Frigate - The Relentless Hunter That Ruled the High Seas

[00:00:00]On the morning of June the 1st, 1813, the hills above Boston Harbor were packed with spectators. They had brought picnics. The local authorities had already reserved dock space for the anticipated prize. A captured British warship to be paraded in triumph. And somewhere in the city, a celebratory banquet was being laid out in advance of Captain James Lawrence's return. The crowd had every reason to expect a show.

[00:00:24]Because in the eight months since the United States had gone to war with Britain, American frigots had done something that nobody on earth had thought possible. They had beaten the Royal Navy repeatedly in open single combat. And they had done it so convincingly that the British Admiral Ty had privately ordered its captains to avoid engaging American frigots one-on-one. What they watched instead in less than 15 minutes was one of the most complete and savage defeats in the history of naval warfare. The Chesapeake came apart under disciplined British gunnery. Her wheels shot away, her captain mortally wounded, her crew overwhelmed by borders before the smoke had settled. Lawrence was carried below, uttering the words that would echo through American naval memory for two centuries. Don't give up the ship. The ship was given up. And the crowd on the hills, who had arrived with their lunches and their confidence, watched the British sail their prize into the Atlantic and north toward Halifax. The frigot gets remembered as the glamour ship of the age of sail, the swift romantic raider, the vessel of adventure and prize money and young captains making their names. That image is not entirely wrong, but it misses what the frigot actually was. A precision instrument built around a single strategic calculation. The most versatile and hardest worked warship in any navy, capable of doing things that no other vessel in the fleet could do and doing them alone thousands of miles from the nearest friendly port. This video is the full story of how that ship came to exist, what it actually did, and why the 11 minutes off Boston Harbor on that summer morning tell you more about the age of sail than almost any other event in the entire period. If you want history that actually holds up, subscribe. I put one of these out every week. To understand why the frigot mattered, you have to start with the system that defined it. Because the Royal Navy in the 18th century did not think in terms of ship types the way we might today. It thought in terms of rates, a formal hierarchy of fighting power that told every captain in the fleet exactly where his vessel stood relative to every other vessel afloat.

[00:02:25]And the number that mattered most was guns. The first rate carried 100 guns or more across three full decks and required a crew of around 800 men. The second rate ran between 80 and 98. The third rate, the workhorse of the line of battle, typically mounted 64 to 74.

[00:02:42]These were the ships that actually decided fleet engagements, the ones admirals maneuvered for position and committed to the formal line. And they were so expensive, so difficult to replace, and so central to national security that the Admiral Ty treated them the way a chess player treats his most powerful pieces with enormous care, rarely risking them independently, and never sending them somewhere a smaller, cheaper ship could do the job instead.

[00:03:08]The frigot sat at fifth rate, which meant between 32 and 44 guns arranged on a single continuous gun deck. And that last detail is the whole point. Previous small warships at the start of the 1700s had carried their guns on two decks, which sounds like more firepower, but created a serious structural problem.

[00:03:27]The lower port sat close enough to the waterline that in any kind of seastate, opening them to fire risked flooding the ship, which meant the lower battery was frequently useless. in exactly the conditions when a fast independent cruiser most needed to fight. The Frigot solved this by concentrating all its guns on one elevated deck high enough above the water to operate in almost any weather and then using the lower deck entirely for crew accommodation and storage, moving it down close to the water line where it reduced the amount of hull exposed above the surface and made the ship dramatically easier to handle under sail. The result was a vessel that could carry a respectable broadside 6 months of stores and a crew of between 200 and 340 men into any ocean on Earth, stay there for months without support, and move fast enough to either run from a ship of the line or chase down virtually anything smaller.

