Things could have been very different: in the summer of 1588 Elizabeth and the people of England faced an overwhelming threat. The country was on the verge of invasion. Dan Snow, Armada: 12 Days to Save England, BBC 2015
Drake was England’s most brazen pirate. ibid.
Summer 1588: England was under attack from the most powerful naval force on Earth. Dan Snow, Armada: 12 Days to Save England II
125 ships carrying 23,000 men. More than just an invasion this was a religious crusade sent to crush a heretic nation. ibid.
Summer 1588: Philip II, Catholic King of Spain, was on the verge of shaping Europe. The most powerful naval force on Earth, the mighty Spanish Armada, had sailed through the Channel. Its aim to crush heretic England and take the crown off Queen Elizabeth. Dan Snow, Armada: 12 Days to Save England III
Philip assumed his army and his Armada could simply send notes to one another saying when and where they should meet. ibid.
Monday 8th August 1588 has gone down as the down of one of the greatest naval battles in history ... It was a bloodbath. ibid.
9th August: The wind direction suddenly changed. ibid.
On a blustery November day four centuries ago the English were preparing themselves for one of the greatest national celebrations ever seen. Beneath the dome of St Paul’s they gathered to celebrate their tiny nation’s victory over the world’s greatest super-power: Spain. Dan Snow, Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World I, BBC 2014
The new world of the Americas offered wealth beyond imagining. ibid.
Hawkins and Drake ... they were slave traders. ibid.
[John] Hawkins produced the fastest ships of their kind anywhere in the world. The first was built in 1570 at the Queen’s dockyard in Deptford. ibid.
The King’s [Charles I] failure to run a modern efficient navy sparked a constitutional crisis. ibid.
The Laws of War offered a blueprint for structure and discipline at sea, they would later be applied through all areas of government. ibid.
[Samuel] Pepys ... He was determined to professionalise every aspect of the Navy’s operations. ibid.
In 1665 came the inevitable clash with the Dutch. ibid.
A vast efficient Navy. This was England’s Heart of Oak. A Navy that now lay at the centre of the national project and its future. ibid.
English warships fleeing pell-mell across the horizon ... The French were coming. Dan Snow, Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World II: The Golden Ocean
Church bells rang out in panic. ibid.
On board was a year’s worth of trade ... The convoy was such a vital national interests that it was given an escort of 102 warships. ibid.
They found 93 French warships waiting for them. ibid.
English dockyards built over a hundred and fifty naval new ships. ibid.
Five tons of iron nails. ibid.
The navy was the single largest consumer of produce in the country. ibid.
It even captured Gibraltar and Minorca, two important bases in the Mediterranean. The English Navy was now a global weapon. ibid.
The slave trade was a lucrative sideline. ibid.
And then there were the pirates. ibid.
Voltaire saw instantly that commerce and naval power were linked. ibid.
Britannia really did rule the waves. ibid.
The most epic naval battle in British history – Trafalgar. The boy’s name was Horatio Nelson. Dan Snow, Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World III: High Tide
The Navy was a national enterprise. ibid.
20th April 1770 – the ship was called The Endeavour; the commander was James Cook. ibid.
Cook was going to claim undiscovered lands for the British. ibid.
By 1771 goods from her colonies were pouring into Britain. ibid.
Recruits as young as ten were sent to sea for months at a time. ibid.
Britain was naming and mapping the world. ibid.
Marine art had never been so popular. ibid.
Britain was now at war with her own subjects ... a transatlantic war. ibid.
Sheathing just one ship could require fifteen tons of copper. ibid.
The lucrative sugar trade powered the British economy. ibid.
Britain gave up her thirteen colonies in North America but retained key possessions all across the globe including her vital Caribbean colonies. ibid.
Across the channel in France the reign of terror was in full swing. ibid.
At the height of the war almost 40% of crews were pressed into service. ibid.
Nelson was front page news. ibid.
From 1799 every British subject earning more than £60 a year was charged income tax at a rate of 10%. ibid.
The Battle of Trafalgar has seared itself into the national psyche. ibid.
The Royal Navy was here to open up China for business. Dan Snow, Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World IV: Sea Change
Gunboat diplomacy – British interests secured down the barrel of a gun. ibid.
Europe was in the grip of Dreadnought-building fever. ibid.
There would be no more Jutlands. ibid.
On May 31st 1916 the British and German fleets clashed in what would be the biggest and bloodiest naval battle of the First World War, and in fact in the whole of navy history – the Battle of Jutland. This was the era of the Dreadnought … The was one battle that didn’t go to plan. Dan Snow, Battle of Jutland: The Navy’s Bloodiest Day, BBC 2016
Britain had lost more than 60,000 men. ibid.
The British had 151 ships; the Germans 99. And Britain expected an easy victory … The Royal Navy came off worse. ibid.
‘The greater number of injuries were caused by burns.’ ibid.
There were only 18 survivors of the Queen Mary. ibid.
This is absolutely no sort of a job for a girl. Carry on Admiral 1957 starring David Tomlinson & Peggy Cummins & Brian Reece & Eunice Gayson & A E Matthews & Joan Sims & Lionel Murton & Reginald Beckwith & Desmond Walter-Ellis & Ronald Shiner & Peter Coke et al, director, him to her fixing outboard motor and falling in water
Looks like we’ve got a bottle a day man. ibid. officer
And king Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom. I Kings 9:26
I can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: I served in the United States Navy. John F Kennedy
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the USS Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon