British Fleet Research Articles

HOW ILL-EQUIPPED WAS THE FLEET AIR ARM IN 1939?

It is often claimed that the British Fleet Air Arm at the outbreak of the Second World War was equipped with obsolete, sub-standard aircraft – particularly in comparison to American and Japanese naval aviation. But the Royal Navy did not plan for major carrier operations in the Pacific theatre, where it would have indeed faced superior Japanese capability. Instead, in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, the Fleet Air Arm acquitted itself well.

Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years War: The Sails of Victory (review)

Reviewed by: Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years War: The Sails of Victory James Pritchard Shipping and Military Power in the Seven Years War: The Sails of Victory. By David Syrett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-85989-786-0. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xi, 179. $59.95. This detailed study of the organization and administration of the British maritime transportation system goes a long way towards answering the question why the Seven Years' War was the most successful British war during the eighteenth century. This is the second posthumous publication by the late David Syrett, Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College CUNY. His death in 2004 cut short the career of a naval historian of the first rank. In this last of twelve books that he either wrote or edited on the British navy during the eighteenth century and on the defeat of the German U-boats during the battle of the Atlantic in the twentieth, Syrett has come full circle back to the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University), which was published (1970) as Shipping and the American War: A Study of British Transport Organization. Although a precedent for a single organization to administer British military overseas transport services had been established earlier during the century, this had been abandoned some time before the Seven Years' War in favour of a system of largely centralized hiring and decentralized administration. In three brief chapters, Syrett deals with ship chartering by the Navy Board, the Victualling Board, and the Ordnance Board. Two additional chapters treat of agents for transports, the procurement of shipping in North America, amphibious operations, and the 1762 expedition to Havana, which examines the transport system in motion. The business of [End Page 1323] chartering vessels to the government boards was largely in the hands of a small group of shipbrokers in the City of London, whether from corruption or favoritism, Syrett does not say. These men submitted bids to provide services, and the boards employed both time and space charters: the former chiefly for transportation overseas to North America and the West Indies and the latter for short voyages to Europe. During the war, the Commissioners of the Navy chartered approximately 1,000 ships in Britain to serve as transports, and in North America, government agents chartered another 440 to support military operations there. And while these numbers represent a small percentage of the merchant marine, the successful procurement, inspection, measurement, fitting out and administration (including enforcement of the terms of charter) of this number of ships well reflected the size and sophistication of the Royal Navy, the most complex, and largest, capitalintensive armed force in the world. Between 1754 and 1762 the commissioners of the Navy Board spent nearly £3 million on transport procurement. What is amazing was not the confusions that were bound to arise, but the success that enabled British forces to be dispatched to Louisburg, Québec, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Havana, Belle Isle and the French coast, Germany, Portugal, Gibraltar, and the American colonies where they were supported until they achieved victory. In a fascinating digression Syrett treats in some detail the unique problems that arose from provisioning the close blockading naval squadrons on the west coast of France between 1758 and 1761. Off loading provisions, including live animals, from small coasters of less than 100 tons alongside large men of war in a westerly wind required seamanship of the highest order, and as autumn came on large transports of 200 to 300 tons burthen chartered to the Navy Board replaced the coasters chartered to the Victualling Board. By November 1760, the Victualling Board was employing 55 transports shuttling back and forth between England and Ireland and the British fleet in the Bay of Biscay. Re-supply at sea in such quantities was unprecedented and was not repeated for more than forty years until the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This re-supply, the author insists, was a precondition of the successes met in the close blockade of Brest and the battle of Quibéron Bay. And so it was across the world, as British financial strength, commercial power, and a prosperous expanding...

British Strategic Interests versus Ottoman Sovereign Rights: New Perspectives on the Aqaba Crisis, 1906

During the first days of 1906, a diplomatic argument broke out between Britain and the Ottoman Empire over the location of the still undefined line of demarcation between Egyptian and Syrian territory in the Sinai peninsula. What started as a local dispute gradually gained momentum, resulting in the British fleet steaming towards Istanbul and the possibility of an international conflict drawing in other powers. The conclusion, after months of bitter diplomatic negotiations involving officials in Istanbul, Cairo and London, was a near total capitulation by the Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II, with the formal loss of several thousand square miles of territory to Egypt and the establishment of a permanent border. Drawing on a number of different archival collections, this article argues that an uneven British attitude met a resolute and consistent, if ultimately unsuccessful, Ottoman response. The British position was, for example, tentatively resisted all along by the ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Nicholas O'Conor. The dispute serves as an important case study of relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to the First World War, of British policy-making in the Near East and of the Ottoman reaction.