[00:04:19]The 1719 Royal Navy establishment had tried to codify small warship design, laying out standard fifth rates with 30 to 40 guns on two decks, but those vessels were short, slow, and clumsy compared to what was coming. And within two decades, the type would be made obsolete by a single ship built in breast by a French naval constructor whose name almost nobody outside maritime history has ever heard. What the rating system could not capture and what made the frigot genuinely different from every other vessel in the fleet was the combination of reach and independence. Ships of the line were too valuable to operate alone. Sloops and Briggs were too small and too lightly armed to handle the full range of tasks that a naval war required. The frigot was the vessel that lived in the space between those two constraints. Powerful enough to fight almost anything it was likely to meet. fast enough to escape anything it could not beat and self-sufficient enough to operate for months without fleet support. That profile made it the most useful ship any admiral could possess. And as the 18th century wore on and the wars between European powers spread across every ocean on the globe, the demand for frig consistently outran the capacity to build them. The ship that defined everything came out of a political crisis, which is often how the best military technology arrives. In the early 1740s, France faced a familiar strategic problem. The Royal Navy was larger, better funded, and built around a doctrine of fleet engagement that France could not match gun for gun. The French minister responsible for rebuilding the Navy, the Comp de Morpa, made a deliberate decision to stop trying. Rather than competing directly in ships of the line, he would rebuild around speed, reach, and economic disruption, attacking British trade through a strategy the French called gerus, meaning war by raiding, using fast independent vessels to strangle the commerce that fed the British war machine. To do that effectively, he needed a new kind of ship. And he found the man to build it in a constructor at the breast naval yard named Bla1 Olivier. What Olivier produced in 1741, a vessel called the Med. looks in retrospect like one of those rare moments when a single design decision changes an entire field. He took the standard two- deck format of contemporary small warships and made one structural change. He designated the upper deck as the main loadbearing one rather than the lower, which meant it was strong enough to carry a full battery of 26 8 pounder guns high enough above the surface to operate in all weathers without risk of flooding. The lower deck was stripped of guns entirely and pushed down toward the waterline as crew accommodation and storage, which reduced the ship's topside profile, lowered its center of gravity, and transformed its handling qualities almost overnight. The Mday was weatherly, meaning she held her course well in a crosswind. She was fast, and she was consistently armed, able to fight in sea states that would have forced an older small warship to close its lower ports and go essentially unarmed. The mantra that spread through French naval thinking after the Mayday entered service captured the logic precisely. She could outrun any ship she could not defeat and defeat any ship she could not outrun. The French Navy ordered 30 frigots built directly to her lines and the design spread fast because in war the fastest way to acquire a proven hole form is to capture one.

[00:07:37]British naval constructors spent much of the mid- 18th century taking lines off captured French frig and building copies, gradually adapting the French proportions to British construction standards, which favored stronger framing and deeper holds at some cost to the pure speed the French achieved through mathematically calculated hull shapes. By the 1770s, French yards were building frigates capable of 14 knots in the right conditions. speeds arrived at not by instinct but by the earliest applications of hydrodnamic theory to warship design and that gap between French speed and British structural conservatism would create real tactical problems that the Royal Navy spent decades trying to solve. The other thing the Med success did was establish the frigot as the vessel of choice for the privateeering economy that ran alongside formal naval warfare throughout the 18th century. A private captain with a letter of mark, meaning a government license to raid enemy shipping, operating a well-found frigot could become extraordinarily wealthy in a short time.

[00:08:35]And the prospect of that wealth attracted exactly the kind of aggressive, skilled, risk tolerant officer the type demanded. The culture that grew up around frigate command, bold, independent, oriented toward action and prize money rather than the slow, deliberate choreography of fleet warfare, produced some of the most capable naval officers of the century and also as we'll come to some of its most consequential tactical decisions.

[00:09:00]The Mayday did not just give the world a better ship. It gave the world a particular kind of captain to sail it.

[00:09:06]The frigot's independence was its defining quality in commerce raiding and patrol work. But inside a fleet engagement, it served a completely different function, one that Nelson understood better than almost any other admiral of his era, and complained about with a regularity that his subordinates found exhausting. "I am most exceedingly anxious for more frigots," he wrote to the Admiral Ty in 1804, during the long Mediterranean chase that preceded Trafalga, and he had written nearly the same sentence dozens of times before, because frigots were the eyes of the fleet in a way that nothing else could replicate. The problem a fleet admiral faced in the age of sail was fundamentally one of information. A squadron of ships of the line moved slowly, communicated by flag signals that required line of sight, and could not send its heaviest vessels ahead to scout without risking them against an unknown enemy force. A frigot could range 50 or 100 miles ahead of the main body, identify what was coming, and be back with a report before the fleet had cleared the horizon. Its speed made it a reconnaissance platform in a way the great battleship simply could not be.

