Edmund Dummer (1651–1713) was an English naval engineer and shipbuilder who, as Surveyor of the Navy, designed and supervised the construction of the Royal Navy dockyard at Devonport, Plymouth and designed the extension of that at Portsmouth. His survey of 18 south coast ports is a valuable and well-known historic document. He also served Arundel as Member of Parliament for approximately ten years and founded the first packet service between Falmouth, Cornwall and the West Indies. He died a bankrupt in the Fleet debtors' prison.
In her account of Dummer, Celina Fox sums up his career thus:Using elements of mathematical calculation and meticulously honed standards of empirical observation, Dummer tried to introduce a more rational, planned approach to the task of building ships and dockyards, with the help of his extraordinary draughting skills. Operating on the margins of what was technically possible, meeting with opposition from vested interests and traditional work patterns, he struggled to succeed. Today he is little recognized outside the circle of naval historians and his grandest building projects were almost wholly destroyed by later dockyard developments or bombing.
Early career Dummer was baptised on 28 August 1651 at St. Nicolas' Church, North Stoneham, Hampshire, the eldest of four sons born to Thomas Dummer (1626–1710), gentleman farmer of Chickenhall, in the parish of North Stoneham near Southampton, and his wife, Joanne Newman. He joined the Royal Navy in 1668 and served his apprenticeship as a shipwright under Sir John Tippetts at Portsmouth naval dockyard. In his 1686 account of the state of the Navy, Samuel Pepys wrote that when Dummer was apprenticed to Tippetts, he was "mostly employed as his clerk in writing and drawing". By 1678, Dummer was employed as an "extra clerk" in the office of the Surveyor, "my patron and friend from my youth upward". His job was to make designs for a variety of projects – lanthorns, wet docks, lodgings at Sheerness, ships' sterns – as well as to draught ships' lines.
In 1677, Dummer and Tippetts assisted Sir Anthony Deane, who had been appointed Controller of the Victualling Accounts on the Navy Board, and given the responsibility for establishing for the first time standardised sets of dimensions of ships of the line to be applied to the "thirty new ships", the largest single shipbuilding programme hitherto undertaken. For his work on establishing the new standards, Dummer was "singled out by the Navy Board for his extraordinary ingenuity to lay down the bodies of all the thirty new ships".
Several of Dummer's draughts from this period survive including a sketch-book Tables of Proportions of Ships, which comprises a series of engraved sheets of squared paper on which are plotted the curves or sweeps of the hulls of one second rate and some of the third rate ships newly built in the Thames and Medway yards. A volume of eight Dummer drawings entitled Draught of the Body of an English Man of War is in the Pepys Library; these are much more elaborate, doubtless intended to show off his extraordinary skills as a draughtsman to potential patrons, and include vertical sections through the ships showing the design and layout of the structure. These works constitute the earliest surviving example of Dummer's skills as a draughtsman, demonstrating a capacity to express an organised tectonic sensibility that was to mark his progress towards the surveyorship.
In February 1679, Dummer became caught up in a political dispute involving Pepys and Deane, who had been accused of leaking naval intelligence to France. Amongst the charges laid against Pepys and Deane by Parliament were that "they had employed a man to take the bodies of the king's ships, supposed to be no good intention". Dummer, "being extremely fearful myself what ill use might be made of me, or of the works so innocently meant" was taken before the King "to prevent (if in him it lay) by the King's approbation and allowance any reflection upon them that were already distressed". Dummer was sent to Bristol until January 1680 when he was summoned to attend the Navy Board with his draughts. There he met Deane who had been released from prison though not yet discharged; Deane asked Dummer to make two draughts for him, a promise Dummer failed to keep, having been instructed by the Navy Board not to do so.
The Admiralty still appeared to have suspicions about the loyalty of both Dummer and Deane, and at a meeting of the Lords Commissioners it was ordered "that I did not at the same time draw draughts for any other and as well as that of the King's service, and ordered they should give me a written order ... and also to report what was fitting to allow me to draught ...". By April 1680, Dummer had delivered five draughts; he wrote to the Navy Board to ask "whether I can be supposed to draw new draughts by that way I have practised". In May he was still asking whether the Board wanted to discharge or continue employing him, warning of his impending ruin: "I could have borne the present with more respect and patience, were I not able to say it hath been always my misfortune, that the greatness of the enterprise was never truly valued nor encouraged". Although the order to pay him at the rate of £7 per draught was made by the Admiralty to the Navy Board on 24 February and again on 11 May 1680 (with the proviso, "to take care before the payment of any of the said sums to the said Mr Dummer, that the work be so performed as may answer the end for which the said draughts were at first designed") he was still waiting for payment on 11 June.
