The Peterhof Affair

                                              25 FEBRUARY 1863                                           THE PETERHOF AFFAIR The Union Navy’s blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War yielded quite a few captures.  In disposing of these ships and their cargoes, there emerged a controversy over what to do with the mail Read More

The First Battle of Quallah Battoo

                       5-7 FEBRUARY 1832                THE FIRST BATTLE OF QUALLAH BATTOO His trading mission scrubbed, Captain Charles Endicott refitted Friendship for sea and departed 4 March 1831 for Salem.  His landfall on 16 July was preceded several days by the arrival of another Read More

Friendship and the Sumatran Pirates

                      EARLY FEBRUARY 1831               FRIENDSHIP AND THE SUMATRAN PIRATES Salem, Massachusetts, was one of our busiest seaports in the early days of our young nation.  In fact, it was the major port through which the American spice trade was conducted.  About the Read More

Bulls Island Incident (cont.)

                       30-31 JANUARY 1863                   BULLS ISLAND INCIDENT (cont.) The morning of 31 January roused CAPT Charles T. Haskell’s Confederates from their rest at the Gibbes house and greeted the arrival of 50 Confederate reinforcements from Fort Moultrie.  Suspecting FLAMBEAU would send a Read More

Bulls Island Incident

                       30-31 JANUARY 1863                       BULLS ISLAND INCIDENT Bull Island is a low coastal island 10 miles north of Charleston Harbor separated from the mainland by the Intercoastal Waterway.  Today a national wildlife refuge, in antebellum times it was owned by a family Read More

Makassar Strait Action

                        24 JANUARY 1942                      MAKASSAR STRAIT ACTION With the wreckage of the American fleet awash in Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s western Pacific squadron, known then as the Asiatic Fleet, found itself isolated.  For the first four months of the war this fleet Read More

Early Naval Aviation

                        18 JANUARY 1911                       EARLY NAVAL AVIATION As early as 1898 such forward thinkers as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt urged that the “flying machines” then under development be investigated.  Indeed, in less than a decade civilian aircraft designers Glenn Read More