The Air Marshal versus the Admiral: Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Morton Forbes in the Pantheon

AbstractThis article assesses two military commanders who would have played key roles defending the nation had Germany invaded Great Britain in 1940. It challenges Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding's enviable public reputation as the man most responsible for preventing invasion by winning the air campaign misleadingly known as the Battle of Britain. By contrast, it rescues Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes who led the Royal Navy's most important tactical force in home waters. Previously, their reputations have been largely pegged to misleading public perceptions of the defence contributions of their service branches between the wars and during the early phases of the Second World War. These perceptions mainly stemmed from propaganda requirements for gaining essential American support, but it is argued here that the performance of Dowding and the Royal Air Force fell significantly short of the Battle of Britain legend. Instead, mainly because of an overwhelmingly powerful British fleet and Forbes's decimation of the German Kriegsmarine around Norway, the German planners came to believe that even with air superiority, invasion was not a viable operation. It concludes that the maligned Forbes and the Royal Navy should now be recognized as the real winners of the wider Battle of Britain.

Vehicle mass as a determinant of fuel consumption and secondary safety performance

One interaction between environmental and safety goals in transport is found within the vehicle fleet where fuel economy and secondary safety performance of individual vehicles impose conflicting requirements on vehicle mass from an individual’s perspective. Fleet characteristics influence the relationship between the environmental and safety outcomes of the fleet; the topic of this paper. Cross-sectional analysis of mass within the British fleet is used to estimate the partial effects of mass on the fuel consumption and secondary safety performance of vehicles. The results confirmed that fuel consumption increases as mass increases and is different for different combinations of fuel and transmission types. Additionally, increasing vehicle mass generally decreases the risk of injury to the driver of a given vehicle in the event of a crash. However, this relationship depends on the characteristics of the vehicle fleet, and in particular, is affected by changes in mass distribution within the fleet. We confirm that there is generally a trade-off in vehicle design between fuel economy and secondary safety performance imposed by mass. Cross-comparison of makes and models by model-specific effects reveal cases where this trade-off exists in other aspects of design. Although it is shown that mass imposes a trade-off in vehicle design between safety and fuel use, this does not necessarily mean that it imposes a trade-off between safety and environmental goals in the vehicle fleet as a whole because the secondary safety performance of a vehicle depends on both its own mass and the mass of the other vehicles with which it collides.

INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE UNCERTAIN FATE OF MILITARY SUNKEN VESSELS

On 5 October 1804, the Spanish warship Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes had almost completed its voyage from Peru to Spain, when it was attacked by the British fleet. In the ensuing battle of Cape St. Mary almost 250 Spanish sailors died. Historians deem the sinking of the Mercedes to be a pivotal event in European history. Mentioning the “sad loss of the frigate Mercedes”, King Carlos IV of Spain declared war against Great Britain and entered the Napoleonic wars on the side of France.The fateful sinking of the Mercedes and its possible recovery by a commercial salvor, Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., has been the focus of a pending legal dispute. After finding the wreck, the salvor claimed ownership of it, under the law of finds or a salvage award under salvage law, which would entitle it to sell the recovered artefacts and receive a part of the revenues as compensation for the efforts made in finding and recovering the shipwreck. However, Spain intervened in the proceedings claiming that the Black Swan – as the salvor had code-named the shipwreck – was the Mercedes, and that, the Mercedes being a warship of the Royal Navy of Spain, it was subject to immunity from Odyssey’s claims and not subject to salvage against the wishes of Spain. In parallel, Peru reclaimed the treasure, which it deemed part of its cultural patrimony, while the Bolivian Government expressed its interest in identifying the origin of the recovered treasure. Finally, twenty-five descendants of those aboard the Mercedes filed claims against the wreck. On 22 December 2009, the District Judge dismissed Odyssey and Peru’s complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and ordered Odyssey to return the artefacts to Spain. While the principles of international law upheld by the judge are not new, one may wonder whether customary norms of international law concerning the protection of sunken warships in the high seas are gradually crystallizing.This study shall proceed as follows. First, it will scrutinize the Black Swan case, by focussing on the identification of the vessel and issues of jurisdiction. Second, it shall explore the international legal framework which governs the recovery of sunken warships at the international law level. Third, issues of sovereign immunity and ownership will be addressed. Finally, some conclusions are put forward.

