A Visit to the Temeraire in 1806

Date Posted: 18/01/2010

Mr Giles Laurent has kindly got in touch with a great piece concerning the Temeraire in 1806 as she lay at Portsmouth.

An ancestor of his visited the ship in 1806, aged seventeen, and wrote  about her experience in her diary.

‘It was a melancholy thing to see the ravages made by the Enemy (her mother was from a leading French Hugenot family) one of the largest balls was still sticking in the side of the ship having done much mischief in passing.  We were shown the marks of the blood on some of the beams.’ 

She goes on to describe the ship’s interior and accommodation and the dockyard with its new steam machinery.