Geoffrey Winter has kindly got in touch from Australia because he was particularly interested in the construction of the Temeraire at Chatham Dockyard. His great great great grandfather, John Weekes, was the Assistant Master Shipwright at Chatham until his retirement in 1830. His work between 1815 and 1830 would therfore have perfectly straddled the period [...]
Sam's Blog
Anniversary of the Capture of the Temeraire
August 19, 2010 – 11:43 pm
August is an excellent month for naval anniversaries. We had the 308th anniversary of Benbow’s Last Fight last week and today is the 251st anniversary of the capture of the Temeraire. The ‘Fighting Temeraire’ so famously painted by Turner being taken to the breaker’s yard in Rotherhythe was the second Temeraire in the Royal Navy [...]
Benbow’s Last Fight
August 16, 2010 – 3:04 am
308 years ago on Wednesday, Admiral John Benbow fought his last fight in which he was wounded and later died. He was abandoned by his captains and ‘Benbow’s Last Fight’ has since become a famous example of naval cowardice that represents the bottom of the scale of British naval competence. Curiously, however, Benbow has never [...]
Navy Days Book Signing
August 2, 2010 – 7:13 am
I was lucky enough to do a book signing at the Royal Naval base in Portsmouth last weekend and witnessed the extraordinary popularity of the annual Navy Days celebration. Some 25,000 came through the gates and there were lengthy queues to see the new Type 45 destroyers Daring and Dauntless. A much earlier version of [...]
Top Ten British Naval Victories
April 28, 2010 – 2:36 am
Follow the link here for my Top Ten British Naval Victories published in the Mail on Sunday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home
/moslive/article-1255826/Ten-greatest-British-naval-victories-A-look-nations-hardest-fought-battles-sea.html
I am sure you will all have something to say about this!
Haiti today and Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1692
January 21, 2010 – 3:04 am
Whilst reading all the horror stories coming from Haiti, it is worth remembering that Haiti is opposite Jamaica where there was a devastating earthquake at Port Royal in 1692, which raised many of the same problems. Perhaps 5000 of a population of 6,500 died, but only 1/5th of those died in the actual earthquake. The [...]
A Visit to the Temeraire in 1806
January 18, 2010 – 5:42 am
Mr Giles Laurent has kindly got in touch with a great piece concerning the Temeraire in 1806 as she lay at Portsmouth.
An ancestor of his visited the ship in 1806, aged seventeen, and wrote about her experience in her diary.
‘It was a melancholy thing to see the ravages made by the Enemy (her mother was from [...]
Richard Powell of the Temeraire
January 11, 2010 – 3:06 am
Mr Colin Powell has kindly got in touch with some information about Richard Powell, who fought on the Temeraire at Trafalgar.
Richard Powell was born in Harwich on 13 August 1787 and was eighteen years old at the time of Trafalgar. Both his parents died when he was six years old and he was cared for [...]
Google Earth spills naval secrets
December 22, 2009 – 8:49 am
I have just finished writing a piece on British naval reconnaissance at Brest in the early years of the Revolutionary Wars and wondered how easy it would be to do the same thing now – using Google Earth. The results are unsurprisingly astonishing, and someone has already been there: see www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/02/google_earth_base_shocker/
Battle of Lagos Update
December 10, 2009 – 1:17 am
Domick Penrose kindly got in touch with some new information about the Battle of Lagos.
Falmouth Packet Captain Robert Lovell heard the news of the battle when his packet, the Prince Frederick, arrived from Lisbon. He noted:
‘This day the Prince Frederick Packet is arrived express from Lisbon in eleven days with an announcement that Admiral Boscawen [...]
The Battle of Lagos, 1759
August 17, 2009 – 10:01 am
250 years ago this week the Royal Navy fought a battle off Lagos in Portugal that is often overlooked, but which was crucial to the foundation of the naval mastery that Britain enjoyed after 1759. The French Mediterranean fleet was harried by Edward Boscawen until they were forced to split up. Those few that stayed [...]
