The global legacy of mutiny and revolution on the high seas. Mutiny tore like wildfire through the wooden warships of the age of revolution. While commoners across Europe laid siege to the nobility and enslaved workers put the torch to plantation islands, out on the oceans, naval seamen by the tens of thousands turned their guns on the quarterdeck and overthrew the absolute rule of captains. By the early 1800s, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all naval seamen serving in the North Atlantic had participated in at least one mutiny, many of them in several, and some even on ships in different navies. In The Bloody Flag, historian Niklas Frykman explores in vivid prose how a decade of violent conflict onboard gave birth to a distinct form of radical politics that brought together the egalitarian culture of North Atlantic maritime communities with the revolutionary era's constitutional republicanism. The attempt to build a radical maritime republic failed, but the red flag that flew from the masts of mutinous ships survived to become the most enduring global symbol of class struggle, economic justice, and republican liberty to this day.

The years leading to World War I were the 'Age of the Dreadnought'. The monumental battleship design, first introduced by Admiral Fisher to the Royal Navy in 1906, was quickly adopted around the world and led to a new era of naval warfare and policy. In this book, Roger Parkinson provides a re-writing of the naval history of Britain and the other leading naval powers from the 1880s to the early years of World War I. The years before 1914 were characterised by intensifying Anglo-German naval competition, with an often forgotten element beyond Europe in the form of the rapidly developing navies of the United States and Japan. Parkinson shows that, although the advent of the dreadnought was the pivotal turning-point in naval policy, in fact much of the technology that enabled the dreadnought to be launched was a continuity from the pre-dreadnought era. In the annals of the Royal Navy two names will always be linked: those of Admiral Sir John 'Jacky' Fisher and the ship he created, HMS Dreadnought. This book shows how the dreadnought enabled the Royal Navy to develop from being primarily the navy of the 'Pax Britannica' in the Victorian era to being a war-ready fighting force in the early years of the twentieth century. The ensuing era of intensifying naval competition rapidly became a full-blooded naval arms race, leading to the development of super-dreadnoughts and escalating tensions between the European powers. Providing a truly international perspective on the dreadnought phenomenon, this book will be essential reading for all naval history enthusiasts and anyone interested in World War I.

In 1858, Mary Millburn successfully made her escape from Norfolk, Virginia, to Philadelphia aboard an express steamship. Millburn's maritime route to freedom was far from uncommon. By the mid-nineteenth century an increasing number of enslaved people had fled northward along the Atlantic seaboard. While scholarship on the Underground Railroad has focused almost exclusively on overland escape routes from the antebellum South, this groundbreaking volume expands our understanding of how freedom was achieved by sea and what the journey looked like for many African Americans. With innovative scholarship and thorough research, Sailing to Freedom highlights little-known stories and describes the less-understood maritime side of the Underground Railroad, including the impact of African Americans' paid and unpaid waterfront labor. These ten essays reconsider and contextualize how escapes were managed along the East Coast, moving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland to safe harbor in northern cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Bedford, and Boston. In addition to the volume editor, contributors include David S. Cecelski, Elysa Engelman, Kathryn Grover, Megan Jeffreys, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Mirelle Luecke, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Michael D. Thompson, and Len Travers.

This is the first major biography of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in fifty years. Ramsay masterminded the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940. Initially, it was thought that 40,000 troops at most could be rescued. But Ramsay's planning and determination led to some 338,000 being brought back to fight another day, although the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy paid a high price in ships and men. Ramsay continued to play a crucial role in the conduct of the Second World War - the invasion of Sicily in 1943 was successful in large part due to his vision, and he had a key role in the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion - coordinating and commanding the 7,000 ships that delivered the invasion force onto the beaches of Normandy. After forty years in the Royal Navy he was forced to retire in 1938 after falling out with a future First Sea Lord but months later, with war looming, he was given a new post. However he was not reinstated on the Active List until April 1944, at which point he was promoted to Admiral and appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief for the D-Day naval expeditionary force. Dying in a mysterious air crash in 1945, Ramsay's legacy has been remembered by the Royal Navy but his key role in the Allied victory has been widely forgotten. After the war ended his achievements ranked alongside those of Sir Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery and General Dwight Eisenhower, yet he never received the public recognition he deserved. Brian Izzard's new biography of Ramsay puts him and his work back centre-stage, arguing that Ramsay was the mastermind without whom the outcome of both Dunkirk and D-Day - and perhaps the entire war - could have been very different.

