Blackbeard returns

Well his ship at least, or rather bits of it. The anchor of the flagship of the pirate known as Blackbeard, who's real name was probably Edward Teach, or Edward Thatch, and born in Bristol in 1680, has been recovered. Like the pirate Captain Kidd, Teach started out as a Privateer. His letter of Marque was to attack French and Spainish ships during the War of the Spanish Succession. Also like Kidd he then went pirate and started to attack everything, but unlike Kidd he was actually rather good at piracy.

Blackbeard deliberately cultivated a fearsome reputation in order to try and get is prey to surrender without having to fight. This was the reason that he tied lite fuses into his beard before boarding ships: he wanted to look like something demonic and frighten people. It was also the reason why almost all pirates flew a black flag. They wanted to frighten people so they could capture their ships without a fight.

One interesting fact that this investigation has brought up as well as the anchor is ammunition used in the cannon. It appears that Blackbeard preferred to use improvised grapeshot. This shows that he wanted to take the ship's he attacked intact. If he wanted to damage or sink ship's he would have used round shot. To destroy rigging the chain shot would have been the weapon of choice. However grape shot flows over a broad area in a similar way to a shot gun blast and it was used principally to kill a ship's crew. Presumably if a crew wasn't willing to submit to him without a fight then he wanted to get rid of them and replace them with one he could trust when he added the ship to his flotilla.

The timing is rather strangely good for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. Is an amazing coincidence that this recovery happened just at the correct time to get some more publicity for the film. If you're cynical you might even think they were connected, but if they are then I can only applaud the films PR department for helping an important and difficult piece of marine archeology.

Cockleshell Heros on Hayling Island

Via the blog of the Historical Maritime Society the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, better known as Cockleshell Heros from the film that was made about their daring raid on Bordeaux in 1942, are getting a memorial erected on Hayling Island were they conducted much of their training. Currently it is little more than a huge granite block from which the eventual memorial will be carved, but once it is finished it could be a reason for going to the Island. Having been to Hayling Island once it would probably be the only reason to go.

The Ladyboy and the 12 pounder

I've just had a very good weekend doing some research into the 12 pounder Quickfiring Naval Gun at Newhaven Fort. The fort is a well preserved Palmerston era fortification designed to protect the harbour at Newhaven from the French. It was designed to make use of the contours of the hill it was on. It made sense from a construction point of view, but it did leave them the only sloping parade ground of that era. Parading on a hill must have made square bashing difficult.

It never fired a shot in anger against the French, but did against German aircraft during the Second World War. After the war the fort was used by the Royal Observer Corps, and the abandoned. It was sold to property developers who tried to bulldoze it, but found that the fort was simply to strong for them. They sold it on to another group that restored it to it's current state as a historical attraction. Unfortunately it was a historical attraction in Newhaven and despite being a very interesting site with plenty to do they could not make it a viable business, so it eventually ended up in the hands of Lewis County Council.

The staff at Newhaven Fort were very helpful not just letting me take measurements from their gun, they also let me read and copy some of the books in their archive which I will be digitising later.

As for the Ladyboy in my blog title? To get to Newhaven with enough time to do anything useful I knew that I was going to have to stay over somewhere. I could have found somewhere in Newhaven itself, except that ... well ... it was Newhaven. Instead just down the road are the bright lights of Brighton. Just opposite Brighton Pavillion a new show in town "The Ladyboy's of Bangkok", and when in Brighton do as the Brightonians do. It was great fun, and considerably less vulgar than you might think.

The canned beans and the Northwest Passage

On this day in 1845 an expedition under Sir John Franklin sailed down the River Thames bound for the icy wastes of the Arctic ocean. This was not Franklin's first trip to the Arctic. In 1819 he lead an expedition mapping another part of the mythical northwest passage along the northern coast of Canada. It was a disaster. Their supplies ran out and they found that there was not enough game to hunt in order to restock. Eleven of the party of 20 died with the remainder becoming so hungry they eat anything they could get their hands on, lichen from trees, their own boots, even their dead colleagues. That really should have been a hint that Arctic exploration was not Franklin's forte. However back in the warmth of the clubs where British the establishment gathered instead of a pitiful failure his story became one of a plucky adventurer battling the elements, he was even promoted.

