British Navy Research Articles

Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (review)

Reviewed by: Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 Michèle Longino (bio) Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. 241 pp. $59.95 (cloth). With this masterful volume, Nabil Matar concludes a brilliant trilogy focused on the English–Islamic connection in the second half of the sixteenth century continuing through the better part of the seventeenth century. The imbalance suggested above by the juxtaposition of the incommensurate terms 'English' and 'Islamic,' pitting nationhood against religion, flags a symptom of the tensions and debates that characterize relations and representations of the Muslim and the Briton in this period. Matar's two earlier equally admirable books, Islam in Britain: 1558–1685 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (Columbia University Press, 1999), lay the groundwork for this final one, and together the three volumes clearly establish Matar as the foremost authority on the subject. Britain and Barbary is organized in five chapters that weave together the representation of the Barbary states in British novels, writings, formal documents and on the stage, and provide a detailed and engaging picture of the context of these writings, the contact story. In addition, ever attentive to his sources, Matar includes three eloquent documents as appendices following the conclusion. The first chapter examines the representation of the Moor on the Elizabethan stage, with attention to Shakespeare's Othello and The Merchant of Venice, but also to Heywood's Fair Maid of the West Part I, and explaining the state of relations and degree of contact between England and Barbary that would explain interest for the topics of these plays. The second chapter analyzes the imperialist initiatives of the English in and around the Mediterranean basin following the defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto [End Page 107] in 1571, resulting in the establishment of the East Levant / Turkey Trading Company and the Barbary Company, a greater British presence in these parts, and, as a consequence, an increasing frequency of pirate attacks and captive-taking. British knowledge of the region and its people increased as the captives (frequently enslaved and held for long spells when not for life) provided written accounts of daily life in North Africa. Unsuccessful demands on the King to provide ransom money exposed his reluctance to intervene and free his subjects. The consequent discontent of the seagoing British and their families played into the civil strife that was fomenting in those same years. An important outcome of the Barbary challenge would be the commitment to build up the British Navy in order to protect the merchants, and thus Britain would become an important maritime power, better equipped to protect the merchant fleets. Matar's brilliant third chapter convincingly demonstrates that British women acquired political agency as a consequence of their men's captivity and the women's need to fend for their families in the absence of male providers. They dared to assume public roles, petitioned and persisted, not simply at the parish level, but at the parliament level, and with letters to the King himself. Thus an important consequence of Moorish captivity was to destabilize domestic politics and the patriarchal order. In addition, class order was challenged by the experience of some British women who found themselves captives in Barbary, only to discover they were treated with more consideration there than at home. They rose in status, esteem, and wealth by virtue of their exotic Britishness. This too, if more paradoxically, led to a sense of greater agency for women, and to a questioning of the traditional ways of British society. In the meanwhile, the Britons were content to hand over their women passengers, indentured servants, and the like, when threatened, and to trust that their women would pave the way for smoother trading relations with the Barbary people. Certainly not all British women who found themselves captive would end up sultanas, but there remains little written trace of those more common and certainly more painful experiences. Matar concludes that Barbary–British relations had an important effect on British women's lives, at home and abroad, and transformed their way of seeing themselves and the world. Matar's fourth chapter discusses...

Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (review)

