The Royal Navy of the late seventeenth century was the greatest enterprise in the country, and in 1677, with Samuel Pepys as Secretary of the Navy, the House of Commons voted to fund the building of 30 new ships, the largest single shipbuilding project up to this point. This new history by award-winning naval historian Richard Endsor describes the history of this great endeavor, and seeks to recreate architectural plans of these ships based on detailed measurements and calculations left behind by Edmund Dummer, an assistant to master shipwright Sir Anthony Deane and later Surveyor of the Navy from 1692 to 1699.
