Maritime Musicians and Performers on Early Modern English Voyages aims to tell the full story of early English shipboard performers, who have been historically absent from conversations about English navigation, maritime culture, and economic expansion. Often described reductively in voyaging accounts as having one function, in fact maritime performers served many communicative tasks. Their lives were not only complex, but often contradictory. Though not high-ranking officers, neither were they lower-ranking mariners or sailors. They were influenced by a range of competing cultural practices, having spent time playing on both land and sea, and their roles required them to mediate parties using music, dance, and theatre as powerful forms of nonverbal communication. Their performances transcended and breached boundaries of language, rank, race, religion, and nationality, thereby upsetting conventional practices, improving shipboard and international relations, and ensuring the success of their voyages.

Much is known about Britain's role in the Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century but few are aware of the sustained campaign against slaving conducted by the Royal Navy after the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807. Peter Grindal provides the definitive account of this little known yet important part of the British, European and American history. Drawing on original sources to provide a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the naval operations against slavers of all nations - in particular Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Brazil, he describes how illegal traders sought to evade treaty obligations, reveals the obduracy of the USA that prolonged the slave trade, and shows how, despite inadequate resources, the Royal navy's sixty-year campaign forced slavers to expend ever greater sums top conduct their business and confront the losses inflicted by capture and condemnation. A work that will transform our understanding of the Royal Navy's campaign against the Atlantic slave trade.

England has a long and involved relationship with the sea. It has provided a final line of defence against invasion, the route over which the country's global trade has travelled, the source of a bountiful harvest of fish and seafood that has sustained the population, the essential links in the empire that saw Britain emerge as the world's first 'Great Power', and, more recently, it has fostered the leisure industry. For many, the sea was to provide their final view of their homeland as emigration took them to far-flung corners of the world, while for others, perhaps fleeing religious or political persecution, the sea offered them a route to safety. For almost a century the photographers from the Aerofilms company recorded Britain from the air. Alongside the photographs taken of the great castles and abbeys of the country, the views also recorded industrial and commercial activity - including the docks and ports that were an essential part in maintaining Britain's place in the world. In this book, Peter Waller has delved through the collection of Aerofilms photographs held by Historic England to explore the country's maritime heritage. Selecting 150 images, the author looks at how the docks and ports have evolved since the years immediately after World War I, how traditional patterns of trade have changed, how the Royal Navy has shrunk and how the leisure industry has come to dominate.

A revelatory narrative of the 538 Pennsylvania and New Jersey privateers, privately owned ships of war some called pirates. Manned by over 18,000 men, these privateers influenced the fight for American independence. From the halls of Congress to the rough waterfronts of Delaware River and Bay to the remote privateering ports of the New Jersey coast and into the Atlantic, a stirring portrait emerges of seaborne raiders, battles, and derring-do, as well as incredible escapes from the great British prison ships "vulgarly called Hell," where more than 11,000 men perished. A work 40 years in the making extracted from archives in both Europe and America, it is a tale unrivaled by any Hollywood fiction.

In the summer of 1942 Jim Vernon, a nineteen-year-old student in Butte, Montana, joined the U.S. Navy's aviation cadet training program. By the end of the war he was flying F6F Hellcats from the USS "Ticonderoga" against the Japanese mainland. This memoir provides a carrier pilot's view of the conflict in the Pacific during the final months of the war when the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan capitulated.

A member of VBF-87, Vernon gives a highly personal eyewitness account of life in a bomber-fighter squadron and the roller-coaster emotions involved in combat sorties over the hostile sea and land. He describes his feelings about meeting the challenges of war and offers stirring memories of his love of flying and the camaraderie of his flying mates--both in the air and on liberty. Added to this entertaining narrative are details of the mobilization and training of carrier pilots as well as a discussion of the high incidence of noncombat fatalities and the air group's response to the kamikaze threat, information that contributes important dimensions to the overall story of the air war.

Completely candid about his emotions regarding day and night landings and errors made in the cockpit, Vernon gives a vivid glimpse into the past at a time when teenagers matured rapidly as they faced the realities of war. His recollections will strike a cord of recognition with aviators everywhere and will inform and entertain those with an interest in World War II combat.