Reviewed by: Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism ed. by Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao Clare Anderson Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Edited by Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. This fascinating set of essays tackles a central paradox of colonialism: the centrality of violence to the supposedly “civilizing mission” of European empires. The editors argue that bodily violence and its relationship to colonial reason were central to histories of the colonial body and repertoires of colonial governance. Moreover, bodily violence marked and constituted the boundaries of alterity (categories of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality) which became enmeshed in the colonial state (pp. 3–4). Four of the nine essays were published as a special edition of the journal Interventions in 2001, and their further expansion and publication is a welcome addition to the growing historical and anthropological literature on the history of the body. Douglas M. Peers, Anupama Rao and Laura Bear examine the policing of sexuality in the early nineteenth-century Indian army, torture in colonial India, and twentieth-century Indian railway workers’ petitions. Steven Pierce and Susan O’Brien look at flogging in colonial and ‘spirit discipline’ in post-colonial Nigeria. Kerry Ward discusses the punishment of suicide at the Dutch East India Company’s Cape of Good Hope; Shannon Lee Dawdy punishment in eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana; Isaac Land corporal punishment in the British navy; and, Dorothy Ko attempts to abolish foot binding in twentieth-century China. In the final chapter, Yvette Christianse presents a collection of imaginative poetry that seeks to give voice to lost narrations of the experience of exile. The collection is a timely intervention on the politics of colonial violence in a post-9/11 world, and the editors state that contemporary concerns – notably the tension between the centrality of human rights discourses to recent US imperial interventions and their violation in places like Guantánamo Bay (Cuba) and Abu Ghraib (Iraq) – drive the essays. To some extent this is true, notably in the chapters on torture in India and flogging in Nigeria by Rao and Pierce. However, the collection as a whole marks a much broader and more significant intervention in the history and anthropology of the body than the introduction implies. It addresses with great clarity and depth not just violence against or the punishment of the body, but its regulation and modification, as also violence as metaphor and/or discourse. Furthermore, Christianse’s Castaway verses make an important methodological contribution to debates about retrieving subaltern voices from colonial archives. Though the editors are right in drawing out the continuities of colonial expansion (p. 20), for comparative work of this kind is of enormous value, I would like to have seen more on the ambivalences and differences of intimate body politics over time and space – and thus of the differential relationship between the body and the broader social and economic concerns of European empires. The invocation of the ‘scandalous violation’ of the body as ‘a pattern repeated from India to King Leopold’s Congo’ (p. 21), is in this respect somewhat striking, for the politics of the rubber plantation produced spectacularly different corporal results in places like the Congo and Burma. What do the politics of the body reveal about differences in the colonial state? For instance, within the British Empire is it significant that Indian women were exempt from flogging while African women were subject to it? And how might the bodily practices of European empires be compared in the African continent? Perhaps this question would have been addressed – and the broader significance of the essays in this respect drawn out - had the collection been more squarely situated within extant literature. Despite massively expanding historiographies (and anthropologies) of the politics of the colonial body, there are significant bibliographical omissions. This leads to a few extraordinary claims such as that flogging in British colonies has yet to receive scholarly attention (pp. 187, 210 n. 5). Notwithstanding the important work of Douglas M. Peers – himself a contributor to this book – what of the work of Radhika Singha, Florence Bernault, or Raymond Evans and William Thorpe? Finally, I am somewhat troubled by the...

THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE (1589)

In July of 1588, the English navy defeated the Spanish Armada, and Elizabeth I (1533-1603) entered the glorious final years of her reign. Recent stage presentations included Tamburlain the Great by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). The early works of John Lyly (1554-1606) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and the fiction of Robert Greene (1560-1592) were in the bookstalls around St. Paul's Cathedral. And Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) had already written his last sonnet sequences, which were still awaiting publication. The Stationers' Company had only been established, and at least twenty five printing houses were turning out scores of books annually in print runs of 1,250 to 1,500 copies.1 In the decade or so leading up to 1588, London printing houses were also bringing out books providing information about the distant lands of Asia, which throughout the first three quarters of the sixteenth century had been the provenance of the seafaring Portuguese and Spaniards. And, for the first time in English history there was interest in a great and distant Asian empire that was now being called China. Some of the publications about this newly-recognized land were English translations of Portuguese and Spanish material. For example, in 1577, Richard Willes' Certain reports of China, learned through the Portugals there imprisoned appeared in his History ofTrauayle in the West and East Indies and other countreys lying eyther way towards the fruitfull and ryche Moluccas, a translation from an Italian version of a Portuguese text. Two years later John Frampton published his translation from the Spanish called A discourse of the nauigation which the Portugales doe make to the Realmes and Prouinces of the East partes of the worlde, and of the knowledge that growes by them of the great thinges which are in the Dominions of China. Written by Barnardine of Esca-

Hemp in the British Isles

Abstract Hemp has been traced back to 343 BC in the UK, with record of its use in Roman times as well, and on into the Middle Ages. Cultivation was widespread, with record of hemp in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. In each of these countries there is record of it being grown in many locations, with place names reflecting this fact to this very day. The availability of hemp made it possible for the English to greatly increase their naval powers, but ultimately hemp had to be imported to maintain their military and economic primacy. By the nineteenth century, most of the hemp used by the United Kingdom was imported from Russia, with Italy as a supplier of the highest quality grades. The dependence of the nation on such a product was of concern to many legislators, who argued for an increase in domestic cultivation for reasons of national security. Ultimately, metal ships and steam power reduced the need for hemp in the British Navy, and production virtually ceased. In the 1980s the ecological movement took an interest in hemp, and hemp was re-introduced. It is now legal to grow hemp with a licence from the Home Office. Acreage has been increasing since the mid-1990s, when a few thousand acres were being grown. Most of the hemp grown in the UK is for seed and oil production. The industry is growing dramatically in the UK, where locally grown hemp provides most of the hemp based food products sold. Other applications of hemp, such as clothing, are also available to the public, but are imported, as in the case of Braintree Hemp Clothing (UK), which used Chinese hemp. This shop and other high profile shops have caught the public imagination in the UK, with a little help from such well-known figures as Anita Roddick and Woody Harrelson. Outlets from Tony's Hemp Corner in London to The Hemp Shop in Brighton are now doing well with a range of products including paper, body products, clothing and food.

