Pett had kept Chatham building and maintaining ships across the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration, but became a scapegoat after the Dutch raid. His decision to rescue models instead of hulls drew ridicule, yet he argued that shipwrights needed the three-dimensional forms to recover complex hull shapes that plans could not fully convey. Design knowledge itself was a strategic naval asset. His fate also shows how a technical administrator could be punished for an operational failure outside his authority.
Notable Point · 2:23:29-2:26:55
Peter Pett saves the models that preserved shipbuilding knowledge
During the Dutch raid on the Medway, Peter Pett saved dockyard models because they encoded shapes that drawings alone could not reproduce.