Naval History Trivia
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40 free Naval History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Naval history is where geography, engineering and nerve collide: an oared fleet wins an empire in a narrow strait, a single biplane torpedo decides the fate of a 50,000-ton battleship, and an admiral is executed on his own deck to keep the rest of them keen. It is also a history of words, because half the idioms in everyday English came ashore from sailing ships. These 40 questions run from the ancient Mediterranean and the great oared battles of the sixteenth century, through the Armada and the age of sail, to ironclads, dreadnoughts, carriers and the first warship ever sunk by a missile. Along the way they cover the ranks, ship types, traditions and slang of the world's navies, with every answer backed by a one-line explanation that adds something the textbooks skip. Built for pub quizzers, history readers and anyone who has ever wondered why a ship's toilet is called the heads.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which admiral was shot by firing squad on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch in 1757 for failing to relieve Minorca?
John Byng
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'.
Q 02At which 1801 battle is Nelson said to have put a telescope to his blind eye and ignored the signal to withdraw?
Copenhagen
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.
Q 03Which country's first aircraft carrier began as an unfinished Soviet hull, bought from Ukraine supposedly to become a floating casino?
China
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.
Q 04Which Russian battleship's crew mutinied in 1905 after sailors refused to eat rotten meat?
Potemkin
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.
Q 05Cast adrift after the 1789 Bounty mutiny, William Bligh sailed an open boat more than 3,500 miles to which island?
Timor
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.
Q 06During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy avoided the word 'blockade', an act of war, in favour of which term?
Quarantine
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.
Q 07The navy slang 'scuttlebutt', now meaning gossip, originally referred to what on a sailing ship?
A drinking-water cask
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.
Q 08The rank 'admiral' reached English through French and Medieval Latin, but ultimately comes from which language?
Arabic
Arabic amir, 'commander', is the root; the stray 'd' crept in later, probably through confusion with the Latin admirari, 'to admire'.
Q 09The warship type 'destroyer' was conceived in the late 19th century to defend battle fleets against which small craft?
Torpedo boats
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.
Q 10Naval toilets are called 'the heads' because on sailing ships the crew's toilet area was placed where?
At the bow
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.
Q 11A speed of one knot, once measured with a knotted log line and a sand-glass, equals one of which unit per hour?
Nautical mile
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.
Q 12Which Athenian had the 483 BC Laurion silver strike spent on warships instead of handed out to citizens?
Themistocles
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.
Q 13Which ancient Greek warship, the type that fought at Salamis, was driven by about 170 oarsmen pulling one oar each?
Trireme
Q 21Driven into the North Sea in 1588, the Spanish Armada sailed home around Scotland and down the coast of which island?
Ireland
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.
Q 22Which Swedish-born engineer designed USS Monitor, the Union ironclad built in about 100 days?
John Ericsson
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.
Q 23The 1898 explosion of which US battleship in Havana harbour helped push America into war with Spain?
USS Maine
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.
Q 14What did the Romans call the spiked boarding bridge, named after a bird, that beat Carthage at Mylae in 260 BC?
Corvus
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.
Q 15Which Ming dynasty admiral led seven treasure-fleet voyages between 1405 and 1433 that reached East Africa?
Zheng He
Zheng He's first fleet in 1405 carried almost 28,000 men, nearly a century before Columbus crossed the Atlantic with three ships.
Q 16Lepanto in 1571 was the last major Western battle fought almost entirely between which kind of warship?
Rowing galleys
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.
Q 17Which future novelist, serving aboard the Marquesa, lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto in 1571?
Miguel de Cervantes
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.
Q 18Which former corsair, as Ottoman admiral, crushed Andrea Doria's Holy League fleet at Preveza in 1538?
Hayreddin Barbarossa
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.
Q 19Which Korean admiral led just 13 ships to victory over at least 133 Japanese vessels at Myeongnyang in 1597?
Yi Sun-sin
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.
Q 20Which sea captain served as second in command to Lord Howard of Effingham against the Spanish Armada in 1588?
Francis Drake
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.
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.
Q 24Commodore Matthew Perry's 'black ships' arrived in 1853 to force which closed country to open its ports?
Japan
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.
Q 25Tōgō's fleet at Tsushima in 1905 performed which manoeuvre, bringing all broadsides to bear on the Russian column?
Crossing the T
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.
Q 26HMS Dreadnought of 1906, which made every earlier battleship obsolete, was the first capital ship driven by what?
Steam turbines
Steam turbines gave Dreadnought an unprecedented 21 knots, and her name became the label for the whole generation of battleships built to match her.
Q 27Who remarked 'there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today' as battlecruisers blew up at Jutland?
David Beatty
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.
Q 28The German raider Emden, terror of the Indian Ocean in 1914, was wrecked by HMAS Sydney off which coral atolls?
Cocos Islands
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.
Q 29Bold geometric 'dazzle' paint on First World War ships was meant not to hide them but to do what?
Confuse range and heading estimates
'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.
Q 30The 1931 Invergordon Mutiny, sparked by naval pay cuts, caused a run on the pound that forced the UK off what?
The gold standard
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.