I ran out on the deck and then I could see ice. It was a veritable sea of ice and the boat was rocking over it. I should say that parts of the iceberg were eighty feet high, but it had been broken into sections, probably by our ship. There fell on the ear the most appalling noise that ever human ear listened to the cries of hundreds of our fellow-beings struggling in the icy-cold water, crying for help with a cry that we knew could not be answered. First published in 1912, Jay Henry Mowbray's Sinking of the Titanic was hugely influential in the aftermath of the maritime disaster, recording the harrowing, first-hand accounts of the survivors - from sailors, to stewards, to passengers - throughout the ordeal, from when the iceberg first hit to when the Carpathia eventually arrived, and honouring those who were lost on that fateful night in 1912. Mowbray's text even follows the survivors when they make it back to land - a lesser-known, riveting aspect of the tragic saga that deals with the investigation and the hearings that took place in the US and UK in the months that followed. The swiftness of the publication of Mowbray's text, the sheer number of first-hand witness accounts therein and the intensity of the chaos and fear that their accounts convey makes for a unique compilation which, together with new notes, maps, images and expert introductory material in this new, updated edition, will fascinate, educate and deeply move contemporary readers as much today as the original publication would have back in 1912.

This book explores the historical and archaeological evidence of the relationships between a coastal community and the shipwrecks that have occurred along the southern Australian shoreline over the last 160 years. It moves beyond a focus on shipwrecks as events and shows the short and long term economic, social and symbolic significance of wrecks and strandings to the people on the shoreline. This volume draws on extensive oral histories, documentary and archaeological research to examine the tensions within the community, negotiating its way between its roles as shipwreck saviours and salvors.

Beginning with the Black Death in 1348 and extending through to the demise of Habsburg rule in 1700, this second edition of Spanish Society, 1348-1700 has been expanded to provide a wide and compelling exploration of Spain's transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Each chapter builds on the first edition by offering new evidence of the changes in Spain's social structure between the fourteenth and seventeenth century. Every part of society is examined, culminating in a final section that is entirely new to the second edition and presents the changing social practices of the period, particularly in response to the growing crises facing Spain as it moved into the seventeenth century. Also new to this edition is a consideration of the social meaning of culture, specifically the presence of Hermetic themes and of magical elements in Golden Age literature and Cervantes' Don Quijote. Through the extensive use of case studies, historical examples and literary extracts, Spanish Society is an ideal way for students to gain direct access to this captivating period.

A sociological investigation into maritime state power told through an exploration of how the British Empire policed piracy. Early in the seventeenth-century boom of seafaring, piracy allowed many enterprising and lawless men to make fortunes on the high seas, due in no small part to the lack of policing by the British crown. But as the British empire grew from being a collection of far-flung territories into a consolidated economic and political enterprise dependent on long-distance trade, pirates increasingly became a destabilizing threat. This development is traced by sociologist Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Norton shows us that eliminating this threat required an institutional shift: first identifying and defining piracy, and then brutally policing it. The Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for understanding the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing, classifying, and constructing institutional order by tracing the transformation of piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity to a criminal category with violently patrolled boundaries-ending with its eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English Empire. Replete with gun battles, executions, jailbreaks, and courtroom dramas, Norton's book offers insights for social theorists, political scientists, and historians alike.

The aftermath of the Great War brought the most troubled peacetime the world had ever seen. Survivors of the war were not only the soldiers who fought, the wounded in mind and body. They were also the stateless, the children who suffered war's consequences, and later the victims of the great Russian famine of 1921 to 1923. Before the phrases 'universal human rights' and 'non-governmental organization' even existed, five remarkable men and women - Rene Cassin and Albert Thomas from France, Fridtjof Nansen from Norway, Herbert Hoover from the US and Eglantyne Jebb from Britain - understood that a new type of transnational organization was needed to face problems that respected no national boundaries or rivalries. Bruno Cabanes, a pioneer in the study of the aftermath of war, shows, through his vivid and revelatory history of individuals, organizations, and nations in crisis, how and when the right to human dignity first became inalienable.

The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean, providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands and peoples of this diverse territory, from the Somali headlands of Africa to the far eastern shores of China and Korea. Traveling eastward, we discover a vivid human landscape-from Chinese society to Hindu religious practices-as well as a colorful range of natural wilderness-from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a kaleidoscope of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information. Here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. An English-only edition.

This collective volume explores the ways merchants managed to connect different spaces all over the globe in the early modern period by organizing the movement of goods, capital, information and cultural objects between different commercial maritime systems in the Mediterranean and Atlantic basin. Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550-1800 consists of four thematic blocs: theoretical considerations, the social composition of networks, connected spaces, networks between formal and informal exchange, as well as possible failures of ties. This edited volume features eleven contributions who deal with theoretical concepts such as social network analysis, globalization, social capital and trust. In addition, several chapters analyze the coexistence of mono-cultural and transnational networks, deal with network failure and shifting network geographies, and assess the impact of kinship for building up international networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This work evaluates the use of specific network types for building up connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Basin stretching out to Central Europe, the Northern Sea and the Pacific. This book is of interest to those who study history of economics and maritime economics, as well as historians and scholars from other disciplines working on maritime shipping, port studies, migration, foreign mercantile communities, trade policies and mercantilism.

