USS Constitution - A Tour from Keel to Upper Deck

[Music] well it's the start of july and you might be wondering what an earth track has happened to all your stuff from the trip to america well the answer is it's um all still here i do have all the footage but it's taking a while to sort through when you've shot almost a third of a terabyte of footage so given the time of year and given that some of the footage is now sorted i thought i'd start everybody off with a look at uss constitution now we have already looked at uss constitution before on the channel from an analytical perspective of her battles but nothing beats having a look at the ship itself it was a relatively windy day but hopefully most of the wind noises damped out so let's go and have a look at the day i spent on uss constitution which was the second day of the trip so spoiler alert the next video from the trip will be on uss salem but that won't be for a few more weeks okay so this is day two of the great america tour and we find ourselves still in boston it's a wonderful wonderful day despite the fact we're on roughly the same latitude as the uk the weather is a lot better it is a little windy but clear skies and sun and all that's all good and as you can see behind me we have the second oldest commissioned warship in the world uss constitution of course famous super frigate of the war of 1812 and a variety of other exploits that perhaps go a little bit less well recorded and today i'm going to attempt to do something that no british captain was ever successfully able to do and board the uss constitution so let's go have a look inside and hey no issues with the second amendment just yet so here we are on the upper deck um obviously as a frigate there is no quarter tech no poop deck etc it is flush deck stem to stern and this is what was obviously this one is not a original but this would have been one of constitution's main elements of firepower now on a lot of frigates on the upper deck you would have had light guns nine pounders 12 pounders maybe the odd 18 pounder but this as you can see starts here and the barrel ends just here so it's actually a very short gun and that's because this is a 32 pounder caronade so it's a much much shorter weapon than a cannon doesn't have tremendously long range compared to a long gun which we'll see further down but at short range it can throw a much much heavier ball than the average upper deck gun for the average frigate not even accounting for the fact that constitution is already substantially larger and substantially more heavily built than the average frigate so this is one of the keys to constitutions victories because most of her fights are fought at very close range and very close range this thing has a lot of options not only can you shoot at the enemy with ball um to just smash up their timbers but you can also due to the large volume fire a significant amount of grape shot or some other kind of canister shot to clear the decks of enemy borders which obviously stops people attacking you as much as it assists you in attacking them so very useful the other thing that you might note is that as with most carinades and unlike most cannons these things are not on your traditional four wheeled carriages these are on carriages which are fairly solid you can see you've got a wedge here to allow you to change the elevation of the gun but the actual wheeled part of the gun is these much much smaller wheels and that allows you by means of ropes like this and this handle and these sockets here to adjust the angle of the gun going backwards and forwards so you can shoot an enemy that's slightly after view or slightly four of you instead of just having to wait for them to be directly broadside you can later on see a modified version of this caronade that has a screw thread through here which allows you to elevate it a bit more precisely than the old wooden wedge but you know this works fairly well for the war of 1812. okay so back up there you can see the stars and stripes flying that is the ship's battle ensign so this is a very important part of the ship because that's not only tells you who the ship belongs to which is quite helpful if the paint job hadn't already given that away but this is also how you tell whether the ship is still in action so if a ship was beaten you would either have its colours shot away or lowered and when the colors are no longer there that was the internationally accepted signal and to a certain degree still is that the ship has in fact surrendered you don't need to hoist a white flag or anything like that you can just strike your colours that's literally where the term comes from and so having this thing up there is critically important during battle it's seen as incredibly dishonorable to strike your colours falsely recover yourself and then go back into the fight to the point you could be thrown out of your own navy for doing so because it would undermine the reliability and the honor and the integrity of your entire navy constitution of course never struck her colours to anybody and her flag is still flying as she is of course a commissioned warship the second oldest commissioned warship in the world and the oldest commissioned warship that's still afloat because the only ship that's older is hms victory and of course she's in dry dark okay and just above where the ensign is mounted you can see we have an aft pointing yard which is coming back off of the mizzenmast now this is a very important piece of ship design in the 18th century because four and aft sales which is what most of the sales are mounted on the yards that are perpendicular to the ship's hull which you can see up on up there on the mast those are great for going forwards they're not so great