Dockyard

Dockyard, an arsenal of nautical stores and materials of all kinds, wherein ships may be built or repaired, moored, fitted, and commissioned. The royal dockyards in the United Kingdom are at Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham, Sheerness, and Pembroke, and there is also a yard available for certain purposes at Haulbowline, Queenstown, and there were formerly yards at Deptford and Woolwich. Abroad there are also British naval dockyards at Gibraltar, Malta, Halifax, Jamaica, Bermuda, the Cape of Good Hope, Ascension, Trincomalee, Hong Kong, Esquimalt (Vancouver's Island), and Sydney. Deptford was established in the time of Henry VIII.; Woolwich, about 1509; Chatham, in the reign of Elizabeth, and, on its present site, about 1622; Sheerness, about 1661; Portsmouth in the reign of Henry VIII, if not before; Devonport, or Plymouth, prior to 1691; and Pembroke in 1815, prior to which year it had been a temporary yard. Portsmouth is now the most important naval dockyard in the world. It. contains twenty-four dry docks, or locks and basin entrances which may be used as such, enormous basins, storehouses, factories and machine works; and it could, in case of necessity, accommodate in dry dock a ship 650 feet long and nearly 80 feet broad. Owing to their importance as headquarters of the fleet, all the royal dockyards are strongly fortified. The French naval dockyards are at Toulon, Cherbourg, Brest, L'Orient, and Rochefort; the German at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven; the Italian at Naples, Spezia, and Venice; the Austrian at Pola and Trieste; the Russian at Cronstadt (St. Petersburg), Sebastopol, and Nicolaieff; and those of the United States at Brooklyn (New York), Charlestown (Massachusetts), Gosport (Virginia), Kittery (New Hampshire), League Island (Pennsylvania), Mare Island. (California), New London (Connecticut), Pensacola (Florida), and Washington.