The 1845 trip was much better equipped than his 1819 attempt with two ships (HMS Terror and HMS Erebus), more men, and enough food that it should have lasted them three years. However just as before the expedition was a disaster, but this time nobody survived. The ships were trapped in the ice and their supplies began to run low. The canned food that they had should have been enough for several years, but there was a problem with the canning process meaning that while the food was kept fresh lead from the solder used to seal the cans leached out into it slowly poisoning everybody that ate it.

Nobody really knows what finally happened in the end. In the end scurvy, cold, pneumonia, as well as the lead probably killed everybody. There were no survivors, and of the dead only an handful of bodies were ever found. Amongst those bodies that were found there was evidence of cannibalism, like on his first expedition. Further expeditions were sent to find Franklin and his men, resulting in even more deaths until the number of people killed on the rescue missions was even more than the number killed on the original one.

The enigma of HMS Bulldog

On the 9th of May 1941 Sub Lt David Balme of HMS Bulldog got on board the sinking U-Boat U110, and got out again with a priceless set of code books for the German Navy's Enigma machine. Most Enigma traffic could be decrypted thanks to the work of British code breakers working at Bletchley Park continuing the work of Polish code breakers. While the rest of the german military were a bit sloppy in their use of their encryption machines, a fact that Bletchley Park exploited ruthlessly. However the navy had much better cypher discipline, a code book to get keys from, and an Enigma machine with four encrypting rotors all of which combined to keep their messages secret. Bletchley Park knew all of this, and they knew that getting into the radio traffic to and from the German Navy's prowling U-Boats was vital if they shipping lanes were to stay open. If they didn't then Britain could loose the Battle of the Atlantic and be staved into submission. They knew how to break the Enigma. They knew how to figure out the settings on the extra rotor wheel. They even knew the from that the entries in the code book would take, but without the actual book there was no way that they could break the code. King George VI famously said that capturing the code book was the most important event in the war at sea, and Bletchley Park have just opened an exhibition on it including eye witness accounts from both sides.

Barbarians

Barbary pirates had been disrupting trade for years. Typically they captured ships, sold their cargo, and then either sold the crews into slavery or held them as slaves until they were ransomed. They would take ships all over the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic. They even went so far as to raid the coast of Ireland and southern England scooping up the populations of coastal villages to be sold as slaves.

Some European states bought them off by paying tribute to the rulers of the north African states that they operated out of. Initially the newly created United States of America tried doing the same and successfully established a treaty with Morocco to pay them off, however Morocco's neighbouring kingdoms got greedy and started demanding more money than the fledgling country could afford. Creating a navy and marine force to protect their traders must have seemed like the cheaper option, and that is exactly what they did so when Jefferson became President in 1801 he had a small fleet of 6 ships under his command. Jefferson had long been an advocate of not paying the tribute so when Yusuf Karamanli, the Pasha of Tripoli, demanded $225,000 he was in no mood to hand it over. So the First Barbery War began on May the 10th 1801.

The Barbary pirates were not used to fighting people with the ability to fight back and so were completely outclassed on the sea. However the US force was far too small to be able to do anything about fighting on land. To end this stalemate they hired a mercenary force and using this they were able to capture the city of Derna. This act proved a sufficiently powerful that they were then able to buy free all the captured Americans for much less money than had been initially demanded. The war did not solve the Barbary problem as soon enough the other Barbary states were taking American sailors as slaves again. It took a second war for America to prove itself too expensive a country to raid for slaves, and the conquest of the area by European powers before the African slave trade was finally brought to an end.

A battle and a liberation

Today in 1864 battle raged around the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea. Denmark was at war with Austria and Prussia, and not doing well. One area that they did have success with was to dispatch ships into the North Sea and English channel to harass their opponent's merchant shipping. A naval blockade is a powerful tactic. When used by the British against Germany in the First World War it is arguably the main reason that they were forced to surrender even though they were (slowly) gaining territory all the way up until the armistice was signed. The Austrians and Prussians obviously wanted to break the blockade and in March the Danes got intelligence that they were massing a fleet to do so.

