hi rich,you live next door to the (true home)of the victory. joking aside,as far as I can rember the partitions were taken down for battle,and 6 canons were employed in the cabin,I expect someone can clarify,eh mike?

Hi Karl and Rich

How could I resist? When a ship went to action stations each of the gun decks became one long fighting space virtually from stem to stern. This is why 18th century sailing ships were particularly vunerable when shots were fired through their stern windows or towards their bows(known as raking the ship), because the projectile could sweep the length of the gun deck doing considerable damage on the way, particularly to soft material such as the bodies of the gun crews!

Cabin partitions were either taken down by knocking out wedges and stored in the hold together with the officer's possessions and furniture or in some cases the partitions were hinged from the deckhead(ceiling??) and swung upwards out of the way and secured.

The officers shared their small cabins with a 24 pdr each (6 of these). The Admiral's day cabin which stretched right across the stern windows had no cannon but the dining room had four long 12 pdrs. The captain had four cannon in his accomodation. I got these figures from McKay.

While looking this up I came across a website which I don't remember seeing before on this forum. http://www.stvincent.ac....797/Victory/cabins.html

This website was originally built by students at St Vincents College supervised by an old acquaintance of mine, Peter Milford. It represents an excellent tour of the ship from a few years ago before the official website was anything like as good as it is today. It's well worth a browse.

Mike T