A PLACE OF CONSIDERABLE IMPORTANCE: LORD COCHRANE AND THE SIEGE OF ROSES 1808

Five months before the battle of Aix Roads (April 1809), his successful but frustrated attack on the French Brest fleet and his last action as a Royal Navy frigate commander, Captain Thomas, Lord Cochrane was engaged in an important operation at Roses on the coast of Catalonia. The Catalonia maritime theatre is considered by some historians to have been something of a backwater for the Royal Navy during the Peninsular War, but Napoleon Bonaparte’s overall strategic vision demanded unfettered access to the Mediterranean, and the Royal Navy’s constant patrols, many based on or near Rosas, kept the French navy contained at Toulon and the French army under duress on the right flank of Bonaparte’s southern Continental theatre. This article, from original research and analysis of primary source material, much of it unpublished, sheds new light on the events surrounding the Siege of Roses in November and December 1808, particularly the strategic context of the part played by Lord Cochrane, and the strategic importance of Rosas as a rendezvous for British fleets and a beachhead for allied forces.

Gabriel Tatton's Maritime Atlas of the East Indies, 1620–1621: Portsmouth Royal Naval Museum, Admiralty Library Manuscript, MSS 352

Gabriel Tatton's collection of manuscript charts, now in the Portsmouth Royal Naval Museum (Admiralty Library Manuscript, MSS 352), is the sole surviving example of original marine surveying in the East Indies by the English in the first half of the seventeenth century. The significance of these charts, however, rests on their immediacy as a record of the ships' routes, drawn by the professional chartmaker Gabriel Tatton while on an English East India Company voyage to the Spice Islands, China and Japan, 1620–1621. The English fleet joined forces with ships from the Dutch United East India Company to atttack Spanish and Portuguese vessels off the coast of China. The charts are described and compared with the work of Hessel Gerritsz., hydrographer to the Dutch United East India Company, 1617–1632. The coincidences of the timing of the joint Anglo‐Dutch fleet and of the work of the two chartmakers suggest a close connection. The subsequent history of the collection casts further light on the approaches of the English and Dutch companies to chart making at this time.

British Warships in the Age of Sail (1793?1817)?Design, Construction, Careers and Fates - by Rif Winfield and Ships of Trafalgar: the British, French and Spanish Fleets, October 1805 - by Peter Goodwin

British Warships in the Age of Sail (1793–1817)—Design, Construction, Careers and Fates RIF Winfield 432 pp., 200 b&w illustrations Chatham Publishing, Park House, 1 Russell Gardens, London NW11 9...

Raman spectroscopic analysis of a unique linen artefact: the HMS Victory Trafalgar sail

AbstractThe Battle of Trafalgar took place in 1805 and is generally accepted to mark the last occasion of combat between major fleets of sailing ships, when a combined Franco‐Spanish force of 33 battleships was defeated by a British fleet of 27 battleships blockading Cadiz and the approaches to the Mediterranean Sea. The HMS Victory Trafalgar sail, the fore‐topsail from Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship, was severely damaged and has since suffered significant natural deterioration. As the only extant early 19th century sail in the world, it is a unique artefact and arguably Britain's foremost maritime textile treasure. Prior to its display at the bicentennial exhibition in 2005, the sail was analysed by Raman spectroscopy. Complementary tensile tests were also completed on loose yarn from around the damaged areas. The mechanical data and Raman spectral comparisons suggest a good correspondence between the historic sailcloth and surrogate specimens. The latter were prepared by subjecting modern linen canvas to a four‐stage regime of artificial ageing in an attempt to reproduce the weakened state of the 200‐year‐old sailcloth, and provide model material to help appreciate the properties of the historic canvas. Detailed analysis suggests that certain Raman signatures are characteristic of ageing and may correlate with reduced performance of the fabric, suggesting that the technique could offer a non‐destructive approach to informing the preservation of a national textile heritage. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

