The Canadian fleet is all surface

The Royal Navy might be completely without aircraft, but now the Canadian Navy has no submarines after HMCS Corner Brook ran aground on a training exercise has put it back in port for repairs. Oops.

Swimmers of the Lost Ark

For the first time since the aircraft carrier was invented the Royal Navy has none. As was found out in the defence of Crete during the Second World War a fleet without air support are sitting ducks, so this means that until the two carriers that have been ordered arrive, and the air groups to go on them, the Royal Navy will only be able to operate with either a allied fleet with carriers, or under the protection of RAF aircraft flying from a land airbase. This could mean that for the first time ever the Royal Navy is reliant for protection on the French.

However the scraping of the current carriers is definitely going ahead and their air groups went years ago. Tenders have even gone out asking for bids as to what to do with the Ark Royal. The tender document makes clear that they should not go to another fleet, and one option is to sink it to produce an artificial reef as a dive site off the Devon coast.

World Ocean day

Happy World Ocean Day to everybody!

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.