Earning Napoleon’s admiration: HMS Grappler 1803 A minor action off the French coast in 1803 which involved the Royal Navy brig, HMS Grappler, was to arouse the admiration of  Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The story is a remarkable one. A brig-of-war - in this case French. HMS Grappler would however have looked very similar. These [...]

Dynamite Guns: Brilliant Technical Dead-Ends! A major role is played in the Dawlish Chronicles novel Britannia’s Shark, set in 1881, by an experimental “pneumatic projector” – essentially a gun from which the projectile is launched by compressed air. Such weapons were considered very promising in the 1880s and 1890s and indeed the inventor John Phillip [...]

The Iéna and Liberté Disasters, 1907 and 1911 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all major navies, other than the German, lost large ships through magazine explosions of unstable ammunition. The first of such tragedies was in the US Navy, when the battleship USS Maine blew up in the harbour of Havana, Cuba, in [...]

HMS Dolphin and the capture of the slaver Firme, 1841  A slaver of the early 19th Century -                 typically a brutal thug In 1807 Britain was the first nation to outlaw the slave trade, one which had existed for millennia (and that, to a certain [...]

The Crimean War’s North Pacific Theatre: Petropavlovsk, August 1854 The most common image of the Crimean War (1854 – 56) is of Britain’s Light Brigade charging to death and glory against Russian guns at Balaclava. Almost equally well known are the epics of the ”Thin Red Line” and of the Storming of the Redan, [...]

The Intercontinental Junk Keying, 1846 In a 1912 book entitled “The Sea Trader – His Friends and Enemies” I came across the engraving illustrated here. I found it wholly fascinating as it refers to the Keying, “The first junk that ever rounded the Cape of Good Hope, as she appeared off Gravesend, 28th March 1848, 477 days from Canton” My interest [...]

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 [...]