Fredrik Henrik af Chapman
Fredrik Henrik af Chapman was an English shipbuilder, scientist and naval officer. He was vice admiral in the Swedish Navy, and manager of the Karlskrona shipyard from 1782 to 1793. Chapman is credited as the world's first person to apply scientific methods to shipbuilding and is considered to be the first naval architect.
Chapman was the author of Architectura Navalis Mercatoria and several other shipbuilding-related works. His Tractat om Skepps-Byggeriet published in 1775 is a pioneering work in modern naval architecture. He was the first shipbuilder in Northern Europe to introduce prefabrication in shipyards and managed to produce several series of ships in record time.
He was ennobled as "af Chapman" in 1772, after the successful coup of Swedish king Gustav III.
Youth and early career
Fredrik Henrik Chapman was born at Nya Varvet, the royal dockyards in Gothenburg, on 9 September 1721, the son of Thomas Chapman, an English naval officer who had moved to Sweden in 1715 and joined the Swedish Navy in 1716. His mother was Susanna Colson, the daughter of London shipwright William Colson. He showed a talent for shipbuilding when he made his first body plan based on a drawing of an Ostend privateer given to him by a Flemish shipwright. Chapman went to sea in 1736, at the age of fifteen, and spent his late teens working in both private and state shipyards. In 1741, he helped build a Spanish merchant vessel, a project that provided him with enough money to allow him to work as a ship's carpenter in London 1741-44. After his stay in England, he returned to Gothenburg and established a shipyard with a Swedish merchant named Bagge. Together they built a few small vessels and provided maintenance work for the Swedish East India Company.Education
Though he had received a good basic education in shipbuilding, Chapman recognized that he did not possess the knowledge of higher mathematics that was required to determine draft and stability at the design stage of a vessel. In 1748, he sold his share of the shipyard and moved to Stockholm where he studied for two years under Baron Fredrik Palmqvist. He went on to study under the English professor of mathematics, Thomas Simpson, who had worked out methods for calculating the volume of irregular surfaces and bodies. After one year of studies in London, he went on to study shipbuilding at the British royal dockyards in Woolwich, Chatham and Deptford.Chapman recorded his extensive research of British shipbuilding in several documents, including an eight-page handwritten document titled Directions for Building of a Ship of 50 Guns, where he described construction methods as well as the British method of launching ships. His activities attracted the interests of the British naval authorities and upon leaving Deptfort in 1753, he was arrested, his papers confiscated and was then charged with trying to lure shipyards workers into French service. France and Great Britain were at the time bitter rivals, and both Sweden and Denmark were active in uncovering British manufacturing methods as well as trying to persuade British shipwrights into their service. Chapman was kept under house arrest for about one month at the cost of half a guinea per day, though still allowed to visit London with an escort. All of his documents were returned to him except a rigging plan. After his release, he stayed a few months to study experimental physics and took lessons in engraving.
In 1754, Chapman continued his educational tour by going to the Netherlands and in 1755 to France, where he was given permission to stay at the royal shipyards at Brest to observe warship construction. There he observed the complete process of construction of the French 60-gun ship Célèbre from keel-laying to rigging under the French shipwright Geoffrey the Elder. He also made line drawings and plans of several French ships, including the huge Ville de Paris and the 64-gun Bienfaisant and pen and ink drawings of ship decorations. The experience in Brest is believed to have made a deep impression on Chapman, later contributing to his conviction that 60-gun ships were the most appropriate for Swedish service.
The French authorities were the first to recognize Chapman's skills and attempted to convince him to stay and enter service for France, an offer he declined. After Chapman returned to London in 1756, the First Lord of the Admiralty tried to do the same, and came close to succeeding by using patriotic appeals to Chapman's British heritage. In his memoirs, Chapman wrote that he would likely have stayed had the current First Lord not lost his office soon after their meeting. Instead, he was recruited by the Swedish minister in Paris, Ulrik Scheffer, later Minister of External Affairs under Gustav III.