[00:10:10]And in an era when the difference between victory and catastrophic surprise could come down to whether an admiral knew his enemy's position 2 hours earlier or 2 hours later, that capability was worth more than its weight in additional broadside. During a fleet engagement itself, the frigots stayed to Windward. Clear of the gun smoke that reduced visibility to almost nothing inside the line of battle and served as signal repeating stations, taking the flagship's flag hoists and reflying them where every captain in the line could see them. This sounds like clerical work, but it was genuinely critical. Without it, orders from the admiral could simply disappear into the smoke, and ships in the thick of a close engagement had no way of knowing whether they were following a coherent plan or fighting blind. At Trfalga in October 1805, four British frigots under Captain Henry Blackwood performed this function for the entire duration of the action.

[00:11:02]And then when the battle was over and a severe Atlantic storm began building from the southwest, they took on a third role that saved the lives of hundreds of men. Both of Nelson's first rates, HMS Victory and HMS Royal Sovereign, were so badly damaged in the action that they could not be sailed safely in the deteriorating conditions. And it was frigots that took them under tow and held them off a dangerous leashore through the worst of the storm. Without that intervention, there is a serious argument that both ships would have been lost with most of their surviving crews.

[00:11:35]The frigots saved the prizes, too, though the storm ultimately claimed a number of the captured French and Spanish vessels before they could be brought into port. There was also a formal convention governing the frigot's place in fleet actions that revealed something important about how 18th century naval warfare understood proportionality. It was considered poor etiquette and in practice almost never done for a ship of the line to fire on an enemy frigot that had not fired first, even in the middle of an open fleet engagement. The logic was straightforward. A frigot could not seriously damage a first rate, and a first rate could destroy a frigot with a single broadside. So engaging one was not a military act so much as an execution, and the norms of the period treated it accordingly. A frigot present at a fleet action was in an almost paradoxical position, genuinely useful to its own side, visible to the enemy, and protected by a shared understanding that it existed in a different category of risk than the ships doing the actual fighting. That protection had limits, and in the cutting out operations and single ship actions that occupied most of a frigot's working life, there was nothing to shelter behind but speed, gunnery, and the quality of the captain's judgment. The war the frigot fought most of the time was not the war of fleet engagements and admirals dispatches. It was an economic war conducted ship by ship across thousands of miles of open ocean. And the mechanism that drove it was one of the most effective incentive systems ever built into a military institution, the prize court. When a frigot captain captured an enemy merchant vessel or warship, the prize did not belong to the crown. It belonged in carefully aortioned shares to the officers and crew who took it. adjudicated by an Admiral T court that assessed the value of the ship and its cargo and issued a formal condemnation order distributing the proceeds. The admiral commanding the station took an eighth share simply for being in theoretical command of the waters where the capture occurred.

[00:13:28]Whether or not he had been anywhere near it, the captain received another eighth.

[00:13:32]The remaining shares cascaded down through the officers and crew according to rank with ordinary seaman receiving the smallest fractions of a total that could on a good capture amount to more money than they would otherwise see in a decade of service. A frigot captain who spent his commission taking prizes rather than patrolling empty ocean could return home wealthy enough to buy a country estate and some did exactly that. Naval historian Nam Roger in his definitive study of the Royal Navy, the command of the ocean documents cases where a single successful cruise produced prize money equivalent to 15 or 20 years of a captain's base salary. and the Naval Encyclopedia records at least one occasion where two British captains intercepted a Spanish treasure convoy and took prizes whose value represented by contemporary estimates roughly 500 years of combined wages for the officers involved all in a single action. By mid1 1813, according to records compiled by prize court historians, US frigot operations had destroyed or captured ships and cargos valued at roughly $5 million, driven up insurance premiums on North Atlantic routes by between 10 and 30%, and forced the Admiral T to divert more than 100 Royal Navy warships from other duties to convoy protection work that those ships had not been assigned to before the war began. The frigot's value as a commerce raider was not measured in the battles it fought, but in the economic dislocation it caused simply by existing and being active in waters where enemy trade moved. The captains who ran these operations understood that the weather gauge, the upwind position, was the key to everything in independent frigot work.

