What is "seventy-fours"

Usage examples of "seventy-fours".

Nelson, with nine seventy-fours, one of which ran aground, came upon Brueys with ten, together with three eighty-gun ships and his own splendid 120-gun l'Orient, fourteen battle-ships in all, in the bay of Aboukir, attacked them at once, and burnt, took or destroyed all but two.

They were the French seventy-fours, and as he fixed them, with the utmost intense concentration, he grew more and more convinced that they too were uncertain of their landfall.

The reason for this headlong flight appeared a moment later, when two English seventy-fours and a frigate appeared round the northern cape.

And as for the French, they have always built better ships than our people could do: our seventy-fours and most of our frigates are modelled on their lines - your own dear Surprise was built at Havre.

They listened, and even down here the rumbling grumble of the French seventy-fours, the Ramillies and the Naiad made the bottles tremble.

The three seventy-fours were somehow managing to hold their positions.

Bolitho held on to a stay and studied the new arrivals, the way they and his own seventy-fours lay about haphazardly under reduced canvas, as if they and not their captains were awaiting instructions.

English pride might have been hurt at the sight of the last, for she belonged to the Royal Navy until some years before: and had English pride been able to look into the jealously guarded Arsenal it would have been mortified again by seeing two more British seventy-fours, the Hannibal, captured during Sir James Saumarez's action in the Gut of Gibraltar in 1801, and the Swiftsure, taken in the Mediterranean a few weeks earlier, both of them under active repair.

English pride might have been hurt at the sight of the last, for she belonged to the Royal Navy until some years before: and had English pride been able to look into the jealously guarded Arsenal it would have been mortified again by seeing two more British seventy-fours, the Hannibal, captured during Sir James Saumarez’s action in the Gut of Gibraltar in 1801, and the Swiftsure, taken in the Mediterranean a few weeks earlier, both of them under active repair.

Along the five vessels, all seventy-fours, he could see the sails changing, being reefed or filling again to the wind as their captains did everything to hold the distances and yet be ready to react to their enemy.