GARY B. NASH. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking. 2005. Pp. xxix, 512. $27.95

When a synthesis elicits fatwas from two giants of the profession (Gordon S. Wood and Edmund S. Morgan) in two of the most popular magazines that review history (New Republic and New York Review of Books), you know the author is onto something. The volume that raised all these hackles is Gary B. Nash's The Unknown American Revolution: The Unreal Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. No one has done a better job than Nash does here of proving Carl Becker's point that the War of Independence was a struggle not only for home rule but over who should rule at home. Nash loves people who love freedom. For instance, he reprises his widely assigned mini-biography of Thomas Peters, who was kidnapped in present-day Nigeria and sold to French Louisiana. Peters somehow ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he became an enslaved millwright, then escaped to a British fleet that sailed up the Cape Fear river in 1776, fought in the Black Guides and Pioneers throughout the war, evacuated New York City with the British (and with more than 3,000 other former slaves) in 1783, and settled in Nova Scotia. Suffering continued discrimination there, he traveled to London and helped persuade Parliament to let the black loyalists resettle in Sierra Leone. Legend has it that he waded ashore signing “The day of jubilee is come” only to die a few months later (p. 428).

The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment, and: The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781 (review)

Reviewed by: The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment, and: The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781 David Curtis Skaggs The Battle of Yorktown, 1781: A Reassessment. By John D. Grainger. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2005. ISBN 1-84383-137-6. Maps. Notes. Sources and bibliography. Index. Pp. 203. $90.00. The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown, 1781. By Jerome A. Greene. New York: Savas Beatie, 2005. ISBN 1-932714-05-7. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 507. $34.95. The 225th anniversary of the most successful combined operation in the Age of Fighting Sail has produced two additions to the growing corpus detailing and analyzing the Yorktown campaign. Each of these books makes a solid contribution to our understanding of divergent aspects of the Chesapeake encirclement. Neither deals with the major strategic decisions made in London, Paris, and Madrid that influenced this campaign. The French and Spanish desired to keep the faltering American rebellion an active theater so their national objectives in the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and West Indies might be achieved. For this aspect of command, we will continue to depend on such old standbys as Piers Mackesy's The War for America (1965) and Jonathan Dull's The French Navy and American Independence (1975). Briton John Grainger's grossly over-priced book concentrates on what military professionals call the operational level of war—that part of military operations between the grand strategy of national policy making and the tactical field operations. At the operational level senior military and naval commanders employ the personnel, equipment, and resources placed under their control to secure desired national objectives. In other words, they determine when and where battles will be fought and who will fight them. Grainger is fascinated by the complexity of these operational choices: "Grasse's decision to bring his whole fleet north; Rodney's decision to divide his fleet; Graves's decision to take his squadron on a cruise to New England waters; Clinton's decision to order Cornwallis to fortify himself; Cornwallis's choice of Yorktown as the site for a naval base. Any one of these decisions could have been different, and so it is necessary to discuss the alternatives facing the decisionmaker, and to try to sort out his reasons at the time" (p. 55). Grainger goes over these decisions in considerable detail, often with excessively long quotations. His often controversial conclusions make this book worth studying. He is an apologist for Admiral Sir George Rodney whose "dispositions of his ships and fleet . . . were correct and well thought out, corresponding with accepted practice and in accord with his instructions." Grainger praises Admiral the Comte de Grasse who "demonstrated a grasp of the overall strategic situation and its possibilities which was clearly beyond the abilities of any of the British admirals (or their generals for that matter)" (p. 166). Although Admiral Thomas Graves was "gulled by Grasse who cunningly decoyed the whole British fleet away from the [Chesapeake] Bay entrance" (thereby allowing Admiral the Comte de Barras to bring the critical French artillery to Yorktown), his decisions "though generally uninspired, even inept and lacking imagination, did not affect the outcome in any way" (pp. 167–68). Grainger continues in this vein with other admirals and generals. Living up to his subtitle—The Siege of Yorktown—Jerome Greene is unconcerned with strategic or operational levels of war; The Guns of Independence is purely tactical. An expansion of an American Revolution bicentennial study published in a limited edition for National Park Service personnel, Greene's updated and revised study is the product of three-quarters of a century of archaeological and documentary research by the [End Page 503] staff of the Colonial National Historic Park. Supplemented by the excellent cartographic work of Theodore Savas, Greene describes the British defensive works and the Franco-American entrenchments, redoubts, and batteries with detail that often overwhelms the reader. There is, for instance, a two-page footnote identifying a British captain who fought at the battle of the Hook, 3 October 1781. Greene deftly weaves contemporary theories of siege craft and gunnery into the narrative of Yorktown developments. Although there are some...

