Il6 TIMBER AND TIMBER TREES. [CHAP. 



of this ship attracted much attention at the time, and it 

 was believed that, having been built in close proximity 

 to the New Forest, only winter-felled timber had been 

 used in her construction. This is said to be borne out 

 by the fact that the authorities at Portsmouth, about 

 1717 or 1718, offered, as an encouragement for the 

 delivery of winter-fqlled Oak timber to that yard, an 

 addition of* ;^S per cent, to the contractor to compen- 

 sate him for the loss of the bark. The state of the 

 materials when the ship was taken to pieces confirmed 

 the conjecture which had been then formed, as the iron 

 fastenings, above the water-line, were in general good, 

 proving the absence of acrid juices in the timber. 



"In the year 1755, Mr. Barnard, of Deptford, con- 

 tracted to build a sixty-gun ship, named the Achilles, 

 for His Majesty's service. She was completed in 1757, 

 and taken to pieces in 1784. It was not known that 

 any peculiar circumstances attended the construction of 

 this ship, until Mr. Barnard was summoned to attend a 

 Committee appointed by the House of Commons, in 

 March, 1771, to consider how His Majesty's navy might 

 be better supplied with timber. He then gave it as his 

 opinion that the method to be observed in felling timber 

 should be by barking in the spring, and not to fell it 

 until the succeeding winter, and added that he built the 

 Achilles, man-of-war, in 1757, of timber felled in that 

 manner. 



"The Montague, launched in 1779, was built of 

 winter-felled timber, and its superiority is forcibly at- 

 tested by the fact that she had only one frame-timber 



* A much higher premium than ;^s P" cent, in addition to the contract 

 price of spring-felled Oak timber was offered and paid by the Government 

 a few years since for winter-felled Oak, without, however, being able to 

 obtain more than a fraction of the quantity required for the royal dockyards. 