for maneuvering when the wind is anything other than in your aft quarter so these two aft pointing yards allow you to put a very large sail which can then catch the wind from the side which then gives you both control and propulsion when the wind is coming in from odd angles so that helps a ship like constitution to maneuver in all sorts of directions obviously she still can't sail directly into the wind no sailing ship can at this point in history but it means that she can maneuver around her opponents in a way that an enemy that lacks either this particular setup perhaps lacks a sail that of this kind of size wouldn't be able to do of course it is a point of vulnerability because if somebody shoots away the miz and mast and that sale goes away then she lacks a fair bit of agility but the designers weren't entirely stupid they did include for other sales of this type all along the ship's rigging particularly off of the bow sprit but you could as you can see with these lines running from the higher portions of the mast down to the lower portions you could also in a pinch rig similar sails for and aft between the masts and as you can see the other thing that constitution has over victory at the moment is that she is in fact fully rigged so you can see the true beauty of a fully rigged ship of war from the late 18th dash early 19th century there's a lot of rope that needs to be keeping the ships marston yards aloft because this is her source of propulsion all the weight of the guns the crew the ships hull etc all of that has to be pushed through the water and as a frigate she has to move through the water pretty quick and all that force is being transmitted through these masts if they weren't rigged as heavily as they are even though these masts are several feet thick they would snap like matchwood the minute the wind picked up so all this rigging helps keep the mass in place not just when it's under propulsion but also when the ship is pitching and rolling because you can imagine with those fighting platforms up there and the sheer height of it if the ship is rolling that's going to create incredible forces left and right or port and starboard which could result in the mast just snapping off and that was a very significant danger in battle a lot of the time when mass collapsed in battle it wouldn't necessarily be from the enemy shooting the mast through although that could and did happen it could also be from enemies shot having cut enough of the rigging that when the ship healed the mass would just go over with a good blow of wind so definitely something worth seeing but of course um i rather doubt anyone's going to let me climb up there i'd be perfectly willing to try it but i have a suspicion that the health and safety risk assessment would probably be a volume almost equal to constitution's battle record so i have feeling going to be saying well down here on the main deck so this is the ship's well it's spelt gun whale most people call it a gunnel and this is part of the ship's protective system you can see here we've got some netting um you could stuff all sorts of things usually hammocks in here as well now obviously as you can see the ship's sides are quite thick um slightly commonly repeated myth constitution is not built to the specs of a ship of the line her ribbing is a bit closer together than the average frigate so she has the ribbing framework of a ship of the line but the hull thickness although it is quite thick is not quite up to ship of the line standards but to be fair she's a big frigate that's not exactly a mark against her she is still immensely strong and the fact that she's still here is testament to that amongst other things but the purpose of this is as you might imagine to shelter people from incoming fire the ship's built from a mixture of live oak and white oak which is very very tough wood which also helps protect the crew and at long range frigate grade gunfire 12 pounders or 18 pounders could bounce off or embed themselves in the hull but it's not like ironclad armor in the latter part of the 19th century at close range even a 12 or 18 pounder ball will still come through this oak with a lot of splinters it's not a particularly good thing to have happen to you [Music] but you know no armor is perfect the fact that if you like this wooden armor could fail at close range again isn't a mark against constitution the fact that she has it at all and she has that protection at longer to medium ranges is a huge step up above most frigates and this is where her name old ironsides or her nickname old ironsides comes from because it's much much easier to survive a sea battle if you're on one of the six original frigates of which obviously constitution is one without too many injuries and too many deaths amongst your crew when you have this kind of protection going on one of the ways that you can actually tell that this kind of damage at close range did happen is that when you look at constitution's victories java gurier and macedonian being of course the most famous when the british ship is beaten into submission she doesn't immediately take the surrender constitution actually hauls off for a little bit of time to make good her own damage which of course tells you that she had taken damage which a bit of a giveaway there but the main thing is yes she'd taken damage but she didn't take any anywhere near as much damage as the other guy because they were the ones who'd surrendered so it's effectively if you imagine a bar fight if someone's going yeah you know what fine i give up maybe you got them on the floor or whatever just because you take a step back to recover your breath mop a few cuts and bruises that you've got before you step in and go right okay and don't do that