Studies in Maritime History – serie

This work covers the real grounds for the Confederacy's failure to build a successful navy. The South's major problems with shipbuilding concerned facilities, materials, and labour. Each of these subjects is discussed, and the text concludes by joining these problems to the issues of the Civil War.

During the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain's Royal Navy faced foes that included, in addition to American forces, the navies of France, Spain and the Netherlands. In this operational history of a period that proved to be a turning point for one of the world's great naval powers, David Syrett presents a saga of battles, blockades, great fleet cruises and, above all, failures and lost opportunities. He explains that the British government severely underestimated the Americans' maritime strength and how that error led to devastating consequences. The seemingly invincible navy failed to muster even one decisive victory during the extensive naval conflict. Noting the complex reasons for British failure in European waters, Syrett lays primary blame at the feet of Britain's political leadership. He describes how Lord North, the first lord of the Treasury and head of government, abdicated control of Britain's military to individual members of the cabinet. Syrett suggests that constant vacillations in policy and strategy, which resulted from power shifts among the cabinet ministers, prevented North's government from formulating a comprehensive wartime strategy or providing the Royal navy with the strategic guidance to launch a successful campaign. Syrett concludes that Britain's inability to gain naval superiority in European waters had a profound effect on the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. He demonstrates how the Royal Navy's failure to hunt down and destroy American blockade runners allowed Yankee rebels easy access to European arms and munitions. He also shows that the inability of the British to defeat French and Spanish naval power off the Continent gave Bourbon monarchies the means to aid American naval forces and to conduct naval operations against the British in such areas as the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.

Loaded with previously unavailable information about the Confederate Navy's effort to supply its fledgling forces, the wartime diaries and letters of John M. Brooke (1826-1906) tell the neglected story of the Confederate naval ordnance office, its innovations, and its strategic vision. As Confederate commander of ordnance and hydrography in Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, Brooke numbered among the military officers who resigned their U.S. commissions and ""went South"" to join the Confederate forces at the onset of conflict. A twenty-year veteran of the United States Navy who had been appointed a midshipman at the age of fourteen, Brooke was a largely self-taught military scientist whose inventions included the Brooke Deep-Sea Sounding Lead. In addition to his achievements as an inventor, Brooke was a draftsman, diarist, and inveterate letter-writer. His copious correspondence about military and personal matters from the war yields detailed and often unexpected insights into the Confederacy's naval operations. Charged with developing a vessel that could break the Union blockade, Brooke raised the Merrimack, a wooden vessel scuttled by the Union Navy, and outfitted it with armor plates as the CSS Virginia. Brooke's papers trace his conception of the plan to create the first Confederate ironclad warship and offer insight into other innovations, revealing a massive amount of factual information about the Confederacy's production of munitions.

THE ABANDONED OCEAN offers an in-depth appraisal of United States maritime policy from the establishment of a merchant marine immediately after the Revolutionary War through radical industry transformations of the late twentieth century. In this sweeping analysis of federal policies that promote, regulate, protect, and subsidize American shipping in coastal and foreign trade, Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan also examine the closely related fortunes of the ship-building industry and the intertwined activities of the merchant and military navies. The authors consider why, since the middle of the nineteenth century, United States maritime policy has been so strikingly unsuccessful in achieving its stated goal of promoting a commercially viable merchant marine engaged in foreign trade.

For most of the 20th century, historians have thought that British naval policy was driven by the Anglo-German arms race. After examining a quantity of primary sources, Lambert concludes that Admiralty decision-making was in fact driven by factors unrelated to the German building programme. This volume explores the intrigue and negotiations between the Admiralty and leading domestic politicians and social reformers of the day, such as Herbert H. Asquith, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Lambert also explains how Britain's naval leaders responded to these non-military, cultural challenges under the direction of Adimiral Sir John Fisher, the service head of the Admiralty from 1904 to 1910, who believed in a radically new approach to navel defence. For mainly political reasons, however, Fisher concealed his ""military technological revolution"" and worked surreptitiously to create a new model fleet capable of protecting all of Britain's imperial interests across the globe.

