Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/114

 she appears to have been simply a large merchant ship of the period, which on the sixth day of October, in the twenty-third year of the reign of Henry VIII. ( 1531), was viewed or inspected by Christopher Morris, a government officer, for the purpose of being employed in the public service.

The largest and most important vessel built at this period in England appears to have been King Henry's Harry Grace à Dieu. Two representations of this ship are extant, one in the Pepysian Library in Magdalen College, Cambridge, another in an original picture of Hans Holbein, published by Allen in 1756. The drawings however differ so widely that it is probable they refer to different vessels.

With the exception of the very high forecastle, an extra range of cabins on her poop, and her extraordinary rig, she does not materially differ from the wooden line-of-battle ships of much later times. All accounts agree in describing the Harry Grace à Dieu as the largest English man-of-war up to the period of her construction; but Henry VIII. had also previously built a vessel called the Regent, of one thousand tons, to carry a crew of eight hundred men,