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 did Nelson put a telescope to his blind eye and ignore the signal to withdraw?

Copenhagen saw Nelson tell his flag captain 'I have the right to be blind sometimes' before ignoring Admiral Hyde Parker's signal and beating the Danish fleet.

China's first aircraft carrier began as an unfinished Soviet hull that a Macau company bought from Ukraine as what?

A floating casino was the declared purpose when the hull of Varyag sold at auction for $20 million in 1998 to a firm with no listed phone number; she was commissioned as Liaoning in 2012.

Which Russian battleship's crew mutinied in 1905 after refusing borscht made from maggot-infested meat?

Potemkin's revolt began at gunnery practice off the Ukrainian coast and was immortalised twenty years later in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film.

Cast adrift after the 1789 Bounty mutiny, William Bligh sailed an open boat 3,618 nautical miles to which island?

Timor held the nearest European outpost, the Dutch settlement of Kupang, and Bligh brought his loyalists there alive on the rations they had in the boat.

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

Quarantine let the United States stop Soviet ships without the formal implications of a state of war, and the naval cordon stayed in place until 20 November 1962.

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

A drinking-water cask, a butt 'scuttled' with a hole so water could be drawn, was where sailors gathered and traded rumours, much like today's office water cooler.

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

Arabic amīr al-, 'commander of the', gave the world its word for a fleet commander, and a later folk etymology tacked on the Greek word for the sea to make 'prince of the sea'.

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 vessel, the crew's toilet sat out over the water, and the name stuck to every toilet afloat.

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 200 warships instead of handed to citizens?

Themistocles' fleet won at Salamis three years later, after a message he sent to Xerxes helped lure the Persian navy into the narrow straits.

Which ancient Greek warship, the type that fought at Salamis, was driven by 170 oars arranged in three rows?

Trireme crews rowed mostly blind, since 108 of the 170 oarsmen could not see the water, so keeping stroke took great skill and practice.

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', and the drawbridge let legionaries turn sea fights into land battles; it is mentioned only at Mylae and Ecnomus before vanishing from the sources.

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

Zheng He's first fleet in 1405 numbered 317 ships and almost 28,000 men, sailing from Suzhou 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 was nicknamed 'El manco de Lepanto', the one-handed man of Lepanto, and Don John of Austria approved four separate pay rises for him.

Which former Barbary 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 is generally credited with at least 23 naval battles without a defeat, and none of the 13 ships at Myeongnyang were his famous armoured turtle ships.

Which Lord High Admiral held overall command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588?

Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, was chiefly credited with the victory that saved England from invasion, though popular memory hands the glory to Drake.

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

Ireland's Atlantic coast was the Armada's graveyard in a year of unusually strong North Atlantic storms; about a third of the fleet was sunk, captured, wrecked or scuttled.

Which Swedish-born engineer designed USS Monitor, the ironclad that went from plans to launch in about 100 days?

John Ericsson's Monitor, with a rotating turret housing a pair of large cannons, fought CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads on 9 March 1862 and foundered under tow off Cape Hatteras that December.

The 1898 explosion of which US battleship in Havana harbour, killing 268, helped push America into war with Spain?

USS Maine's loss was blamed on a mine by a navy board of inquiry, though the bituminous coal she burned was prone to spontaneous explosion; 'Remember the Maine!' became the war cry.

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

Japan signed the Convention of Kanagawa in March 1854, opening Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships after at least 27 earlier US vessels had been turned away.

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

Crossing the T was managed twice by Jellicoe at Jutland and last by Oldendorf at Surigao Strait in 1944, the final time a battle line ever did it.

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

Steam turbines made Dreadnought the fastest battleship afloat when completed, and Fisher had her built in about a year by stockpiling material before her keel was laid.

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 wireless station got out 'Unidentified ship off entrance' before the German landing party could silence it, summoning Sydney from a convoy 52 nautical miles away.

The bold geometric 'dazzle' paint schemes on First World War ships were designed 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, five days after around 1,000 sailors of the Atlantic Fleet refused orders at their Cromarty Firth anchorage.

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

Malta's air offensive against Axis shipping was revived by Ohio's aviation fuel, and the island still remembers the convoy as Il-Konvoj ta' Santa Marija, the Santa Maria Convoy.

Which country's navy invented the angled flight deck, first trialled at sea in 1952?

Britain's Dennis Cambell devised the angled deck, trialled on HMS Triumph in 1952, letting carriers launch and land aircraft at the same time instead of in turns.

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

Ship-launched missiles, three Soviet-made Styx hits from two small Egyptian Komar boats, made Eilat the first vessel sunk by a missile boat in wartime.

The cruiser General Belgrano, sunk by HMS Conqueror in 1982, had survived Pearl Harbor in 1941 under which US Navy name?

USS Phoenix came through the Pearl Harbor attack undamaged and earned nine battle stars before her October 1951 sale to Argentina; in 1982 she became the first ship sunk by a nuclear-powered submarine.

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

Shellback, or 'Son of Neptune', is the rank earned by enduring the initiation, while the uninitiated are 'slimy pollywogs'; the Royal Canadian Navy calls them tadpoles.

The Royal Navy's traditional Saturday toast, 'Our wives and sweethearts', was answered with which muttered retort?

May they never meet is the joke reply, and the Royal Navy has since replaced the Saturday toast with 'Our families' to reflect the women now serving at sea.

The 'third rate' that became the most popular size of large warship for 18th-century navies carried how many guns?

74-gun ships became so standard that fleets were simply counted in them, as in 'a squadron of three 74s', while first rates of 100 guns or more stayed rare flagships.

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 the Greek War of Independence ended two years later.

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, hours before the Treaty of Versailles was due to be signed.

How many US Navy officers have ever held the five-star rank of Fleet Admiral, all promoted in 1944–45?

Four men, Leahy, King, Nimitz and Halsey, hold the rank for life; Halsey was the last, promoted in December 1945.