again that doesn't mean you lost the fight it just means you know you're being a bit sensible about things and you've got to remember that not only is this part of the ship's protection this is also part of the ship's hull that goes obviously all the way down so only a fool after a battle would immediately start worrying about taking over the other ship when there are potentially holes and other forms of damage in his own ship you know you have this thing has to stay afloat after the battle as well just winning the battle and sinking because you left a hole at the waterline isn't a good thing but obviously she was correctly patched up and sufficiently patched up and was able to tow in quite the number of prizes so here we are at the ship's bow patriotic music apparently obligatory um and what you might notice is a few things one we have here a position for a bow chaser so obviously if you're chasing your opponent your broadside guns not the world's most useful weapons you can when you're pursuing an enemy turn port and starboard and basically weave and fire your broadside but of course that means you're describing a much longer course and given that you're wind driven you may be pulling into areas where the wind isn't propelling you quite as efficiently so you have to have a lot of speed advantage over your opponent to be able to pull that off and given the constitution's main prey are other frigates she might be faster than them she's not that much faster than them that she can easily risk that all the time and so the bow chaser position on most age of sale warships is an absolutely excellent idea because it means you can have a gun here and you can shoot at your opponent with minimal to no course change granted you only have one position here one position on the opposite side but the enemy's going to be similarly restricted with his stern chasers and of course he's already running from you so you don't have to worry about that too much another thing that's quite interesting to note up here on the bow sprit you can see these little steps now obviously there's a little bit of modern anti-skid on the steps themselves but that does give away a bit of a clue and you know some of the pads up there on this yard across at the front there would be or could be another sale and that sale would have to be full unfold managed etc and there's some rigging there as well so that if that got damaged people would have to go up and fix that and you can't just wait to go back into port to sort that out this kind of stuff has to be sorted at the time whilst the ship is at sea and that's where someone would have to go and now there is a modern safety line running up the side but back in the day not only would the ship be moving and pitching and rolling and swaying and potentially people also shooting at you but you'd be running up there without the anti-skid probably in bare feet because you know there's a modicum of safety compared to wearing shoes at the time but you'd have to be running up the bow sprit to do whatever it was the captain needed you to do and then hope that you can make it back again now there is a little bit of more wooden construction here beyond the structural bow of the ship which gives it a bit more of a forward peak but that is as a it's not structural it's just design well i'd say for aesthetic but partly for sea keeping as well so that's the bow here and obviously we've got the this big block and tackle system with a bunch of really nice thick ropes this sets actually going all the way back to the main mast so for reference on most ships at the time which have most ships whether they're frigates or ships of the line they will have three masts so you have the four mast which is the one obviously the forward most masked you have the main mast which is a midships which is usually the biggest mast and then you have the mizzen mast which is usually the aft mast now obviously you could get a four or five mastered ship and then they have other names for that mostly based on early medieval terms which is was the last time that anyone built a warship with more than three mars three mars kind of became the standard but if you only have two masts you are classed as a brig so you're not a ship you're a brig now um and this also explains why on later warships perhaps a world war one a world war ii uh battleship or a cruiser you'll see a mast coming up somewhere around about the bridge or just after the bridge and that'll be the four most that's all understandable perfectly fine but then you see another mast on a iron or steel vessel and it might be right back it'll be before the behind the funnels might actually be you know right back as far as the aft turret and you it'll be called the main mast and you might think why is it the main mast it's right at the back and that's because master always counted from the four from forward so first masters former second master's main master and if you don't have a third master it doesn't matter where that second mast is it's still the main mast and the one thing you don't should be doing is standing before the mask because that usually means someone's about to hit you with a whip [Music] and at the moment we've got sea shanty going so if you can hear that you can try and figure out which one it is anyway this is another 32 pound caronade so you've already seen one of those on the aft starboard quarter but over here we see a long gun and you can immediately tell the difference whereas the carnage barrel basically stops at this netting in its current position this cannon as you can see the carriage is pretty much at the same position aft but firstly the basket of this gun is right at the back of the carriage whereas the basket of the caronade is about two three