Dead men tell no tales, or so the pirate maxim goes. But when facing execution in 1831 for mutiny and murder, the previously enigmatic pirate Charles Gibbs recounted the infamous crimes of his harrowing life at sea in a self-aggrandizing series of ""confessions."" Wildly popular reading among nineteenth-century audiences, such criminal confessions were peppered with the romanticized mythology that informs pirate lore to this day. Joseph Gibbs takes up the task of separating fact from fiction to explicate the true story of Charles Gibbs - an alias for James Jeffers (1798-1831) of Newport, Rhode Island - in an investigation that reveals a life as riveting as the legend it replaces. Jeffers was the child of a Revolutionary War privateer captain with his own history in the ""rough work."" After a heroic career in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812, Jeffers eschewed military life and took to the privateer trade himself. As Charles Gibbs, pirate, he sailed from the ports of Charleston and New Orleans to wreak havoc in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Stripping away 170 years of embellishment, Joseph Gibbs maps the still-shockingly violent career of Charles Gibbs across the seas and, in the process, challenges and discredits much of his self-made mythology. Gibbs recounts Jeffers' well-documented role in the infamous mutiny and murders in 1830 aboard the brig Vineyard while the vessel was carrying a load of Mexican silver. The pirate was captured the following year and brought to New York. The case against Jeffers and accomplice Thomas Wansley culminated in a sensational trial, which led to their subsequent executions by hanging on Ellis Island. In addition to recounting the exploits of a ruthless cutthroat, ""The Confessions of ""Charles Gibbs"""" tells the larger story of American piracy and privateering in the early nineteenth century and illustrates the role of American and European adventurers in the Latin American wars of liberation. Carefully researched, engagingly written, and enhanced by twenty illustrations, this is pirate history at its most credible and readable.

This is a firsthand account of a nineteenth-century sealing expedition that recalls the spirit of Herman Melville. Lewis Coolidge (1783-1871) was a nephew of Billy Dawes, the man who accompanied Paul Revere on his legendary midnight ride. An adventurous spirit seems to have run in the family: in 1806, Coolidge set out on a five-year voyage around the globe aboard the China trader Amethyst. The crew's mission was to catch and skin fur seals to trade in China for tea, porcelain, silk, and other highly prized commodities while avoiding entanglements with European traders and ports unfriendly to the young American republic. Edited by Evabeth Miller Kienast and Coolidge's descendant John Phillip Felt, Coolidge's private diary of this voyage sheds light on the nineteenth-century sealing trade and offers a thoughtful vantage on maritime culture of the era as experienced by a highly literate Bostonian on the adventure of a lifetime. The Amethyst sailed from Boston in September 1806 to Gough Island in the Antarctic, where a few men were dispatched to seal hunt as the ship continued around the horn to the Pacific Ocean. Coolidge was left in charge of a sealing party in the Cerros Islands off the coast of Spanish-controlled California while the ship returned to Gough. Almost a year later, the Amethyst finally retrieved Coolidge and his crew from the barren Cerros Islands, where they not only had to catch and skin seals but had to sustain themselves on whatever they could find. After more sealing off California, the Amethyst sailed next to the Hawaiian Islands and then on to China to trade the accumulated skins. The ship then sailed to the Palau Islands, where the crew obtained a cargo of sea cucumbers, a delicacy in China. The crew returned to China to sell this cargo and the ship itself, and then Coolidge and the others embarked for home on other vessels. With a keen eye, sharp wit, and a literary style reminiscent of Herman Melville, Coolidge ably chronicles all aspects of his odyssey in the diary published here for the first time. Coolidge's well-annotated historical account is supplemented by eighteen illustrations, Felt's brief survey of the 'Old China trade' enterprise, and his account of Coolidge's life following the voyage. Collectively these elements paint a vivid portrait of an adventurous era on the high seas and of a young man eager to find his way in the world.

Captain James Carlin is a biography of a shadowy nineteenth-century British Confederate, James Carlin (1833–1921), who was among the most successful captains running the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War. Written by his descendent Colin Carlin, Captain James Carlin ventures behind the scenes of this perilous trade that transported vital supplies to the Confederate forces.An Englishman trained in the British merchant marine, Carlin was recruited into the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey Department in 1856, spending four years charting the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. Married and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, he resigned from the survey in 1860 to resume his maritime career. His blockade-running started with early runs into Charleston under sail. These came to a lively conclusion under gunfire off the Stono River mouth. More blockade-running followed until his capture on the SS Memphis. Documents in London reveal the politics of securing Carlin’s release from Fort Lafayette.On his return to Charleston, General P. G. T. Beauregard gave him command of the spar torpedo launch Torch for an attack on the USS New Ironsides. After more successful trips though the blockade, he was appointed superintending captain of the South Carolina Importing and Exporting Company and moved to Scotland to commission six new steam runners.After the war Carlin returned to the southern states to secure his assets before embarking on a gun-running expedition to the northern coast of Cuba for the Cuban Liberation Junta fighting to free the island from Spanish control and plantation slavery.In researching his forebear, the author gathered a wealth of private and public records from England, Scotland, Ireland, Greenland, the Bahamas, and the United States. The use of fresh sources from British Foreign Office and U.S. Prize Court documents and surviving business papers make this volume distinctive.