Maritime History

June 8, 1708 the count of Casa Alegre knew a squadron of English warships was lurking in the area, but he thought he could avoid it. As captain of the Spanish galleon San José, he was charged with leading the Tierra Firma fleet from the Caribbean back to Spain, 17 ships in all, loaded with several years’ worth of treasure from the New World, enough perhaps to turn the tide of war in Europe. Casa Alegre had no doubt the English would be after the precious cargo. If he could reach the harbor of Cartagena de Indias, on the coast of what is now Colombia, the fleet would be safe. Then they appeared on the horizon to the north. Four English sails. To give the fleet’s merchant ships a chance to reach the harbor, Casa Alegre had no choice but to turn and fight. He hoisted the red battle flag up the mainmast and sailed toward the enemy, accompanied by two armed galleons. As in a bar brawl, the two most fearsome combatants sought each other out. At sunset, the 70-gun HMS Expedition, helmed by Commodore Charles Wager, took on the 62-gun San José. For more than an hour, they traded broadsides, sailing past each other while firing their cannons at close range, pulverizing wood and bone. Read the complete article in Vanity Fair. Also, refer to this article in Wikipedia.

May 2, 1670 – King Charles II of England grants a permanent charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company, made up of the group of French explorers who opened the lucrative North American fur trade to London merchants. The charter conferred on them not only a trading monopoly but also effective control over the vast region surrounding North America’s Hudson Bay. Although contested by other English traders and the French in the region, the Hudson’s Bay Company was highly successful in exploiting what would become eastern Canada. During the 18th century, the company gained an advantage over the French in the area but was also strongly criticized in Britain for its repeated failures to find a northwest passage out of Hudson Bay. Read the complete story on History.com.

On May 17, 1970, Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II, a papyrus sailing craft modeled after ancient Egyptian sailing vessels. Heyerdahl was attempting to prove his theory that Mediterranean civilizations sailed to America in ancient times and exchanged cultures with the people of Central and South America. The Ra II crossed the 4,000 miles of ocean to Barbados in 57 days. Read the complete article on History.com.

Referred to as the “singeing of the beard” of King Philip II of Spain. In 1585 the tension between the England and Spain erupted into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. Philip II ordered the arming of a great military fleet, which was to become known as the Invincible Armada, and it was hastily assembled in the Spanish port of Cádiz and in the Portuguese port of Lisbon with the objective of invading England. Queen Elizabeth gave the English privateer, Sir Francis Drake, an outstanding leader of previous naval expeditions, the command of a fleet whose mission was to inspect the Spanish military preparations, intercept their supplies, attack the fleet and if possible the Spanish ports. Read the complete article on Wikipedia. Read this article in Weapons and Warfare that includes useful maps and images.

On January 18, 1778, the English explorer Captain James Cook becomes the first European to travel to the Hawaiian Islands when he sails past the island of Oahu. Two days later, he landed at Waimea on the island of Kauai and named the island group the Sandwich Islands, in honor of John Montague, who was the earl of Sandwich and one his patrons. In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was commissioned a lieutenant in command of the H.M.S. Endeavor and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti to chart the course of the planet Venus. In 1771, he returned to England, having explored the coast of New Zealand and Australia and circumnavigated the globe. Beginning in 1772, he commanded a major mission to the South Pacific and during the next three years explored the Antarctic region, charted the New Hebrides, and discovered New Caledonia. In 1776, he sailed from England again as commander of the H.M.S. Resolution and Discovery and in 1778 made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. Read the complete article on History.com.

On October 15, 1863, the H.L. Hunley, the world’s first successful combat submarine, sinks during a test run, killing its inventor and seven crew members. Horace Lawson Hunley developed the 40-foot submarine from a cylinder boiler. It was operated by a crew of eight—one person steered while the other seven turned a crank that drove the ship’s propeller. The Hunley could dive, but it required calm seas for safe operations. It was tested successfully in Alabama’s Mobile Bay in the summer of 1863, and Confederate commander General Pierre G.T. Beauregard recognized that the vessel might be useful to ram Union ships and break the blockade of Charleston Harbor. The Hunley was placed on a railcar and shipped to South Carolina. Read the complete article on History.com. 1863 was in the later period when the work songs of sailors were flourishing, variously called chanties in America or shanties in England.

On this day (23 Nov) in 1912, the schooner ROUSE SIMMONS, better known as the Christmas Tree Ship, foundered in Lake Michigan near Two Rivers, Wisconsin. There were no survivors. The ROUSE SIMMONS was a 3-masted schooner built in 1868 by Allen, McClelland & Company of Milwaukee. She was 124 feet long with a 27.5-foot beam, and named after a well-known Kenosha merchant. She spent much of her career on Lake Michigan hauling lumber for Charles Hackley of Muskegon, Michigan. Read the complete article in the State of Michigan publication MLive.com.

In an incident that some regard as the first naval engagement of the American Revolution, colonists board the Gaspee, a British vessel that ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island, and set it aflame. The Gaspee was pursuing the Hanna, an American smuggling ship, when it ran aground off Namquit Point in Providence’s Narragansett Bay on June 9. That evening, John Brown, an American merchant angered by high British taxes on his goods, rowed out to the Gaspee with a number of other colonists and seized control of the ship. After leading away its crew, the Americans set the Gaspee afire. Read the complete article at History.com. Also, refer to this Wikipedia article.

