Neptune's Needle

from Sweetman, Great American Naval Battles (1998)
...This was the Constitution, one of the three big, 44-gun frigates Joshua Humphreys had designed to outgun anything they could not outrun. On the date of the declaration of war she had just completed refitting and repairing her hull’s copper sheathing at the Washington Navy Yard. Receiving a new crew and enough stores to take her to New York kept her in the Chesapeake for nearly a month; she cleared the caped on 12 July 1812.

from Potter, Illustrated History of the United States Navy (1971)
The new 44-gun ships, which actually carried 50 or more guns, are generally called “Humphreys frigates” because the Philadelphia shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys drew the final designs. These remarkable vessels were, however, the product of many men’s ideas, notably those of Josiah Fox, a brilliant young ship designer who had studied in the leading dockyards of Europe. They were more powerful than any other existing frigate and they were able to sail faster and come closer into the wind than any ship of the line. In short, they were designed to outrun anything they could not outfight.

from Dudley and Crawford, The Early Republic and the Sea (2001)
...Rather than quickly acquiring ships through purchase, Congress followed the lines that Morris suggested in 1783, building better ships in American than had previously been available. Shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys forwarded designs to Senator Morris based on his diagrams of the South Carolina, which Morris and apparently Humphreys, among others, had examined in detail in 1783. These diagrams became a basis for the designs of the Constitution and the Constellation.

from Samuel W. Bryant, The Sea and the States (1967)
On the score that they built bigger and better frigates than the British the Americans were guilty, and specifically one Joshua Humphreys, Quaker son of a Pennsylvania farmer, was to blame. Humphreys, born in 1751, was apprenticed in his youth to a ship carpenter, and he came to know the innards of ship-construction as well as any man in America. He had been appointed naval constructor in 1794, and he brought to his duties a mind unhindered by tradition. His approach to the construction of warships was fundamentally logical; the United States could not compete in numbers with the Royal Navy (there were not enough funds for that) so Humphreys decided that what the United States needed in its warships was quality rather than quantity. He thought the ideal warship would be one with enough speed to run away from a ship of the line. The results were Humphrey’s frigates, for which he prepared models in 1794; ...

Sources

Compiler

Peter Richards