NAVY

NAVY. Up to the late fifteenth century, permanent navies with ships built only for warfare were unimportant in Europe. Wars at sea were fought with infantry weapons and they could be used on merchantmen temporarily armed for war. Maritime cities with many large cargo carriers could rapidly form powerful navies, and mercantile power was easily converted into sea power. The only specialized warships were the oared galleys, but they could be built quickly in large numbers when a war began. The sea power of a state became visible only during wars. One part of this system was retained in most early modern navies as, to a considerable extent, they were manned with seamen recruited from the mercantile marines. In peacetime, only a nucleus of seamen was employed by the navies. Permanency was created by warships, dockyards, and cadres of leaders, which gradually became corps of officers.

The introduction of heavy guns able to damage ships at a distance stimulated the development of specialized, heavily built, sailing warships that could carry such guns, use them efficiently in combat, resist gunfire, and stay at sea during long periods of time. Guns and specialized warships were expensive, and only states were able to make major naval investments. The size of the permanent navies became increasingly important for the control of the sea for offensive and defensive purposes and for diplomatic influence. Guns and warships also gave states a new role as the most efficient protectors of private shipping. The growth of the European navies reflected both the improved efficiency of a specialized technology and the increased centralization of resources to the states.

Galleys and sailing warships had different capabilities, and they were often regarded as parts of different organizations. Most Mediterranean galleys were of about the same size in all navies. There was a general rise in their size from the mid-sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century, but otherwise galley navies can be measured by number of galleys. In contrast, sailing warships were built in widely different sizes at the same time and size increased over time. The average size of European ships-ofthe-line grew from around 1,200 modern displacement tonnes in 1680 to 2,400 displacement tonnes in 1790. Consequently, the number of ships is of limited value in comparing the navies.

The displacement, that is, the weight of the ship including stores, began to be used to measure size in the eighteenth century. For earlier centuries, approximate displacements can be calculated from dimensions, contemporary tonnage calculations, or the size of crews. This makes it possible to compare different navies and measure fluctuations over time with one measurement that reflects fighting power and manpower requirements. Typically, galleys that relied on muscle power for their propulsion had about one man per tonne displacement. Sailing warships in the latter half of the seventeenth century had manning establishments that required around one man to three tonnes displacement while eighteenth century warships normally had around one man to four tonnes.

MEDITERRANEAN GALLEY NAVIES

The early permanent navies in the Mediterranean developed with the traditional galleys as the main component. Their rise was closely connected with the power struggles for control of the Greek archipelago and Italy and trade in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1450, only Venice had a major peacetime galley navy. Up to about 1500 the Ottoman and Venetian navies increased in size during the struggle for control of Greece. After that, the Italian Wars (1494–1559) stimulated the growth of the French and Spanish galley navies. The latter included the naval resources of Sicily and Naples. The Papal States, Tuscany, Genoa, and the Order of St. John on Malta developed minor galley navies. Finally, from the 1540s to the 1570s, the great contest between Spain and the Ottomans led to a dramatic increase in the galley navies. In terms of manpower (including chained oarsmen) and requirement of provisions, they were the largest concentrated military forces of the sixteenth century. Logistical problems often made them sluggish in operation.

The end of the imperial contests in the Mediterranean around 1580 was followed by a major reduction

of the galley navies, which continued during the seventeenth century. The limited utility of oared forces was revealed during two wars between Venice and the Ottomans (1644–1669 and 1684–1699), and both powers reduced the number of galleys. They were now primarily used for routine patrols and transfer of troops, and all major Mediterranean powers created sailing navies as their main force at sea during the seventeenth century. In the first half of the eighteenth centuries galleys were abolished or cut down to insignificant numbers, and by the end of the century they had disappeared in the Mediterranean.