foot further forward and then you have another three to four foot of gun going past the netting it's hence long gun so this is uh part of the ship's main armament obviously this weapon is a much longer range weapon for a given value of long range it is the age of sale after all and as you can see it's also on a far more traditional naval carriage so big wooden wheels like four of them two slightly larger forward two slightly smaller aft same kind of ropes to restrict the recoil and you can see from the rings there would be if this gun was going into action same with the caronade considerably more ropes you wouldn't just have the one because apart from anything just just this on its own that'll stop the gun going back but gives you no ability to wheel the gun forward again once you've reloaded it so this is this is somewhat reduced compared to its full rope rig constitution's main advantage which we'll see down on the lower gun deck as compared to other frigates wasn't just her speed her size and the material she was built of it was also her armament because the average frigate of that day fifth rate or a sixth rate would carry one fewer guns than she does because she's big but secondly the main guns the long guns of most frigates would either be 12 pounders or 18 pounders some ships would have actually quite small nine pounder almonds although it's very difficult to get a nine pounder armed ship rated as a frigate but 12 and 18 pounders okay fine lots of 12 pounder frigates some 18 pounder frigates but constitutions long guns down on the main gun deck are 24 pounders so they're the same kind of poundage as the guns you'd find on the midship's deck of a ship of the line or possibly sometimes the lowest gun deck of two decker like a third ray and that gives her at long range a much heavier punch than other frigates of the time for the most part there are a few other frigates out there with 24 pounders but you have to build a frigate fairly big and fairly hefty in order to accommodate a 24-pounder and quite frankly most of the big navies at the time france uk spain usually didn't have the time to invest in large numbers of these kinds of super frigates they prefer to have slightly less capable frigates but in much much larger numbers because they could afford that so that's why we have just the one long gun here so this long gun for example would be a bow chaser because it's got the range you wouldn't really bow chase with a carnade but we're going to go down onto the main gun deck and have a look at her main battery and now it's time to head down on to the gun deck so we're now on the lower deck well one deck lower than the main deck so we're on the main gun deck and the sunglasses come off because they find boston sunshine is now safely trapped behind a layer of wooden planking and as you can see we're besides the 24 pounder main armament nice big chunky guns and well as i said on the upper deck this is really what gives constitution its firepower this is this allows you to attack pretty much any other frigate that's out there with a very high chance of success because you just simply outgun them we forget the speed advantages the durability advantages even if constitution was built exactly the same as any other frigate these guns alone will give very significant advantage when it comes to shooting up the enemy because they are so much heavier it doesn't mean she can take on a ship of the line okay so if for those of you thinking oh can constitution take on victory no um these 24 pounders are approximately equivalent to the middle deck battery of hms victory and they transfer it has a third gun deck below that which has 32 pounders which are much heavier even than these and she has a gun deck full gun deck above that and she has an upper deck which would have not quite the same carry armament as we saw up there but it does have even more guns and a couple of sixty eight pounder grenades which you really don't want to mess with just ask blue centaur but still um it would maybe give constitution a fighting chance against a fourth rate ship of the line now the fourth road by the time constitution is in service has kind of gone out of fashion but there are still a number of them 52 gunners 56 gunners and 64 gunners still in various fleets and constitution when she's fully kitted up has almost as many guns and her firepower is probably about equal so very very big frigate fighting very small ship of the line possibility of victory now one of the other things you might notice is if you see videos of me in victory or some other places if you're on the main gun deck you do have to stoop a bit or you have to find a convenient section between beams to stand up in one of the good features of frigates is that because someone's ringing a bell one of the best features about frigates is that because they only have the one gun deck they can afford that gun deck to be a little bit taller anyway and because constitution is as i said before a larger frigate on top of that it means that my six foot nothing of height can quite happily walk straight under the beams without even a risk of clocking my head i mean i've got my glasses on my head and even if i stand under my tiptoes i can't even knock my glasses off so i'm really liking this particular design feature um and you can see on the sides here again like we saw up at the gunnels the size of the ship are pretty darn thick and each of the guns now seems to have a name plate so that's not to help the gunners work out where they should be because you know they know where where they should be they live fight and sleep here but it does help with a bit of familiarity with those weapons uh and you can just see how heavily built the ship is critical importance though