The Growth of British Fisheries during the Industrial Revolution

One consequence of the industrial revolution was to make fishermen much more effective and efficient. Nowhere was this change in situation more stark than in the North Sea, which the British trawler fleet came to dominate during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much of modern fisheries policy can be traced to this period and this area.

Admiral Nelson's Tactics at the Battle of Trafalgar

AbstractOn 21 October 1805 the British fleet under Admiral Nelson met the Franco‐Spanish fleet under Admiral Villeneuve off Cape Trafalgar. The outcome of this encounter of 27 British ships against 33 enemy ships is justly famous, but the actual tactics that helped to achieve this notable British victory have not been fully understood and still remain a matter of dispute. This essay attempts to clarify the matter and to provide an improved account of what tactics Nelson planned to adopt and what tactics he actually adopted when he engaged the Franco‐Spanish fleet at the battle of Trafalgar.

Napoleon in Egypt

Napoleon in Egypt. Edited by Irene A. Bierman. With an introduction by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2003. In association with Gustav E. von Grunembaum Center for Near Eastern Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. Pp. v, 189. $49.50/£29.95. This collection of ten essays considers significance of General Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to and occupation of Egypt. Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798 after evading British fleet commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson. He defeated Ottoman and Mamluk forces and established, with varying degrees of success, a new political and economic administration. Napoleon also campaigned in Levant before returning to Egypt. In 1799, he left for France to pursue political ambitions and stranded his dwindling army, by then ravaged by war and disease. Residual French forces capitulated to British and Ottoman forces in 1801. The contributors to this book agree French ephemeral had important, if not profound, implications for Egypt and Middle East. Nelly Hanna views expedition as part of a long-term process in changing relationship Egypt and Europe. Egypt was a transit entrepot for coffee trade Hijaz and Europe. By French arrived, however, coffee trade had collapsed due to Antiguan competition. Furthermore, native textiles faced burgeoning British and European cheap imports. Geoffrey Symcox agrees with Edward Said that expedition acted as the formative moment for discourse of Orientalism (p. 13). His essay places expedition-a strategic gamble (p. 26)-in broader context of France's conflict with Great Britain. The attack was daring and risky and meant to threaten Britain's land links with India. Although Directory's geopolitical objectives were not attained, French resulted in two particular cultural consequences: (1) founding of Institut d'Egypte, and (2) confrontation Enlightenment and Islam. Stuart Harten provides an exceptional synthesis of Said's thought toward expedition-the enabling project for all subsequent Orientalist enterprises (p. 35). He also injects Henry Laurens's interpretation of ideological foundations of expedition by tracing its roots to discourse of Oriental Despotism' (p. 36). Harten points out that primary contributors of seminal Description de l'Egypte were engineers rather than Orientalist scholars. To Harten, French expedition appropriated Egypt politically and culturally, dispossessing native inhabitants of their very presence (p. 44). Juan R. I. Cole views French as perhaps first in a long line of liberal colonial adventures, of which Vietnam War is most famous in our time (or arguably, American of Iraq). What he calls also serve as binary relationships between Self and Other, civilization and barbarism, liberty and dominance, public and private, male and female, Great Powers diplomacy and local politics (p. 48). Cole uses memoirs to explore these contradictions and constructions. Nairy Hampikian examines mapping of Cairo and describes the drastic changes that took place in Cairo both during and after Napoleonic invasion (p. 70). Hampikian convincingly demonstrates not only that Description represented an Orientalist paradigm, but that its illustrations' efforts to see unseen (p. 74) are valuable for architectural and urban historians. Shmuel Moreh provides an Egyptian view of French invasion. The chief observers were 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Niqula Turk, and Hasan al-'Attar. …