EARLY SAILING NAVIES, 1500–1650

Sailing warships with guns began to be built by several states in the decades around 1500. They were few in number and major fleets were still formed by requisitioned or hired merchantmen. Merchantmen often protected themselves by sailing in convoys. Early sailing, gun-armed navies were developed primarily by states without strong mercantile marines: Portugal, France (Brittany), England, Denmark, and Sweden. They were closely related to royal ambitions to explore new technology in order to control coasts, territories, and trade routes, but a sailing navy was not regarded as necessary for great power status. The Habsburgs, who controlled Spain and the Netherlands with their large mercantile marines, for a long time did not develop naval power in the Atlantic, and for the French kings the sailing navy usually had a low priority. The Mediterranean powers preferred galleys, which at least up to the mid-sixteenth century proved viable as a weapons system in competition with sailing warships, which were still in their infancy.

The sailing navies grew during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century without entirely replacing temporarily armed merchantmen as an important instrument of warfare. Experience of war such as the Anglo-French contests up to 1559, wars in the Baltic in the 1530s and 1560s, and the Anglo-Spanish confrontation from 1585 to 1603 showed that specialized gun-armed warships had considerable advantages over traditional great cargo carriers provided with infantry and a few guns, which were gradually abolished as combatants. Merchantmen built to carry a substantial number of guns, and specialized for trade in contested waters such as the Mediterranean and the East and West Indies, became useful as temporary warships from the late sixteenth century up to the 1650s and 1660s. The English, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and Swedish navies were reinforced by considerable numbers of armed merchantmen during major wars, and Venice fought the war with the Ottomans from 1644 to 1669 with hired English and Dutch merchantmen. Armed merchantmen were used for the European penetration of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, and they remained the main European

force at sea in this area until the early nineteenth century.

It is not meaningful to look for a European balance of power at sea in this period, but powers who were antagonists, such as Denmark and Sweden in the Baltic and Spain and the Dutch in Western Europe, attempted to balance each other. The English and French navies were primarily maintained for control of the Channel, although the French civil wars rendered France almost powerless at sea from the 1560s to the 1620s. The absence of a French threat gave the English the opportunity to deploy the navy in the Atlantic during the war against Spain (1585–1603). The sixteenth-century Portuguese navy, of which too little is known to quantify its size, was primarily developed for control of the sea route to India. When Portugal was united with Spain in 1580, it formed the nucleus of a new Habsburg navy.

THE EUROPEAN BATTLE FLEETS, 1650–1790

The three Anglo-Dutch maritime wars from 1652 to 1674 and the rise of the new strong monarchy in France was the start for a major growth and transformation of the European fleets. Armed merchantmen were still chartered in large numbers during the first Anglo-Dutch Wars, but they proved deficient in combat with major warships. The English and the Dutch fought several intense battles for control of the Channel and the North Sea. It became obvious that fewer large ships with heavier guns had an advantage over more numerous smaller ships. This realization resulted in a long-term increase in the size of warships and made it uneconomical to use armed merchantmen in naval warfare. Tactics changed to make full use of large ships, which could continuously fire heavy broadsides and resist enemy gunfire. Growing corps of sea officers developed professionalism and a new doctrine that emphasized disciplined battle lines and well-drilled gun crews. Improved foundry technology made it possible to produce cheap iron guns that reduced the cost of permanent naval armament.

The naval conflicts between England and the Dutch were influenced by competition about trade and colonies. The French fleet expanded dramatically in the 1660s mainly as a result of increased royal power. It gave France naval supremacy over its traditional antagonist Spain as the Spanish navy declined

to a medium-sized force in the latter half of the seventeenth century. France could also challenge the two great maritime powers at sea in conflicts that predominantly were Continental. However, the combined Anglo-Dutch navies gained superiority at sea over France in the 1690s and could use their navies to support allies in the Mediterranean and for military actions on the Iberian peninsula in the early 1700s. French naval power collapsed in the 1710s and Great Britain emerged as the dominant sea power. Britain retained this position until the twentieth century, and other great powers were reduced to more or less successful challengers of British supremacy over the European and transoceanic sea-lanes.