The Danes and combined Prussian and Austrian fleets clashed off the small island of Heligoland on May the 9th 1864. The Prussian gun boats where not aggressive enough, always hanging back at long range which meant that their fire was not effective. This lent the Danes concentrate on the Austrian 51-gun screw frigate Schwarzenberg setting her on fire twice. Strangely for a small island off the coast of Germany and populated by German speakers Heligoland did not belong to either Germany or Denmark, but was part of the British Empire a fact that was used by the Austrian commander, Kommodor Wilhelm von Tegetthoff. He fled to the neutral waters around the island. The Danes could have followed and finished him off but for the fact that the British Frigate Aurora was observing the battle. Attacking the Schwarzenberg within British Territorial waters could well have caused a diplomatic spat with the world's most powerful nation. Under the cover of darkness the mangled Austro-Prussian squadron succeeded in returning to Cuxhafen. The Austro-Prussians had been pasted and did not manage to break the Danish blockade the honours, but that did not stop both sides from claiming victory!

After the battle Von Tegetthoff was promoted to Rear Admiral and conferred the Order of the Iron Crown. He next turns up in the historical record in 1866 as commander of the Austrian fleet against the Italians. He attacked the Italians in the Adriatic Sea near the island of Vis. His fleet was completely outclassed: he had fewer ships, which had less armour, and worse guns. He made up for this through a level of aggression that bordered on the insane. His plan was to get as close as possible to the enemy to make up for his inferior guns, and ram them if possible. One of his unarmoured ships, the Kaiser, engaged four Italian ironclads at the same time. He used his own ship to ram and sink the Italian Iron-Clads Re d'Italia and Palestro sinking both. This spectacular use of ramming lead to 50 years of naval designers fitting rams to their battleships, and ramming did sink many ships. Unfortunately they tended to be ships from the same fleet when the ships accidentally collided. Again both sides claimed victory, but as far as winning the war was concerned this engagement was completely irrelevant.

While Heligoland might no longer be British there is another British island off the coast of another country that has an important historical event today. For the Channel Islands today is Liberation Day. The Germans had expected the Channel Islands to be attacked, they were after all British. However the logic that had left them abandoned was still very much in force, they were still strategically irrelevant to the war. After the Normandy landings the allies needed to capture the Cotentin Peninsula to protect their flank, but the little islands just off its coast? They were no threat. The rocky coast and high cliffs make any invasion of the channel islands difficult. When you add in the way that they had been fortified the number of men that would have been lost to retake them was simply too high for the minimal strategic gain, especially since the redirection of resources would have slowed down the advance on the main front. So the German garrison on the Channel Islands was simply left to sit it out behind the meter thick concrete walls of their fortifications.

HMS Speedy and the navy's rise

It was during the Napoleonic period that the Royal Navy gained its position as the world's dominant naval force, a position that it was to maintain until the Second World War. It did not gain this position through technology as it was quite common for ships to pass through several navies during the course of their careers, normally ones on opposite sides. Nor did it gain this premier reputation due to simple weight of numbers, though it had many ships, or just the economic clout of the country behind it, though Britain was becoming more properous. One thing that it did have over all of its rivals at that time was the attitude of the people commanding its ships which can be best described as ... rabid.

During this period the form of regulated piracy that would become known as the Prize' system was very much in force. If managed to capture a lot of prizes then you could become very very wealthy. The money went up and down the chain of command from the lowest sailor up to the Captain (if they were sailing on an independent commission) or the admiral in charge of the engagement, the shares in the prize money was split up according to rank. Even in during the First World War, which marked the effective end of the Prize System the King's Regulations includes the number of shares that each man had in any prize money that the ship got as well as his regular pay. Nelson started his career the poor second son of a farmer, but he ended it hugely rich because of the prizes that he had captured.

The other spur to action was what happened if they failed to do their uppermost to engage the enemy. The regulations stated that the commander would have to answer for his actions to a Court Martial, and could even be executed. The Byng case showed that this was no empty threat, and that even Admirals could find themselves facing a firing squad. This combination of the carrot of huge rewards and the stick of harsh penalties lead to Royal Navy commanders being willing to attack anything, anywhere, anytime. If it floated it was a target, even if a more rational mind withdraw because they were up against an opponent that hopelessly out gunned them.

An example of this happened on this day in 1801 when Thomas Cochrane in HMS Speedy attacked and captured the Spanish frigate El Gamo despite it being four times their size and sporting 32 guns to Speedy's 14. The napoleonic period has many incidents like this, incidents so unlikely that if you where to fictionalise them you would have to tone things down to make them seem believable, and they set the tone for a century and a half of dominance.

Claude Choules Last WW1 Combat Veteran Dies

The BBC is reporting that the world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, has died in Australia aged 110.

He Royal Navy at 15 and went on to serve on HMS Revenge on which he saw action in the North Sea aged 17, going on to witnessed the surrender of the German fleet in the Firth of Forth in November 1918, then the scuttling of the fleet at Scapa Flow.

Having moved back to Australia and joining the Royal Australian Navy in 1932. During World War II he was chief demolition officer for the western half of Australia. It would have been his responsibility to blow up the key strategic harbour of Fremantle, near Perth, if Japan had invaded. After finishing his service Mr Choules joined the Naval Dockyard Police.

Despite his military record, Mr Choules became a pacifist. He was known to have disagreed with the celebration of Australia's most important war memorial holiday, Anzac Day, and refused to march in the annual commemoration parades.

His autobiography, The Last of the Last, which was published in 2009, the same year that last three WWI veterans living in Britain - Bill Stone, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch - all died.

HMS Sheffield

Yesterday marked the adversary of the sinking of HMS Sheffield by an Exocet rocket during the Falklands War. Rockets have been around as long as gun powder, but until the twentieth century they had never been that good. The chinese were the first to use rocket artillary, with their use spreading from China, through the Indian states and the Middle East. The British brought the idea back from india and used them during the Napoleonic Wars, with both Army and Naval Rocket artillary being used. However the cannon remained the principal form of artillary, simply because the inventions that rockets needed to transform them into a really effective weapon hadn't been created yet.

There were two main problems with rockets: they were not very efficient at turning the energy of the gunpowder fuel into movement, they were not at all accurate. Of course cannon was not accurate either during the napoleonic period, but the way that they were used meant that this did not matter. On land you just pointed it at one of the densly packed columns of men coming towards you and waited until you could expect to hit somebody. At sea broadsides needed to conducted at fairly close range in order to be able to punch through the thick hulls of their opponents. The main advantage of a rocket over a cannon is that the range is potentially greater, but all that does it means that it will miss by a greater amount.

These problems were solved during the twentieth century. The efficiency problem was solved by Goddard when he attached an exhaust nozel to his rocket that was tuned to the hypersonic speeds of the exhaust gasses. The accuracy problem was solved by the creation of guidence systems: starting with the primative ones developed by the Germans during World War 2, and then improved upon by everybody else subsequently.

The sinking of the HMS Sheffield vividly showed how dangerous guided missiles had become to surface ships; much like Toranto had demonstrated that the era of the Battleship was over though the technology that had made this so had already been in place for decades.

Salcombe Castle

One more interesting fact that I have learned about Salcombe's military history while I was there is how it's ruined castle came to be that way. I had thought that it was simple neglect. The estuary that it protected was not a real estuary like those of the Dart or the Exe. It does not contain a river, it is simply a valley that sank below the rising sea level at the end of the last ice age. Therefore unlike the Dart or the Exe estuaries it does not provide an easy way to trade with the interior of the country and is so less economically valuable.

However Salcombe's castle did not simply fall into disuse since it had only a limited trade to protect, it was actively pulled down by the Parliamentary forces at the end of the English Civil Wars. During those wars Salcombe, and most of the south western peninsular of England sided primarily with the Royalist cause, and as everybody knows they lost. Being on the loosing side of civil war is generally a bad place to be so those that could hold out did so, and having a castle that can be supplied by sea means you can hold out for quite a long time.

Castle Cornet back in Guernsey was somewhere just like that, a Royalist castle supplied by sea and trying to hold off the moment that it had to surrender. They did it rather well and in the end they were the last Royalist stronghold to surrender. Salcombe castle didn't hold out so long, but they did hold out long enough that it annoyed the Parliamentary forces so much that after they had captured the place they tore it down.