This book thoroughly explores and analyses naval policy during the period of austerity that followed the First World War. During this post-war period, as the Royal Navy identified Japan its likely opponent in a future naval war, the British Government was forced to "tighten its belt" and cut back on naval expenditure in the interests of "National Economy". G.H. Bennett draws connections between the early 20th century and the present day, showing how the same kind of connections exist between naval and foreign policy, the provision of ships for the Royal Navy, business and regional prosperity and employment. The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity 1919-22 engages with a series of important historiographical debates relating to the history of the Royal Navy, the failures of British Defence policy in the inter-war period and the evolution of British foreign policy after 1919, together with more mundane debates about British economic, industrial, social and political history in the aftermath of the First World War. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of British naval history.

This monograph is an exploration of the historical legacy of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, in particular in Goa, Macau, Melaka, and Malabar. Instead of fixing the gaze on either the colonial or the indigenous, it attempts to scrutinise a creole space that is rooted in Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.

This is an indispensable reference for the lighthouse enthusiast, required reading for those interested in maritime history, and a necessity for anyone who loves Cape Cod. Step back in time and observe the lighthouses and lightships that marked the shores and guided mariners through dangerous waters surrounding Cape Cod. Experience these maritime marvels and trace through the history of these lighthouses and lightships. Archived plans describe the details of these aids to navigation with more than 500 images, including some that have never before been published. Complete your journey with a visit to these historic spots, using the books comprehensive visitors guide.

When and why did the Royal Navy come to view the expansion of German maritime power as a threat to British maritime security? Contrary to current thinking, Matthew S. Seligmann argues that Germany emerged as a major threat at the outset of the twentieth century, not because of its growing battle fleet, but because the British Admiralty (rightly) believed that Germany's naval planners intended to arm their country's fast merchant vessels in wartime and send them out to attack British trade in the manner of the privateers of old. This threat to British seaborne commerce was so serious that the leadership of the Royal Navy spent twelve years trying to work out how best to counter it. Ever more elaborate measures were devised to this end. These included building 'fighting liners' to run down the German ones; devising a specialized warship, the battle cruiser, as a weapon of trade defence; attempting to change international law to prohibit the conversion of merchant vessels into warships on the high seas; establishing a global intelligence network to monitor German shipping movements; and, finally, the arming of British merchant vessels in self-defence. The manner in which German schemes for commerce warfare drove British naval policy for over a decade before 1914 has not been recognized before. The Royal Navy and the German Threat illustrates a new and important aspect of British naval history.

'Killing whales is sometimes attended with bad accidents.' Dr. William Dalton, surgeon of the Phoenix
Scurvy. Amputation. Tropical disease. Irritable captains. Mutinous crews. Such were the trials facing the men who shipped out as doctors on South Seas whalers in the early nineteenth century. Using diaries, journals and correspondence the author tells a fascinating story of remarkable men undergoing unbelievable hardships.
In this lively and often darkly humorous tale we learn what type of person would sign on for a dangerous three year voyage across the globe, what types of medicines and surgical tools were available and what sort of people they encountered on remote South Seas islands.

In a time of great need for Britain, a small coterie of influential businessmen gained access to secret information on industrial mobilisation as advisers to the Principal Supply Officers Committee. They provided the state with priceless advice, but, as "insiders" utilised their access to information to build a business empire at a fraction of the normal costs. Outsiders, in contrast, lacked influence and were forced together into a defensive "ring" - or cartel - which effectively fixed prices for British warships. By the 1930s, the cartel grew into one of the most sophisticated profiteering groups of its day. This book examines the relationship between the private naval armaments industry, businessmen, and the British government defence planners between the wars. It reassesses the concept of the military-industrial complex through the impact of disarmament upon private industry, the role of leading industrialists in supply and procurement policy, and the successes and failings of government organisation. It blends together political, naval, and business history in new ways, and, by situating the business activities of industrialists alongside their work as government advisors, sheds new light on the operation of the British state. This is the story of how these men profited while effectively saving the National Government from itself.

Since the Titanic disaster of 1912, the horrors of major maritime casualties have prompted international conventions and domestic legislation, but the link between events and outcomes (which are often separated by many years) is rarely understood by those working in the maritime industry. This book, the only comprehensive guide to this link, sets forth the major casualties of the last hundred years and explains resulting regulatory changes. Taking a macro-level view, it describes the trends and reactions across decades, and how, over time, focus has shifted from equipment failures to people and their behaviors as the primary cause of maritime casualties. Timely and thorough, it also explores the alarming increase in the criminalization of maritime accidents, especially the relatively recent reclassification of pollution incidents as "environmental crimes." This book offers broad insight to the history, laws, and conventions that regulate worldwide commercial maritime activity.

