Naval hobbies of the 18th century (part 1)

There's a review at the Spectator of a book about Lord Byron's nutty ancestors.   Apart from the incest and all round excess, I thought this particular hobby (noted in the second paragraph) sounds particularly eccentric:

When the Wicked Lord inherited Newstead in 1743 he returned it to its former decay, building a creepy gun tower and a stone battery with crenellations and parapets. Lazy, cowardly and incompetent, he was described by Gertrude Savile as having a ‘sad caricter in everything’, and by Horace Walpole as ‘an obscure lord’ and a ‘worthless man’. Having stalked and abducted an Irish actress called George Anne Bellamy, he ran a sword through the stomach of his neighbour, the much loved William Chaworth, over a row about estate boundaries. After incarceration in the Tower of London, he was found guilty of manslaughter and given a small fine.

By now he had dismantled his wife’s considerable estates and spent his way through her fortune, buying whatever he felt like: Titians, Raphaels, Holbeins and a model navy for his lakes. It’s hard to imagine what this navy must have looked like, but it appears to have been life-size. Twenty-five-ton ships were pulled up to Newstead by armies of horses, and a sailor and his boy were hired to maintain and crew the vessels. No Byron marriage lasted for long, and after parting from his wife the Wicked Lord made ends meet by pawning Newstead’s brass locks and floorboards.