Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by the English kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years War against the Kingdom of France; the modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century. From the middle decades of the 17th century, through the 18th century, the Royal Navy vied with the Dutch Navy and with the French Navy for maritime supremacy. From the mid 18th century, it was the world's most powerful navy until surpassed by the United States Navy during the Second World War; the Royal Navy played a key part in establishing the British Empire as the unmatched world power during the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries. Due to this historical prominence, it is common among non-Britons, to refer to it as "the Royal Navy" without qualification. Following World War I, the Royal Navy was reduced in size, although at the onset of World War II it was still the world's largest.
By the end of the war, the United States Navy had emerged as the world's largest. During the Cold War, the Royal Navy transformed into a anti-submarine force, hunting for Soviet submarines and active in the GIUK gap. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its focus has returned to expeditionary operations around the world and remains one of the world's foremost blue-water navies. However, 21st century reductions in naval spending have led to a personnel shortage and a reduction in the number of warships; the Royal Navy maintains a fleet of technologically sophisticated ships and submarines including two aircraft carriers, two amphibious transport docks, four ballistic missile submarines, six nuclear fleet submarines, six guided missile destroyers, 13 frigates, 13 mine-countermeasure vessels and 22 patrol vessels. As of November 2018, there are 74 commissioned ships in the Royal Navy, plus 12 ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary; the RFA replenishes Royal Navy warships at sea, augments the Royal Navy's amphibious warfare capabilities through its three Bay-class landing ship vessels.
It works as a force multiplier for the Royal Navy doing patrols that frigates used to do. The total displacement of the Royal Navy is 408,750 tonnes; the Royal Navy is part of Her Majesty's Naval Service, which includes the Royal Marines. The professional head of the Naval Service is the First Sea Lord, an admiral and member of the Defence Council of the United Kingdom; the Defence Council delegates management of the Naval Service to the Admiralty Board, chaired by the Secretary of State for Defence. The Royal Navy operates three bases in the United Kingdom; as the seaborne branch of HM Armed Forces, the RN has various roles. As it stands today, the RN has stated its 6 major roles as detailed below in umbrella terms. Preventing Conflict – On a global and regional level Providing Security At Sea – To ensure the stability of international trade at sea International Partnerships – To help cement the relationship with the United Kingdom's allies Maintaining a Readiness To Fight – To protect the United Kingdom's interests across the globe Protecting the Economy – To safe guard vital trade routes to guarantee the United Kingdom's and its allies' economic prosperity at sea Providing Humanitarian Aid – To deliver a fast and effective response to global catastrophes The strength of the fleet of the Kingdom of England was an important element in the kingdom's power in the 10th century.
At one point Aethelred II had an large fleet built by a national levy of one ship for every 310 hides of land, but it is uncertain whether this was a standard or exceptional model for raising fleets. During the period of Danish rule in the 11th century, the authorities maintained a standing fleet by taxation, this continued for a time under the restored English regime of Edward the Confessor, who commanded fleets in person. English naval power declined as a result of the Norman conquest. Following the Battle of Hastings, the Norman navy that brought over William the Conqueror disappeared from records due to William receiving all of those ships from feudal obligations or because of some sort of leasing agreement which lasted only for the duration of the enterprise. More troubling, is the fact that there is no evidence that William adopted or kept the Anglo-Saxon ship mustering system, known as the scipfryd. Hardly noted after 1066, it appears that the Normans let the scipfryd languish so that by 1086, when the Doomsday Book was completed, it had ceased to exist.