On the Meteorological Instruments and Observations Made during the 19th Century Exploration of the Canadian Northwest Passage

Meteorological records from about 30 British Navy ships that overwintered in the Canadian Arctic islands between 1818 and 1859 are the earliest detailed baseline of direct historical data in this region against which modern and future climate trends can be assessed. We describe the types of meteorological instruments and the observational methods employed aboard these ships. For measuring air temperatures, both mercurial and spirit thermometers were used. Observations of atmospheric pressure were made using marine and aneroid barometers. Wind direction and speed were also logged. The Royal Navy’s ordered and disciplined daily regime was well-suited to regular scientific observations. Individual instruments on most Navy ships were calibrated against established Royal Observatory standards before and after expeditions. Many recording officers commented on the relative unreliability of spirit thermometers below the freezing point of mercury. Little contemporary written evidence exists regarding absolute accuracy or precision of meteorological instruments taken to the Arctic, but some calibration data are available to assess typical instrument errors between 32° and −38°F (0° and −39°C). Our comparison of minimum daily temperatures from four overwintering ships in 1853 and 1854 shows very high correlation coefficients. The mutual consistency of these records implies good instrumental precision. Although the absolute accuracy of temperatures recorded below the freezing point of mercury is in doubt, those above this point are relatively accurate. Guidance on the preferred methods of observing and recording were codified in, for example, the Admiralty’s Manual of Scientific Enquiry (Herschel, 1851). Meteorological registers were regarded as official documents that were, as far as possible, required to be complete and no attempt was to be made to fill in missing data. The need to screen or cover instruments from both solar and terrestrial radiation was also recognized from the earliest expeditions. It was not until the 1850s that standardizing the exposure of thermometers was resolved through the introduction of louvered screens. This unique set of ships’ meteorological registers presents opportunities to investigate a variety of meteorological parameters for the Canadian High Arctic in the 19th century, allowing quantitative assessment of change relative to contemporary climate.

National Institutes of Health State-of-the-Science Conference Statement: Multivitamin/Mineral Supplements and Chronic Disease Prevention

National Institutes of Health State-of-the-Science Conference Statement: Multivitamin/Mineral Supplements and Chronic Disease Prevention

Organization and incentives in the age of sail

The British Navy in the age of sail was the most successful bureaucracy of its time. Its organization and incentive structures differed importantly from contemporaneous private sailing ventures, but closely resembled those of today’s large corporations. To induce efficient effort, the navy used a hierarchical tournament, in which sailors competed for higher pay that came with promotions based on relative performance. Promotion probabilities, the option value of future promotions, and the higher effort required of men in higher ranks and on larger vessels, combined to yield a highly skewed pay structure.

'The cat' Gets its Nine Tails

THE OED attributes the first appearance of ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ to Congreve's The Way of the World (1695); his use of the phrase indicates its meaning had already become familiar: ‘If you should give such language at sea, you’d have a cat-o’-nine-tails laid cross your shoulders’.1 The word was in fact recorded earlier, but more interesting was the way it first entered public discourse through a sensational crime in a non-naval context: a domestic murder in Ratcliff on 24–5 December 1680. 1 ‘Cat-o’-nine-tails, n.1. A whip with nine knotted lashes; till 1881 an authorized instrument of punishment in the British navy and army’ (OED). The term ‘cat’ derives from name of several kinds of ship-ropes, such as ‘cat-harpings’ for bracing the shrouds (‘Cat-o’-nine-tails’, E. C. Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Philadelphia, 1898), http://www.bartleby.com/81/3164.html. OED, harpings, n. pl.2, cat-head, n.). The crime attracted extraordinary attention for several reasons: its cruelty, its grotesque imitation of a naval flogging, its intimations of sexual perversion, and perhaps its seasonal ironies. It centred on the fatal whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails of a thirteen-year-old maidservant, Elizabeth Houlton, at the hands of a man named John Sadler and on the alleged instigation of his landlady and Houlton's mistress, Elizabeth Wigington. The number of reports and notices published in news pamphlets, execution accounts, and newspapers was unprecedented for a non-aristocratic domestic murder.2 Publication in the last of these printed genres was especially telling, since newspapers at this time concentrated on political, religious, and foreign news, and only the most unusual or spectacular private crimes managed to gain a place in their restricted half-broadsheet format.3 2 Wigington mentions that news-ballads of the crime were published, but none of these have survived (The Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington Of Ratclif, who suffered at Tyburn, On Fryday the 9th of this instant September, 1681, written by her own hand in the Goal [sic] of Newgate, two days before her death, being Condemned for whiping [sic] her Apprentice Girl to death (1681), 4). 3 James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and Its Development (Cambridge, 1986), 68–72.

Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820 (review)

Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820 (review)

The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the West African Slave Trade

Drawing on archival sources, this Note explores an early experiment in humanitarian intervention undertaken by the Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone through the suppression of the West African slave trade during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Part I discusses the social and geopolitical pressures that helped British abolitionists realize their hopes of creating a free colony in Africa. Part II demonstrates the manner in which Robert Thorpe, Chief Judge of the Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone, enforced Britain’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade against British and foreign traders alike. Part III argues that Thorpe’s court, in conjunction with aggressive interdictions by the British Navy and privateers, forced Europe’s great slaving powers to the negotiating table and secured their abandonment of the slave trade through the creation of multilateral institutions equipped to adjudicate captured slave ships. This Part also discusses the Le Louis case, which demonstrated the impact of Thorpe’s court on the legal regime governing free navigation. Part IV then analyzes the relevance of Thorpe’s experiment in humanitarian intervention to current interdiction efforts undertaken by the Proliferation Security Initiative. author. Yale Law School, J.D. expected 2006; University of Cambridge, M.Phil., Political Thought & Intellectual History; University College London, M.A., Legal & Political Theory. I conducted the archival research on which this Note is based while a research assistant to David Sharpe, Professor Emeritus at The George Washington Law School. I am deeply indebted to him for allowing me to publish it in the present Note, and am grateful to him for his unstinting support. I also wish to thank Edgar J. McManus, W. Michael Reisman, David Richardson, and James Q. Whitman for their valuable comments on early versions of this Note, and Tad Heuer for his editorial assistance. HELFMAN 3/2/2006 5:40:54 PM the court of vice admiralty at sierra leone

A Comparison Between GEBCO Sheet 5.17 and the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) Version 1.0

In 1979, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) published Sheet 5.17 in the Fifth Edition of its series of global bathymetric maps. Sheet 5.17 covered the northern polar region above 64° N, and was for long the authoritative portrayal of Arctic bathymetry. The GEBCO compilation team had access to an extremely sparse sounding database from the central Arctic Ocean, due to the difficulty of mapping in this permanently ice covered region. In the past decade, there has been a substantial increase in the database of central Arctic Ocean bathymetry, due to the declassification of sounding data collected by US and British Navy nuclear submarines, and to the capability of modern icebreakers to measure ocean depths in heavy ice conditions. From these data sets, evidence has mounted to indicate that many of the smaller (and some larger) bathymetric features of Sheet 5.17 were poorly or wrongly defined. Within the framework of the project to construct the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO), all available historic and modern data sets were compiled to create a digital bathymetric model. In this paper, we compare both generally and in detail the contents of GEBCO Sheet 5.17 and version 1.0 of IBCAO, two bathymetric portrayals that were created more than 20 years apart. The results should be helpful in the analysis and assessment of previously published studies that were based on GEBCO Sheet 5.17.

