Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas

At four o'clock in the morning of the 4th of August, 1914, Lord Jellicoe opened the secret orders appointing him Commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, which was then ready wait...

The daring English sailors who roved the waters to prey on Spanish vessels were given the name of Sea-Dogs because they often used to hunt together like a pack of hounds. Their...

By 1580, the year of Drake's return, Spain and England were fast moving toward the war that had been bound to come ever since the Old World had found the riches of the New.

Jutland proved to all hands in the German Navy that they had no chance whatever against Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. But the great mass of the German people never heard this truth; a...

The Celts had been little more than a jumble of many different tribes before the Romans came. The Romans had ruled England and the south of Scotland as a single country. But whe...

No one who has had a look behind the scenes will ever forget the three War Wednesdays of 1914, the 22nd and 29th of July and the 5th of August; for during that dire fortnight th...

The British part of the Seven Years War was rightly known as The Maritime War, because Pitt, the greatest of British empire-builders, based it entirely on British sea-power, bot...

Nelson and Napoleon never met; and Wellington the soldier beat Napoleon ten years after Nelson was killed at Trafalgar. Yet it was Nelson's victories that made Napoleon's null a...

England needed good pilots to take the ship of state safely through the troubled waters of the wonderful sixteenth century, and she found them in the three great Royal Tudors: H...

We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet...

In 1864 the Fathers of Confederation met at Quebec, while the Germans took from the Danes the neck of land through which they cut the Kiel Canal to give the German Navy a safe b...

Now that the last and most formidable of our enemies has acknowledged the triumph of the Allied arms on behalf of right and justice, I wish to express my praise and thankfulness...

The British Empire leads the whole world both in size and population. It ended the Great War with the greatest of all the armies, the greatest of all the navies, and the greates...

The fight between Napoleon's land-blockade and Britain's sea-blockade divided not only the people of Europe into friends and foes but also divided the people of the United State...

In Chapter VI we saw how French and English once fought a Hundred Years War to decide the French possession of all the land of France, and how the French, having the greater arm...

As Jutland broke the spirit of the Germans who fought on the surface so minefields, netting, convoys, patrolling, and Q boats broke the spirit of those who fought in submarines....

Thousands and thousands of years ago a naked savage in southern Asia found that he could climb about quite safely on a floating log. One day another savage found that floating d...

During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War against the Germans the Royal Navy had no more fights for life or death. But it never ceased to protect the...

right, and Ostend to the left. To close only Zeebrugge was to leave the back door open. So Ostend was raided, and smashed later on, the old _Vindictive_, now past her fighting d...

The Dutch Wars, which lasted off and on for fifty years (1623-1673), were caused by rivalry in oversea trade. In the sixteenth century the Dutch and English had joined forces ag...

This chapter begins with a big surprise. But it ends with a bigger one still. When you look first at the title and then at the date, you wonder how on earth the two can go toget...

Just as Germany tried to win the overlordship of the world in this twentieth century so Spain tried in the sixteenth; and just as the Royal Navy was the chief, though by no mean...

For two thousand years Eastern fleets and armies tried to conquer Europe. Sometimes hundreds of years would pass without an attack. But the result was always the same--the trium...

The Dutch quickly took up the East India trade dropped by the beaten Spaniards, started their general oversea freighting again, and were soon as dangerous rivals as before. The...

When Caesar was conquering the Celts of Western France he found that one of their strongest tribes, the Veneti, had been joined by two hundred and twenty vessels manned by their...

The rights and wrongs of this Revolution are not our business here. But British sea-power is. So we should like to tell the whole story of the Navy in that unhappy time; because...

British sea-power. Spain promised to take away from the British all the trading rights she had been forced to grant them in America, while France promised to help Spain to win G...

Eddystone Lighthouse, 1699. The first structure of stone and timber. Build for Trinity House by Winstanley and swept away in a storm. Eddystone Lighthouse, 1882. The fourth and...

King Charles II of Spain, having no children, made a will leaving his throne to Philip V, a grandson of Louis XIV, whose wife was sister to Charles. Louis declared that "the Pyr...

Germany made 1914 a year of blood; but let us remember it as also being the hundredth year of peace between the British, Americans, and French, those three great peoples who wil...

I THE VERY BEGINNING OF SEA-POWER (10,000 years and more B.C.) II THE FIRST FAR WEST (The last 5,000 years B.C.) III EAST AGAINST WEST (480 B. C.-146 B.C.) IV CELTIC BRITAIN UND...

XIII THE FIRST WAR AGAINST LOUIS XIV (1689-1697) XIV THE SECOND WAR AGAINST LOUIS XIV (1702-1713) XV WAR AGAINST FRANCE AND SPAIN (1739-1748) XVI PITT'S IMPERIAL WAR (1756-1763)...