The varied career of the Dutch Protected Cruiser Gelderland My wife’s grandmother, a splendid lady who died at almost 100 in the 1980s, gave me a very graphic eye-witness account of actually seeing the ex-president of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger. He was then being applauded by a crowd while taking a carriage ride in Amsterdam [...]

The bloody Plattsburg mutiny, 1816 – Part 2 Part 1 of this article (Click here to read if you missed it) left the trading schooner and her valuable cargo of  coffee and currency in the hands of her mutinous crew, close to the Azores. The only officer who had been spared was Onion, the second [...]

The bloody Plattsburg mutiny, 1816 - Part 1 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 were out sight of land. Large numbers of vessels disappeared annually, [...]

1759 – “The Wonderful Year” When I was twelve I found in our local library a leather-bound “Children’s History of the World” in two volumes, each about two and a half inches thick. They dated from the 1890s (the summit of human progress might have been assumed to be Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in [...]

Training Tragedies: the losses of HMS Eurydice and HMS Atalanta At first glance the picture of a frigate such as HMS Eurydice, as above, immediately evokes visions of single-ship actions of the Napoleonic period. It is therefore all the more surprising that this ship was still in service in 1878 and that her destruction was witnessed by the [...]