[00:15:09]Because it gave you the choice of whether to engage or disengage, which meant that a well-andled frigot could almost always dictate the terms of any encounter. You could pursue a fleeing merchantman with the wind behind you or hold the upwind position against a superior enemy and run before he could close the range. Prize law required that captures be adjudicated in a neutral or homeport, which meant a successful raider needed to manage not just the fighting, but the logistics of getting prizes to court before a recapture or a storm intervened. and frigate captains who handled that administrative dimension. Well, tended to accumulate wealth considerably faster than those who simply fought well, but lost their prizes at sea before the paperwork was done. For the ordinary sailor, the prize money trickled down through so many hands and so many fractions that the sums were rarely life-changing, but they were real, and they provided a material incentive for the kind of aggressive, attentive seammanship that kept a frigot crew sharp through months of patrol work where nothing happened at all. The prize money and the glory were real, but they acrewed to a relatively small number of people, and the men who actually sailed the frigots lived inside conditions that the official record of fleet actions and captains dispatches almost never described. Honestly, a typical fifth rate frigot ran between 240 and 340 men inside a hole roughly 140 ft long and 38 ft wide, which works out to something between 4 and 6 ft of living space per person. Once you subtract the guns, the rigging, the stores, the magazine, the carpenters's walk, the surgeon's cockpit, and every other claim on the interior that the ship's function made before the crew's comfort was considered at all. They ate salt beef and ship's biscuit. The biscuit so reliably infested with weevils that experienced sailors learned to tap it on the table before eating, knocking the weevils out.

[00:17:01]Though whether this was from genuine fidiousness or simply preference for the texture is a matter the historical sources do not resolve. Fresh water was rationed and frequently foul. The standard daily ration included a gallon of beer or an equivalent in spirits, not as a luxury, but as a practical substitute for water that could not be trusted to stay drinkable across a six-month cruise. A significant portion of the crew on any given voyage had not chosen to be there. Press gangs operated in Britishport cities from roughly the mid-7th century through to 1850, seizing men with seafaring experience and sometimes without it and delivering them to ships that needed crew. The practice peaked during the 18th century's near continuous sequence of major wars. When the Royal Navy expanded so rapidly that voluntary recruitment could not keep pace, the men pressed into service had no meaningful recourse and no guaranteed right of return at the end of a commission. And the resentment this generated ran through the lower decks of the fleet in ways that captains managed with varying degrees of skill and brutality. But the single largest killer was none of that. It was not the guns, not the storms, not the press gangs violence, and not even the floggings that punctuated shipboard discipline. It was disease. And specifically for the first three centuries of deep ocean sailing, it was scurvy. a condition so prevalent and so destructive that researchers now estimate it killed at least 2 million sailors between 1500 and the early 19th century. The mechanism was simple and the cure once understood was equally simple. Scurvas caused by the absence of vitamin C and a sailor on a diet of salt meat and biscuit cut off from fresh fruit and vegetables for more than 2 months at sea would begin showing symptoms within about 68 days. Men would start dying after roughly 84. On the longest voyages before the cause was understood, entire crews were lost to it. Commodore George Anson's circumnavigation of 1740 to 1744 began with six ships and around 1,900 men. By the time the squadron staggered back to Britain, scurvy and related deprivation had reduced that number to fewer than 500 survivors. The solution came from a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind, who conducted what is often described as the first controlled clinical trial in medical history aboard HMS Salsbury in 1747, demonstrating that citrus juice cured scurvy within days. It took the Admiral nearly 50 years to act on it. In 1795, largely through the persistent lobbying of physician Gilbert Blaine, the Royal Navy finally issued lemon juice as a daily ration across the fleet, and the mortality rate from scurvy collapsed almost immediately. By the time of Trfalga a decade later, British crews were measurably healthier than their French and Spanish opponents, who had not yet adopted the same measure. And some naval historians argue that this health differential contributed as meaningfully to British naval dominance in the Napoleonic period as any tactical or material advantage. The ship that ruled the seas did so partly because its men were, by the brutal standards of the age, slightly less likely to have their teeth fall out before the enemy came into range. The gap between French frigate design and British frigate design had been a running problem for the Royal Navy since the Mday and by the second half of the 18th century it had become an institutional embarrassment.

[00:20:21]French constructors were working from hydrodnamic principles that British yards had been slow to adopt.

[00:20:28]Calculating hull forms mathematically to minimize water resistance rather than relying on established proportions and the accumulated intuition of the master ship rights. and the results were consistently faster ships. 59 French frigots built between 1777 and 1790 were capable of 40 knots in good conditions.

