The word battleship is shortened from ship of the line of battle, a ship stout enough to stand in the battle line. Its ancestor was the carrack, developed in Portugal by fusing the tough North Sea cog with the fighting utility of the Mediterranean galley. Carracks carried towering castles fore and aft, source of the word forecastle, where archers shot down and crews dropped heavy stones onto enemy decks, because the goal was to capture ships, not sink them. England’s Mary Rose, built around 1510, grew from 78 to 91 guns and carried over 200 sailors, 185 soldiers, and 30 gunners before sinking at the Battle of the Solent in 1545, and the Henry Grace à Dieu, built at Woolwich from 1512 to 1514, was among the first English two deckers with watertight gun ports.

Lower gun ports made the broadside possible, and in the 17th century Dutch and English fleets adopted single file battle lines to avoid friendly fire, shrinking castles by the time of Sovereign of the Seas in 1637. Only ships strong enough to trade broadsides joined the line, and the sweet spot proved to be the French designed 74. After capturing L’Invincible in 1747, Thomas Slade and William Bateley studied its lines and produced the Dublin and Bellona classes. Steam and the screw propeller arrived with France’s Napoleon in 1850, but explosive shells at Sinop in 1853 and the ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862 ended the wooden battle fleet.

• Razees were two deckers with the top deck cut off, like HMS Indefatigable under Sir Edward Pellew.
• Spain’s Santísima Trinidad grew to 140 guns on four decks.
• The Ottoman Mahmudiye of 1829 mounted 128 guns with a crew of almost 1,300.
• France’s Valmy of 1847 was so unstable it needed wooden stabilizers below the waterline.
• HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, is the world’s oldest commissioned warship, preserved at Portsmouth.