On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I of England grants a formal charter to the London merchants trading to the East Indies, hoping to break the Dutch monopoly of the spice trade in what is now Indonesia. In the first few decades of its existence, the East India Company made far less progress in the East Indies than it did in India itself, where it acquired unequaled trade privileges from India’s Mogul emperors. By the 1630s, the company abandoned its East Indies operations almost entirely to concentrate on its lucrative trade of Indian textiles and Chinese tea. In the early 18th century, the company increasingly became an agent of British imperialism as it intervened more and more in Indian and Chinese political affairs. The company had its own military, which defeated the rival French East India Company in 1752 and the Dutch in 1759. Read the complete article on History.com.

Spanish explorer Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who had commanded the Nina during Christopher Columbus’ first expedition to the New World, reaches the northeastern coast of Brazil during a voyage under his command. Pinzon’s journey produced the first recorded account of a European explorer sighting the Brazilian coast; though whether or not Brazil was previously known to Portuguese navigators is still in dispute. Pinzon subsequently sailed down the Brazilian coast to the equator, where he briefly explored the mouth of the Amazon River. In the same year, Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal, arguing that the territory fell into the Portuguese sphere of exploration as defined by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. However, little was done to support the claim until the 1530s, when the first permanent European settlements in Brazil were established at Sao Vicente in Sao Paulo by Portuguese colonists. Read the complete article on History.com.

Born today, April 3, 1693, John Harrison, the cantankerous Yorkshireman who would go on to invent the naval chronometer and solve the mystery of calculating longitude at sea. Read the complete story on Atlas Obscura.

The British naturalist Charles Darwin returns to Falmouth, England, aboard the HMS Beagle, ending a five-year surveying expedition of the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Visiting such diverse places as Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, and geology of many lands. This information proved invaluable in the development of his theory of evolution, first put forth in his groundbreaking scientific work of 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species. His Origin of Species, the first significant work on the theory of evolution, was greeted with great interest in the scientific world but was attacked by religious leaders for its contradiction of the biblical account of creation. Read a complete article on National Geographic’s website: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/hms-beagle-darwins-trip-around-world

Royal George sank on 29 August 1782 whilst anchored at Spithead off Portsmouth. The ship was intentionally rolled so maintenance could be performed on the hull, but the roll became unstable and out of control; the ship took on water and sank. More than 800 lives were lost, making it one of the most deadly maritime disasters in British territorial waters. Several attempts were made to raise the vessel, both for salvage and because she was a major hazard to navigation in the Solent. In 1782, Charles Spalding recovered fifteen 12-pounder guns using a diving bell of his own design. From 1834 to 1836, Charles and John Deane recovered more guns using a diving helmet they had invented. In 1839 Charles Pasley of the Royal Engineers commenced operations to break up the wreck using barrels of gunpowder. Pasley’s team recovered more guns and other items between 1839 and 1842. In 1840, they destroyed the remaining structure of the wreck in an explosion which shattered windows several miles away in Portsmouth and Gosport. Read the complete article on Wikipedia.com.

The loss of the side-wheel steamship Lady Elgin was one of Lake Michigan’s most tragic maritime disasters. On September 8, 1860, the ship, returning to Milwaukee from Chicago, sank following a collision nine miles off Winnetka, Illinois. Read the complete article on the Wisconsin Historical Society website.

The day after the Senate followed the House of Representatives in voting to declare war against Great Britain, President James Madison signs the declaration into law—and the War of 1812 begins. The American war declaration, opposed by a sizable minority in Congress, had been called in response to the British economic blockade of France, the induction of American seaman into the British Royal Navy against their will, and the British support of hostile Indian tribes along the Great Lakes frontier. A faction of Congress known as the “War Hawks” had been advocating war with Britain for several years and had not hidden their hopes that a U.S. invasion of Canada might result in significant territorial land gains for the United States. Read the complete article on History.com.

The Erie Canal opens, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River. Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, the driving force behind the project, led the opening ceremonies and rode the canal boat Seneca Chief from Buffalo to New York City. Work began on the waterway in August 1823. Teams of oxen plowed the ground, but for the most part the work was done by Irish diggers who had to rely on primitive tools. They were paid $10 a month, and barrels of whisky were placed along the canal route as encouragement. West of Troy, 83 canal locks were built to accommodate the 500-foot rise in elevation. After more than two years of digging, the 425-mile Erie Canal was opened on October 26, 1825, by Governor Clinton. The effect of the canal was immediate and dramatic. Settlers poured into western New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Goods were transported at one-tenth the previous fee in less than half the time. Barges of farm produce and raw materials traveled east, as manufactured goods and supplies flowed west. In nine years, tolls had paid back the cost of construction. Later enlarged and deepened, the canal survived competition from the railroads in the latter part of the 19th century. Today, the Erie Canal is used mostly by pleasure boaters, but it is still capable of accommodating heavy barges. Read the entire article on History.com.

Because it lacked sufficient funds to build a strong navy, the Continental Congress gives privateers permission to attack any and all British ships on April 3, 1776. In a bill signed by John Hancock, its president, and dated April 3, 1776, the Continental Congress issued “INSTRUCTIONS to the COMMANDERS of Private Ships or vessels of War, which shall have Commissions of Letters of Marque and Reprisal, authorizing them to make Captures of British Vessels and Cargoes.” Read the full story on History.com.

Henry Hudson Set Adrift by mutineers (June 22, 1611) After spending a winter trapped by ice in present-day Hudson Bay, the starving crew of the Discovery mutinies against its captain, English navigator Henry Hudson, and sets him, his teenage son, and seven supporters adrift in a small, open boat. Hudson and the eight others were never seen again. Link to full article on History.com

Vasa is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship sank after sailing roughly 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannon were salvaged in the 17th century, until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbor. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet (“The Vasa Shipyard”) until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961. Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognized symbol of the Swedish Empire. Link to full article on Wikipedia.