[1] Though he had received a good basic education in shipbuilding, Chapman recognized that he did not possess the knowledge of higher mathematics that was required to determine draft and stability at the design stage of a vessel.

His activities attracted the interests of the British naval authorities and upon leaving Deptfort in 1753, he was arrested, his papers confiscated and was then charged with trying to lure shipyards workers into French service.

[1] In 1754, Chapman continued his educational tour by going to the Netherlands and in 1755 to France, where he was given permission to stay at the royal shipyards at Brest to observe warship construction.

[2] The French authorities were the first to recognize Chapman's skills and attempted to convince him to stay and enter service for France, an offer he declined.

Inspired by Russian "chebecks" (variants of Mediterranean xebecs, hybrid sailing ships that incorporated features of galleys), the two created craft that could be rowed, but with heavier armament and additional protection for the crew, a necessity in the cold Baltic climate.

The frames should decrease from the place of greatest width in the same relation as the ordinates 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc (pictured), where the arc ABC is a parabola, AD is the axis and A is the vertex (the "peak").

The old school, represented most prominently by Gilbert Sheldon, came into conflict with the new ideas, but lost the debate when the Board of the Admiralty favored the findings of the commission at the Riksdag in March 1769 and put Chapman in charge of designing the navy's new warships.

A conglomerate of the Åkers gun foundry and owners of the Swedish East India Company provided the capital, while Chapman was to contribute his technical skills and experience with shipbuilding.

The same year he moved into a newly built house in Djurgården with his nephew Larg Bogeman and his former housekeeper Elisabeth Lindborg, with whom he had a daughter and son.

[7] Chapman constructed a new type of saw mill for the Djurgården yard that replaced the traditional "saw pit" with a circular blade at the center of an octagonal building.

Since the death of Charles XII in 1718 and Sweden's reduction to the status of a minor power, the country's politics had been dominated by the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, with frequent intervention by Russia, Great Britain, France and Denmark through bribes and subsidies.

Gustav's palace coup established him as a self-defined enlightened despot while curbing the influence of nobility, which had become unpopular through rampant corruption and political intrigues.

[14] The portrayal of the conflict as conservative reactionaries versus progressive pioneers is shared by several historical authors, including Daniel G. Harris, Chapman's modern biographer.

This includes descriptions of action approaching sabotage in providing substandard rigging material for the Wasa and outright insubordination on the part of Gilbert Sheldon by making the hull 60 cm (2 ft) shorter than planned.

Swedish Jan Glete has argued this description is partial to Chapman and his supporters and stressed the political nature of the conflict; Chapman and af Trolle were both close to the royal circles and their aims coincided with those of king Gustav III, who wished to assert control of the armed forces and to portray himself as an enlightened monarch who encouraged innovation against the conservative navy establishment in Karlskrona.

[15] Chapman also worked out several improvements of the royal shipyards that he supervised, including recommendations for the use of sheds to protect ships from deterioration when they were in reserve, something that was particularly important for the often lightly built galleys.

Showing considerable organization skills, he made detailed plans on how to make naval vessels ready for quick mobilization and proposed a more efficient system of management for shipyards based on his experiences in Sweden and abroad.

Chapman also became a pioneer in the application of mathematical calculations in the relation between rigging, displacement, water resistance, the center of gravity of hulls, stability and tonnage.

The charts and the following Tractat om Skepps-byggeriet ("Treatise on shipbuilding") in 1775 launched Chapman as one of the leading experts on ship building in the world.

[18] A further advance in the general theory was made on the appearance in 1775 of a work on the construction of ships by the Swedish Constructor—Admiral Frederick Henry de Chapman.

It contains the first published record of the use of Simpson's rules for approximate quadrature, and the calculations of displacement, centre of buoyancy, and metacentre given in the book closely resemble those made at the present day.