looking for and after you can literally see the bow there you could see all the way to the stern there are no bulkheads in the nature tail ship of the line so if water comes in the gun ports you're in trouble but that's another benefit of both being a frigate and being a constitution style super frigate these gun ports are pretty high above the water so the chances of the water shipping in through the gun ports and going down mary rose style are pretty low it also gives you a slight advantage against some ships of the line um the combat between amazon intervatical and waterhook delam comes to mind in the a small ship of the line a 74 for example would not be able to keep its lower gun ports open in heavy seas whereas a frigate could so if you're talking about something like a 74 gunner something like constitution could potentially outgun such a ship of the line if the weather was bad because she'd be able to operate these 24 pounders when a 74 would be stuck with only 12 or 18 pounders on the upper gun deck okay so here we can see the primary stove pretty much the only big stove so this is the ship's galley now whereas on a ship of the line you might find this couple of decks down possibly even lower of course again on a frigate with significantly fewer decks you have to kind of fit everything in as best you can where you can and so in this case it's here in the forward part of the gun deck they would of course put the fire out before any kind of combat because the last thing you need on a wooden ship is a cannonball coming through the side of the ship hitting this thing and kicking a bunch of um boiling hot embers all over the ship what you can see to either side of the galley are these things these are for the anchor cables you can see one of them is kind of loosely wrapped here and there's another one over there and that lets the ship's anchors out through this block which you can see here which has a screw-powered tensioner and out through that green plate that you can see just behind it so that's how you keep the ship at rest and no you're not doing any battleship movie style handbrake turns with them um frankly in most water will be too deep anyway and even if you did it in shallow water the chances are probably the snap the rope or rip these things out of the hull before you did a you know a point turn all be it the if you're ever going to stand a chance of doing it at all without causing massive damage to the ship uh age of sale frigate is probably one of the better candidates but what you can also see down here is another bow chaser position and of course there'll be a matching one on the other side and you can see also the bow splits coming down here so you've only got the two positions on the upper deck which have the best visibility so if you're ranging at long distance those are probably the two that are going to give you the best chances but down here you've got a couple more so perhaps if you get into medium or close range in your chase you can supplement your firepower in theory you could put bow chasers there for the whole chase and try shooting your opponent but one you are slightly lower and two as you can probably appreciate the visibility is nowhere near as good so the chances of you getting accurate shooting from down here are much less than if you're up top um and again you know this is the forward part of the ship that's literally where the ship ends and its guns from here all the way down to the far end so this is the aft section of the gun deck and as you can see it's not entirely the end of the gun deck there are actually gun ports here so all of this furniture which is of course for the ship senior staff would be cleared away in a time of combat in order to allow the ship to bring more firepower to there as you can see it's not a tremendously great amount of the ship if you've seen some of the clips i took on hms victory this entire area for the ship's offices about the size of maybe victory's great cabin but obviously somewhat subdivided so you've got a cot there and you can see some of the glazing that's right up on the stern so constitution another way of telling her apart from british french or spanish-made frigates in the war of 1812 is her stern structure it is quite distinctive most of the european frigates would have a much more rounded top to their sterns constitutions is almost not quite but almost flush flat across the top and that does lend her a very distinctive aft profile and the fact that she painted black and white also helps obviously the british colors by the war of 1812 are a yellow ochre and black the nelson checker the french at this point have just about begun to adopt some kind of uniform color procedure as well although their sides of their hulls are much more mono color the us navy colour scheme at this point black hole with white striping now we pause at this point to allow a tour group to come past and i started trying to record a segment on this rather wonderful display of ammunition um while i was doing that some other tourists saw me looking vaguely presentable and decided of course i must work for the ship and began asking me questions about the ammunition and i couldn't resist giving them what should have been a relatively short lecture on types of age of sale ammunition and i think ended up turning into about a 40-minute discussion of ammunition guns and everything else so yeah poor old cameraman here relegated to the back while he um took the occasional candid camera shot of me talking to a bunch of tourists who had no idea that i didn't actually work for the constitution museum but there you go anyway back on with the regular tour once everyone had uh moved on right so here we have some of the shot that constitution would use