[00:20:47]A speed that British contemporaries of the same nominal rating struggled to match. And the standard British response to this problem was to capture a French frigot, take her lines off with careful measurements, and build copies, sometimes with modifications for the heavier British construction standards that added structural strength at the cost of some of the originals performance. The British Admiral's conservatism in design was not simply institutional stubbornness. There were genuine reasons to favor Proven. Robust construction over experimental speed. A frig that was slightly slower but less likely to spring a mast in a North Atlantic gale had real operational advantages over a flyer that needed frequent dockyard attention. But conservatism has costs and the cost here was a fleet of fifth rates that were consistently outpaced by their French counterparts in the kind of long-d distanceance pursuit work that commerce raiding and blockade running demanded.

[00:21:41]By the 1790s, the Royal Navy was building frigots based on 1780 vintage designs. At a moment when French and American yards were pushing the boundaries of what a wooden warship hull could do, the Americans entered this arms race from a position of deliberate ambition. When Congress authorized the construction of six frigots in 1794, the naval constructor Joshua Humphre argued successfully for ships that would be heavier, longer, and more powerfully armed than any comparable vessel in any European Navy. vessels that could defeat a standard frigot and outrun a ship of the line. The result was a class that included USS Constitution, USS United States, and USS President, each carrying 24 pounder long guns on their main battery, where British frigots of nominally equivalent rating carried 18 pounders. The difference mattered enormously in practice. A 24 pounder threw a ball that was a third heavier at higher velocity with a range advantage that meant an American heavy frig could hit a British opponent before the British guns could reach back.

[00:22:42]Constitution sides were so densely constructed with alternating layers of live oak and white oak framing that British shot was observed bouncing off her hull during the engagement with HMS Gerriè in August 1812, which is how she acquired the nickname that has followed her for two centuries, old iron sides.

[00:23:00]Gerrier was destroyed in the action in under 30 minutes. Her masks gone, her hull shattered below the waterline. The captain forced to surrender a vessel so damaged that Constitution's crew could not sail her as a prize and burned her instead. HMS Java followed in December of the same year, fought to destruction off the coast of Brazil. HMS Macedonian was taken by USS United States in October and became the only British frigot of the war sailed into an American port as a prize. The shock inside the Admiral T was genuine and severe. A navy that had grown accustomed to dominance in single ship actions suddenly found its frigots outmatched by a design philosophy it had not taken seriously. The British response characteristically was to study captured American vessels and start building heavier. HMS and Demian, already the fastest ship in the Royal Navy by that point, had been built by copying a captured French hull and improving on it. And in trials, she recorded 14.4 four knots, the highest verified speed achieved by any sailing warship in the age of sail. She would eventually engage USS President in January 1815 in one of the last significant frigot actions of the period, holding her long enough for two other British vessels to come up and force a surrender. The arms race had by then produced ships on both sides that bore only a passing resemblance to the vessel Blaze Olivier had drawn at breast in 1741.

[00:24:19]Heavier, more powerfully armed, faster in ideal conditions, and crewed by men who understood from four decades of accelerating competition exactly what the type could do when it was handled well. The string of American victories in 1812 had done something to the Royal Navy that battlefield defeats rarely managed. It had introduced doubt. The service that had broken the combined Franco Spanish fleet at Trfalga 7 years earlier that had blockaded the French coast for the better part of two decades with a consistency that amounted to strategic strangulation suddenly found itself reading dispatches that described its frigots being systematically taken apart by an opponent it had not fully respected. The Admiral T's private instruction to avoid single combat with American heavy frigots was a rational response to a real tactical problem. But it circulated through the fleet like a slow poison because a navy that believes it cannot fight tens over time to find that it cannot. Captain Philip Broke of HMS Shannon had spent six years making sure that particular doubt would not infect his ship. Broke was unusual among frigot captains of his era in treating gunnery as a technical discipline rather than a matter of courage and volume. and the training regime he ran aboard Shannon between 1806 and 1813 was unlike anything standard in the Royal Navy. His crews drilled at the guns every single day at a time when most captains exercised their gun crews perhaps once a week and considered that sufficient. He installed tangent sights on his cannon precision aiming devices that most ships did not carry. and he developed a system of firing by individual aim rather than by broadside ripple, which meant that each gun captain was responsible for placing a shot accurately rather than simply touching off his piece when the ship rolled to the correct angle. By June 1813, Shannon's crew could sustain an accurate rate of fire that was effectively without parallel in either navy. Broke's written challenge to USS Chesapeake's commander, Captain James Lawrence, was a document that managed to be simultaneously chivalous and coldly tactical, proposing a formal single combat between the two frigots at a time and place of Lawrence's choosing. With both sides free of interference from other vessels, Lawrence sailed before the letter reached him, but he sailed anyway on the morning of June 1st, out of Boston Harbor and into the engagement that the crowd on the hills above the bay had gathered to watch. Lawrence was an aggressive and genuinely skilled officer, fresh from a successful cruise in USS Hornet. But Chesapeake was newly commissioned with a crew that had been together for less than 2 weeks, many of them strangers to each other and to the ship. The engagement lasted between 11 and 15 minutes, depending on which account you read, and it was decided in the first two. Shannon's opening broadsides fired with the precision that six years of daily drilling had built, swept Ches Peak's quarter deck and destroyed her steering, killing or wounding the helmsman and leaving the ship unmanageable at the moment when maneuvering mattered most. Lawrence was hit and carried below, mortally wounded, issuing the order that would become the most famous dying command in American naval history. His crew fought on without him, but the situation was already beyond recovery. Ches Peak swung into the wind, lost her forward momentum, and fell against Shannon's side. Broke led the boarding party himself, was nearly killed by a musket blow to the head during the hand-to-hand fighting on Chesapeake's deck, and had secured the ship before the 15 minutes were up. The human cost was concentrated into an interval so short it is almost difficult to process. 252 men killed or wounded across both ships in roughly the time it takes to eat a meal. Shannon suffered 83 casualties. Chespake lost 146, including Lawrence, who died of his wounds 3 days later as the prize was being sailed north to Halifax. The battle gave the Royal Navy its confidence back at a moment when that confidence had genuine strategic value.

