Over 100 years before American patriots rebelled at the Boston Tea Party Dutch warships devastate the British Fleet at the Battle of Medway in 1667. On paper the British Fleet was the most powerful in the world, but institutionalized corruption and neglect had turned that fleet into a paper tiger ripe for the plucking. In this painting the captured 80-gun first-rate ship of the line HMS Royal Charles is being towed away by the Dutch.
From the Medway England to Mare Island: How a 17thâCentury Disaster Shaped a Nuclear Navy and Why it Still Matters
How the Lessons of Corruption and Reform from the River Medway Echoed in Rickoverâs Nuclear Shipyards
In June 1667, the mighty Royal Navy, once the pride of a rising English empire, lay humiliated in the muddy bends of the River Medway. Dutch warships, sailing boldly up Englandâs own waterways, burned and captured some of the Crownâs most formidable vessels almost within sight of London. The shock rippled far beyond the smoke and shattered timbers. It exposed something more corrosive than cannon fire: a system riddled with complacency, corruption, and neglect.
Nearly three centuries later, at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover would invoke that same story, not as distant history, but as a living warning. He liked to quote vivid accounts of corruption in ânavy yards,â of favoritism, missing materials, and officials who looked the other way while standards eroded. Listeners often assumed he was describing contemporary American shipyards. Only after he had their attention would Rickover reveal the source: the complaints came from the 1660s, from British dockyards chronicled by a meticulous civil servant named Samuel Pepys.
For Rickover, the lesson of the Medway was timeless. Technology could change from oak hulls to nuclear reactors, but human systems failed in the same ways. If corruption and complacency could invite a Dutch fleet up the Thames in the 17th century, they could just as easily invite catastrophe into a nuclear submarine in the 20th.
The War and the River
The Battle of the Medway took place near the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665â1667), a bitter contest between two maritime powers, within the broader pattern of recurring European power struggles in the seventeenth century over global trade routes and naval dominance. England, financially exhausted and politically strained after years of conflict and plague, had laid up much of its fleet to save money. Ships sat under-crewed, under-supplied, and poorly defended in the estuaries of the Thames and Medway.
The Dutch, led by the audacious Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, saw an opportunity. In a daring raid, their fleet sailed past English fortifications, broke a heavy chain meant to block the river, and attacked the anchored ships. The Royal Navyâs flagship, HMS Royal Charles, was captured and towed away as a trophy. Others were burned where they lay.
For England, the humiliation was profound. This was not merely a military defeatâit was a public revelation of administrative failure. How could a nation that prided itself on maritime strength allow its navy to rot at anchor, undefended in its own backyard?
Samuel Pepys: The Reluctant Reformer and Unwitting Inspiration for Rickover
Enter Samuel Pepys, a man better known today for his candid diary than for his role in shaping naval reform. In 1667, Pepys was not a sailor but a powerful civil servant: the Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. He stood at the intersection of policy, finance, and operations, the bureaucratic heart of the Royal Navy.
Pepysâs diaries reveal a system plagued by: - Patronage over competence, appointments based on influence rather than ability. - Financial mismanagement, unpaid sailors, missing supplies, and murky contracts. Complacency, a dangerous assumption that Englandâs naval supremacy was permanent.
The Medway disaster forced a reckoning. Parliamentary inquiries followed. Pepys, despite being under suspicion himself, emerged as a key voice for reform. He championed principles that were radical for his time:
Professionalism Over Favoritism Pepys pushed for standardized training and qualifications for naval officers, arguing that command should be earned through competence, not connections.
Accountability and Record-Keeping He insisted on meticulous documentation, of supplies, ship readiness, finances, and performance. His belief was simple: what gets recorded can be examined; what gets examined can be improved.
Civilian Oversight of Military Power Pepys believed that a strong navy required transparent civilian administration to prevent waste and abuse. In many ways, Pepys helped transform the Royal Navy from a medieval institution into a modern, professional force, one that would dominate the seas for the next two centuries.
The Long Shadow of the Medway The lesson of the Medway was not merely that ships must be guarded. It was that systems fail when integrity erodes. Corruption, neglect, and the absence of clear responsibility can defeat even the strongest fleet without a single enemy cannon fired.