you've got round shot 24 pounder round shot fairly standard all-purpose ammunition you can double or triple load it for short-range combat if you really want and of course you have your round shot gauge because if it's been manufactured it's not close to perfectly spherical i mean it's never going to be perfectly spherical but you don't want it to be too oblong because then it might get stuck in the gun barrel and uh yeah well that does bad things because you've effectively then invented a very very large three to five ton pipe bomb and well that never ends well for whoever does that so the shock gauge is always very important you pass that over the shot to make sure it will fit you've got canister shot for your mid mid-range anti-personnel purposes uses smaller balls like this all wrapped up as you see in cloth put on a platform that platform goes in the gun all of this cloth and string disintegrates when you fire the gun these will fly out like a big shotgun blast this will damage rigging punch holes and sails punch holes in people pretty nasty anti-personnel shot you've got your double-headed shot kind of like a barbell you also get double-headed shot that is literally like a barbell with a basically two round shots stuck together this is good at damaging masts very good at damaging mass actually i mean all of this was very good at damaging people as well in various horrific ways but ideally this is what you shoot at a mast star shot again all closed up so it can fit down the barrel when it's fired these will open up hence the name star this particular model as you can see has heavy weights on the ends of the bars other models have don't have these weights will have lesser weights but we'll have more of these and the idea of this is to punch a hole in a ship's sail although again you wouldn't want to be hit by one but if you punch a hole in the ship's sail then you know three four foot hole that's not brilliant okay the the mast or the sail on the mast might be the size of a tennis court so you might think that's not so much a problem but there's a huge amount of energy going into that sail and when that happens the energy that's going through that gut being pushed into that cell by the wind will find a weakness like say the shot you just punched the hole you just punched with a star shot and rip straight through it and that'll blow the sail out so starts weaknesses and the the wind exploits them canister shot your short-range anti-personnel shot no real capability for going through the ship's hull but the fragments kind of like the grape shot being a big shotgun blast the canister shot is an even bigger shotgun blast it almost exclusively for anti-personnel use so this is what you use either to clear the enemy decks before you board them or if they're massing to board you well wipe out the boarding party before they get to you that's always a good idea and then you have the bar shot and this is very good for taking out rigging again would also quite happily clothesline anyone it gets in the way but this will expand out into a very long as it name suggests a series of bars and that will catch wrap around and rip through the ship's rigging and that's good on multiple counts because one well lots of ropes flying around is bad two it means if there's damage to the sails or the mast from any of this stuff if the rigging's cut then the sailors on the enemy ship can't climb the rigging to go and repair it and also as we mentioned when we're looking up up on the upper deck the bar shot if it cuts enough of the rigging then the masts might actually collapse and go over the side anyway now we are one deck lower than the gun deck and as you can see the height of the hull has gone down a bit so now i'm having to shelter between the main beams now as you may recall if you've seen the video on hms unicorn much like hms unicorn where again i was mostly able to stand in the gun deck area i now can't stand one day closer this whole level is a little bit shorter and like the later class you can see this is another area for accommodation so again like the later class there's not enough room on the gun deck for all the crew some of them will live and sleep and fight there but a good chunk of them will be accommodated down here and you can see how the hammocks would be stored when they're not in use and you can see over here how a hammock would be deployed when it is in use and this is a fairly important area of the ship because obviously we're now not quite below fully below the water line but this is inc completely enclosed and this is where a good chunk of the crew are going to spend a good chunk of their time the later and the reason there's so much similarity between the later class i drink commonly in unicorn nowadays and constitution is that to a greater or lesser degree the later class is actually built in response to ships like constitution so the fact that they've got very very similar methods of accommodation very very similar kinds of main battery shouldn't be too much for a surprise especially since by the point that the later class are really undergoing mass production the british are kind of cribbing notes from the uss president okay we are now three decks down in the ship and as you can tell we are rapidly running out of ship this is the part the stern so we've got the mizen mast coming down just there obviously it's also being used as a water storage area um but you can see part of the ship structure so this is one of the part of the ship's framing coming up we've got several of these and you can see these are absolutely massive timbers it's part of what lends the ship so much strength but you can also see how raked the stern is because this is you know yeah this is probably the lowest single