Whale oil lit the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. In light of its importance, competition between whalers was high. Far from courts and law enforcement, competing crews of American whalers not known for their gentility and armed with harpoons tended to resolve disputes at sea over ownership of whales. Left to settle arguments on their own, whalemen created norms and customs to decide ownership of whales pursued by multiple crews. The Law of the Whale Hunt provides an innovative examination of how property law was created in the absence of formal legal institutions regulating the American whaling industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using depositions, court testimony, logbooks, and other previously unused primary sources, Robert Deal tells an exciting story of American whalers hunting in waters from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk.

One of the greatest treasures in the archives of the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum is the Hansen Collection, consisting of over 4500 negatives of shipping taken at Cardiff Docks between 1920 and 1975. Lars Peter Hansen, a native of Copenhagen, settled in Cardiff in 1891 and he and his third son Leslie established a photographic business in the docks; taking pictures of ships for sale to seamen and shipowners was an important part of their business. Following the retirement of Leslie Hansen in 1975, the museum purchased the negative collection. Its historical value cannot be overstated and this album is intended as a tribute to the Hansens, who through their work have bequeathed to Wales a pictorial record of shipping activity at the nation's premier port.

The story of Britain's colourful maritime past seen through the changing fortunes of the Cornish port of Falmouth. Within the space of few years, during the 1560s and 1570s, a maritime revolution took place in England that would contribute more than anything to the transformation of the country from a small rebel state on the fringes of Europe into a world power. Until then, it was said, there was only one Englishman capable of sailing across the Atlantic. Yet within ten years an English ship with an English crew was circumnavigating the world. At the same time in Cornwall, in the Fal estuary, just a single building - a lime kiln - existed where the port of Falmouth would emerge. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Falmouth would be one of the busiest harbours in the world. 'The Levelling Sea' uses the story of Falmouth's spectacular rise and fall to explore wider questions about the sea and its place in history and imagination. Drawing on his own deep connection with Cornwall, award-winning author Philip Marsden writes unforgettably about the power of the sea and its ability to produce greed on a piratical scale, dizzying corruption, and grand and tragic aspirations.

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board-sick, frozen, and starving-were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship's crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do and, in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event had emerged. In one account, the crew murdered the captain, extorted money from the passengers by prolonging the voyage and withholding food, then abandoned ship. In the other, the islanders lured the ship ashore with a false signal light, then murdered and robbed all on board. Some claimed the ship was set ablaze to hide evidence of these crimes, their stories fueled by reports of a fiery ghost ship first seen drifting in Block Island Sound on the one-year anniversary of the wreck. These tales became known as the legend of the Palatine, the name given to the ship in later years, when its original name had been long forgotten. The flaming apparition was nicknamed the Palatine Light. The eerie phenomenon has been witnessed by hundreds of people over the centuries, and numerous scientific theories have been offered as to its origin. Its continued reappearances, along with the attention of some of nineteenth-century America's most notable writers-among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson-has helped keep the legend alive. This despite evidence that the vessel, whose actual name was the Princess Augusta, was never abandoned, lured ashore, or destroyed by fire. So how did the rumors begin? What really happened to the Princess Augusta and the passengers she carried on her final, fatal voyage? Through years of painstaking research, Jill Farinelli reconstructs the origins of one of New England's most chilling maritime mysteries.

The whaling bark Progress was a New Bedford ship transformed into a whaling museum for Chicago's 1893 world's fair. Traversing waterways across North America, the whaleship enthralled crowds from Montreal to Racine. Her ultimate fate, however, was to be a failed sideshow of marine curiosities and a metaphor for a dying industry out of step with Gilded Age America. This book uses the story of the Progress to detail the rise, fall, and eventual demise of the whaling industry in America. The legacy of this whaling bark can be found throughout New England and Chicago, and invites questions about what it means to transform a dying industry into a museum piece.

The Command of the Ocean describes with unprecedented authority and scholarship the rise of Britain to naval greatness, and the central place of the Navy and naval activity in the life of the nation and government. It describes not just battles, voyages and cruises but how the Navy was manned, how it was supplied with timber, hemp and iron, how its men (and sometimes women) were fed, and above all how it was financed and directed. It was during the century and a half covered by this book that the successful organizing of these last three - victualling, money and management - took the Navy to the heart of the British state. It is the great achievement of the book to show how completely integrated and mutually dependent Britain and the Navy then became.

