Customer Reviews

Send a Gunboat: The Victorian Navy and Supremacy at Sea, 1854-1904

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A wonderful book on the Victorian small ships. The book covers the whys and wherefores of the development of the gunboat from the middle of the 19th century until the type was phased out at the start of the dreadnought era. It is a well balanced account, containing a short history of the development, attributes, and failings of each class and a concise history of each boat. The book has a number of well reproduced photos and a few drawings, and a list of each boat in each class and the fate of each one. As an engineer and gear head, I only wish that there had been more drawings.

As someone researching my family tree I was looking for some detail regarding my Grandfathers service during the 2nd Anglo Boer War (1899-1902). As he served on a Gunboat i.e. not a sexy Battleship information was pretty sparse as to the history and duties of these tiny vessels.
This book covers not just the history of the vessels but the part they played in the creation of the Empire. The politics of the period is neatly woven into the story and an analysis of todays similar role played by much larger vessels provided some interesting matter. I would strongly recommend this work to anyone interested in the period, Royal Navy history and the growth of the British Empire.

The book is organized into two major sections. The first is a narrative history of the gunboats and gun vessels that served in Victorian times from their first use in the Crimean War up through their removal from the Navy by Jackie Fisher early in the twentieth century. The second major section is a catalog of the two types of vessels through their various classes. This updated edition of "Send a Gunboat" has some additional material, including a section on the restoration of HMS Gannet. Additionally there has been some re-organization, including moving the footnotes all to one section at the end of the narrative history. There are numerous photos, illustrations and maps. The book does have some drawbacks. Due to the breath of the period covered, all of the gunboat/gun vessel actions are not described in detail, and certainly a working knowledge of Victorian military and political history would be of benefit to the reader to help make appreciation of some of the activities more meaningful. Still, overall it's a well done effort with excellent production quality.

Send a Gunboat: The Victorian Navy and Supremacy At Sea, 1854-1904 by Antony Preston & John Major was published in 1967. The current book is the 2007 Revised Edition with the updates produced by the surviving author, John Major. The book covers the development of sea-going gunboats and the larger gunvessels in the Royal Navy during the Victorian age. During the Crimean War, the Royal Navy needed ships with smaller draughts to engage Russian shore fortifications in the Crimea and in the Balkans. So the gunboat was rapidly designed, built, and commissioned for that task.

After the Crimean War ended, the Royal Navy was forced to shrink, particially within its battlefleets but the gunboats evolved to take on the Royal Navy's emerging role as the world's superpower global naval police force. This role became know as gunboat diplomacy. While today, the term is viewed as a political policy to support imperialism, Preston & Major repeatedly stress that was not the case in Victorian England. Rather, gunboat diplomacy was the political policy to help support English shipping and trade and avoid establishing additional overseas colonies (which were viewed as drains on Victorian England's finances rather than resources to be exploited). So gunboats were used to eliminate piracy and rescue/protect Enghish traders from hostile situations. Since the slave trade involved collecting slaves from Africa and transporting them by sea to other locations, gunboat diplomacy also included English humanitarian efforts to eliminate the collection of humans, mostly African, as slaves or "indentured laborers" elsewhere. I mention indentured because the French collected Africans for use in Nossi-Be (off Madagascar's northwest coast), Reunion, and Mayotta (in the Comoro Islands). The French called this engage trading and claimed that the Africans had volunteered to work for five years in their Indian Ocean locations off Africa's east coast. The book has chapters on dealing with pirates and trade in China and Malyasia, opening trade to Japan, protecting the Suez Canal, and dealing with trade and unrest in Western and Eastern Africa. It was not until the 1880s that Victorian England join the European Scramble for Africa. Politically, it was primarily a counter to French, Portugese, German, and Italian colonial ambitions for Western and Eastern Africa which threatened English trade and the safety of English shipping through the Suez Canal that led to the establishment of English colonies in these areas.

One chapter covers American Crises that included American freebooters attempting to seize the island of Roatan from Honduras, a coup in Haiti, an armed rebellion of negro freemen in Jamaica, and the American Irish Fenian Brootherhood raids on Canada. American threats on Canada even resulted in the building of three armored super-gunboats, H.M.S. Viper, Vixen, and Waterwitch in 1864. Considering how close the US, Canada, and Great Britian are today, it is interesting to read about American threats on Canada. The Avalanche Press even has a game available called Great War at Sea: U.S. Plan Crimson (see [...]) based upon U.S. military plans of the 1920s for protecting the U.S. Great Lakes region from Canadian threats and to support the American invasion of Canada as a subplan for U.S. Plan Red, which considered dealing with a potential 1920s U.S.-British conflict.

My only regret about the book is that it mentions some of the Victorian paddle gunboats that the Royal Navy used to extend its reach up rivers but does not provide any details on their dimensions or armorment. I would have liked to have seen information and pictures on the H.M.S. Alecto used in Western Africa from 1883-1899 and the H.M.S. Mosquito and H.M.S. Herald that were built and used to patrol the Zambesi River in Eastern Africa during the 1890s.

The book provides details and specifications that cannot be found anywhere else. It is a great resource for researching Victorian era naval history.