In Swedish service
In 1757, Chapman was made assistant shipwright at the royal dockyards in Karlskrona at the age of 36. Soon after his appointment, he drafted his ideal plans for docks, which included facilities for properly ventilated sail storage and advanced dock pumps that could be powered by human power, horses or wind mills. The plans would, however, not be realized until much later, when Chapman was made chief shipwright of the Karlskrona yards.In November 1758 to April 1759, he was charged with a timber inspection cruise along the coasts from Turku up to the Gulf of Bothnia. Later, Chapman moved first to Stralsund where he stayed until 1762, and later to Sveaborg where he stayed until 1764. His first major assignment came in 1760. The recently formed archipelago fleet, an inshore fleet independent of the navy under the command of the army, was in need of new vessels to replace the galleys which had proved problematic in the war against Prussia that had broken out in 1757. Augustin Ehrensvärd, the commander of the archipelago fleet and the man in charge of the construction of the new naval base and fortress of Sveaborg, began a successful collaboration with Chapman in designing new types of what would later be called "archipelago frigates". Inspired by Russian "chebecks", the two created craft that could be rowed, but with heavier armament and additional protection for the crew, a necessity in the cold Baltic climate. The cooperation resulted in four new types of archipelago frigates: italic=no, italic=no, italic=no and hemmema, all named after the Finnish names of Swedish provinces in Finland, the coasts of which they were intended to protect.
By closely examining drawings of ships with known good sailing qualities Chapman realized that the framework should be divided in a certain progression. The frames should decrease from the place of greatest width in the same relation as the ordinates 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc., where the arc ABC is a parabola, AD is the axis and A is the vertex. This construction method is called the "parabola method". Chapman also introduced the so called "relaxation method", but preferred the former himself.
At Sveaborg, Chapman supervised and led the construction and expansion of the naval yards, including cranes, docks and various buildings. He moved to Stockholm in 1764, but remained in charge of the design of vessels for the archipelago fleet. He was also made a part of a commission that was to propose improvements on the expansion of the high seas navy. Its final report was presented in 1764 and recommended new designs for standardized ships of the line ranging from 50 to 70 guns. The report represented the ideals of a new school of shipwrights that favored scientific methods and the use of theoretical models at all stages in ship design, a view that was in conflict with the old school, which favored slow evolution based on practical experimentation. The old school, represented most prominently by Gilbert Sheldon, came into conflict with the new ideas, but lost the debate when the Board of the Admiralty favored the findings of the commission at the Riksdag in March 1769 and put Chapman in charge of designing the navy's new warships.
Djurgården yard
Chapman acquired a share in a shipyard at Djurgården in Stockholm in 1768. A conglomerate of the Åkers gun foundry and owners of the Swedish East India Company provided the capital, while Chapman was to contribute his technical skills and experience with shipbuilding. The same year he moved into a newly built house in Djurgården with his nephew Lars Bogeman and his former housekeeper Elisabeth Lindborg, with whom he had a daughter and son. Chapman constructed a new type of saw mill for the Djurgården yard that replaced the traditional "saw pit" with a circular blade at the center of an octagonal building. A system of chains and pulleys pulled lengths of timber towards the saw, which could receive them from eight different directions.The Djurgården yard produced several of Chapman's own designs that were successful, including cats, barques and East Indiamen in 1767-79. Some of the latter were named in honor of King Gustav and were launched in the presence of the royal family. This included praise from Carl Michael Bellman, one of Sweden's most popular composers and at the time a favorite of the court. The yard constructed merchant vessels as well as warships under contract from the military. During Chapman's time at the yard over 50 vessels of various sizes were constructed, including the first so-called archipelago frigates, the italic=no, italic=no and italic=no.
"Royal Revolution"
In 1772, king Gustav III accomplished what was described as a "royal revolution". Since the death of Charles XII in 1718 and Sweden's reduction to the status of a minor power, the country's politics had been dominated by the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, with frequent intervention by Russia, Great Britain, France and Denmark through bribes and subsidies. Gustav's palace coup established him as a self-defined enlightened despot while curbing the influence of nobility, which had become unpopular through rampant corruption and political intrigues. Inspired by the absolute monarchy of France, Gustav took great inspiration from the "Sun King" Louis XIV and allied himself with his successor Louis XV.Chapman supported the king's boldness and even gave concrete assistance by warehousing ammunition for troops that were loyal to the king. The maneuver paid off since Gustav supported an expansion of both army and navy and singled out Russia as the primary enemy of Swedish interests. The alliance with Louis XV meant that large French subsidies were sent to expand the Swedish military against the common Russian enemy. This provided the funds to finance Chapman's plans to expand the navy with 60- to 70-gun warships of his own design.