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This article aims to clarify the origins of the animosity that developed between Admiral Sir William Parker (1742–1802), one of the Royal Navy's senior commanders at the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, and Admiral Sir John Jervis, who became Earl St Vincent following the victory. It traces the deterioration of their relationship, which culminated in Parker's recall from his final post in Halifax, where he was serving as commander in chief of the North Atlantic Station, a few months after St Vincent was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1801. On his return to England, Parker requested a court martial to clear his name and was acquitted of any wrongdoing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant record of Captain James Cook's third Pacific voyage (1776–80) provides multiple detailed accounts, affording the opportunity to compare how the voyage's officers portrayed themselves and each other. Using logs and journals written during the voyage, this article focuses on two incidents in which first Cook and then his 3rd Lieutenant John Williamson use violence against Pacific islanders. Analysing the various accounts reveals the officers' collectively held ideals about how and under what circumstances violence was to be used, as well as how they responded when the ideal was violated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Army is regularly ranked as the best training provider in the UK, with the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force also in the top ten. The Military train a lot of people, from the most basic infantry training to advanced skills and leadership courses. At the pinnacle of this is the Defence Academy, which provides world-class professional defence and security education for UK military, civil service and the defence industry and for allies and partners from across the world. This article is based on the Prince Philip Lecture 2024 delivered by Major General Rowell at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies at its Whitehall, London, headquarters on 10 July 2024. An abridged version of the first part of this paper appeared in Education Journal No. 568, 17 July 2024. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The naval town of Portsmouth bore a large portion of the brunt of the casualties lost at the Battle of Jutland (1916). The article will explore the precedent of naval philanthropy in Portsmouth and its historical links with naval disasters affecting the town which will lead to an analysis of how the town viewed their civic duty and mobilised local support for war widows immediately after the Battle of Jutland. It will then turn to assess the role of the local War Pensions Statutory Committee and its intersections with charitable organisations such as the Royal Patriotic Fund and Lady Beatty's Jutland Fund. The analysis will lastly explore some of the stories of the nearly 100-strong Jutland war widows who worked in Portsmouth Royal Dockyard during the war. It will highlight the agency of civic leaders in determining aspects of World War One relief and how war widows were able to navigate and survive their personal tragedies in a naval town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In shallow water off the coast of West Sussex in England lies the wreck of a French built, English warship, lost in 1706. The remains represent a hybrid of French construction and armament with English organisation and adaption. This paper brings the site's investigations up to date, discussing new records relating to the structure and internal layout of the main site, as well as the discovery of several new areas, rich in guns and other artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a century and a half, apprenticeship was of fundamental importance to the recruitment and training of British seafarers. From the introduction of compulsory apprenticeship in 1703, through the removal of compulsion in 1850 and up to the outbreak of the First World War, tens of thousands of boys and young men served apprenticeships on British ships, making up a substantial proportion of the maritime labour force. Apprenticeship in the merchant shipping industry has received little attention and the whole question of maritime training remains under-researched. This article opens by revisiting the debates of the 1840s over the Navigation Laws and argues that shipowners' attitudes to apprenticeship were ambivalent. It provides a survey of the decline and evolution of apprenticeship in the six decades following the repeal of the Navigation Laws, highlighting the unevenness of its decline and the existence of countervailing factors in some sectors. Finally, it examines the widespread concerns over the quality and skill of British seafarers and the impact of apprenticeship on recruitment to the Royal Navy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model-making has been part of the history of the world as a scaled-down, and often simplified, version of an object. This form of representation has had different functions including validation, creative solution, communication and decoration among others. Models depicting ships are known at an early date from ancient Egypt, although some of those boats had funerary ritual symbolism. More than four millennia later the ship models of the eighteenth century were conceived at a time when naval power was reaching a new chapter offered by technological advancements. Such items, made for shipyards and wealthy patrons, showed details that otherwise would have been missed from the plans and became a physical record of the constructive accomplishment. When other data such as plans are missing, the details from these models are vital to determine the otherwise obscure provenance in the same way as details associated with written or pictorial accounts. The purpose of this paper is to determine the origin of the model SLR0436 stored at the National Maritime Museum's model collection at its Chatham site. The features of the model will be discussed as well as the merits of the different hypotheses, including the historical context. Finally, it proposes that the most credible provenance, given the evidence, is the Vittorio, a ship built in Deptford in 1716 for the Savoyard navy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex systems are difficult to manage, operate and maintain. This is why we see teams of highly specialised engineers in industries such as aerospace, nuclear and subsurface. Condition based monitoring is also employed to maximise the efficiency of extensive maintenance programmes instead of using periodic