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Versatile Bloggers!
My writing-friend Alison Morton has successfully combined the genres of hard-boiled thriller and alternative-history. She has created a convincing and internally consistent parallel universe in which a...
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The Bellona and Courageux action 1761
Devotees of naval history and fiction will know that the “74”, the so-called Third- Rate ships of the line, were the backbone of the fleets of the major European powers in the period 1756-1815. Though...
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The loss of HMS Vanguard 1875
The name HMS Vanguardis associated today with the Royal Navy’s last battleship, scrapped in 1960. An earlier Vanguard was however to meet an even more unpleasant fate, and arguably a wholly avoidable...
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Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 3
Thomas Luny (1759–1837)Two sorts of courage move me. The first is the sort of bravery that is called upon for a finite period, for minutes, hours, days or even on occasion months, and which demands a...
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The Death of the Adder 1882
It is well known that the USS Monitor, which can be argued to be the first modern warship, and which gave its name to a type of ship which would see service until the end of WW2, was lost off Cape...
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The Spar Torpedo – a weapon for heroes and madmen
The Spar Torpedo – which plays a vital role in my novel Britannia’s Wolf, the account of Nicholas Dawlish’s service in the Ottoman Navy 1877-78 – was a crude weapon, born of necessity and desperation...
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The wreck of the Rusalka 1893
In my blog last week I recounted the story of the loss of the Dutch monitor Adder in 1882. The lesson of this tragedy was that it was folly to send low-freeboard vessels suited to use in sheltered...
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The Crimean War’s North Pacific Theatre: Petropavlovsk August 1854
The most common image of the Crimean War (1854 – 56) is of Britain’s Light Brigade charging to death and glory against Russian guns at Balaclava. Almost equally well known are the epics of the ”Thin...
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Diplomacy at Sea: USS Miantonomoh 1866/67
Two recent blogs described the loss of low-freeboard monitors in the open sea, the Dutch Adderin 1882 and the Russian Rusalka in 1893. In both cases the inadvisability of taking vessels designed for...
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Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 4
Richard Paton (1717 – 1791)In the previous parts of this occasional series I commented on the fact that so many of the artists of the 18th Century who left us the paintings that have formed our mental...
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SS Utopia and HMS Anson 1891
In 1866, at the naval battle of Lissa, in the Adriatic, victory was secured by the Austro-Hungarian fleet over its Italian enemy by means of ramming. Though this was a unique event in a fleet-action,...
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Steerage-passenger conditions in the 1880s
In my recent blog about the disaster that overcame the SS Utopia in 1891, which resulted in the deaths of 562 Italian emigrants, I commented briefly on the bewilderment and trepidation with which these...
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The “Great Siege” of Gibraltar – and Heated Shot
Accounts of naval operations against shore fortifications in the “Age of Fighting Sail” make frequent references to the use of “heated shot” – cannon balls warmed to white heat in furnaces before...
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Nelson at the Nile, 1798
Bonaparte's fury at the defeat!Nelson’s stunning victory at Aboukir, off the Nile Delta, in August 1798 was to raise his reputation to a European level. In this battle Nelson brought his force of...
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The SS Arctic Disaster 1854
In my recent blog about the loss of the steamer SS Utopia in Gibraltar harbour in 1891 I commented on the fact that for almost a century insufficient provision of lifeboats a major factor in marine...
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How the “humorous” magazine Punch saw WW1
Belgium bars the way - August 1914Amid the many commemorations now in progress about World War 1, “The Great War” as it was known to its contemporaries, there is a strong tendency for us to look back...
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Built to be unlucky? The French battleship Suffren
The splendidly-expressive Yiddish word “schlemiel” describes a person who is invariably unlucky and whose endeavours are doomed to failure – “so inept that even inanimate objects pick on them”. One...
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Twilight of the Pre-Dreadnoughts and the Sinking of HMS Goliath, May 13th 1915
At the start of World War I the major navies had significant numbers of pre-dreadnought battleships which, though in many cases only eight or ten years old, had been rendered wholly obsolete by the...
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The attack on the "General Armstrong" 1814
“Cutting out” operations were the SEAL or SBS-type operations of the Napoleonic era. Small boats carrying large numbers of armed seamen attempted to capture enemy ships which had gained the shelter of...
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Palmyra: a world-legacy under threat
For me Friday evening is the time of the week when I write my main blog, usually on a historical topic from the 18th or 19thCenturies, often, but not invariably, naval in focus. I usually pick my...
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