According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 1068, Harold Godwinson's sons Godwine and Edmund conducted a ‘raiding-ship army’ which came from Ireland, raiding across the region and to the townships of Bristol and Somerset. In the following year of 1069, they returned with a bigger fleet which they sailed up the River Taw before being beaten back by a local earl near Devon. However, this made explicitly clear that the newly conquered England under Norman rule, in effect, ceded the Irish Sea to the Irish, the Vikings of Dublin, other Norwegians. Besides ceding away the Irish Sea, the Normans ceded the North Sea, a major area where Nordic peoples traveled. In 1069, this lack of naval presence in the North Sea allowed for the invasion an
Piracy in the Caribbean
The era of piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1500s and phased out in the 1830s after the navies of the nations of Western Europe and North America with colonies in the Caribbean began combating pirates. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1660s to 1730s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of the existence of pirate seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica, Tortuga in Haiti, Nassau in the Bahamas. Piracy in the Caribbean was part of a larger historical phenomenon of piracy, as it existed close to major trade and exploration routes in nearly all the five oceans. Pirates were former sailors experienced in naval warfare. Beginning in the 16th century, pirate captains recruited seamen to loot European merchant ships the Spanish treasure fleets sailing from the Caribbean to Europe; the following quote by an 18th-century Welsh captain shows the motivations for piracy: In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, hard Labour. No, a merry Life and a short one shall be my Motto.
—Pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts Piracy was sometimes given legal status by the colonial powers France under King Francis I, in the hope of weakening Spain and Portugal's mare clausum trade monopolies in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This sanctioned piracy was known as privateering. From 1520 to 1560, French privateers were alone in their fight against the Crown of Spain and the vast commerce of the Spanish Empire in the New World, but were joined by the English and Dutch; the Caribbean had become a center of European trade and colonization after Columbus' discovery of the New World for Spain in 1492. In the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas the non-European world had been divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands; this gave Spain control of the Americas, a position the Spaniards reiterated with an unenforceable papal bull. On the Spanish Main, the key early settlements were Cartagena in present-day Colombia, Porto Bello and Panama City on the Isthmus of Panama, Santiago on the southeastern coast of Cuba, Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola.
In the 16th century, the Spanish were mining large quantities of silver from the mines of Zacatecas in New Spain and Potosí in Bolivia. The huge Spanish silver shipments from the New World to the Old attracted pirates and French privateers like François Leclerc or Jean Fleury, both in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, all along the route from the Caribbean to Seville. To combat this constant danger, in the 1560s the Spanish adopted a convoy system. A treasure fleet or flota would sail annually from Seville in Spain, carrying passengers and European manufactured goods to the Spanish colonies of the New World; this cargo, though profitable, was just a form of ballast for the fleet as its true purpose was to transport the year's worth of silver to Europe. The first stage in the journey was the transport of all that silver from the mines in Bolivia and New Spain in a mule convoy called the Silver Train to a major Spanish port on the Isthmus of Panama or Veracruz in New Spain; the flota would meet up with the Silver Train, offload its cargo of manufactured goods to waiting colonial merchants and load its holds with the precious cargo of gold and silver, in bullion or coin form.
This made the returning Spanish treasure fleet a tempting target, although pirates were more to shadow the fleet to attack stragglers than to engage the well-armed main vessels. The classic route for the treasure fleet in the Caribbean was through the Lesser Antilles to the ports along the Spanish Main on the coast of Central America and New Spain northwards into the Yucatán Channel to catch the westerly winds back to Europe. By the 1560s, the Dutch United Provinces of the Netherlands and England, both Protestant states, were defiantly opposed to Catholic Spain, the greatest power of Christendom in the 16th century, it was the French who had established the first non-Spanish settlement in the Caribbean when they had founded Fort Caroline near what is now Jacksonville, Florida in 1564, although the settlement was soon wiped out by a Spanish attack from the larger colony of Saint Augustine. As the Treaty of Tordesillas had proven unenforceable, a new concept of "lines of amity", with the northern bound being the Tropic of Cancer and the eastern bound the Prime Meridian passing through the Canary Islands, is said to have been verbally agreed upon by French and Spanish negotiators of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis.