The first of these challenges came from a new combination of naval powers, France and Spain, which began to act as allies in the eighteenth-century struggle over colonies and trade in America and Asia. The new Bourbon regime in Spain launched an ambitious Atlantic naval policy that made Spain into the third largest naval power in Europe for most of the century. During the war of 1739–1748, both Bourbon powers were defeated by Britain at sea. They started major programs of new construction, but the war of 1756–1763 resulted in a victory for Britain, partly because Spain joined the war after France already had suffered large losses at sea. During the 1760s and 1770s French and Spanish battle fleet strength outpaced the British by a wide margin, and during the War of American Independence the combined Bourbon navies were frequently able to place severe limits on British operational freedom on sea and on land. France and Spain continued with large shipbuilding programs in the 1780s, with the intention to renew the challenge against Britain in future contests in the Atlantic.

The other two Atlantic powers, Portugal and the Dutch Republic, preferred neutrality during most of the eighteenth century. Both were primarily interested in defense of their worldwide empires of trade and colonies, but not in expansion. Portugal had maintained a navy of around 20,000 to 25,000 tonnes after it regained independence in 1640, increasing it to 25,000 to 35,000 tonnes in the eighteenth century. The Dutch navy was kept steady at a level of 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes from the 1720s to about 1780. The failure of the Dutch policy of neutrality in the War of American Independence forced the Dutch to join the Atlantic naval race and increase the navy to around 120,000 tonnes during the 1780s.

In the Baltic, Denmark and Sweden remained the only major naval powers up to the early 1700s, when Russian conquests of Swedish-controlled territories made it possible for Russia to build a navy. Sweden and Denmark traditionally regarded it as important that the other power should not be able to control the Baltic Sea, and this shaped their naval policy. Russia under Peter I rapidly created a major navy and for most of the eighteenth century, the Danish, Swedish, and Russian navies were of the same magnitude. Denmark usually had the largest battle fleet, but the other two navies also maintained large oared flotillas of galleys, oared frigates, and, by the 1780s, gunboats. By 1790, the Swedish navy had to a considerable extent become an archipelago fleet. Oared vessels were intended for cooperation with the army along archipelagic coasts, not for the open sea. From around 1780, the Russian navy began to expand and created a new fleet in the Black Sea. This was a part of Catherine II's expansionist policy in the Balkans, and it was the beginning of a period when Russia was a major European power at

sea, replacing Spain in the nineteenth century as owner of the third largest battle fleet.

In the Levant, Venice and the Ottomans began to build sailing navies in the 1670s, although information about the latter navy is incomplete. Both navies had reached a size of around 40,000 tonnes by 1700. The Venetian navy did not expand further but the Ottoman navy grew to one of the largest in Europe, with a strength of around 60,000 tonnes in the 1720s. Both navies were gradually reduced as a result of the long period of peace in the eastern Mediterranean after 1718, and the Ottoman navy was unprepared for the new challenge from Russia in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea from 1768 on. The Turks responded with a new expansion from a low level to about 70,000 tonnes in 1790. Russia had by then a fleet of around 45,000 tonnes in theBlack Sea, while Venice since the mid-eighteenth century had maintained a navy of around 20,000 tonnes.

The total size of the European sailing navies was around 200,000 tonnes in 1650, around 750,000 tonnes in both 1700 and 1750, and almost 1.7 million tonnes in 1790. After that they declined markedly. Rising timber costs and reduced naval ambitions in several European states in the wake of a series of British naval victories during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars limited further growth.

See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars ; Armada, Spanish ; Galleys ; Italian Wars (1494–1559) ; Shipbuilding and Navigation ; Shipping .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acerra, Martine. Rochefort et la construction navale française, 1661–1815. 4 vols. Paris, 1993. Broad survey of French naval administration, shipbuilding and technology.

Bruijn, Jaap R. The Dutch Navy of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Columbia, S.C., 1993. A comprehensive synthesis of modern scholarship.

Dull, Jonathan R. The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787. Princeton, 1975. Emphasizes the importance of naval strength.

Glete, Jan. Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860. 2 vols. Stockholm, 1993. Navies and naval technology as parts of the state formation process. Displacement calculations in this article are from this book.

Guilmartin, John Francis, Jr. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century. London and New York, 1974. A reevaluation of galley warfare and the introduction of guns at sea in general.

Harding, Richard. Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650–1830. London, 1999. Broad survey of the role of the sailing battle fleets in history.