Hello sailor!: the hidden history of gay life at sea

When gays had to be closeted, ships were the only places where homosexual men could not only be out but also camp. And on some liners to the sun and the New World, queens and butches had a ball. They sashayed and minced their way across the world's oceans. Never before has the story been told of the masses. These are the thousands of queer seafarers, mainly stewards, who sometimes even outnumbered the straight men in the catering departments of ships that were household names and the pride of the British fleet. Hello Sailor! uniquely shows what it was like to be queer at sea at a time when land meant straightness.

Commentary: Addressing the Gap Between Science and Practice in Children's Mental Health

In the mid 1700s, a British naval surgeon discovered the cure for scurvy, which would often so decimate the crews of sailing vessels that they would have to terminate their voyages and return to port in order to re-outfit their ships in human resources. In spite of the severe human and economic consequences of scurvy, the simple dietary solution for it was not fully implemented across the British naval fleet and merchant vessels for another hundred years (Valente & Rogers, 1995). These events serve to illustrate the natural barriers that support resistance to the adoption of even the simplest and most powerful of innovations. The gap between science and practice appears to be a chasm that exists in many fields, but nowhere is it greater than in the field of children's mental health. In the past several decades, great progress has been made in the understanding and treatment of children's mental health, but the broad adoption and implementation of evidence-based interventions (i.e., the practice) continues to lag far behind the research (i.e., the science) that accounts for these advances. However, there are emerging signs of hope that this gap may be closing to some degree. In the last several years, many important developments have occurred in the mental health field that may positively affect the welfare of at-risk children who are vulnerable to negative, destructive outcomes. For example, during the decade of the 1990s, there were numerous calls to reprioritize children's mental health needs and to examine critically generic strategies and methods by which this important goal might be achieved. The U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Children's Mental Health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999) resulted from a national forum in which critical issues, priorities, and needed actions were addressed by professionals, advocates, and consumers. A series of important legislative and policy directions designed to (a) improve children's mental health services and (b) refocus much stronger governmental action on early identification and intervention for children's mental health problems were incorporated into the report. Secondly, Peter Jensen, M.D., former chief of the NIMH child psychopathology branch, founded the center for Children's Mental Health at columbia and also established The Report on Emotional and Behavioral Disorders of Youth, an influential volume for mental health professionals dedicated to the promulgation and adoption of evidence-based practices in children's mental health. As editor of the report, Jensen has identified and explicated criteria for judging evidence-based intervention approaches (see Jensen, 2001). Finally, a seminal volume by Burns and Hoagwood (2002) has been published that describes the complex landscape of the community-based treatment of children experiencing severe emotional and behavioral problems. These authors provided a thorough and insightful analysis of the conditions, barriers, obstacles, and opportunities that mediate the design, delivery, and evaluation of effective interventions for high-risk children and their families within natural community settings. Burns and Hoagwood call for the development of a public health science that subsumes the related sciences of implementation and dissemination, and that will assist in finding the means to position evidence-based practices and services within community settings, sustain and support them over time, and identify the barriers that impede such positioning. Further, these authors urge examination of features of the practice environment that influence the clinician/client relationship and that have an effect on why some professionals are motiva ted to change and adopt new, proven strategies whereas others are not. They call for a new model of applied, real world research and practice that supports studies of the efficacy of new treatments within the contexts of the practice settings where the service is ultimately placed. …

