Admiral Charles Wager’s first step in a meteoric career I dipped some time ago into a magnificently titled 19th Century book called: “THRILLING NARRATIVES OF MUTINY, MURDER AND PIRACY, a weird series of tales of shipwreck and disaster,from the earliest part of the century to the present time,with accounts of providential escapes and heart-rending fatalities” [...]

Guest Blog by J.D. Davies One of the pleasures for me of having embarked on historical naval fiction has been meeting so many interesting people who are active in the same genre. Of these, D.D. Davies is one of the most fascinating, for he not only writes enjoyable novels but is also a distinguished [...]

The Novara scientific expedition, 1857-59 Title page of the official report on the Novara Expedition The Natural History (Naturhistorisches) museum in Vienna, Austria, is one of the largest – and most impressive – institutions of its type in the world. My wife and I spent two days there in September 2016 and we could [...]

HMS Bellona vs. Courageux Duel: 1761 Devotees of naval history and fiction will know that the “74”, the so-called Third- Rate ships of the line, were the backbone of the fleets of the major European powers in the period 1756-1815. Though the type is primarily thought of as British, the original concept, dating from the 1740s, [...]

First Blood 1914: HMS Amphion and SMS Königin Luise On 4th August 1914 Germany rejected the British ultimatum to withdraw from neutral Belgium, which had been invaded in the preceding days. From 2300 hrs that evening both countries were at war.  Britain’s Royal Navy was already on a war footing and sweeps of the North Sea were already [...]

The Wreck of the Rothsay Castle 1831 A number of articles on this blog site have dealt with 19th Century shipping disasters. There is a horrible fascination about them since they illustrate how the management of civilian shipping was often so lackadaisical and how command, control and management techniques did not keep pace with [...]

Duel: HMS Espoir and the Liguria 1798 The Mediterranean was a very active theatre of naval warfare in 1798, culminating in Nelson’s spectacular destruction of the French fleet that had convoyed Bonaparte’s Army to Egypt at the Battle of the Nile on the 1st to the 3rd of August. At almost exactly the same [...]

The Royal Navy 29th July 1914: “Eighteen miles of warships running- at high speed and in absolute blackness through the narrow straits” This blog is published one day before the one hundred and sixth anniversary of a decisive step taken by Winston Churchill on Wednesday 29th July 1914. Germany had not yet declared war [...]

Guest Blog: Napoleon in Egypt Introduction by Antoine Vanner One of the great pleasure I found after I published my first novel was meeting other writers who were working in the Historical Fiction Genre - one that covers a vast range of epochs.  It was not only a welcoming community, but one that offered [...]

The loss of the liner La Bourgogne, 1898 The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 remains locked in the public imagination as the supreme tragedy of North Atlantic passenger travel, all the more so since elementary safety precautions could have saved many more lives, even if they could not save the ship. What is however quite horrifying is [...]