Lavery, Brian. The Ship of the Line : Vol. 1, The Development of the Battlefleet, 1650–1850; Vol. 2, Design, Construction and Fittings. London, 1983–1984. British battleship development in its technological, administrative and political framework with a list of British ships-ofthe-line.

Lyon, David. The Sailing Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy: Built, Purchased and Captured, 1688–1860. London, 1993. A detailed and intensively researched work of reference.

Modelski, George, and William R. Thompson. Seapower in Global Politics, 1494–1993. Seattle, 1988. A quantitative approach to long-term trends and fluctuations of political power.

Phillips, Carla Rahn. Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. Baltimore, 1986. Spanish warship technology and naval administration in the seventeenth century and its institutional framework.

Symcox, Geoffrey. The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697: From the Guerre d'Escadre to the Guerre de Course. The Hague, 1974. The critical phase in European naval history when France lost the initiative to the maritime powers.

Teitler, Gerke. The Genesis of the Modern Professional Officer Corps. Translated by Mrs. C. N. Ter Heide-Lopy. Beverly Hills, Calif., 1977. The development of sea officer corps in the largest navies.

Jan Glete

navy, from the Latin, naves, ships, in its original meaning the entire shipping of a nation, but now only that part which is armed to defend the nation to which it belongs, its shipping routes, and its merchant marine.

Navies have been described as instruments of national policy, and while this is an accurate enough definition from about the Middle Ages onwards, many of the world's earlier navies were no more than collections of vessels capable of warlike action and used for private gain in the raiding and harassing of weaker peoples. There were some, organized on a national basis, which were used to further national policies of conquest or defence, but it was more usual to find squadrons of national ships in the hands of leaders licensed to use them for piracy. Typical of these were the Danish and Viking longships which harried western Europe in the 8th–10th centuries.

It was not until the early years of exploration by sea, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, that national navies began to grow and to assume a shape and function akin to the navies of today. As the known world opened up the growing volume of lucrative trade, and the national competition which it invoked, called for navies to control and defend these routes and the trade monopolies claimed as a result of the prior right of discovery. This was the start of the national struggle for sea power on which so much of the wealth of the trading nations depended. From the start of the 15th century to the early years of the 19th century, Spain, Holland, France, and Britain were more or less permanently engaged in warfare at sea to win mastery of the oceans and control vital trade routes.

At the end of the 19th century three new navies, those of the USA, Japan, and Germany, emerged to challenge Britain's naval dominance, which had eventually triumphed at sea over all the other European powers. Following the Second World War (1939–45), the US Navy, though once challenged by the fleets of what was the Soviet Union, is now by far the largest in the world and is centred around its twelve Carrier Battle Groups, or Carrier Strike Groups as they are to be called. With the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of terrorism and rogue states, future US Navy strategy, known as ‘Sea Power 21’, provides the way forward for the next twenty years. The nuclear submarine fleet in particular is facing substantial changes.

Cuts in the Royal Navy surface fleet, announced in 2004, mean that for the first time since the 17th century it will be smaller than the French Navy, while the Russian government is making strenuous efforts to modernize and reorganize its sea forces. For a glimpse of how small surface warships may evolve, see illus. in corvette. See also surface effect ship; swath ship.

Royal Navy.

Two early English monarchs, Alfred and Canute, were both known for their abilities to conduct warfare at sea, but neither could be said to have founded the British Navy as none was permanently established until Tudor times. Before then ships and men were recruited as necessary, the Cinque Ports being one of the mainstays of this system. The office of the Lord High Admiral was established in 1391 but it was the Tudors, notably Henry VII (1457–1509) and his son Henry VIII (1491–1547), who laid the foundation for the modern navy, building such ships as the Henry Grâce à Dieu and the Mary Rose. During the latter's reign, in 1520, the beginnings of the Admiralty took shape and later the navy prospered under the able administration of Sir John Hawkins.

With the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the boldness of adventurers like Drake and Frobisher, the navy came of age under Elizabeth I. Neglect followed, but between 1642 and 1688, aided by that talented

Major Warships of Selected Navies Built, Building, and Planned, 2003.