maintenance. A level of automation is often required in such complex engineering platforms in order to effectively and safely manage them. Advances in Artificial Intelligence related technologies have offered greater levels of automation but this potentially pivots the weight of decision making away from the operator to the machine. Implementing AI or complex algorithms into a platform can mean that the Operators' control over the system is diminished or removed altogether. For example, in the Boeing 737 Air Max Disaster, AI had been added to a platform and removed the operators' control of the system. This meant that the operator could not then move outside the extremely reserved, algorithm defined, "envelope" of operation. This paper analyses the challenges of AI driven condition based monitoring where there is a potential to see similar consequences to those seen in control engineering. As the future of society becomes more about algorithm driven technology, it is prudent to ask, not only whether we should implement AI into complex systems, but how this can be achieved ethically and safely in order to reduce risk to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We research how deep learning convolutional neural networks can be used to automatically classify the unique data set of black-and-white naval ships images from the Wright and Logan photographic collection held by the National Museum of the Royal Navy. We contrast various types of deep learning methods: pretrained models such as ConvNeXt, ResNet and EfficientNet, and ConvMixer. We also thoroughly investigate the impact of data preprocessing and externally obtained images on model performance. Finally, we research how the models estimated can be made transparent using visually appealing interpretability techniques such as Grad-CAM. We find that ConvNeXt has the best performance for our data set achieving an accuracy of 79.62% for 0-notch classification and an impressive 94.86% for 1-notch classification. The results indicate the importance of appropriate image preprocessing. Image segmentation combined with soft augmentation significantly contributes to model performance. We consider this research to be original in several aspects. Notably, it distinguishes itself through the uniqueness of the acquired dataset. Additionally, its distinctiveness extends to the analytical modeling pipeline, which encompasses a comprehensive range of modeling steps, including data preprocessing (incorporating external data, image segmentation, and image augmentation) and the use of deep learning techniques such as ConvNeXt, ResNet, EfficientNet, and ConvMixer. Furthermore, the research employs explanatory tools like Grad-CAM to enhance model interpretability and usability. We believe the proposed methodology offers lots of potential for documenting historic image collections.

The royal ship Vanguard, the first of many English warships to bear that name, served three sovereigns between its construction in 1586 and scrapping in 1630. This article examines Vanguard's readiness, equipment, manning and deployment over 44 years, from the Armada battle of 1588 to the Cadiz campaign of 1596, from the 1620–1 expedition against the pirates of Algiers to the controversial French loan in 1625, and through phases of rest, refit and deterioration. Peacetime service saw Vanguard patrolling the Channel, hunting pirates and ferrying dignitaries as a much-used tool in England's defence and diplomacy. Serving Elizabeth I, Vanguard's talented captains included Sir William Wynter, Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir John Wingfield. Their Stuart successors included Sir William Monson, Sir Richard Hawkins and John Pennington. Administrative and financial records also identify some of the officers and ship's company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relatively unexplored relationship between Royal Navy flag and commissioned officers and shore-based secular and civic voluntary societies in the early Victorian period using the case study of the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners' Royal Benevolent Society. Portrayed in the literature as heroes and objectivized symbols of the glory of nation, naval officers instead had agency of their own. They were active facilitators, employing personal experience, naval culture and patronage networks to drive forward philanthropic initiatives for the society. They were crucial to the society's success, moving it forward to incorporation by an act of parliament in 1850, and to national and imperial expansion. It suggests that naval associative voluntary service needs to be considered more fully not only in naval history, but also within broader historical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the actions of foreign navies and enemy privateers in the Caribbean have occupied the minds of maritime scholars, the role of the Royal Navy as an instrument of counterinsurgency to be used in suppressing self-liberation struggles by the enslaved has received much less attention. Yet, across the Caribbean, the Royal Navy was instrumental in securing victory for the colonial elite. In addressing this lacuna, this article revisits Fédon's rebellion in Grenada and the Second Carib War in St Vincent in 1795–1796, and the Jamaican Rebellion in 1831–1832, to suggest the extent of naval activity in confronting internal threats, and how responses to revolts illuminate the complex relationship between the navy and enslavement. In adopting its counterinsurgency role, after 1815 the navy found itself in the seemingly paradoxical situation of protecting enslavement and suppressing the slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The islands of the West Indies are often considered the most dangerous places for eighteenth century British sailors. Contemporary sources maintain that the level of sickness and mortality in the West Indies crippled the Royal Navy's fleet to such an extent as to render it extremely ineffective during the American Revolutionary War. There can be no doubt that disease, accidents and naval action had an effect on the Royal Navy in the West Indies; however the true extent of the impairment has been grossly exaggerated. This paper seeks to examine the precise effects of disease and mortality on British sailors stationed in the West Indies during the American War of Independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of French Journal of British Studies / Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique is the property of Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes en Civilisation Britannique and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)