continuous deck on the ship but if we're not that close to the stern above us actually directly above us is the end of the gun deck so there's still we're basically pretty much under the divide between the gun deck and the officers quarters and the officers quarters go back a fair distance that way so you know this is very very quickly raking down underwater and this is part of the secret to the constitution speed and the speed of her sister ships when they're properly trimmed the hydrodynamic form of their stern is a lot has a lot sharper rake than a lot of frigates of the time and that helps the water flow of course there's no propeller so but there is a rudder so it also helps the water flow over the rudder which helps them with the their agility because constitution is relatively rare beast in the age of sale in that it is both fast and fairly agile most of the time you could get one but not the other so british ships of the time tend to be more agile french and spanish ships the time tend to be a bit faster you do get the occasional unicorn which can do both but constitution and her sisters when they when they are being properly trimmed actually can do that by design and this is one of the little secrets of it the fact that uh the the hull is so shaped underwater but of course as you can also tell the deck has gotten even lower which is why i'm bringing this to you leaning against the side rather than standing up because even if i am between the main beams here which i am if i stand up that is about as okay so i can stand up vertically if i basically have no head which is not really a situation i particularly like finding myself in so that's right after the constitution let's have a look at a few other bits and pieces down here on the lowest deck where is the precious okay and now we are actually below the last deck we are literally in the void spaces of the constitution um there there is nowhere below here other than probably 15 foot of boston harbor which i'd rather not be in so apologies for the slight noise you might be able to hear but of course they do have the hvac systems going constantly down here for rather obvious reasons but as i say this is literally the lowest you can possibly get in the ship before we were in the lowest part of the decked area but these are the lowest planks of the ship i'm standing with my right foot here on the keel so that's the central spine of the ship that's running after obviously and this is the deck we were on a minute ago just above us you can see the hull raking up um here again we're near the stern and right down here when the ship was in service this is where the ballast would have been this is where the stores would have been and it's not just in terms of water and of course alcohol because the us navy was not dry at this point food some of the ships okay most of the ships rats would also live down here as of course with any ships cats or dogs whose job it was to keep make sure the rat population was kept under control as you would have seen in other age of sail ships that we visited spare rope storage ammunition so cannon shot etc would be stored near the guns but there would be more down here in magazines and of course the other thing would be down here well not literally where i'm standing now but just above us and just a bit forward would be the main magazine where the gun powder is stored because well it's the only safe place for it to be stored so this deck and the well this void space and the deck we were above are below the water line and there's a very very good reason for keeping all that gunpowder down here i mean obviously apart from the fact you need to use it to you know shoot the guns but a ship like this might be carrying dozens of tons of gunpowder so a ship like this if it's carrying dozens of tons of gunpowder in the main magazine you do not want that to catch fire it catches fire this is just so much hope streams and splinters so it has to be kept below the water it has to be kept safe of course the iron ammunition has no explosion risk you can store that wherever you like but the gun powder definitely has to be kept down here and copper line magazine pretty much like hms victory people would run the charges up through a kind of airlock system it's not actually an airlock system but it's the closest modern equivalent we can think of or maybe you call it an interlock system to make sure that no sparks get in there and uh well if one ton of gunpowder can destroy the houses of parliament 30 tons of gunpowder yeah you'd be lucky to pick up bits of the master a mile away and of course the fact that we're here means that never happened because unlike certain people the u.s navy crew of this ship understood magazine safety procedures and speaking of magazines the crew were incredibly helpful during our tour of the ship and they pointed out where one of the ship's magazines actually was so this and also allowed us in now as you can see this is of course i said copper lined everything is copper lined except for the modern light bulb there and this is at one of the extreme ends of the ship and of course being deep down you can tell it's just a little claustrophobic we're basically taking these pictures lying on our sides and hence that's why i didn't shoot any live video in the magazine it would have been a hilariously undignified way of talking to people and you might notice there is quite a lot of this white paste on there that's because they're in the process of cleaning it so you can see in some areas where it has been cleaned somewhere is where patina has built up and some areas where this cleaning chemical is currently in the process of cleaning up existing patina and of course in the magazine you want to store anything that