United States Navy.

The newly independent United States of America had no navy after 1785, when the last of its Continental Navy's ships had been sold, although it then possessed the world's second largest merchant marine. Depredations on this by the Barbary pirates of North Africa led, in March 1794, to the construction of six frigates, the United States, Constellation, Constitution, President, Chesapeake, and Congress. By the time the first three became operational in 1798, the dispute had been settled, but a ‘quasi-war’ with France began. In May 1801 trouble broke out again in the Mediterranean when the Pasha of Tripoli declared war, but after Commodore Edward Preble (1761–1807) had blockaded and then bombarded the Pasha's home port a peace treaty was signed in 1805, along with renewed treaties of friendship with Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco.

The War of 1812–15 pitted seventeen ships against the Royal Navy's thousand or more. The best-remembered actions are the three consecutive American victories scored by two of these original 44-gun frigates, which led to their becoming the world standard in this type of warship for the remaining age of fighting sail. However, the most important victories strategically, securing a lasting peace with Britain, were those on Lakes Erie (1813) and Champlain (1814), and at New Orleans (1815). During the following decades squadrons were deployed worldwide to protect US interests, naval forces saw action during a war with Mexico (1846–8), and Commodore Perry opened Japan to American trade (1853).

In the American Civil War (1861–5) the US Navy, in its ultimately successful struggle with the Confederate States Navy, became larger than ever before. In 1862 it promoted its first admirals and introduced the monitor. It was also the first navy to lose a ship to a submarine, a weapon two Americans, David Bushnell and Robert Fulton, had earlier done so much to develop.

The post-war decline in naval strength was almost as rapid as its expansion, but fuelled by the writings of naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the navy began a resurgence in the early 1880s. War with Spain in 1898 left the USA with overseas possessions in the Caribbean and the western Pacific which, in turn, led to the construction of the Panama Canal. Involvement in the First World War (1914–18) came late and amounted to no more than convoy duties. Afterwards, the US Navy developed aircraft carriers and landing craft, and built battleships and cruisers to the maximum size allowed. Further expansion, aimed at creating a ‘two-ocean navy’ capable of fighting simultaneously in the Pacific and the Atlantic, began before the USA entered the Second World War (1939–45).

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the American carriers were at sea. Their survival allowed a tactical victory over the Japanese in the Coral Sea (May 1942) and then a pivotal one at Midway (June 1942). Later others (Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, Okinawa) virtually destroyed Japanese naval power, and led to the Japanese surrendering aboard the battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

It was a different war in the Atlantic, where the US Navy's first task was to overcome Hitler's U-boats. This took time as it required the construction of anti-submarine forces, and their training, but by mid-1943 the Atlantic was secured. This underpinned the second task, the seaborne invasions of Nazi-occupied Europe—Sicily (July 1943), mainland Italy (September 1943), Normandy (June 1944), and southern France (August 1944). In each instance, the US Navy transported, landed, and provided supporting gunfire and logistic support that culminated in Germany's surrender on 8 May 1945.

At war's end, the US Navy had approximately 5,000 warships, auxiliaries, and large landing craft, and more than 30,000 aircraft. It was the mightiest navy the world had ever seen, but these numbers shrank rapidly as pre-war ships were scrapped and many war-built ones placed in reserve. During the second half of the 20th century the US Navy's biggest commitments were supporting United Nations forces in the Korean War (1950–3), providing air support, coastal interdiction, and special forces operations in the Vietnam War (1965–75), and, of course, ensuring an adequate submarine and surface screen, both nuclear and conventional, against the Soviet bloc.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the US Navy was reduced to about 300 warships. However, individual units have, with the advent of long-range, extremely accurate missiles, extended range guns, and sophisticated detection and command and control systems, markedly increased their potency. On balance, it remains the most powerful navy in the world.

See also liberty ships; marines; us coast guard.

Bibliography

Miller, N. , The US Navy: A History (3rd edn. 1997).
Sweetman, J. , American Naval History (3rd edn. 2002).

