Part III: Conclusion

The rich source material regarding Denmark's warships seized by Britain in 1807, which is available in British archives, fleshes out the knowledge available from Danish sources regarding the assessment of these Danish warships' qualities in terms of design, construction, seaworthiness, sailing attributes, and armament. Much of the British archival source material provides comparative information on subjects which would likely have remained in the field of conjecture had this contemporaneous British source material never been compiled, as for example the qualities of the Christian den Syvende under the conditions of hard operational usage in British sea service.

Contemporary British assessments of the Danish warships of 1807 are also valuable because these professional judgements were made independently, outside the context of the Danish naval bureaucracy and of Danish usage of Denmark's own warships, from the fresh, cogent perspective of the world's then foremost navy which had considerably different experiences in naval warfare, in operational areas of warship deployment and in conditions of warship usage, which Danish admiralty men and operational sea officers were largely unfamiliar. Therefore, these independent, contemporaneous British assessments, including British Sailing Quality reports and professional opinions on Danish warship design and construction, constitute a rich and invaluable source for historians of Danish warship design during the age of sail to fully exploit in the future. Hopefully, this preliminary study will inspire historians to do just that.

Aside from comparative insights into the qualities of the individual Danish warships of 1807 that are available from a study of British source material in Britain's archives, the British admiralty draughts of Danish warships seized by Britain in 1807 offer unique and thought-provoking opportunities to assess and critique not only the comparative design and drafting practices of British and Danish admiralty draughtsmen, but also insights into the comparative qualities of the Danish navy's master shipbuilders and naval architects of the period, i.e., Gerner, Stibolt, and Hohlenberg.

One major area on which this preliminary study does not offer expository ideas is a comparative analysis of the attributes and merits of the actual construction of the Danish warships of 1807. Recent British scholarly works, such as Gardiner's Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars, offer considerable insights into the relative nature and qualities of French naval construction, regarding French frigates, in comparison to British building qualities. However, comparable information and analysis is utterly absent regarding the comparative qualities of Danish naval construction versus that of Britain during this period.

Regarding the quality of Danish naval construction, while Danish design practices and principles (at least prior to Hohlenberg) were typically akin to those of France, it is not known if the nature and quality of Danish naval construction similarly mirrored those of France. Nineteenth century French naval construction is known to have typically produced lighter warships of inferior structural strength compared to those of Britain. Therefore, if Denmark closely followed principles of French warship design, it might reasonably be inferred that Denmark also followed France's principles of light and weak naval construction. However, the robust performance of, inter alia, Hohlenberg's Christian VII under rigorous British operational conditions, argue against a finding of light Danish naval construction that produced warships of inferior structural strength. Therefore, available British archival materials, and comparative analysis based thereon, on the subject of the nature, quality and effectiveness of the construction of the Danish warships of 1807 should offer important comparative insights in this area.

Since (1) the Danish admiralty draughts and other source material on warship design during the age of sail that is available in Denmark's Rigsarkivet is perhaps second only to that of Britain's, and (2) the Danish naval constructor Hohlenberg occupies such a unique and intriguing position in the transitional period of warships design that occurred during the Napoleonic wars, it is incumbent upon modern historians to utilize the British archival material in general, and British admiralty draughts in particular, to gain deeper insights and understanding of the attributes and character of Gerner, Stibolt, and Hohlenberg, of the Danish warships they designed, and of the design draughts produced during their tenure in office as the Danish navy's chief constructor. This comparative analysis should, in turn, provide a benchmark which should shed additional light on the individual design attributes and practices of the Danish navy's earlier naval architects and the admiralty draughts they produced.