40 Fun Facts About Naval History

Which admiral was shot by firing squad on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch in 1757 for failing to relieve Minorca?

John Byng's death moved Voltaire to write in Candide that in England it is good to kill an admiral from time to time 'to encourage the others'.

At which 1801 battle is Nelson said to have put a telescope to his blind eye and ignored the signal to withdraw?

Copenhagen: Nelson reportedly told his flag captain 'I have the right to be blind sometimes', fought on despite Hyde Parker's signal, and forced the Danes into an armistice.

Which country's first aircraft carrier began as an unfinished Soviet hull, bought from Ukraine supposedly to become a floating casino?

China's navy got the hull after a Macau firm bought it as a would-be floating hotel; the hulk then took several years to reach Dalian under tow, where it became the carrier Liaoning.

Which Russian battleship's crew mutinied in 1905 after sailors refused to eat rotten meat?

Potemkin's mutineers killed several officers and later gave the ship up in Constanța, Romania; Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film made the revolt famous.

Cast adrift after the 1789 Bounty mutiny, William Bligh sailed an open boat more than 3,500 miles to which island?

Timor had a Dutch settlement, Kupang, and after islanders killed one of his men on Tofua, Bligh steered straight for it rather than risk another landing.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy avoided the word 'blockade', an act of war, in favour of which term?

Quarantine set the cordon legally apart from a blockade, which presumes a state of war, and the softer word helped win the backing of the Organization of American States.

The navy slang 'scuttlebutt', now meaning gossip, originally referred to what on a sailing ship?

A drinking-water cask: the butt was 'scuttled' with a hole for drawing water, and sailors are said to have swapped rumours around it, like office workers at a water cooler.

The rank 'admiral' reached English through French and Medieval Latin, but ultimately comes from which language?

Arabic amir, 'commander', is the root; the stray 'd' crept in later, probably through confusion with the Latin admirari, 'to admire'.

The warship type 'destroyer' was conceived in the late 19th century to defend battle fleets against which small craft?

Torpedo boats were the threat, so navies built 'torpedo boat destroyers', a name shortened to plain 'destroyer' by nearly every navy by the First World War.

Naval toilets are called 'the heads' because on sailing ships the crew's toilet area was placed where?

At the bow, the head of the ship, the crew used holes in a plank over the water, while the captain had a private privy in the stern galleries.

A speed of one knot, once measured with a knotted log line and a sand-glass, equals one of which unit per hour?

Nautical mile per hour is exactly 1.852 km/h; the knots on the log line were spaced 47 feet 3 inches apart so that counting them against a 28-second glass gave the speed directly.

Which Athenian had the 483 BC Laurion silver strike spent on warships instead of handed out to citizens?

Themistocles' fleet won at Salamis three years later, after he reportedly sent Xerxes a false message that lured the Persian navy into the narrow straits.

Which ancient Greek warship, the type that fought at Salamis, was driven by about 170 oarsmen pulling one oar each?

Trireme means a ship with three banks of oars; light and fast, it fought by driving a bronze-clad ram into the hulls of enemy ships.

What did the Romans call the spiked boarding bridge, named after a bird, that beat Carthage at Mylae in 260 BC?

Corvus means 'crow' or 'raven'; the swivelling drawbridge let Roman legionaries storm enemy decks and turn sea fights into the infantry battles they were good at.

Which Ming dynasty admiral led seven treasure-fleet voyages between 1405 and 1433 that reached East Africa?

Zheng He's first fleet in 1405 carried almost 28,000 men, nearly a century before Columbus crossed the Atlantic with three ships.

Lepanto in 1571 was the last major Western battle fought almost entirely between which kind of warship?

Rowing galleys and the larger galleasses fought at Lepanto much as oared fleets had for two thousand years; within decades the sailing galleon displaced them and the Age of Sail began.

Which future novelist, serving aboard the Marquesa, lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto in 1571?

Miguel de Cervantes, sick with fever, refused to stay below and took three gunshot wounds, decades before writing Don Quixote; he looked back on the battle with pride all his life.

Which former corsair, as Ottoman admiral, crushed Andrea Doria's Holy League fleet at Preveza in 1538?

Hayreddin Barbarossa's victory made the Ottoman Empire the leading naval power in the Mediterranean for thirty years, until the defeat at Lepanto in 1571.

Which Korean admiral led just 13 ships to victory over at least 133 Japanese vessels at Myeongnyang in 1597?

Yi Sun-sin won every one of his 23 or more sea battles; when the king moved to disband the shattered navy before Myeongnyang, he replied that he still had twelve ships.

Which sea captain served as second in command to Lord Howard of Effingham against the Spanish Armada in 1588?

Francis Drake was only vice admiral: overall command lay with Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, whose fireships scattered the Armada from its anchorage off Calais.

Driven into the North Sea in 1588, the Spanish Armada sailed home around Scotland and down the coast of which island?