Showcasing established and new patterns of research, The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing takes an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and to travel texts themselves. The volume adopts a thematic approach, with each contributor considering a specific aspect of travel writing - a recurrent motif, an organising principle or a literary form. All of the essays include a discussion of representative travel texts, to ensure that the volume as a whole represents a broad historical and geographical range of travel writing. Together, the 25 essays and the editors' introduction offer a comprehensive and authoritative reflection of the state of travel writing criticism and lay the ground for future developments.

Offering an introduction to the world's seas as a platform for global exchange and connection, Michael North offers an impressive world history of the seas over more than 3,000 years. Exploring the challenges and dangers of the oceans that humans have struggled with for centuries, he also shows the possibilities and opportunities they have provided from antiquity to the modern day. Written to demonstrate the global connectivity of the seas, but also to highlight regional maritime power during different eras, A World History of the Seas takes sailors, merchants and migrants as the protagonists of these histories and explores how their experiences and perceptions of the seas were consolidated through trade and cultural exchange. Bringing together the various maritime historiographies of the world and underlining their unity, this book shows how the ocean has been a vital and natural space of globalization. Carrying goods, creating alliances, linking continents and conveying culture, the history of the ocean played a central role in creating our modern globalized world.

This book explores the tenuous existence of seafarers, divided between their time on the ocean and their residence in sailortown economies geared to exploit them. Particular attention is given both to the contribution of seafarers as a global workforce into the nineteenth century, and to their help in creating vibrant multicultural enclaves in port cities worldwide. In addition, research explores the scandalized opinions of outside observers, challenging ideas about public behavior and relationships. Sailortown myths persisted far into the twentieth century, to the detriment of older waterfront districts and their residents, and readers will find this book is invaluable in casting new light on forgotten communities, whose lives bridged urban, maritime and global histories.

Tom Cunliffe is one of the biggest names in the sailing world - an internationally renowned journalist and speaker, and the go-to guru when the BBC wants a presenter for a new TV series about maritime interests. For the last ten years he has edited the 'Great Seamanship' column of Yachting World magazine. Each column features an extract from a classic yachting book that covers an aspect of great seamanship. Tom introduces each extract by giving insightful background on the writer, their book and what makes their experience so worth reading about - and learning from. This book comprises Tom's 40 favourite extracts, and covers the entire scope of yachting concerns, from small-boat handling to yacht racing to long-distance cruising and exploring. Introduced in Tom's quintessential lively, engaging fashion, and illustrated with photos both from the original books and Tom's own archives, this book contains a wealth of yachting wisdom and is a collection to be treasured.

Despite the port's prominence in maritime history, its cultural significance has long been neglected in favour of its role within economic and imperial networks. Defined by their intersection of maritime and urban space, port towns were sites of complex cultural exchanges. This book, the product of international scholarship, offers innovative and challenging perspectives on the cultural histories of ports, ranging from eighteenth-century Africa to twentieth-century Australasia and Europe. The essays in this important collection explore two key themes; the nature and character of 'sailortown' culture and port-town life, and the representations of port towns that were forged both within and beyond urban-maritime communities. The book's exploration of port town identities and cultures, and its use of a rich array of methodological approaches and cultural artefacts, will make it of great interest to both urban and maritime historians. It also represents a major contribution to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of coastal studies.

The 19C roots of globalisation demonstrated through an account of the enterprise network created by the Scottish merchant, William Mackinnon. WINNER OF THE 2004 WADSWORTH PRIZE. WINNER OF THE 2004 SALTIRE SOCIETY RESEARCH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD. This book explores the nineteenth century roots of globalisation through the activities of the enterprise network created by the Scottish merchant, William Mackinnon. It follows the rise of the family-led business group from its modest origins in Scotland to its transformation into the world's largest maritime and mercantile conglomerate, tracing the history of the various shipping firms within the group - including the British India, Netherlands India andAustralasian United companies - and identifies the key factors behind its domination of coastal steamshipping around the Indian Ocean and into the western Pacific. It provides an analysis of the anatomy and dynamics of the enterprise network over time. The book also examines Mackinnon's relationship with the imperial statesman, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, which drew the network into the operations of British "informal imperialism" in the Persian Gulf, Red Seaand East-Central Africa regions, and eventually to its sponsorship of the ill-fated Imperial British East Africa Company. It breaks new ground in identifying the interplay of personal and business considerations behind Mackinnon's participation in the "Scramble for Africa" in its combination of maritime history with business history and imperial history to contribute to the current debate over "gentlemanly capitalism" and British overseas expansion. WINNER OF THE 2004 WADSWORTH PRIZE. JOINT WINNER OF THE 2004 SALTIRE SOCIETY RESEARCH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD. J. FORBES MUNRO is emeritus professor of international economic history, University of Glasgow.