[00:28:04]And it demonstrated something the arms race of the preceding decade had obscured, that the frigot's effectiveness was not primarily a function of its guns or its hull form, but of the men behind the guns and the officer who had spent years making them ready. Chespake was taken into Royal Navy service and eventually broken up at Portsmouth in 1820. Her timbers were sold as ship's timbers often were and some of them were purchased by a miller in Hampshire who used them in the construction of a watermill that stood and operated for another 150 years. The oak that had crossed the Atlantic under fire quietly grinding grain in the English countryside long after everyone who had sailed her was gone. The frigot story is usually told through its most dramatic moments. The single ship duels, the prize captures, the admiral's complaints about never having enough of them. And those moments are real and worth knowing. But the deeper truth about the type is more mundane and more important than any of them. The frigot was the vessel that actually ran the maritime empires of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Not by fighting the setpiece battles that filled the dispatches and the paintings, but by doing everything else. The scouting, the raiding, the convoy work, the message carrying, the showing of the flag in distant waters where a ship of the line could not go without becoming a liability. While admirals maneuvered their battleships with the care of men moving irreplaceable objects, frigots were out in the world doing the actual work of sea power alone across every ocean in conditions that the official record rarely captured. Honestly, what makes that worth sitting with is the irony buried inside it. The frigot was designed to be expendable in the way that ships of the line were not. Cheaper to build, faster to lose, crewed by men who oppressed or lured by prize money rather than the career calculations of the officer class. And yet, it outlasted the age that produced it in a way the great battleships did not. The ship of the line became obsolete almost overnight when steam and iron arrived in the mid-9th century. Its entire tactical rationale dissolved by technology that made the formal line of battle irrelevant. The frigot simply changed its materials and kept going because the job it had always done, fast, independent, longrange cruising and patrol work, was a permanent requirement of naval power rather than a product of any particular technology. The cruisers and destroyers that followed it were doing in steel and with steam turbines, exactly what Blaze Olivier had designed the midday to do in oak and canvas in 1741. range ahead of the fleet, find the enemy, and handle whatever they found without waiting for orders from someone further up the chain. The men who sailed the frigots, pressed or willing, lucky with prizes or not, lived and died inside conditions that the romance of the period consistently softened. And the full accounting of what the age of sale actually cost in human terms runs well past 2 million dead from scurvy alone. Before you add the storms, the battles, the accidents, and the diseases that killed far more sailors than enemy shot ever did, that cost was paid mostly by people whose names did not make it into the dispatches. Men who slept 14 in from their neighbors in a damp hull on the other side of the world from anyone who knew them, doing work that the age of sail could not have functioned without. If you want to understand where the frigot story goes next, the video on the ship of the line is on screen now, and it covers the world the frigot was built to serve. Subscribe for more of the history that got cleaned