Deathwatch beetle threat to celebrated British warship

Dean Macpherson
File: Passengers wait to get on the Gautrain in Pretoria. 
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LONDON – HMS Victory has survived the cannonballs of Napoleon’s navy, being rammed by another warship, a World War II bomb, even UK navy plans to scrap her.
But nearly 260 years after it was launched, Victory — emblem of British maritime heritage and scene of naval hero Horatio Nelson’s death during the Battle of Trafalgar — is facing another equally deadly threat: The deathwatch beetle.
The 104-gun warship is undergoing a £45-million refit, which is one of the biggest of its kind carried out.
Visited each year by over 350,000 people in Portsmouth Dockyard on England’s southern coast, Victory’s huge renovation follows the unwelcome discovery that much of the wooden structure was affected by rot.
Shipwright surveys found that rain water had caused decay and created food for the dreaded beetles.
Without urgent action Victory would have continued to degrade, ending in “catastrophic structural failure”, conservation project manager Simon Williams told AFP.
Visitors to the ship currently find it’s middle section encased in scaffolding to allow a team of shipwrights to painstakingly replace parts of the “frames” — described as the vessel’s ribs.
After that “replanking” will see it given a new water-tight outer layer.
Project managers are also consulting with experts at the University of Southampton to ensure modern materials are employed where possible to provide maximum longevity.
Once work on the middle section of the ship is finished, shipwrights will repeat the process on the bow and stern.
Other work will see the masts conserved and the entire ship re-rigged to return Victory to its previous glory.
It is not the first time Victory has been “saved” from neglect.
 
Its story is inextricably intertwined with that of Admiral Lord Nelson, who masterminded a string of naval victories over the French culminating in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar.
The battle in which he died defeating the combined French and Spanish fleet ended the threat of invasion by France under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. It earned Nelson national hero status.
At his funeral at London’s St Paul’s cathedral his coffin was carried by six fellow admirals and thousands lined the streets.
The 51-metre Nelson’s Column monument erected in his memory still towers over Trafalgar Square in the heart of the city.
The last time Victory underwent a revamp on the current scale was in 1814.
A “Save the Victory” campaign, spearheaded by the Society for Nautical Research, in 1922 also led to major work and it was opened as a museum six years later.
For nearly a century, visitors have been able to immerse themselves in what Williams calls the “really visceral experience” of what it would have been like to be an eighteenth century sailor.