Ireland's west coast became a graveyard for the retreating Armada, as autumn gales drove ships that had survived the English guns onto its rocks.

Which Swedish-born engineer designed USS Monitor, the Union ironclad built in about 100 days?

John Ericsson's Monitor fought CSS Virginia to a draw at Hampton Roads in March 1862, the first duel between ironclads, which opened a new era in naval warfare.

The 1898 explosion of which US battleship in Havana harbour helped push America into war with Spain?

USS Maine's loss was blamed on a mine by a navy inquiry, yet the true cause remains a mystery, and 'Remember the Maine!' still became the war cry.

Commodore Matthew Perry's 'black ships' arrived in 1853 to force which closed country to open its ports?

Japan signed the Treaty of Kanagawa in March 1854, opening Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships; Perry's gifts included a working model locomotive and a telegraph.

Tōgō's fleet at Tsushima in 1905 performed which manoeuvre, bringing all broadsides to bear on the Russian column?

Crossing the T means passing across the head of the enemy column, so every gun bears while he can reply only with his forward guns; Tōgō's fleet all but wiped out the Russians.

HMS Dreadnought of 1906, which made every earlier battleship obsolete, was the first capital ship driven by what?

Steam turbines gave Dreadnought an unprecedented 21 knots, and her name became the label for the whole generation of battleships built to match her.

Who remarked 'there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today' as battlecruisers blew up at Jutland?

David Beatty said it to his flag captain Chatfield after two of his ships exploded within half an hour; he later succeeded Jellicoe in command of the Grand Fleet and took the German surrender in 1918.

The German raider Emden, terror of the Indian Ocean in 1914, was wrecked by HMAS Sydney off which coral atolls?

The Cocos Islands radio station got off a distress call before Emden's landing party could silence it, and Sydney left a nearby troop convoy to pound the raider until she ran aground.

Bold geometric 'dazzle' paint on First World War ships was meant not to hide them but to do what?

'Confuse range and heading estimates' sums up marine artist Norman Wilkinson's aim: a submarine misjudging a ship's course would take up a poor firing position.

The 1931 Invergordon Mutiny, sparked by naval pay cuts, caused a run on the pound that forced the UK off what?

The gold standard was abandoned on 21 September 1931, days after about 1,000 sailors of the Atlantic Fleet refused duty; a shaken Admiralty renamed it the Home Fleet the next year.

Operation Pedestal in August 1942 fought the tanker Ohio and a battered convoy through to relieve which besieged island?

Malta saw only five of the convoy's fourteen merchant ships arrive, the crippled Ohio towed in lashed between two destroyers, and still calls it the Santa Marija Convoy.

The angled flight deck, steam catapult and mirror landing aid that made jet carriers practical were all invented by which country's navy?

Britain's Royal Navy devised all three to cope with heavier, faster jets; the angled deck lets a pilot who misses the arrestor wires power away and try again.

The Israeli destroyer Eilat, sunk off Port Said in October 1967, was the first warship ever destroyed by what?

Ship-launched missiles, Soviet-made Styx fired from small Egyptian Komar boats, sank Eilat, and the shock made navies around the world take the small missile boat seriously.

USS Phoenix survived Pearl Harbor unharmed in 1941, only to be sunk in 1982 as which Argentine warship?

General Belgrano was torpedoed by the submarine HMS Conqueror in the Falklands War, and afterwards Argentina's surface fleet returned to port and stayed there.

A sailor initiated by 'King Neptune' on passing the equator is afterwards called what?

Shellback is the title a sailor earns at the equator, while novices are 'slimy pollywogs'; Franklin D. Roosevelt went through the initiation aboard USS Indianapolis in 1936.

The Royal Navy's old Saturday toast, 'Our wives and sweethearts', traditionally drew which reply?

May they never meet was the joke reply; in 2013 the Royal Navy replaced the Saturday toast with 'Our families', since women had by then served at sea for over two decades.

The 74-gun ship, classed by the Royal Navy as a third rate, was first developed in the 1740s by which country?

France built the first 74s; the British were so impressed by captured ones, such as Invincible in 1747, that they copied the design for their own fleet.

The 1827 Battle of Navarino, the last major battle fought entirely under sail, helped win which nation's independence?

Greece's allies, the British, French and Russian fleets, destroyed an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet in Navarino Bay, mostly at anchor, and within three years those powers recognised Greece as independent.

Interned after the Armistice, Germany's High Seas Fleet scuttled itself in June 1919 at which Scottish anchorage?

Scapa Flow's guard ships beached a few, but 52 of the 74 interned vessels went down on Admiral Ludwig von Reuter's order, a week before the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

Which Pacific commander was one of only four US Navy officers ever promoted to five-star Fleet Admiral?

Chester Nimitz got his fifth star in December 1944 with Leahy and King, and Halsey followed a year later; Raymond Spruance, a hero of Midway, lost out to Halsey for the last place.