STATE OF THE ROYAL NAVY OF Great Britain, AT THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE YEAR 1799

By the 1840’s the era of the wooden ship of the line was coming to a close. As early as the 1820’s and 1830’s, ships of war were outfitted with increasingly heavy guns. Naval guns such as the increasingly popular 68 pounder could quickly damage the best wooden hulled ships of the line. Yet, by the 1840’s, explosive shells were in use by the British, French, and Imperial Russian navies. It was the explosive shell that could with great ease, cripple a standard wooden hulled warship, this truth was exposed at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. For this reason, warships had to be armored. By 1856, Great Britain drafted a design for an armored corvette. In 1857, France began construction on the first ocean going ironclad, La Gloire, which was launched in 1859. This development quickly caused Great Britain to begin construction on HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. By the time HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861, the Royal Navy had decided that its entire battle fleet needed to be armored. While the British and the French naval arms race was intensifying, the United States was entering into its greatest crisis, the United States Civil War. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of the United States Navy remained loyal to the Union. The Confederacy, therefore, gained inspiration from the ironclads across the Atlantic, quickly obtaining its own ironclads. CSS Manassas was the first to enter service, but was eventually brought down by a hail of Union broadside fire. The CSS Virginia, however, made an impact. Meanwhile, the Union began stockpiling City Class ironclads and in 1862, the USS Monitor was completed. After the veritable stalemate between the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor, the Union utilized its superior production capabilities to mass produce ironclads and enter them into service in the Union Navy. As the Union began armoring its increasingly large navy, the world’s foremost naval power certainly took notice. Therefore, this paper will utilize British newspapers, government documents, Royal Naval Reviews, and various personal documents from the 1860’s in order to examine the British public and naval reaction to the Union buildup of ironclad warships.

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Great Britain, Blockades, and Neutral Rights: Royal Navy Operations during the Mexican- American War, 1846-1848

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord ◽

10.25071/2561-5467.157 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 173-188

Author(s):

Stanley Adamiak

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Gulf Of Mexico ◽

Mexican American ◽

Pacific Coast ◽

Royal Navy ◽

Mexican American War ◽

International Pressure ◽

Us Navy ◽

Naval Officers

Although neutral during the Mexican American War (1846-8), Great Britain’s Royal Navy had to navigate the war’s naval component, particularly commerce raiding and blockades, as it sought to protect and promote trade and neutral rights. While able to use international pressure to limit privateering, handling the blockade proved more problematic. Although US policies largely mirrored British expectations in the Gulf of Mexico, along Mexico’s Pacific coast, inconsistent US Navy actions created tension. The professionalism of both American and British naval officers and a willingness of both governments to compromise effectively diffused any potential crises. Bien qu’elle soit restée neutre pendant la guerre américano-mexicaine (1846-1848), la Marine royale de la Grande-Bretagne a dû s’occuper de l’aspect naval de la guerre, en particulier les corsaires marchands et les blocus commerciaux, alors qu’elle cherchait à protéger et à promouvoir le commerce et la neutralité des droits. Pour limiter la course, la Marine pouvait recourir à des pressions exercées au niveau international, mais la gestion des blocus s’est révélée plus difficile. Bien que les politiques américaines aient reflété en grande partie les attentes britanniques dans le golfe du Mexique, les mesures incohérentes prises par la Marine américaine ont créé des tensions le long de la côte pacifique du Mexique. Le professionnalisme des officiers de marine américains et britanniques et la volonté des deux gouvernements de faire des compromis ont efficacement dissipé toute crise potentielle.

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‘True, Publick and Notorious’: The Privateering War of 1812

London Journal of Canadian Studies ◽

10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2013v28.005 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Faye M. Kert