The gondola Philadelphia & the Battle of Lake Champlain

A veteran of the American Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia is the oldest intact warship on display in North America. After its recovery from the bottom of Lake Champlain in 1935, the fifty-four foot long vessel, armed with three cannon and eight swivel guns, was moved to the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. The Philadelphia testifies to the heroic struggle between a hastily built fleet of American warships and an overwhelmingly superior British fleet on Lake Champlain in 1776. Although the Americans were defeated and the Philadelphia was sunk, the shipbuilding race and naval contest of which the gondola was a part delayed the British invasion, giving the Americans time to muster a defense that resulted in the British defeat at Saratoga in 1777. In this work, John R. Bratten details the gunboat's history, construction, armament, tools, utensils, personal items, and rigging elements. Through his careful analysis, Bratten offers modern readers a glimpse of the naval battles that ultimately helped to win the independence of our democratic nation.

U.S. National Security and Party Politics: The Consensus on Louisiana, 1789-1803

WITH THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the Louisiana Purchase, it is appropriate to once again examine the developments surrounding this sea change in American history. The purchase has been celebrated as the result of the vision of one man, Thomas Jefferson, and as the beginning of the great western expansion of the U.S. Yet the purchase should be understood not simply in the context of western expansion but of a young republic's quest for national security. In an oft-quoted statement, Jefferson declared: There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans . . . . The day France takes possession of New Orleans, fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. . . . From that moment, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.1 Jefferson was doing more than indulging in political hyperbole or expressing some solitary inspiration. he was reflecting a political consensus among national leaders that had developed since the founding of the Republic. It stressed the need for access to the Mississippi River and the importance of the Mississippi Valley to national security. An important party to this consensus, Federalists, has been accorded only a minor place in histories of the purchase. In United States history textbooks, for instance, the reaction of the Federalists to the purchase, if it is mentioned at all, is only given one or two sentences and generally focuses on the opposition in New England.2 The support of leading Federalists, such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, is seldom mentioned. The United States' concerns over Louisiana between 1789 and 1803 have been the subject of much study, but less attention has been paid to the role these concerns played in prompting leading Federalists to support purchase of the territory. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's work on the early republic, The Age of Federalism, shows the importance of national security concerns to the early Federalist governments, but it does so by looking at domestic politics and not directly at attitudes about Louisiana and, in any case, ends with Jefferson's assumption of the presidency.3 James Lewis in American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood notes leading policy makers' commitment to securing the goals of the Revolution against the problem of neighborhood . . . as they responded to changing conditions throughout the New World between 1783 and 1815.4 But he makes little reference to the attitudes and reasons behind Federalist support of the purchase and says nothing about pre-1800 rumors of retrocession of Louisiana to France. Other studies make more of Federalist enthusiasm for the purchase. Daniel Lang in Foreign Policy in the Early Republic argues that party leader Alexander Hamilton saw the acquisition of those countries [Louisiana and the Floridas] as essential to the permanency of the Union.5 Alexander DeConde's This Affair of Louisiana notes that even before 1800 it was not Republicans alone who saw possession of Louisiana in the United States' future. Like Jefferson, policy makers in the new American government thought of Louisiana and the Floridas as being held by the Spanish in a kind of trusteeship.6 Federalist leaders besides Hamilton also desired Louisiana and the Floridas.7 But Federalist reactions to the Louisiana Purchase merit further study. The national security concerns faced by Federalist administrations between 1789 and 1801 helped lead Federalists who had served in these governments as officers and diplomats-they might be termed national Federalists-to a consensus with Republicans on the status of Louisiana. They accepted Jefferson's purchase, in spite of opposition within their own party and the possibility that the new territory, like other parts of the West, would become heavily Republican. Louisiana's strategic and economic importance was immense. …

Report on the first research campaign on the Napoleonic brick, Mercure, wrecked off Lignano, Udine, Italy in 1812

During 2001, the NAUSICAA office organized a research campaign on the site where two carronades had been retrieved by a fishing boat. Side-scan sonar research led to the discovery of a mound and six more carronades. The mound was composed of iron ingots, cannon balls, and tools reused as ballast. After the cleaning of a carronade, it was possible to read the name of the foundry, Du Creusot, and the date, 1806. This evidence was sufficient to identify this as the wreck of the Napoleonic brick, Mercure, lost during the Battle of Grado, fought between an English and French fleet in February 1812.