South and west of these lines no protection could be offered to non-Spanish ships, "no peace beyond the line." English and French pirates and settlers moved into this region in times of nominal peace with the Spanish. The Spanish, despite being the most powerful state in Christendom at the time, could not afford a sufficient military presence to control such a vast area of ocean or enforce their exclusionary, mercantilist trading laws; these laws allowed only Spanish merchants to trade with the colonists of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. This arrangement provoked constant smuggling against the Spanish trading laws and new attempts at Caribbean colonization in peacetime by England and the Netherlands. Whenever a war was declared in Europe between the Great Powers the result
Richard Bourke
General Sir Richard Bourke, KCB, was an Irish-born British Army officer who served as Governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837. As a lifelong Whig, he encouraged the emancipation of convicts and helped bring forward the ending of penal transportation to Australia. In this, he faced strong opposition from its press, he approved a new settlement on the Yarra River, named it Melbourne, in honour of the incumbent British prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Born in Dublin, Bourke was educated at Westminster and read law at Christ Church, Oxford, he was a cousin of Edmund Burke and spent school and university holidays at Burke's home, thus acquired some influential friends. He joined the British Army as an ensign in the Grenadier Guards on 22 November 1798, serving in the Netherlands with the Duke of York before a posting in South America in 1807, where he participated in the siege and storming of Montevideo, he was promoted to major general in 1821. He retired from the army after the Peninsular War to live on his Irish estate, but sought government office to increase his income.
He was appointed to the Cape Colony and was promoted to Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern District of the Cape of Good Hope, acting as governor for both the eastern and western districts. Under Bourke's governorship, much was done to reform the old mercantilist system of government inherited from the Dutch East India Company at the Cape. Bourke was an avowed Whig. In November 1830, the Whigs won government in a climate of reform. Major-General Bourke was appointed to succeed Sir Ralph Darling, Irish-born, as Governor of New South Wales in 1831. Bourke proved to be an able, if controversial, governor. In most of his efforts, he faced entrenched opposition from the local conservatives: the'exclusive' faction in the New South Wales Legislative Council, the Colonial Secretary Alexander Mcleay and the Colonial Treasurer Campbell Riddell; the newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald always opposed him. Bourke described himself as being "pretty much in the situation that Earl Grey would find himself in if all members of his Cabinet were Ultra Tories and he could neither turn them out nor leave them".
Bourke had authority from the Colonial Office to extend trial by jury and substitute civil for military juries in criminal cases. He managed this despite fierce opposition from the legislature, his 1833 bill for the extension of juries was only passed with his casting vote and with conservative amendments. Appalled by the excessive punishments doled out to convicts, Governor Bourke initiated the Magistrates Act, which simplified existing regulations and limited the sentence a magistrate could pass to 50 lashes; the bill was passed by the legislature because Bourke presented evidence that magistrates were exceeding their powers and passing illegal sentences, in part because regulations were complex and confusing. However, furious magistrates and employers petitioned the crown against this interference with their legal rights, fearing that a reduction in punishments would cease to provide enough deterrence to the convicts, this issue was exploited by his opponents. In 1835, Bourke issued a proclamation through the Colonial Office, implementing the doctrine of terra nullius by proclaiming that Indigenous Australians could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown.
Bourke continued to create controversy within the colony by combating the inhumane treatment handed out to convicts, including limiting the number of convicts each employer was allowed to 70, as well as granting rights to emancipists, such as allowing the acquisition of property and service on juries. It has been argued that the abolition of convict transportation to New South Wales in 1840 can be attributable to the actions of Bourke. Bourke abolished the status of the Anglican Church as the state church of New South Wales, declaring each religious denomination on equal footing before the law, he increased spending on education and attempted to set up a system of public nondenominational schools. He was credited as the first governor to publish satisfactory accounts of public receipts and expenditures. In 1837, the year of his promotion to lieutenant-general, he was made colonel for life of the 64th Regiment of Foot; the same year, he named the town of Melbourne after The 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the British Prime Minister.