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Great Britain ◽

United States Navy ◽

West Indies ◽

The United States ◽

War Of 1812 ◽

Royal Navy ◽

The West ◽

The Government ◽

British North American

During the War of 1812, hundreds of private armed vessels, or privateers, carrying letters of marque and reprisal from their respective governments, served as counterweights to the navies of Great Britain and the United States. By 1812, privateering was acknowledged as an ideal way to annoy the enemy at little or no cost to the government. Local citizens provided the ships, crews and prizes while the court and customs systems took in the appropriate fees. The entire process was legal, licensed and often extremely lucrative. Unlike the navy, privateers were essentially volunteer commerce raiders, determined to weaken the enemy economically rather than militarily. So successful were they, that from July 1812 to February 1815, privateers from the United States, Britain, and the British provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (as well as those sailing under French and Spanish flags) turned the shipping lanes from Newfoundland to the West Indies, Norway to West Africa, and even the South Pacific into their hunting grounds. In the early months of the war, privateers were often the only seaborne force patrolling their own coasts. With the Royal Navy pre-occupied with defending Britain and its Caribbean colonies from French incursions, there were relatively few warships available to protect British North American shipping from their new American foes. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had only a handful of frigates and smaller warships to protect their trade, supported by 174 generally despised gunboats. The solution was the traditional response of a lesser maritime power lacking a strong navy—private armed warfare, or privateering.

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Rebels’ Property: Smuggling and Imperial [Dis]loyalty in the Anglo-American Atlantic

Journal of Early American History ◽

10.1163/187707012x624078 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 32-67

Author(s):

Patricia Rogers

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Great Britain ◽

Nova Scotia ◽

American Revolution ◽

Royal Navy ◽

Political Ideologies ◽

Anglo American ◽

Insight Into

In early 1776, the Royal Navy entered Liverpool, Nova Scotia searching for smuggled goods. The sailors found what they sought in three warehouses, including that of Simeon Perkins, the local magistrate. My curiosity over this incident includes an off-hand reference to the contraband as “rebels’ property”. Why describe trade goods in politically loaded terms? Caught up in the pre-revolutionary tensions, understandings of illegal commerce intertwined with debates over political ideologies and imperial obligations between Great Britain and its original mainland colonies. In the process, loyalty to empire became linked to commerce in the imperial imagination. In this essay, I focus on the experience of Nova Scotia as seen through the diary of Simeon Perkins. Although not one of the central venues of the American Revolution, Nova Scotia represented one site of intersection between the metropole and its colonies. As such, it reveals a unique insight into the larger imperial civil war and the anxieties that produced it.

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I. Experiments to ascertain the ratio of the magnetic forces acting on a needle suspended horizontally, in Paris and in London

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London ◽

10.1098/rstl.1828.0001 ◽

1828 ◽

Vol 118 ◽

pp. 1-14 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Keyword(s):

Great Britain ◽

Silk Fibre ◽

Horizontal Position ◽

Royal Navy ◽

Magnetic Forces ◽

The Mean ◽

Magnetic Meridian ◽

Mean Time ◽

Different Parts ◽

Made In

The magnetic needles employed in these experiments were cylinders of 0,16 inch diameter, and 2, 4 inches in length, pointed at the ends: they were suspended by a single silk fibre of rather more than five inches in length. The box in which they were inclosed, as a protection from the weather, was of wood, having at the bottom a graduated circle in ivory, rather exceeding in diameter the length of the needles, and over the centre of which the silk fibre was suspended. The bottom of the box being rendered horizontal by means of foot screws, and shown to be so by an unattached spirit level, the zeros of the circle were placed in the direction of the magnetic meridian, and a needle was suspended in a horizontal position. Another needle was then employed to draw it 50 or 60 degrees from its natural direction ; on the removal of which, the suspended needle resumed its direction in the ordinary process of vibration. The registry of the vibrations was commenced when the arc had diminished to 30°, and continued until it was reduced to below 5°: the method of registering the vibration will be best understood by a reference to the Tables at the close, and is too simple to require further explanation. The number of vibrations made by each needle between the arcs of 30° and 5° was usually from 300 to 400; and the time in which these were performed varied, in the different needles, from 12 to 16 minutes: the mean time of performing 100 vibrations between the specified arcs is the result deduced for each experiment. Four of the needles, Nos. IV, VIII, X, and XI, with an apparatus in duplicate, were sent to me in the summer of 1826 by Professor Hansteen of Christiania, to be employed in obtaining the comparative magnetic intensity in different parts of Great Britain. Shortly after their arrival, an opportunity occurred of sending two of the needles, Nos. IV and XI, with an apparatus, to Captain Basil Hall, in Edinburgh; by whom, assisted by Lieut. Robert Craigie, of the Royal Navy, the experiments numbered 12 to 16 in the subjoined tables were made, in February 1827; and the needles returned, so as to be included in the comparative experiments between Paris and London.

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