigging each receive a single profile and perspective view each, while the rigging associated with each mast in shown in frontal view, along with a plan showing where each line was belayed (secured). Rounding it out are dimensioned drawings of 19 common rigging blocks, and a "rigging schedule" giving the length and circumference of every major line, and the type and size of the blocks used with it.

The 100-Gun Ship Victory is unfortunately the weakest of McKay's four anatomies, which still puts it above many of the books in the series. His style would evolve over the next six years, and this book's successors would be better detailed, better edited, and more polished. Of course, if you're building a model of the Victory it's a must have (though not the only book you'll want to have), and there's still some wonderfully detailed stuff in here for Age of Sail enthusiasts, such as the detailed plans of the deck structure. Where the book fails are the crude drawings of boats, the unreadable (1/384 scale, seriously?) rigging diagrams, and a relative lack of perspective views.

The biggest problem, however, is the 2010 edition you'll receive if you buy this book through Amazon. The photos look fine, as do about half the plans, but the rest look horrid. It looks like someone went over the drawings with 80-grit sandpaper, xeroxed them, rescanned them, and attempted to fix them up in Photoshop. A lot of fine detail has been lost, such as the wood grain in the cross-section views, and the hull planking in the exterior plans. Many of the drawings look faded, washed out, and in some cases, badly digitized. The plans of the running rigging feature jagged lines due to JPEG compression - simply unacceptable in a book that currently retails for $47.95. In fact, I'd recommend hunting down a 1987 edition of the this book if you want it, despite the presence of some errors that were fixed in later releases. It has to look better than this!

Final rating: 7.75 for the 1987 edition, 5.0 for the 2010 edition.