Bourke Street in Melbourne's central business district and the town of Bourke were named after him. The County of Bourke, which includes Melbourne, Bourke County, New South Wales, were named after him. Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, is considered to be named in honour of his wife; the bronze statue of Bourke outside the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney was the first public statue erected in Australia. It was dedicated on 11 April 1842, it records his accomplishments as governor in florid detail. It was made by Edward Hodges Baily in London. Bourke was promoted to general in 1851, he died at his residence, Thornfield House, Ahane, in County Limerick, Ireland, on Sunday 12 August 1855 and is buried in Stradbally Cemetery in Castleconnell. Bourke is a supporting character in the 1937 novel Under its adaptations, he was portrayed by Peter Collingwood. Historical Records of Australia Images and transcript of Sir Richard Bourke's journal at the State Library of Victoria. Hazel King,'Bourke, Sir Ric
Captain (Royal Navy)
Please see Captain for other versions of this naval rank. Captain is a senior officer rank of the Royal Navy, it ranks above commander and below commodore and has a NATO ranking code of OF-5. The rank is equivalent to a colonel in the British Army and Royal Marines, to a group captain in the Royal Air Force. There are named equivalent ranks in the navies of many other countries. In the Royal Navy, the officer in command of any warship of the rank of commander and below is informally referred to as "the captain" on board though holding a junior rank, but formally is titled "the commanding officer". In former times Royal Navy officers who were captains by rank and in command of a naval vessel were referred to as post-captains. Ashore, the rank of captain is verbally described as "captain RN" to distinguish it from the more junior Army and Royal Marines rank, in naval contexts, as a "four-ring captain" to avoid confusion with the title of a seagoing commanding officer. In the Ministry of Defence, in joint service establishments, a captain may be referred to as a "DACOS" or an "AH", from the usual job title of OF5-ranked individuals who work with civil servants.
The rank insignia features four rings of gold braid with a loop in the upper ring. When in mess dress or mess undress, officers of the rank of captain and above wear gold-laced trousers, may wear the undress tailcoat. Captain
HMS Rattlesnake (1822)
HMS Rattlesnake was an Atholl-class 28-gun sixth-rate corvette of the Royal Navy launched in 1822. She made a historic voyage of discovery to the Cape York and Torres Strait areas of northern Australia. Launched at Chatham Dockyard on 26 March 1822, Rattlesnake was 32 feet abeam, she carried six 18-pounder carronades and two 9-pounder long guns. For most of the years 1827 to 1829 Rattlesnake was cruising off the coasts of Greece, under the command of Captain the Hon. Charles Orlando Bridgeman. During that period her log was kept by Midshipman Talavera Vernon Anson and survives in a collection at the New York Public Library. Both men went on to become admirals. William Hobson was appointed captain in December 1834. Rattlesnake served in the Far East squadron, commanded by Admiral Sir Thomas Bladen Capel. In 1836, the Rattlesnake was ordered to Australia, arriving at Hobart on 5 August 1836 and at Sydney 18 days later. On 26 May 1837, the Rattlesnake sailed to the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, in response to a request for help from James Busby, the British Resident, who felt threatened by fighting between Māori tribes.
In 1838 the Rattlesnake returned to England. During the period 1841–42 she was involved in actions off Canton in the fleet commanded by Sir William Parker in the First Anglo-Chinese War, known popularly as the First Opium War, she was converted to a survey ship in 1845. The captain on the voyage to northern Australia and New Guinea from 1846-1850 was Owen Stanley. Aboard were John Thomson as Surgeon, Thomas Henry Huxley as Assistant Surgeon, John MacGillivray as botanist and Oswald Walters Brierly as artist. T. H. Huxley established his scientific reputation by the papers he wrote on this voyage, leading to his election as fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. Rattlesnake was the ship that rescued Barbara Crawford Thompson, shipwrecked on Prince of Wales Island, North Queensland, aged 13 in November 1844 and spent the next five years living with the local Kaurareg people, despite their reputation for being cannibals, she was broken up at Chatham in January 1860. European and American voyages of scientific exploration Winfield, R..