1682 voyage to the Mediterranean In July 1682, Dummer (now officially Master Carpenter on HMS Windsor Castle) was commissioned as a midshipman-extraordinary on HMS Woolwich and sent to the Mediterranean "in order to his collecting what useful observations should arise to him, in his enquiries through the several foreign ports there, relating either to the said art of ship-building, or the nature and order of the said ports, appearances of land, or ought else than might conduce to our service". Dummer had estimated that his expenses for about two years would be £95 4s 0d and it was agreed he was to be reimbursed for that sum by the Treasurer of the Navy.
On 3 August 1682, Dummer set out from Deal on the Woolwich, under the command of Captain William Holding, taking the Moorish Ambassador, who had been in England for six months, back to Tangier. Despite an attempted mutiny by the Ambassador's Moorish retainers while the ship was at anchor in Plymouth Sound, the Woolwich reached Tangiers on 31 August. After a change in command to Lieutenant Rigby (Holding had died and was buried at Tangiers), they sailed on east into the Mediterranean, south of Sardinia and Sicily, across the Ionian Sea to Cephalonia and Zante, then back through the Strait of Messina past the active volcano of Stromboli to Naples and Livorno, where Dummer disembarked, while the Woolwich started back to England on 24 November.
Dummer records that he then divided his time between Livorno and Pisa until 11 February 1683, when he received an answer from the Commissioners of the Admiralty "to whom I had given an account of my leaving the ship, and the reasons" for requesting extended shore leave. During this period, Dummer delivered to Sir Thomas Dereham, the English envoy in Florence, a magnificent panel carved by Grinling Gibbons celebrating the fruits of peace and friendship between princes, which was commissioned by Charles II as a gift for Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Dummer took a keen interest in recording towns, their dockyards and fortifications throughout the Mediterranean, making detailed perspectives and measured plans, producing a visual record of the arsenals of Naples, Livorno, Pisa, Venice, Genoa, Toulon, Marseille, Gibraltar and Cádiz. In contrast to the English method of building and repairing ships in dry dock, the Mediterranean ports used covered slipways of which Dummer made many drawings. He was particularly impressed by the Venetian Arsenal, drawing it in plan, general and detailed perspective, including A Perspective of the Mode of laying up small Ordnance and A Perspective of Two Arches ... under which Ships & Gallies are Built & Repaired.
By April 1683, he was in Toulon where he took the opportunity to carry out a little informal espionage: "They with much readiness permit you to go aboard their ships, but it is in such regularity, as not to be done but by a note, under the hand of a special officer". Amongst the 50 or more vessels in the harbour was the Royal Louis and two more first-rate vessels. Dummer described the fleet as a "good fleet, but in appearance ill built, or through some weakness in long living have generally put their wales a little straight in the midships". He described the Royal Louis as "a great ship and glorious in her first carving, no doubt; but to my judgment not of good proportion, nor good workmanship, her figure under water I know not, nor is that above to be admired".
Dummer reported that in Toulon, "all ships great & small are built on launches, and are careened when their occasions require it; for here are no docks, an obligation we are not tied to". He also made drawings of the new fortifications then under construction to the designs of Vauban.
On 14 April 1683, he arrived at Marseille the home of the French King's galleys, of which there were 35 in the harbour. He described the galleys as "the most polite and beautiful I ever saw".
During the voyage, Dummer diligently carried out the King's orders to make "observations upon all foreign shipping", from Cádiz to Constantinople. His journal described each vessel, both large and small, in great detail accompanied by both watercolour views and three-dimensional skeleton models.
In July 1683 Dummer sailed homewards from Livorno in the Swallow via the Balearic Islands, Málaga, Alicante, Gibraltar and Cádiz, where on 13 September he received orders to attend Lord Dartmouth in Tangier and stay until the English garrison was given up and destroyed, on 6 February 1684. Dummer returned to England accompanied by Samuel Pepys who had been in Tangier assisting Lord Dartmouth with the evacuation and abandonment of the British colony; they travelled back through Spain, arriving back in England after a particularly rough passage on 30 March 1684. By the end of the year his expenses, which amounted to £150 10s 6d – 50% more than his initial estimate – had been reimbursed.
On the completion of the voyage, Dummer produced a "sumptuous volume" which is now in the British Library.The full title of his survey is A Voyage into the Mediterranean Seas, containing (by way of Journall) the Viewes and Descriptions of such remarkable Lands, Cities, Towns, and Arsenalls, their severall Planes, & Fortifications, with divers Perspectives of particular Buildings which came within the compass of the said Voyage; Together with the Description of 24 Sorts of Vessells, of common use in those Seas, Designed in Measurable Parts, with an Artificiall Shew of their Bodies, not before so accurately done, Finished in the Yeare 1685, by E. Dummer. and is King's MS.40 of the British Library
Chatham