The French Navy in Korea in 1866 The (now) fifth novel in the Dawlish Chronicles series, Britannia’s Spartan, is set in Korea in 1882 when internal pressures and great-power interventions plunged the country into riot and chaos. A malign role is played by the “Daewongun”, the father of the weak King Gojong. Initially regent [...]

Diplomacy at Sea: USS Miantonomoh 1866 - 67 Two recent blogs described the loss of low-freeboard monitors in the open sea, the Dutch Adder in 1882  (Click here to read) and the Russian Rusalka in 1893 (Click here to read). In both cases the inadvisability of taking vessels designed for protected coastal waters into open-sea conditions was a [...]

The US Navy's Sumatran Expeditions of 1832 & 1838 The US Navy’s role in the suppression of Barbary piracy in the Mediterranean is deservedly well known but few today are aware that in the 1830s two American expeditions were launched against pirates in what is now Indonesia. The scene was to be the then [...]

Lonely Lives and Deaths French Prisoners of War in Britain 1793 - 1815 Part 2 The most notable reminder of the Napoleonic-era French prisoners in modern Alresford is to be found in the graveyard of the ancient church of St. John the Baptist (Click here to read Part 1 for context, should you have [...]

Lonely Lives and Deaths French Prisoners of War in Britain 1793 - 1815 Part 1 Though the focus of my own writing – in my novels of the Dawlish Chronicles series – is on the mid-Victorian period, I retain a lively interest in the Napoleonic era. I have always found the plight of prisoners [...]

Hit and Run at Sea, 1876 - SS Strathclyde and SS Franconia A recent blog dealt with an 1876 case of a ship “passing by on the other side” and not rendering assistance to a wrecked vessel (click here to read this article). An even more extreme case occurred the same year. In this “Hit and [...]