We've taken up the question of the
Victory's entry ports a couple of times before. The bottom line is that, though the evidence so far is inconclusive, Heller may well have been right to leave them off.
Quite a few paintings of the
Victory date from the Trafalgar period. (We have to be careful when consulting paintings of her; she had a long career and got modified many times.) The recent book by Allan McGowen and John McKay,
H.M.S. Victory: Construction, Restoration and Repair (I may have garbled the title a little) contains several excellent reproductions of such pictures. Not one of them shows the entry ports.
The most persuasive piece of evidence may be the enormous oil painting, "The Battle of Trafalgar," by J.M.W. Turner. It was commissioned not long after the battle by the Prince Regent (the future George IV), and now hangs in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The
Victory is the centerpiece of the picture; if I remember right, she stands at least six feet tall in it. Turner is known to have gone on board the ship shortly after the battle to make sketches for the painting. (One of those sketches is in the McGowen-McKay book.) He shows the steps on the side of the hull exactly the way Heller does.
The Turner painting is pretty convincing, but not absolutely decisive. Turner was a great artist, but his knowledge of ship construction was sometimes a little hazy. He apparently worked on that painting for a long time; if I remember correctly he didn't finish it till sometime in the 1820s. It's entirely possible that he unwittingly included some features of her that weren't there at the time of the battle.
The National Maritime Museum has two contemporary models of the
Victory. One of them represents her "as built," 1765 configuration. It does have entry ports - but in many other ways doesn't look anything like the ship looks now. The other model seems to have been intended to show what she looked like after her 1802 refit (i.e., just about how she looked at Trafalgar). That model doesn't have entry ports - and is enough to make a ship modeler throw up his hands and give up. All sorts of features of that model differ from the real ship (and every published set of plans, and every commercial kit - including the Heller one). The structure of the bow is different, the decorations on the transom are different, much of the deck furniture is different (there's no belfry, if I remember right), and the stripes on the sides are white instead of yellow. The number of gunports in the quarterdeck bulwarks is also different - and, just to provide food for thought, agrees beautifully with the Turner sketch. (That sketch is itself rather disquieting. It shows a different form of railing at the break of the poop deck - and the railing has a couple of swivel guns mounted on it.)
One other conspicuous feature of that newer model: the bulwarks around the forecastle deck are shoulder-high (rather than knee-high, as the real ship's - and the Heller kit's - are today). There's room for argument about that one too, but I'm inclined to think the NMM model is right. Back in the 1920s, when the ship was undergoing one of her first historical restorations, a fine scholar named R.W. Bugler did a thorough search of the records and concluded that the forecastle bulwarks had been raised during the 1802 refit. Unfortunately, by the time his book came out the carpenters had torn the bulwarks down and rebuilt them in their present configuration. Dr. R.C. Anderson, who was in charge of the work, acknowledged the mistake; he was (understandably) reluctant to tear apart the skilled work that the carpenters had just completed.
I think Chuck Fan is right about the armament - but that's a matter of some question too. Some sources give her 104 guns at the time of Trafalgar; some give her 102. Some put a couple of long guns on the forecastle deck beside the carronades, firing through ports in the tall bulwarks. And, of course, if the entry ports are omitted there are two additional gunports on the middle gundeck.
The omission of the royal yards isn't exactly an error. In 1805 the royal was in the process of being established as a permanent element of the sail plan. Rigging practices varied from ship to ship, but at that time the sail was often referred to as a "topgallant royal" and was "set flying." The sail and its yard were lowered and stowed (often by being lashed inside the topmast shrouds) whenever they weren't set. Setting the topgallant royal entailed rigging the halyard, braces, and sheets and hauling the yard up to the topgallant masthead. In a ship the size of the
Victory that would be quite a job - which probably is why, within a few years, warships in general adopted the practice of mounting their royal yards permanently.
To my mind the most bewildering thing about the Heller
Victory kit has always been the absence of any means of fastening the
other yards to the masts. There are no parrels for the topsail or topgallant yards, and the rigging diagrams show no trusses for the lower yards. Apparently the yards are just supposed to hang there. That's utterly ridiculous. It would have been perfectly practicable to make a set of parrels out of plastic - and that would have been a much better use of plastic and ingenuity than those idiotic "looms" for making ratlines and hammock nettings. Sorry; getting up on the soapbox again.
As I understand it, the people in charge of the real
Victory are in the midst of an extremely high-powered research project, the objective of which is to determine once and for all what she looked like on October 21, 1805. My hunch is that their ultimate answer to that question will be, "well...we really aren't sure." They've come to some interesting conclusions already, though. They've established fairly firmly, for instance, that Nelson didn't die on the spot where the "here Nelson died" marker is - and they seem to be leaning toward the conclusion that the forecastle bulwarks were indeed shoulder-high. But to my knowledge they haven't said anything about the entry ports. I'll be watching the press with great interest to see what the final conclusions of that research project are.