A three-decker was a sailing warship which carried her principal carriage-mounted guns on three fully armed decks. Usually additional (smaller) guns were carried on the upper works (forecastle and quarterdeck), but this was not a continuous battery and so did not count as a "fourth deck". Three-deckers were usually "

ships of the line A ship of the line was a type of naval warship constructed during the Age of Sail from the 17th century to the mid-19th century. The ship of the line was designed for the naval tactic known as the line of battle, which depended on the two colum ...

", i.e. of sufficient strength to participate in the line of battle, and in the

rating system of the Royal Navy The rating system of the Royal Navy and its predecessors was used by the Royal Navy between the beginning of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th century to categorise sailing warships, initially classing them according to their assi ...

were generally classed as

first First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

second The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds ...

rates, although from the mid-1690s until the 1750s the larger of the

third rate In the rating system of the Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks (thus the related term two-decker). Years of experience proved that the third r ...

s were also three-deckers. Three-deckers also served in the naval forces of other European states, notably those of France, Russia and Spain. The French definition of a three-decker differed from that of the English Navy until 1690, as some ships that were officially termed "three-deckers" prior to this date had only a partially-armed third tier of guns, with a significant gap between the guns in the forward portion of that deck and the guns in the aft portion of that deck. In some of these nominal three-deckers this division constituted a structural gap separating the forward and aft sections of this deck, so that these vessels would have been described as "two-deckers" in equivalent English warships.Lemineur, Jean-Claude. ''The Sun King's Vessels'' (1996, A.N.C.R.E.) .

Respect of a patriotic community

Three-deckers held special respect among the local community and the troops who farewelled these ships when they left the harbour. Such patriotism was expressed when HMS ''Britannia'' left Portsmouth bound for active service in the Mediterranean, in October 1840:

References

{{Wiktionary Naval sailing ship types

Respect of a patriotic community

See also

References