might go boom so there'll be boxes of grenades as well as fuses for those grenades and as you can see various kinds of powder this would obviously have to be broken down into individual charges but it will be stored long term in these barrels deep in the magazines deep into the ship the copper sheeting of the magazine would of course be accompanied by the use of copper and wooden tools absolutely no iron permitted in any way shape or form to avoid striking sparks and that would allow you to safely handle the gunpowder and turn it into bag chargers ready for use you can also see the absolute deepest and oldest part of the ship just around this area so this is part of the original keel and original planking as you can see narrowing quite significantly at this end of the ship where this magazine is located and just outside the magazine you have quills which are useful for the priming of the guns various tools you can see most of those there are copper and a few that aren't wouldn't be allowed in the magazine itself with some empty charge bags and they've got scoops and so forth a spare powder bag and of course some pre-made charges ready to go and the different colors would signify as far as i was going to understand do the different guns that those charges would then be used in now exiting the ship we also found this delightful little creature so this is the subject of many memes online um from people who have taken photos of it or found photos of it over at various periods this is constitution's own little pet tug boat yes it is a u.s navy vessel and it is the most adorable towing vessel on the planet it lives just to the starboard of constitution now i was there thinking to myself well this has been a really successful day we've toured constitution from top to bottom well with the exception of the actual fighting tops the crew have been absolutely wonderful now i should go and get myself a u.s constitution baseball cap but then they mentioned that they had something special in mind for me okay i thought this should be good let's head back on the ship i was not expecting what was about to happen okay everyone here we are after hours aboard uss constitution and as you might notice this gun looks a little bit more active than all the others because we are going to fire it and uh well i'd say helping me fire it to be honest he knows what he's doing a lot more than i do hey everyone i'm gmt nieves it's graduate second class petty officer navas in the united states navy i'm a gunners mate right here in my hand i have a 40 millimeter 200 gram round that i'm going to be loading into our mark 11 mod 2 saluting battery the purpose of this is to execute evening colors when we bring down our american flag and then for all the lost military members and not only us the uss constitution brings down our american flag but the sound of this gun also the nps national park services and coast guard base are going to listen to this this gun to uh execute their colors as well colors is at sunset evening colors at sunset and the time today april 10 2022 is 7 20 p.m right now what i'm doing i'm checking my site sites clear i'm checking my sites prior and the gutters mate you always make sure that gun is clear and safe before you mess with it so i have a live round i'm going to insert it into the swing battery i have permission to fire on the command batteries release and now the gun is loaded we have two minutes to colors i'm going to check again at one minute the colors make sure the sights are clear at 30 seconds and that's standby and uh the wonderful people for constitution have have let me have the great honor of actually firing the gun today so uh at the command i shall fire the weapon absolutely which will be the first time i've fired a gun of this caliber before this is a like again a 40 millimeter 200 gram round this gun has a concussion radius clear sure i'm doing is checking 30 degrees left right of the barrel and 100 feet down just for safe measures and i'm looking for personnel in the water kayakers small boats anything here the sights aren't clear i hope this cdm now and we'll hold out on fire until we get that clear away [Music] there's my airport one ceo stand by [Music] [Music] wow [Music] oh [Music] [Music] and that concluded an absolutely wonderful day aboard uss constitution again huge huge thanks to the uh uss constitution group both sorting that out and obviously giving me the honor to fire the gun that signals colours for that particular day it was certainly something i wasn't expecting but something i hugely enjoyed and of course respect and of course i was able to therefore add my own signature to the book of uss constitution gunners so that's a little permanent record which is quite fun so there you have it a quick look aboard uss constitution the second oldest commissioned warship in the world and the oldest floating commissioned warship in the world uh highly recommend you go visit her in boston harbour there is also a fletcher class destroyer the casino young just over behind her in this picture also definitely worth a visit although we only got to see it from an external perspective because there was limited time of course the world's cutest tugboat there down to the right and the uss constitution museum so it's definitely a full day out if you're able to get to central boston so with one ship down let's get on with the rest of the america trip over the course of the year that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 405,853

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Drachinifel, There and Drach Again, USS Constitution, War of 1812, Boston, HMS Java, HMS Guireierre

Id: YTsdaQBJONg

Length: 50min 16sec (3016 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022