Sailing Craft versus U-Boats in World War 1 Though the “Age of Fighting Sail” ended around 1840 as regards major warships, small sailing craft were to play a very important role in World War 1 in Britain’s battle against Germany’s U-Boats.  One such heroine craft was the Lowestoft fishing smack Telesia, which was conscripted into naval [...]

Cool Heads in Crisis: HMS Venerable, 1804 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars locked Britain and France into almost twenty-two years of continuous warfare from 1793 and conflict at sea was a critical part of this. What is surprising however is how few ships were actually destroyed in combat. Whether in large fleet actions or in “single ship” [...]

The Imperial German Navy – sketches of life on board ship 1902 Some time ago I stumbled on German publication of 1902 entitled “Germany’s Honour on the World’s Oceans” (Deutschlands Ehr im Weltenmeer) by a Vice-Admiral von Werner. The sub-title is “The development of the German Navy and sketches of life on board.” The illustrations, not [...]

The Twilight of the Pre-Dreadnoughts and the Sinking of HMS Goliath, 1915 At the start of World War I all major navies had significant numbers of pre-dreadnought battleships which, though in many cases only eight or ten years old, had been rendered wholly obsolete by the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought in 1905. This, the first turbine-driven, all-big [...]

Privateer in action: the Ellen 1780 Privateers receive little attention in accounts of naval warfare right up to the time when the practice was banned by international Paris Declaration of 1856, which only the United States, among major nations, omitted to sign. Such privately-owned ships were authorised by a “letter of marque” to prey on enemy [...]

Built to be unlucky? The French battleship Suffren The splendidly-expressive Yiddish word “schlemiel” describes a person who is invariably unlucky and  whose endeavours are doomed to failure – “so inept even inanimate objects pick on them”. One does come across such unfortunate individuals – who are usually likeable – but in reading naval history one is often struck [...]

HMS Dolphin and the capture of the slaver Firme, 1841  Early 19th Century Slaver In 1807 Britain was the first nation to outlaw the slave trade, one which had existed for millennia (and that, to a certain extent, still does). Active measures to suppress the evil had to wait until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when other [...]

Frigate Duel, 1782: HMS Santa Margarita vs. L’Amazone In reading about warfare in the Age of Fighting Sail one is invariably impressed by the aggression and sheer bloody-minded will to win that characterised the officers and crews of the Royal Navy. These were the factors that regularly brought victory even when the odds seemed stacked against British [...]

The loss of HMS Queen Charlotte, 1800 During the twentieth century, damage-control was to become a naval discipline in itself, and was to result in many epics of courage. In earlier centuries such response was on a much more ad-hoc basis but the bravery and self-reliance of the crews involved were no less than those [...]