Ensuring Energy Security

On the eve of World War I, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill made a historic decision: to shift the power source of the British navy’s ships from coal to oil. He intended to make the fleet faster than its German counterpart. But the switch also meant that the Royal Navy would rely not on coal from Wales but on insecure oil supplies from what was then Persia. Energy security thus became a question of national strategy. Churchill’s answer? “Safety and certainty in oil,” he said, “lie in variety and variety alone.” Since Churchill’s decision, energy security has repeatedly emerged as an issue of great importance, and it is so once again today. But the subject now needs to be rethought, for what has been the paradigm of energy security for the past three decades is too limited and must be expanded to include many new factors. Moreover, it must be recognized that energy security does not stand by itself but is lodged in the larger relations among nations and how they interact with one another. Energy security will be the number one topic on the agenda when the group of eight highly industrialized countries (g-8) meets in St. Petersburg in July.The renewed focus on energy security is driven in part by an exceedingly tight oil market and by high oil prices, which have doubled over the past three years. But it is also fueled by the threat of terrorism, instability in some exporting nations, a nationalist backlash, fears of a scramble for supplies, geopolitical rivalries, and countries’ fundamental need for energy to power their economic growth.

Mind the gap

In this issue of Australian Health Review, the contributing authors explore the issues associated with their attempts to bridge the well recognised gap between research and practice in health policy and management. We have heard that it took nearly 200 years from the time that a cure was found for scurvy to the time when the new practices were adopted by the British navy.1 Perhaps the timeframes are not as long, but there still appears to be little evidence of research informing policy development and management practice in health care. There have been discussions over many years in many disciplines on the most appropriate ways to bridge this gap.

:The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century

:The British Navy and the State in the Eighteenth Century

Colonial-Era Brazilian Music: A Review Essay of Recent Recordings

Introduction What does the late 1960s Brazilian popular music movement Tropicália have in common with the late 1700s São Paulo mestre de capela André da Silva Gomes (1752–1844)? They both had a collaborator—in a manner of speaking—in the composer and arranger Rogério Duprat. When the Silva Gomes manuscripts were discovered in 1960, Duprat devoted himself to their transcription and edition. This was a couple of years before he would spearhead the avant-garde música nova movement, and it was seven years before his involvement with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and the rock band Mutantes as the musical arranger for the seminal album Tropicália, ou panis et circensis (Polydor LPNG 44.018 [1967]; reissued on compact disc as Polygram 119 271 [1997]). Having known of Duprat for his avant-garde work and his distinctive arrangements for rock and popular musicians, I was at first surprised to see his name associated with eighteenth century sacred music. I should not have been: Duprat is referred to as "the George Martin of Brazil," in part for his pioneering work with the Tropicalist musicians, but also for his familiarity with Western classical traditions. His brother, Régis Duprat, is a musicologist and performer of colonial music. Indeed, the lasting influence of Tropicália owes to its original mixture of erudite and popular culture.1 The São Paulo based classical music label Paulus has released two recordings of music by Silva Gomes, as well as other recordings of sacred music from roughly the same period. These CDs are among several I will review in this essay on recordings of music from colonial-era Brazil released since 1995. My intention here is not primarily to evaluate the quality of these recordings, although I will do so to some extent, but rather to draw attention to their existence and to elaborate in broad terms the current status of recorded performances of [End Page 448] music from Brazil's colonial period. Among the ensembles whose recordings will be described in this essay are: the Brasilessentia Vocal Group and Orchestra, Collegium Musicium de Minas, Camerata Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, Ensemble Turicum, Quadro Cervantes, Vox Brasiliensis, and a group called XVIII–21 Musiques des Lumières. All of these CDs were released on small labels or, in some cases, by the artists themselves, and thus are difficult to acquire in the United States. Background Brazil's colonial period is generally said to have begun when Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the shores of Bahia in 1500, and to have ended in 1822 after King João VI—who brought his entire court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808—returned to Lisbon, leaving his son Prince Pedro in charge of the colony. The Portuguese royal court had fled Napoleon's armies in 1807 in more than 70 ships escorted by the British Navy. In exchange, Britain secured favorable trading rights with Brazil, which gave it considerable control over the country's economy for about 100 years. Nevertheless, the presence of King João and his court invigorated public life in Rio de Janeiro. The residency of this monarch in his colony is unique in the history of European colonialism. The city suddenly became more cosmopolitan. Among the important items that accompanied the court's transfer to Rio was Dom João's library of some 60,000 volumes, which were made available to the public in Brazil. In 1811, Portugal's most renowned composer, Marcos Portugal, also came to Rio, displacing the exceptionally gifted but less famous priest José Maurício Nunes Garcia, known in Brazil as José Maurício, from the position of mestre de capela of the Royal Chapel. Shortly after his father's departure for Lisbon in 1822, Prince Pedro read the writing on the wall and declared the country's independence. He created the Empire of Brazil and named himself emperor. The Empire...

