Prize Money: Frigates, Snobbery - 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 or bought by the Admiralty, is rightly shown as an important driver for [...]

More Privateer Action in the Channel: 1799 An earlier article (Click here if you missed it) told of a small vicious action between a British merchant ship and a French privateer in the English Channel at the start of the Revolutionary War in 1793.  In the years that followed the pace was not to [...]

Privateer Action in the English Channel: 1793 Probably like many others I have always thought of privateers in the Age of Fighting Sail as preying on enemy merchant shipping on commercial routes in open ocean, far from land. My perception has however been changed by an 1889 book, “Betwixt the Forelands”, [...]

The Loss of the Russian cruiser Pallada, October 1914 The illustration below  is from a German WW1 part-work, published monthly, in this case in 1914/15. It is an artist’s impression of the destruction of the Bayan-class Russian armoured cruiser Pallada on 11th October 1914. There were no survivors from Pallada's 597-man crew when she blew up after [...]