That lesson would echo, faint but persistent, into the twentieth century, into the mind of a man who believed the next great naval revolution would be fought not with sail , but with atoms creating steam, and he went on to lead the nation in designing, building, and operating a revolutionary fleet of nuclear-powered ships.
Rickover and the Nuclear Age
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, often called the âFather of the Nuclear Navy,â was a man obsessed with failure, specifically, preventing it. When the United States set out to build nuclear-powered submarines and ships after World War II, the stakes were unprecedented. A mistake in a boiler could sink a ship; a mistake in a reactor could poison a crew, a harbor, or a nationâs confidence.
Rickover understood something Pepys had learned centuries earlier: technology magnifies both excellence and incompetence. Rickover central view was that advanced technology does not make organizations safer or smarter by itself. In his view, it often did the opposite: it hides mistakes, diffuses responsibility, and allows incompetent systems or leaders to persist.
To counter this he built an organization, the Naval Reactors program, that was unlike anything else in the U.S. military:
Radical Accountability Rickover demanded personal responsibility at every level. Engineers, officers, and contractors knew their names were attached to their work. If something failed, someone owned it.
Ruthless Standards Training was punishing. Inspections were relentless. Paperwork was exhaustive. Critics called it tyrannical; Rickover called it necessary.
Independence from Politics and Contractors Like Pepys, Rickover distrusted systems where money, influence, or convenience could override safety and performance. He structured Naval Reactors to maintain direct authority over both the Navy and its industrial partners.
The result was extraordinary: over decades of operation, the U.S. Navyâs nuclear fleet compiled a safety record unmatched in the history of nuclear power.
Mare Island: A Bridge Between Eras
Mare Island Naval Shipyard, established in 1854 in Californiaâs San Pablo Bay, was more than a backdrop to Rickoverâs nuclear revolution, it became one of its proving grounds. For Rickover, shipyards were not distant industrial partners; they were extensions of his command. He came to Mare Island often, attending launches, conducting audits, and overseeing operations with the same intensity he brought to the Pentagon.
By the early 1950s, when Congress finally funded the first new class of nuclear submarines, Rickover was determined that the culture of accountability he had built in Washington would survive contact with steel, welders, and schedules. The lead boat of the Skate class would be built at Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, but subsequent submarines would also be constructed at two naval shipyards: Portsmouth and Mare Island. However, Rickover remained wary of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyardâs leadership, believing that traditional management structures and production pressures could undermine the strict accountability and technical rigor he demanded for nuclear propulsion work.
Mare Island, he believed, might be different.
He made sure of it personally.
âWho Really Gets Things Done?â
Rickover appointed Commander Edwin Mintner, an Engineering Duty Officer who had worked under him on the Nuclear Regulatory Board, as superintendent at Mare Island. Mintnerâs reporting structure was unusual, formally answerable to the shipyard commander and planning officers, but also required to write directly to Rickover every week and to call him whenever he deemed necessary. It was a deliberate bypass of bureaucracy, echoing Pepysâs insistence on clear lines of responsibility.
Several weeks after Mintner arrived, Rickover flew in for his first visit. On the drive from the airport, Rickover asked a deceptively simple question:
âWhoâs in charge here?â
Mintner instinctively named the shipyard commander. Rickover shook his head. That wasnât what he meant.
âWho really gets things done?â
Mintner thought for a moment and answered honestly: Irv Whitthorne, the head of the Pipe Shop.
Whitthorne was not an officer or an executive. He was a master tradesman who had started working at Mare Island at the age of sixteen and had nearly fifty years on the island. He led the mastersâ association, and when he said something should happen, it happened. His office sat inside the Pipe Shop itself, surrounded by the noise and heat of fabrication. (Decades later, that same building would house the former Mare Island Museum.)
When Rickover arrived at the yard, he ignored the formalities of checking in with the shipyard commander. Instead, he went straight to the Pipe Shop, walked into Whitthorneâs office, and shut the door. For half an hour, Mintner watched from outside as the two men pounded on desks and shouted, their words inaudible through the walls. It was a collision of worlds: the relentless admiral and the immovable shipyard master.