A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’sPersuasion

Research Article| November 01 2005 A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion ANNE FREY ANNE FREY Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2005) 38 (2-3): 214–234. https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.038020214 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation ANNE FREY; A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion. Novel 1 November 2005; 38 (2-3): 214–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.038020214 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Novel Corp. 20052005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The German Fleet at War, 1939-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: The German Fleet at War, 1939–1945 Keith W. Bird The German Fleet at War, 1939–1945. By Vincent P. O’Hara. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59114-651-8. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 308. $32.95. The German Kriegsmarine in World War II remains a highly popular subject, as the numerous recent studies of the U-boat war and the major engagements of surface raiders, the Bismarck and the Graf Spee, demonstrate. [End Page 1242] In this work, the author attempts to show how the surface navy's role was more complex and critical than has generally been appreciated. He summarizes "sixty-nine" surface actions of the "large" warships (which he defines as "purpose-built surface warships" of 500 tons or more) supplemented by a statistical analysis (engagement by type, opponents, location, results, etc.) that provide a useful perspective on the scale of the war at sea and a reminder of the gritty day to day efforts of those in the naval "trenches." Relying on the standard secondary English sources (with some notable omissions) and works translated from German, along with some primary sources from the American and British navies, he has produced a highly readable book which will satisfy the general reader with its focus on the stories of the crews and commanders who carried out their duties with the weapons and conditions (and orders) at hand. However, the absence from its bibliography of most of the standard German secondary sources, such as Michael Salewski's indispensable three-volume history of the Seekriegsleitung or the German Military History Research Office's comprehensive ten-volume history of the Second World War (also published in English by Oxford University Press), raises a question as to whether the book should more properly be titled "Actions against the German Fleet, 1939–1945." His descriptions of the sinking of the Glorious on 8 June 1940 and the Battle of the Barents Sea, 31 December 1942, for example, are told more from the perspective of the British than the Germans and do not reflect current research from the German sources. A more complete analysis of the motivation behind the decisions of the naval command, 1939–1945, and its two commanders, Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, particularly Raeder's struggle to justify his capital ships, while, at the same time, preserving the "core of the fleet" for a future "rebirth," would have provided a richer context for the individual engagements described in this work. Utilizing the published War Diary of the Naval Command (Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung 1939–1945, Part A) would also have greatly added to the author's attempt to blend the micro and macro character of the naval war. The exclusion of the auxiliary cruisers (Hilfskreuzer) from this work is also surprising considering their contribution for most of 1939 and 1940 in prosecuting Raeder's sea commerce strategy. More importantly, their role presaged what increasingly became a war of "improvisation" for the navy and after 1943, a necessary "miniaturization" of the navy following Dönitz's appointment as commander and the strains of total war. For the specialist, this book points out the need for a broader new general history of the German navy in World War II that covers all the operations of the naval war, especially the "forgotten navy"—the 3,000 ships of the security forces that protected the coasts from Norway to the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. Keith W. Bird Lexington, Kentucky Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Remembering the USS Chesapeake : The Politics of Maritime Death and Impressment

The bombardment of the USS Chesapeake by the HMS Leopard on June 22, 1807, outraged citizens of the young republic. Not only had three sailors been killed and eighteen more wounded, but the British had forcibly removed four other men that they claimed belonged to them. Angry Americans condemned the incident, demanded satisfaction, and prepared for war. Although the crisis abated, diplomatic negotiations failed to resolve the issue until late 1811, and the surviving sailors were not returned until the start of the War of 1812. How Americans recalled the Chesapeake disaster has never been satisfactory examined. The episode was, to be sure, a diplomatic cause celebre, suggesting that the U.S. flag afforded no protection against a British navy intent upon impressment. Yet the memory of the incident also reveals the contours and limits of American compassion toward sailors. If mariners received praise for economic contributions and wartime heroism, they nonetheless attracted suspicion when ashore. While concerned about issues of trade and neutral rights, Americans proved less interested in protecting and retrieving sailors seized by the British. The four impressed men from the ChesapeakeÐJenkin Ratford, David Martin, John Strachan, and William WareÐillustrate this social phenomenon. If Ratford received publicity because of his 1807 execution, the other three men, two of whom were persons of color, generally remained unnamed and ignored, not unlike other impressed sailors. As such, the Chesapeake episode illuminates American ambivalence toward the sailors of the young republic. Class and race rendered sailors anonymous in the public memory.

Book Review: Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820

Book Review: Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820

Review: Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820

Review: Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard before 1820