Having selected a suitable tree, the men stamped a broad arrow on the tree trunk to indicate that it was now government property. The trees were felled at the end of autumn or in early winter when the leaves had dropped and the sap was no longer rising, and before the heavy frosts came along. Timber merchants who had secured contracts from the Navy Board sent out tree-fellers with teams of horses to cut down and haul away the selected trees. It was heavy and demanding work. The axes swung by the tree-fellers needed constant sharpening because the oak was so dense and hard, and the tree must be felled without breaking the valuable curved and forked branches. When the tree had crashed down, the smaller branches were lopped off and the great trunk was either slung between wheels or hauled onto a sturdy timber cart. Several pairs of cart-horses then dragged the load to the nearest water. The River Medway was navigable as far as Tonbridge, and timber felled in the surrounding area was floated downstream on the river or one of its tributaries for the first part of the journey. At Prentice's Wharf in Maidstone the trunks were loaded onto massive wooden barges with the aid of a primitive crane. The barges were flat-bottomed, with slab sides, and could carry four or five trees. They could be towed or rowed downstream with the current, or sailed with a single large square sail. From Maidstone the timber barges followed the swinging curves of the Medway through the Kentish fields to Rochester. There they passed under the arches of the medieval stone bridge and out into the wide expanse of river beyond where they anchored off Mr Greaves's shipyard until high tide when they were brought alongside the wharf and unloaded.
Meanwhile the yard's shipwrights had been busy working on Sir Thomas Slade's plans on the floor of the mould loft. Since the plans were drawn to the scale of 1:48 it was necessary to enlarge the frames shown on the drawing to full size. The mould loft was in a large barn-like building and had a smooth floor on which the shapes of the timbers to be used in the ship's construction were drawn in chalk. From these chalked patterns the men made up templates or moulds of thin wood battens which enabled them to transfer Slade's designs to the oak timbers which were now piling up in the yard outside.
The mould loft was the womb in which the form of the ship was created but the birthplace was the slipway down by the water's edge. There were two slipways, or slips as they were called, at Greaves's yard. The Bellerophon was built on one of these and on the other was built the Meleager, the 32-gun frigate which had been ordered at the same time as the Bellerophon. The slip was a ramp which sloped down to the river at a gentle angle of about 4 degrees. By long experience this was reckoned to be steep enough to allow the finished hull of the ship to slide slowly into the water when the time came for her launch. A line of wooden blocks was laid along the centre of the slip and on these rested the massive elm timbers which formed the keel of the ship. Elm was preferred over oak for keels because it was more readily available in long, straight lengths, and because elm, provided it was kept submerged, was even more resistant to rot than oak. A line of scaffold poles was erected on each side of the slip; as the ship grew upwards the poles provided supports for working platforms for the shipwrights. At each end of the slip were sheerlegs which acted as cranes to raise into place the timbers for the stem and sternposts, and the frames which formed the ribs of the ship.
With two ships on the go, the yard was a bustle of activity from dawn to dusk. Building a ship was highly skilled work but it was also labour intensive and physically strenuous. Apart from the teams of horses used to drag timber to and fro, every job in the yard was carried out by hand, just as it would be later when the ship put to sea. As on a sailing ship the only mechanical aids were the various forms of block and tackle, and the windlass or capstan. Shipwrights' tools were few and simple and had scarcely changed for centuries. The principal tools were the axe, the adze, the auger for drilling holes, and the saw. The larger timbers were sawn into shape by men working in sawpits, one man working the saw from above and the other heaving it down again from the bottom of the pit. Once the rough shapes had been sawn out, skilled shipwrights got to work with adzes, cutting and smoothing each piece of oak to its final shape. The sweet smell of sawn wood, sawdust and fresh oak chippings filled every corner of the yard, mingling with the coarser smells of horse manure and tar and the smoke from the blacksmiths' workshops. The families living in the neighbourhood, and the men working on the boats out on the river, became accustomed to the constant banging and thudding of iron tools, and the shouts and curses of the men and the boy apprentices as they slowly converted the raw oak branches and tree trunks into finely curved frames, futtocks, knees, stemposts, sternposts and neat piles of planks.
By the end of the first year the keel was in place and a line of curved frames marked the shape which the ship was to take. From a distance she rose into the air like the skeleton of a huge animal stranded on her back. And then, as the planks were laid, first on the inside of the frames and then along the outside, the skeleton became a ship. Every plank had to be fastened in place with trenails (literally 'tree-nails' but pronounced 'trunnels'). These were wooden pegs like dowel rods. They were made of oak and were hammered into the holes drilled with the auger. They were better than iron nails because they did not rust, swelled when wet to a watertight fit and would not damage the shipwright's tools when the final smoothing and shaping of the planks took place.
No documents have survived to indicate how many men were employed by Edward Greaves, but the surviving records of the royal dockyards suggest that there must have been two or three hundred men at work in the shipyard during the building of the Bellerophon and the Meleager. When the 58-gun ship Sunderland was in the early stages of construction at Portsmouth dockyard in the 1740s no fewer than 186 shipwrights and twenty joiners were working on the ship during the course of one week. At a later stage the shipwrights would have been joined by caulkers whose job it was to make the outer planks and the decks watertight. This was done by caulking the seams or spaces between the planks with unravelled strands of old rope called oakum. The oakum was hammered into the seams and then sealed with hot pitch to prevent it from rotting. Alongside the men working in wood were the blacksmiths who had to convert crude pieces of iron into dozens of specialised fittings ranging from stern lanterns, stanchions and rails to the hinges for gunports and cabin doors.
According to Edward Greaves' agreement with the Navy Board, the hull of the Bellerophon should have been completed in twenty-four months from the signing of the contract, which meant that she should have been ready to launch in April 1784. She was not ready that summer, nor the following summer, and was still on the slip in October 1786, four and a half years after her keel had been laid down. Since it was certainly possible to build a 74-gun ship in two years (indeed some were built in eighteen months) there must have been a good reason for the delay. We can find the explanation hidden in the contract for the ship. Towards the end of the document, before the penalty clauses and the details of the stage payments, there is a hand-written note concerning the time of launching which says that 'in case the said Commissioners think proper that the said ship should stand to season it is agreed that whatever time she shall so stand to season should be allowed the Contractor . . .'
For years the navy had experienced problems with ships built of unseasoned timber. Such ships were likely to succumb to rot much more rapidly than ships built of timber which had been allowed to weather and dry out in the yard for two or three years. In the royal dockyards large quantities of oak were therefore stored out in the open or under cover in special seasoning sheds and regulations were introduced which laid down that ships under construction must be allowed to season in frame: that is to say, the partially completed hull would stand on the slip for two or three years before being launched. A private shipyard could not always afford to buy in large quantities of expensive timber and then allow it to remain unused for two or three years while it was seasoning. It is clear that the officers from Chatham dockyard who were responsible for checking on the progress of the Bellerophon ordered Greaves to delay the launch for two years to give the ship's timbers time to dry out. The Admiralty would have had no problem with this because there was no longer such an urgent need for warships. In February 1783 the Peace of Paris had been signed, bringing to an end the war with Britain's former colonies in America.