The Ghost Ships of San Francisco
At the start of 1848, San Francisco was a sleepy Mexican village with a population of under two hundred Spanish-speaking fishermen and...
Plimsoll Lines
Search the hull of a merchant ship and you will find a curious ladder of lines punched or welded to the hull and picked out in paint. It...
Sir William Sidney Smith
No age of sail commander divides opinion quite like Sir Sidney Smith. On the one hand he was an arrogant, pompous, spendthrift who was a...
The Spithead Mutiny
The final decades of the 18th century were ones of revolution. In the New World American colonists led the way, throwing off British rule...
The Battle of Matanzas Bay
By the first few decades of the 17th century, the Dutch and Spanish had been at war in the Netherlands for over sixty years, with little...
Captain Riou and the Iceberg
Edward Riou was born near Faversham in Kent in 1762, the son of a junior officer in the British army. In 1774 the 12-year-old Riou joined...
Words of the Sea
You can tell a surprising amount about a nation’s history from its language. A linguist once told me that if Shakespeare was to return,...
The Royal Navy’s strangest ship - HMS Diamond Rock
A mile off the southern coast of Martinique is a steep-sided basalt island that rises almost six hundred feet above the electric-blue...
Fire in the Dockyard
The Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth was one of the largest industrial concerns of the 18th century. It was a huge site in the heart of the...
The Ship’s Compass – A History
The Earth has a core of molten iron which provides it with a strong magnetic field. This is not true of all planets, and it transpires...