Tyrone G. Martin

navy. ‘For the regulating and better government of H. M.'s, ships of war and forces by sea, wherein, under the good Providence of God, the wealth, safety, and strength of the Kingdom is so much concerned’ (Preamble to Naval Discipline Act, 1661); ‘Fishermen, yachtsmen … river boatmen … manned their craft with volunteer crews and rushed them to the assembly point, although they did not then know for what purpose they were required’ (Admiralty communiqué, The Times, 4 June 1940). Separated by three centuries, these records of mid-17th-cent. aspiration in the wake of Cromwellian successes against Dutch and Spaniards, and mid-20th-cent. summons of all seafarers from Sussex to East Anglia to rescue at Dunkirk the only army the nation possessed, proclaim the importance of naval power for an island. The first is a perception of state interest which dates back well beyond the Armada to the reign of Elizabeth I's grandfather Henry VII, and has never ceased to apply, while the second invokes the duty owed the realm by the subject best equipped to discharge it. That obligation can be traced back to Æthelred II's plight under Danish attacks at Sandwich in 1006, and probably to Alfred's native-found ships at Poole, again resisting the Danes, in 897. Yet few aspects of the crown's prerogative power were more strenuously questioned through the 17th, 18th, and 19th cents. than that to impress the subject for sea service. Not until 1853, when fixed terms of service in the navy and pension rights were made statutory, did age-old constraints cease to be obnoxious. There seems poetic justice that the first Victoria Cross was won by a non-commissioned seaman in the Crimean War.

Britain's place in the ‘Viking World’ was rendered most definitive through the person of Cnut (1016–35). King, or overlord, also in Denmark (1019) and Norway (1028), no English monarch had such distant dominions again until Charles II in the later 17th cent. Cnut's navy seems not to have been a personal apanage but an auxiliary, its periods of service specifically fixed by financial provision. In 1051 it was dispensed with by Edward the Confessor out of economy, though this Norman-raised king may also have intended to ease the succession to his crown of the rich and ecclesiastically regenerated Normandy. William I had continuous trans-channel ferry needs during his reign, after the first crucial shipment of an army to Pevensey in September 1066; and he, William II, and Henry I may have made some 40 Channel crossings in all. Portsmouth, a nascent naval base by the reign of John (1199–1216), or Southampton were their usual destinations. But did they pretend to naval power beyond such dictates, or occasionally commandeering the resources of English merchants trading with Scandinavian, Flemish, or, later, Gascon ports? By the end of the 12th cent. the Cinque Ports had long enjoyed privileges from the crown in return for an annual provision of ships and men. Through the 13th cent. these ports, joined by Winchelsea and Rye, provided the ‘drive’ for assembling royal fleets, though under Henry III (c.1255) they so resisted his weak authority that Henry had to look to the east coast shipbuilding ports. By this time the oared single sail ‘long ship’ or galley, still predominant in northern waters and the Mediterranean, was ceding place to wider-beamed and higher-sided vessels, furnished with fore and stern castles. These were more difficult to manœuvre, but they could carry bowmen and projectiles in their castles and were more suitable for boarding an enemy, even if oar-power remained the handiest means finally to position a warship. Edward III's victory over the French at Sluys in 1340 must have featured such ships; and before the 14th cent. was out there was vital sail evolution through the development of the three-masted ship. The age-old side rudder also gave place to the stern-post rudder aligned on the keel, facilitating steering a few points off the wind.