This book demonstrates the importance of the presence of the Royal Navy in South America. Historically there have been no treaty obligations and few strategic considerations in the region, yet it is frequently referred to as forming part of Britain's 'unofficial empire'. The role of the Navy in supporting foreign relations and promoting commerce is examined during a period of the twentieth century which is often associated with the decline of the British Empire. The Role of the Royal Navy in South America, 1920-1970 shows how the Royal Navy reacted to changing circumstances during the post-war decades by adopting a more pro-active attitude towards the imperative of supporting naval exports. It provides a scholarly investigation of this important peacetime role for the service and offers the first book-length study of the Navy's involvement in the region during this period.

In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of 'legal posturing' on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in Piracy in World History highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.

In the late fifteenth century, the production of print editions of Claudius Ptolemy's second-century Geography sparked one of the most significant intellectual developments of the era-the production of mathematically-based, north-oriented maps. The production of world maps in England, however, was notably absent during this "Ptolemaic revival." As a result, the impact of Ptolemy's text on English geographical thought has been obscured and minimalized, with scholars speculating a possible English indifference to or isolation from European geographic developments. Tracing English geographical thought through the material culture of literary and popular texts, this study provides evidence for the reception and transmission of Ptolemaic-based geography in England during a critical period of geographic innovation and synthesis, one that laid the foundation for modern geographical representation. With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England, one that reveals the lively integration of geographic concepts through narrative and non-cartographic visual forms.

This book forms part of the scholarly rejection of the 'experts' of empire and calls for us to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present. Western publics are constantly being told by 'experts' that they ought to rethink the history of empire. They are told that their (presumed) guilt regarding their countries' imperial pasts can be assuaged: if people were only able to deploy a 'balanced scorecard' they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialised forms of ethnic conflict. Building around an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni (here translated into English for the first time), this book shows how the genre and forms of imperial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after-effects of empire, which last into the present and will continue into the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

On the night of 14-15 April 1912, Titanic, a brand-new, supposedly unsinkable ship, the largest and most luxurious vessel in the world at the time, collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people on board, only 712 were saved. The rest perished in the icy-cold waters of the North Atlantic, and the tragedy has fascinated and perplexed the world ever since. This stunning book tells the story of not just the Titanic, but also of its sister ships, Olympic and Britannic. Maritime experts J. Kent Layton, Tad Fitch, and Bill Wormstedt tell the stories of these legendary liners with a compelling narrative alongside original artwork from up-and-coming artists, bringing to life the design, construction and service of the ships together with the wrecks of the ill-fated Titanic and Britannic. From the cold, starry night when Titanic collided with her iceberg to the tragic wartime loss of Britannic and the impressive reliability of the long-lived Olympic, this cinematic and immersive new study captures all of the glory and drama of the Olympic-class age and allows readers to visualise Titanic and her sisters like never before.

The story of Leith-built ships continues in this third volume from just after the conclusion of World War Two to 1965. However, the world was different; the men came back from the front and those women who had been working in the shipyards lost their jobs. All shipyards were experiencing full order books, replacing, or repairing ships lost or damaged in the conflict, but the industry was changing albeit slowly at first. The advent of electric welding would eventually change the way ships were built leading to the demise of the Rivet Squad, which was replaced as a cost cutting exercise as it became the accepted method of ship construction. Henry Robb Shipyard participated in the massive new shipbuilding programme with a great many vessels being ordered from two of the largest customers of the yard. Many orders came from the giant Ellerman Lines, while a great many more were ordered by other customers, such as the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand. The Admiralty also remained a customer and a few large supply ships would be built in this time. In this volume the author has not forgotten the people who were the very fabric of the yard and community. Personal accounts are included from those who built or sailed on these vessels. This is the story of a mighty industry, but one which nonetheless had begun its decline. In the century from 1893, this nation went from producing 80% of all the worlds' commercial ships to producing no commercial ships at all. It is a sad fact, but this volume keeps alive the story of the Leith-built ships and the vibrant industry that once existed.