The Sail and Steam Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy 1815–1889. London: Chatham Publishing. ISBN 978-1-86176-032-6. MacGillivray, Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, London: BooneHuxley, T. H. Huxley, Julian, ed. Diary of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, London: Chatto and WindusGoodman, The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea, London: Faber & Faber, ISBN 978-0-571-21078-7Goodman, Jordan, "Losing it in New Guinea: the voyage of HMS Rattlesnake", Elsevier, 29, pp. 60–65, doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2005.04.005, PMID 15935857 Narrative of the Voyage of H. M. S. Rattlesnake, Volume 1 at Project Gutenberg Narrative of the Voyage of H. M. S. Rattlesnake, Volume 2 at Project Gutenberg Images from the voyage of the Rattlesnake at the State Library of New South Wales
Treaty of Waitangi
The Treaty of Waitangi is a treaty first signed on 6 February 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and Māori chiefs from the North Island of New Zealand. It is a document of central importance to the history and political constitution of the state of New Zealand, has been significant in framing the political relations between New Zealand's government and the Māori population; the Treaty was written at a time when British colonists were pressuring the Crown to establish a colony in New Zealand, when some Māori leaders had petitioned the British for protection against French forces. It was drafted with the intention of establishing a British Governor of New Zealand, recognising Māori ownership of their lands and other possessions, giving Māori the rights of British subjects, it was intended to ensure that when the declaration of British sovereignty over New Zealand was made by Lieutenant Governor William Hobson in May 1840, the Māori people would not feel that their rights had been ignored.
Once it had been written and translated, it was first signed by Northern Māori leaders at Waitangi, subsequently copies of the Treaty were taken around New Zealand and over the following months many other chiefs signed. Around 530 to 540 Māori, at least 13 of them women, signed the Treaty of Waitangi, despite some Māori leaders cautioning against it. An immediate result of the Treaty was that Queen Victoria's government gained the sole right to purchase land. In total there are nine signed copies of the Treaty of Waitangi including the sheet signed on 6 February 1840 at Waitangi; the text of the Treaty includes three articles. It is bilingual, with the Māori text translated from the English. Article one of the English text cedes "all powers of sovereignty" to the Crown. Article two establishes the continued ownership of the Māori over their lands, establishes the exclusive right of pre-emption of the Crown. Article three gives Māori people full protections as British subjects. However, the English text and the Māori text differ in meaning particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty.
These discrepancies led to disagreements in the decades following the signing culminating in the New Zealand Wars. During the second half of the 19th century, Māori lost control of the land they had owned, some through legitimate sale, but due to unfair land deals or outright seizure in the aftermath of the New Zealand War. In the period following the New Zealand Wars, the New Zealand government ignored the Treaty and a court case judgement in 1877 declared it to be "a simple nullity". Beginning in the 1950s, Māori sought to use the Treaty as a platform for claiming additional rights to sovereignty and to reclaim lost land, governments in the 1960s and 1970s were responsive to these arguments, giving the Treaty an central role in the interpretation of land rights and relations between Māori people and the state. In 1975, the Treaty of Waitangi Act was passed establishing the Waitangi Tribunal as a permanent commission of inquiry tasked with interpreting the Treaty, researching breaches of the Treaty by the British Crown or its agents, to suggest means of redress.
In most cases, recommendations of the Tribunal are not binding on the Crown, but settlements totalling $1 billion have been awarded to various Māori groups. Various legislation passed in the part of the 20th century has made reference to the Treaty, but the Treaty has never been made part of New Zealand municipal law. Nonetheless, the Treaty is regarded as the founding document of New Zealand. Waitangi Day was established as a national holiday in 1974 and commemorates the date of the signing of the Treaty; the first contact between the Māori and Europeans was in 1642, when Dutch explorer Abel Tasman arrived and was fought off, again in 1769 when the English navigator Captain James Cook claimed New Zealand for Britain at the Mercury Islands. The British government showed little interest in following up this claim for over half a century; the first mention of New Zealand in British statutes is in the Murders Abroad Act of 1817, which clarified that New Zealand was not a British colony and "not within His Majesty's dominions".
