2019 Retrospective: A Blog Miscellany Best wishes to you and yours for a Happy, Healthy and Successful 2020 and the decade thereafter from me, Antoine Vanner. Many thanks for your support and for the enjoyable discussions that my writing has so often triggered. 2019 was a busy year in the Dawlish Chronicles front, including [...]
An epic stand against French oared-galleys in British Waters – 1707 When one thinks of battles involving oared galleys one thinks automatically of actions in the Mediterranean. The lot of a galley-slave chained to an oar must have been dreadful enough in the warm and usually calm waters of that sea, but it must [...]
A ruse to escape annihilation: HMS Phaeton, 1795 Cornwallis The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars saw very large numbers of battles at sea between small numbers of ships, but few in which entire squadrons engaged and yet fewer fleet actions on the scale of the Nile, Camperdown or Trafalgar. On one occasion however a medium-sized Royal Navy squadron [...]
From Rebel to Samurai – the epic career of the Confederate ironclad Stonewall - Part 2 Part 1 of this article told of the genesis of the ironclad, CSS Stonewall. To read it, click here. The Alabama/Kearsarge action by Édouard Manet A major role is played in my new novel, Britannia’s [...]
From Rebel to Samurai – the epic career of the Confederate ironclad CSS Stonewall - Part 1 In 1864, two significant conflicts raged: the "Danish War", in which Denmark resisted the combined forces of Prussia and Austria, and the Civil War that raged not only in North America but on the world's oceans. A [...]
