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The families left behind by merchant seamen of the 1870s
In September last year I wrote a blog about working conditions in merchant shipping in the 1870s (Click here to read it). In it I referred to the work done by the great maritime reformer Samuel...
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Guest Blog by Helen Hollick: Pirates, Night-Walkers and White Witches!
The Nautical Fiction genre has many different sub-genres within it and once of the most entertaining – and original – has been virtually created by one writer, my friend Helen Hollick. You may have...
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Naval Hero Sir James Lucas Yeo – Part 1
When reading of action by the Royal Navy in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic War period one is struck not just by the commitment in carrying the fight into the enemy’s inshore waters – and even...
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Guest Blog by Catherine Curzon: “The Sailor King”
Followers of my blog will have noted that my list of links to other blogs includes “A Covent Garden Gilflurt's Guide to Life”– a vastly entertaining blog that addresses all aspects (but especially...
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Naval Hero Sir James Lucas Yeo – Part 2
A recent blog introduced us to the real-life naval hero Sir James Lucas Yeo (1782 – 1818), a handsome and dashing officer who might seem overdone were he to step from the pages of a novel. At the end...
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First Blood 1914: Amphion and Königin Luise
On 4th August 1914 Germany rejected the British ultimatum to withdraw from neutral Belgium, which had been invaded in the preceding days. From 2300 hrs that evening both countries were at war....
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The Capture of Fort Serapaquí — February 1848
A small and now-forgotten punitive expedition in 1848 showed just how effectively the Royal Navy could function as Britain’s 19th Century rapid-reaction force.In the turmoil that followed ending of...
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The Wreck of the Rothsay Castle 1831
A number of articles on this blog site have dealt with 19th Century shipping disasters. There is a horrible fascination about them, since they illustrate how the management of civilian shipping was...
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Lafayette at Sea 1824
Lafayette as a dashing young general(Portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court)Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757 –1834) is remembered chiefly today, especially in the United States, as one of the...
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Naval Hero Sir James Lucas Yeo – Part 3
Two recent articles on this blog introduced us to the real-life naval hero Sir James Lucas Yeo (1782 – 1818), a handsome and dashing officer who might seem overdone were he to step from the pages of a...
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The five Padstow heroines of 1879
Most of my blog-entries deal with naval history, and inevitably involve much “Blood and Iron”. This post deals however with a peacetime act of heroism and one that typifies the courage and resolution...
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The Capture of Curaçao 1807
Lying some 40 miles north of the Venezuelan coast, the Caribbean island of Curaçao is today a separate country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was first colonised by the Dutch in the mid-17th...
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On the Royal Navy List for 96 Years - Admiral Sir Provo Wallis (1791-1892)
Wallis in 1813I am always amazed at just what change – political, technical, economic, scientific – can occur in a single human lifetime. I was reminded of this when I saw a reference in an 1895 book...
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The Novara scientific expedition, 1857-59
Title page of the official report onthe Novara ExpeditionThe Natural History (Naturhistorisches) museum in Vienna, Austria, is one of the largest – and most impressive – institutions of its type in the...
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The bloody Plattsburg mutiny, 1816
Radio has been an integral feature of maritime operations, whether military or civil, for well over a century and it is difficult to imagine just how isolated all ships were prior to that once they...
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French liners in WW1 – slaughter in the Mediterranean
October 4th was the one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the SS Gallia, one of the worst maritime disasters of the First World War. What made it even more terrible was that this was one of four...
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Training Tragedies - the losses of HMS Eurydice and HMS Atalanta
At first glance the picture of a frigate such as HMS Eurydice, illustrated above on a cigarette card, immediately evokes visions of single-ship actions of the Napoleonic period. It is therefore all the...
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Guest Blog by Richard Abbott: South-West England’s Gigs
I’m honoured today to welcome back the novelist Richard Abbott as a guest blogger. You can out more about him at the end of this article. When he last appeared here (on 1st March 2016) he brought us...
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The salvaging and afterlife of minelayer UC-5
A blog on Tuesday 3 November 2015 described the horrific sinking of the hospital ship Anglia close to English south-coast in 1915. She was a victim of a submarine-laid mine, a weapon that was to prove...
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Prize Money - Frigates, Treasure and Jane Austen
HMS Pomone - frigate,archetypal prize taker In naval fiction set in the Age of Fighting Sail, prize money, accruing from the capture of enemy shipping which would subsequently be sold to third parties...
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