Between 1795 and 1830 a steady flow of sealing and whaling ships visited New Zealand stopping at the Bay of Islands for food supplies and recreation. Many of the ships came from Sydney. Trade between Sydney and New Zealand increased as traders sought kauri timber and flax and missionaries purchased large areas of land in the Bay of Islands; this trade was seen as mutually advantageous, Māori tribes competed for access to the services of Europeans that had chosen to live on the islands because they brought goods and knowledge that were essential to the local iwi. At the same time, Europeans living in New Zealand needed the protection that Māori chiefs could provide; as a result of trade, Māori society changed drastically up to the 1840s. They changed their society from one of subsistence farming and gathering to cultivating useful trade crops; the Māori respected the British due to encouragement from missionaries and due to British status as a major maritime power, made apparent to Māori travelling outside New Zealand.
The other major powers in the area around the 1830s included American whalers, whom the Māori accepted as cousins of the British, French Catholics who came for trade and as missionaries. The Māori were still distrustful of the French, due to a massacre of 250 people that had occurred in 1772
The Crown
The Crown is the state in all its aspects within the jurisprudence of the Commonwealth realms and their sub-divisions. Ill-defined, the term has different meanings depending on context, it is used to designate the monarch in either a personal capacity, as Head of the Commonwealth, or as the king or queen of his or her realms. It can refer to the rule of law. A corporation sole, the Crown is the legal embodiment of executive and judicial governance in the monarchy of each country; these monarchies are united by the personal union of their monarch. The concept of the Crown developed first in England as a separation of the literal crown and property of the kingdom from the person and personal property of the monarch, it spread through English and British colonisation and is now rooted in the legal lexicon of the United Kingdom, its Crown dependencies, the other 15 independent realms. It is not to be confused with any physical crown, such as those of the British regalia; the term is found in various expressions such as "Crown land", which some countries refer to as "public land" or "state land".
The concept of the Crown took form under the feudal system. Though not used this way in all countries that had this system, in England, all rights and privileges were bestowed by the ruler. Land, for instance, was granted by the Crown to lords in exchange for feudal services and they, in turn, granted the land to lesser lords. One exception to this was common socage—owners of land held as socage held it subject only to the Crown; when such lands become owner-less they are said to escheat. Bona vacantia is the royal prerogative; the monarch is the living embodiment of the Crown and, as such, is regarded as the personification of the state. The body of the reigning sovereign thus holds two distinct personas in constant coexistence: that of a natural-born human being and that of the state as accorded to him or her through law; the terms the state, the Crown, the Crown in Right of, Her Majesty the Queen in Right of, similar are all synonymous and the monarch's legal personality is sometimes referred to as the relevant jurisdiction's name.
As such, the king or queen is the employer of all government officials and staff, the guardian of foster children, as well as the owner of all state lands and equipment, state owned companies, the copyright for government publications. This is all in his or her position as sovereign, not as an individual; the Crown represents the legal embodiment of executive and judicial governance. While the Crown's legal personality is regarded as a corporation sole, it can, at least for some purposes, be described as a corporation aggregate headed by the monarch. Whilst the Crown refers to the monarch, this reference is made in re the monarch this reference is to the monarch in their capacity as monarch, does not refer to that individual in their totality of ownership interests and actions; the monarch can act in a private capacity. This duality of characterisation can be illustrated in several ways. In property ownership for example, although both are royal residences, Buckingham Palace is the property of the Crown via the Crown Estate whilst Balmoral Castle is the property of Elizabeth II and not of the Crown.
The latter property can be alienated by the Queen, whereas any disposition of the former property would need to be done via instrument of government as an act of state. The Queen's bank accounts at Coutts contain components of her private wealth only, whilst the resources of the monarch acting as the Crown are dispensed from HM Treasury and the Crown Estate to the Royal Household. A third example is in employment relationships; however those who assist as employees of the monarch as the Crown do so on employment from the Royal Household, the official department charged with supporting the monarch. Those who a
United Kingdom
Royal Navy