When Rickover finally emerged, he turned to Mintner and said:
âOkay. Youâre the new shipyard commander.â
From that moment on, Mintner later recalled, he got whatever he needed.
Building Trust in Steel and Atoms
A rumor spread through the yard that Rickover had made a pact with Whitthorne: if Mare Island built a good nuclear submarine, they would get more, and more, nuclear work. Whether spoken or unspoken, the understanding became real in its results.
Rickover returned again and again. His representatives audited procedures, questioned foremen, examined paperwork, and inspected welds and piping systems that would one day carry pressurized water through a nuclear reactor. His presence sent a clear message: quality was not a slogan; it was a personal expectation.
The numbers tell the story. By 1972, when the last nuclear submarine built at a U.S. naval shipyard was completed, Portsmouth had constructed ten nuclear submarines. Mare Island had built seventeen, more than any other naval shipyard in the country. Whitthorne, it seemed, had kept his word. And so had Rickover. In Mare Islandâs shops, Pepysâs old principles, meticulous record-keeping, professional pride, and unyielding accountability, found new life in a nuclear age. The dockyard ledger became the quality assurance log. The shipwrightâs reputation became the reactor engineerâs certification. The stakes, once measured in burning hulls on a riverbank, were now measured in megawatts and national survival.
A Thread Through Time
From the smoke of burning ships on the River Medway to the quiet hum of a nuclear reactor deep beneath the ocean, a single thread runs through naval history: the character of the institutions that build and maintain power matters as much as the power itself.
Samuel Pepys learned, painfully, that corruption and neglect could invite disaster without an enemy ever needing to fire a shot. Hyman Rickover learned that in the nuclear age, the margin for such failure had shrunk to zero.
Both men, separated by centuries and technology, arrived at the same conclusion: a navy is not just a fleet. It is a culture.
And culture, whether in a 17th-century dockyard or a 20th-century nuclear shipyard, is built on principles that endure long after the ships themselves are gone.
Legacyâs Forged in Service
As for Admiral Rickover and Irwin H. Whitthorne, they both had long and distinguished careers with the Navy.
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover served the United States Navy for an extraordinary 63 years, from his commissioning in 1922 until his retirement in 1982, making him one of the longest-serving officers in U.S. military history and the driving force behind the Navyâs nuclear propulsion program. As the architect of the worldâs first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, and the leader of Naval Reactors for more than three decades, he oversaw the design, construction, and operation of the Navyâs fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, establishing a culture of uncompromising technical rigor and personal accountability. For his achievements, Rickover received numerous honors, including two Congressional Gold Medals (1958 and 1980), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and multiple Distinguished Service Medals, reflecting both the national significance of his work and the unprecedented longevity and impact of his naval career.
Irving âIrvâ Whitthorne devoted more than 59 years of civilian service to the United States Navy, establishing the longest consecutive civilian employment record in U.S. naval history. Following his meeting with Admiral Hyman G. Rickover and at the time of his mandatory retirement in 1960, Whitthorne served as Master Pipefitter; at the Navyâs request, he continued in service and was appointed Machinery Outfitting Group Superintendent, where he exercised broad authority over critical shipyard operations. In recognition of his exceptional career, Whitthorne received the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award, and the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award, and was formally honored upon his retirement after 59 years and three months of continuous service.
How a Planning Failure Undermined Americaâs Naval Shipbuilding Advantage
Long after the hard-won lessons of Samuel Pepys in 17th-century Britain and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in 20th-century America, history repeated itself. In both cases, capable, mission-driven systems gradually gave way to bureaucratic processes that prized paper compliance over operational performance.
At Mare Island, once a cornerstone of U.S. naval power, this shift culminated in its closure in 1996 following a flawed budget driven Department of Defense capacity analysis during the 1993 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. By the late 1990s, the combined capacity of the remaining public and private shipyards could no longer meet the Navyâs construction and maintenance demands that themselves had already been reduced to levels far below the projections of the 1993 analysts.
As in Britainâs slow administrative drift from naval supremacy to institutional stagnation, this self-imposed infrastructure crisis in the United States hollowed out competition in the domestic naval shipbuilding sector. That lack of competitive pressure persists today, even as technology and workforce capabilities have advanced dramatically.
