Category: Miscellaneous
More Images from John Pitt’s Sketchbook
Date Posted: 20/09/2011
John Pitt has kindly allowed me to post some more images from his unpublished sketchbook, made between 1801 and 1807. Some scenes are certainly made in the Caribbean while other locations are uncertain. The identity of the artist is also uncertain, though there is some .... Read More
Temeraire at Barbados 1801
Date Posted: 10/09/2011
John Pitt from Eastbourne has kindly got in touch with an excellent discovery. Whilst trying to trace a RN ancestor John came across a sketchbook which includes a number of fascinating images, including one of the Temeraire at anchor in Barbados, 1801. She is shown with a .... Read More
Rules of the Road (revised)
Date Posted: 06/04/2011
As occasionally happens, I was very lucky today to be sent a previously unpublished – and very little read, I suspect – naval diary. This one was written on board the armed merchant cruiser HMS Virginian in the new year of 1915 cruising out of Liverpool up .... Read More
Me, Admiral Benbow and the Astronomer Royal’s Dad
Date Posted: 07/03/2011
It just so happens that I know that Professor Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, is currently reading my book on Benbow. And here’s the interesting bit: his father wrote an unpublished manuscript on Benbow, parts of which I have now .... Read More
Captain Cook’s House, the MCG and Horses.
Date Posted: 20/12/2010
Now that the great Ashes circus is moving to Melbourne for the Boxing Day test I thought I would reassure all you English cricket fans that there is reason for hope in an unexpected quarter. You may presume that Melbourne, famous for the MCG – the cavernous, soulless, .... Read More
Cricket and Sailors
Date Posted: 05/12/2010
To my intense pleasure I discovered today that sailors in the eighteenth century were notorious for getting into fights ashore with the locals – not as one might assume because of gambling or women but because of….cricket! Games in the mid-eighteenth century .... Read More
Waterboarding in the French Navy, 1793
Date Posted: 02/12/2010
One thing that the French Revolution brought to the French Navy in 1793 was a more humanitarian code of punishment. Under the ancien regime the system of punishment was particularly severe, even for minor offences, and there was a host of barbaric punishment that could be .... Read More
Now this is funny.
Date Posted: 09/11/2010
This is great. There is a popular misconception amongst the English that the motto of the French Navy was once “A l’eau, C’est l’heure.” But this is actually a wonderful pun. Translated it is moderately convincing, meaning “To the water, .... Read More
The Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck
Date Posted: 19/09/2010
Was the son of the captain of the French flagship L’Orient at the battle of the Nile (1798). The captain’s surname was Casabianca, which is why the famous poem that begins ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ is called Casabianca. I have just found a great eye-witness report .... Read More