
The Fighting Temeraire
At the 1839 Royal Academy exhibition Joseph Turner revealed his most famous oil painting. It was a wonderful work, heavy with symbolism....

Rogue Waves
In May 1916, the explorer Ernest Shackleton and four of his men were approaching the end of a gruelling ordeal. They had left the rest of...

Thomas Earnshaw and the Marine Chronometer
The story of the quest to find a way of calculating longitude at sea is well known, thanks largely to Dava Sobel’s excellent book...

The Battle of Sinop and the End of Oak
In 1853 most of the world’s warships were still made from wood and powered by sail. The ships of the line that had dominated the great...

A City called Pompey
Portsmouth is on England’s southern coast and has long been the home of the Royal Navy. Known by the nickname Pompey, its special...

Why are ships female?
When Admiral Chester W Nimitz, the architect of the Allies victory in the Pacific during WW2, was asked this question, he replied; "A...

The French Captain Cook
Captain James Cook’s three voyages of exploration in the Pacific where widely admired throughout Enlightenment Europe. The southern...

The Santisima Trinidad
When she was launched in 1769, the Santisima Trinidad (Holy Trinity) was the greatest warship the age of sail had seen. She was built as...

The Search for Longitude
Mankind has long known that they lived on a spherical world. Astronomers could see the circular shadow cast by the earth on the moon...

Captain Elphinstone and the Siege of Havana
The city of Havana in Cuba was Imperial Spain’s most important base. In the 18th century it was the third largest city in the New World...