The results are stark. The first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine now under construction is projected to take more than 12 years from keel laying to commissioning. By contrast, early-generation ballistic missile submarines built in the 1950s and 1960s, at multiple, competing shipyards such as Mare Island, were typically completed in just over two years. In shipbuilding, as in most complex industries, reducing cost ultimately depends on reducing schedule.
Why Does It Matter?
The story of Medway and Mare Island is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a warning about how great maritime powers decline, not with a single defeat, but through the slow, often invisible erosion of the institutions that sustain them.
In 1667, England did not lose HMS Royal Charles because Dutch sailors were braver or ships were faster. It was lost because money was diverted, ships were neglected, and responsibility was blurred across a maze of offices and favors. The fleet failed long before the enemy appeared. Samuel Pepys understood that the true battlefield was not the river, but the system that built, funded, and maintained the navy itself.
Rickover drew the same conclusion in the nuclear age. He believed that the most dangerous adversary to a technologically advanced fleet was not a foreign power, but an internal culture that allowed standards to soften, accountability to diffuse, and performance to be measured in reports rather than verifiable results.
Today, the closure of Mare Island and the contraction of Americaâs shipbuilding base suggest that the United States may be relearning that lesson the hard way.
Modern naval power depends not only on ships in the water, but on time, capacity, and competition. A fleet that takes more than a decade to replace a single strategic submarine is a fleet vulnerable to surprise, geopolitical shifts, and industrial disruption. When only a handful of shipyards can build or maintain critical vessels, the nationâs margin for error shrinks dramatically, just as Englandâs did when its fleet lay idle and undefended on the Medway and in the Chatham Dockyard.
The parallels are structural, not symbolic. Seventeenth-century Britain hollowed out its naval readiness through patronage, underfunding, and administrative complacency. Twenty-first-century America is risking hollowing out its maritime power through planning models that underestimate demand, procurement systems that discourage competition, and infrastructure decisions that trade long-term resilience for short-term cost savings.
In both cases, the danger is the same: a navy that looks formidable on paper but is fragile in practice.
The Columbia-class submarine timeline is more than a statistic. It is a measure of institutional health. It reflects how well a nation can mobilize skilled labor, sustain industrial capacity, coordinate government and industry, and enforce standards across vast, complex systems. These are precisely the functions Pepys fought to reform and Rickover fought to preserve.
This is why the story matters now.
Naval power has always been more than steel, reactors, or missiles. It is a product of culture, of how seriously a nation treats readiness, competence, accountability, and institutional memory. The Medway showed what happens when those values decay. Mare Island showed both what is possible when they are enforced, and what happened when they were abandoned.
The question this history leaves behind is not whether the United States can still build powerful ships. It clearly can. The deeper question is whether it will invest in the infrastructure and human capital needed to sustain its systems, preserve healthy competition, and enforce the discipline required to build ships quickly, safely, and at the scale naval strategy demands.
Because in every era, the greatest vulnerability of a great navy is not found at sea. It is found in the quiet decisions made in halls of power, over budgets, standards, and priorities long before the first ship ever touches the water.
Dennis Kelly
Samuel Pepys at the time of the Battle of Medway disaster.
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover descends into the reactor vessel at Shippingport Atomic Power Station, 1957 (photo by Yale Joel / LIFE). The photo symbolizes Rickoverâs belief that: No detail was too small for personal inspection, and Responsibility could not be delegated, even in highly technical systems.
Machinery Outfitting Group Superintendent Irvin Whitthorne (left), Head of Naval Reactors Admiral H. Rickover (center) and shipyard commander RADM Edward Fahy sometime in the mid-1960s when the nuclear submarine construction program on Mare Island was at full capacity. Based on Rickoverâs dress and the date range for this photograph, this was likely associated with sea trials for a ballistic missile submarine.
Rickover attending the launch ceremonies for the nuclear-powered fast attack submarine USS Permit (SSN 594) in 1961.
Report of VADM Rickover returning from Sea Trials in 1960 aboard Mare Island's first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. During a sixteen year period Mare built and commissioned a total of 17 nuclear submarines.