In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author Dean Snow rights the record on a shipwrecked sailor who traversed the length of the North American continent only to be maligned as deceitful storyteller. In the autumn of 1569, a French ship rescued David Ingram and two other English sailors from the shore of the Gulf of Maine. The men had walked over 3000 miles in less than a year after being marooned near Tampico, Mexico. They were the only three men to escape alive and uncaptured, out of a hundred put ashore at the close of John Hawkins's disastrous third slaving expedition. A dozen years later, Ingram was called in for questioning by Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. In 1589, the historian Richard Hakluyt published his version of Ingram's story based on the records of that interrogation. For four centuries historians have used that publication as evidence that Ingram was an egregious travel liar, an unreliable early source for information about the people of interior eastern North America before severe historic epidemics devastated them. In The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram, author and recognized archaeologist Dean Snow shows that Ingram was not a fraud, contradicting the longstanding narrative of his life. Snow's careful examination of three long-neglected surviving records of Ingram's interrogation reveals that the confusion in the 1589 publication was the result of disorganization by court recorders and poor editing by Richard Hakluyt. Restoration of Ingram's testimony has reinstated him as a trustworthy source on the peoples of West Africa, the Caribbean, and eastern North America in the middle sixteenth century. Ingram's life story, with his long traverse through North America at its core, can now finally be understood and appreciated for what it was: the tale of a unique, bold adventurer.

From muddy creek to naval-industrial powerhouse; from constructing wooden walls to building Dreadnoughts; from maintaining King John's galleys to servicing the enormous new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers: this is the story of Portsmouth Dockyard. Respected maritime historian Paul Brown's unique 800-year history of what was once the largest industrial organisation in the world is a combination of extensive original research and stunning images. The most comprehensive history of the dockyard to date, it is sure to become the definitive work on this important heritage site and modern naval base.

Recent discussion, academic publications and many of the national exhibitions relating to the Great War at sea have focussed on capital ships, Jutland and perhaps U-boats. Very little has been published about the crucial role played by fishermen, fishing vessels and coastal communities all round the British Isles. Yet fishermen and armed fishing craft were continually on the maritime front line throughout the conflict; they formed the backbone of the Auxiliary Patrol and were in constant action against-U-boats or engaged on unrelenting minesweeping duties. Approximately 3000 fishing vessels were requisitioned and armed by the Admiralty and more than 39,000 fishermen joined the Trawler Section of the Royal Naval Reserve. The class and cultural gap between working fishermen and many RN officers was enormous. This book examines the multifaceted role that fishermen and the fish trade played throughout the conflict. It examines the reasons why, in an age of dreadnoughts and other high-tech military equipment, so many fishermen and fishing vessels were called upon to play such a crucial role in the littoral war against mines and U-boats, not only around the British Isles but also off the coasts of various other theatres of war. It will analyse the nature of the fishing industry's war-time involvement and also the contribution that non-belligerent fishing vessels continued to play in maintaining the beleaguered nation's food supplies.

Taken for granted as the natural order of things, peace at sea is in fact an immense and recent achievement -- but also an enormous strategic challenge if it is to be maintained in the future. In Maritime Strategy and Global Order, an international roster of top scholars offers historical perspectives and contemporary analysis to explore the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the international system. The book begins in the early days of the industrial revolution with the foundational role of maritime strategy in building the British Empire. It continues into the era of naval disorder surrounding the two world wars, through the passing of the Pax Britannica and the rise of the Pax Americana, and then examines present-day regional security in hot spots like the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean. Additional chapters engage with important related topics such as maritime law, resource competition, warship evolution since the end of the Cold War, and naval intelligence. A first-of-its-kind collection, Maritime Strategy and Global Order offers scholars, practitioners, students, and others with an interest in maritime history and strategic issues an absorbing long view of the role of the sea in creating the world we know.

Richard Hakluyt's 12-volume Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, originally published at the end of the sixteenth century, and reissued by the Cambridge Library Collection in the edition of 1903-5, was followed in 1625 by Hakluytus Posthumus or, Purchas his Pilgrimes, now reissued in a 20-volume edition published in 1905-7. When first published in four folio volumes, the work was the largest ever printed in England. An Anglican priest, Samuel Purchas (1577-1626) was a friend of Hakluyt, and based his great work in part on papers not published by Hakluyt before his death. As well as being a wide-ranging survey of world exploration, it is notable as an anti-Catholic polemic, and a justification of British settlement in North America. Volume 15 focuses on the West Indies, Mexico, and 'New Spain', and especially on the narratives of Jose de Acosta.