Stories that massive beams of Irish oak were favoured for mediaeval buildings in Britain have little factual basis," writes Charles Nelson in his monumental Trees of Ireland. The same may hold for any suggestions there may be that Ireland timbered the British Navy. Eileen McCracken in her most informative The Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, quotes one Peter Brousden, sent over to scour the country for timber suitable to the British Navy's needs in 1671. He reported that while the Shillelagh timber would be large and straight enough, it was so full of shakes and wormholes that he would advise against snakes would be clefts or fissures.
Of the hazards faced by the wooden battleships of the late eighteenth century, was one that might not occur to you: fungal decay. Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory, a tour de force, tells us that in the frantic atmosphere of Anglo French competition following the American war, there was a temptation on the part of the royal yards to cut corners and use what ever timber they could lay their hands on, and no questions asked. So, disasters followed.
He instances the Royal George, a 100 gun warship which was "heeled over" for minor repairs in Portsmouth, in 1872. The timbers failed to take the strain and the whole bottom of the ship fell out. Scores were drowned, including an admiral. William Cowper wrote:
Toll for the brave,
The brave that are no more,
All sunk beneath the wave
Fast by their native shore.
Sometimes, writes Schama, the vessels were so rotten from fungus or shipworm molluscs that, before even commissioning, the hull and keel needed rebuilding. "No wonder, that whenever Admiral Collingwood took shore leave he went about with his breeches pockets full of acorns, from which handfuls would be surreptitiously strewn on his hosts' land." Short term, captured French ships filled the gap, built, we are told of the oak of the Pays Basque and the pines of the Pyrenees. It could not then be said, as Samuel James Arnold had it: "Our ships were British oak/And hearts of oak our men.