The evolution of the navy in the 15th cent. has to be seen in the context of an ever-increasing volume of trading voyages, to Iceland, the Baltic ports, to the Basque coast and Portugal, and then the Newfoundland Banks. The east coast coal trade needed many ships, and Hanseatic competition in the shipment of English cloth to the processors in the Low Countries had to be countered. More distant trades made big ships economic: in 1400–25, 68 per cent of crown-hired ships were of less than 100 tons burthen, but by 1451 that percentage had dropped to 52. The three great ships of Henry V were each over 550 tons; the Grace Dieu of 1420, whose timbers yet lie in the Hamble river, was of over 1,000, though she may never have put to sea. These ships were unique, and possibly uniquely unserviceable. Around 170 years later, when England faced the Armada in 1588, only 14 of the 177 private ships enlisted for service were over 200 tons, and only 5 of the 34 ‘Queen's Ships’ exceeded 500 tons. The late medieval small ship had a durable progeny in the navy of the Tudors, the dynasty which truly founded the navy with its yards at Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich, and which fostered native gun-founding. In 1546, Henry VIII's last year, the Navy Board was formed from the navy's principal officers: it was destined to serve as the executant of the fleet's construction, maintenance, and supply, the country's largest industrial undertaking until the 19th cent. The names of Hawkins, Pepys, and Barham are inseparable from its record, strained though the board's relations with the policy-making Board of Admiralty often were. The critical change in warship design came during the 40 years before 1588, the removal of the medieval ‘castles’ in favour of a lower superstructure, with ships' sides pierced for guns on wheeled carriages, which made for some ease of movement between decks and allowed for recoil. Through to the coming of the steam-powered ‘ironclad’ this was the basic character of the warship; the teamwork, ensuring high rates of fire, inculcated in motley crews described in the 18th cent. as of ‘naturally generous dispositions though turbulent, fearless, or, rather, thoughtless of consequences’, made a singular contribution to Britain's awesome repute at sea in the century of Vernon, Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson.

When in June 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Wellington) spoke in Parliament of the navy as ‘the characteristic and constitutional force of Britain’, he was expressing a national sense of obligation to a service which, resolutely administered by Middleton (Barham) since 1778, and liberally provided for by Pitt in the 1780s, had earlier withstood the unprecedented challenges of the American War and had next reaped the laurels of victory under exceptional commanders. In the years to come the navy played a crucial role in supporting Wellington in the Peninsula. Wellington's logistical back-up had been prefigured, however modestly, by the first wintering of a British fleet in the Mediterranean in 1694–5; but few developments in Britain's Atlantic economy were more spectacular than the doubling of her exports to the Caribbean after 1808, following the Anglo-Spanish entente. At long last, and following Trafalgar, the book was closed on one of the most abiding and distracting of Britain's strategic preoccupations: the security of the West Indies possessions had exercised the minds of all thinking naval officers, as well as commercial lobbies, since the age of William III. This concern lay close to the beginnings of Britain's commercial empire in the 16th and 17th cents.—the Levant Company 1592, the Virginia Adventurers 1609, the Royal Africa Company 1660, above all the East India Company 1600—all undertakings calling for ships which must dwarf the warships of Elizabeth I. Some traces of her fleet's tonnage possibly survived even in the great battle fleets sent out under Cromwell; but by the time of Pepys's ‘30 ship’ building programme of 1677, ‘your ships’ as he reminded Parliament, there may have been an average burthen tonnage of 1,200 for ships of over 70 guns as against 940 in 1660. The navy finally became ‘royal’ in name under Charles II, and it was of incalculable importance for its future self-identity that there was, deliberately, no discrimination against that religious dissent among seamen which had afforded the Cromwellian navy its special pugnacity.

The first steam-powered vessels in the navy were the paddle-driven frigates/sloops of the 1820s, but the navy's ships in the Crimean War did not look much different from those of 75 years before. Even Warrior, Britain's first screw-driven ironclad (1860), retained sail-power after modifications in 1887. Within the period 1867–90 there was a breath-taking acceleration in the power of warships, but seamen of all ranks lacked the training to exploit these advances. During the incipient naval race with Germany in the 1890s there emerged, in the fascinating and powerfully prophetic educator John Arbuthnot Fisher, the man who drove the navy into the 20th cent. What has to be understood about his 18,000-tons displacement Dreadnought, with her 21-knot speed (launched February 1906), is that such a ship was waiting to be built: turbine and not reciprocated engine driven, and with a provision of uniformly heavy guns ensuring straddling salvoes of the highest possible accuracy. Yet Dreadnought was rapidly overtaken by more powerful and faster sisters, and she herself played little part in the First World War. Though included in the 1922 scrapping programme, Dreadnought had served her turn through her very launching and her specifications became common currency across the world. But at the end of his life (1920) Fisher was convinced that air power was inseparable from sea power in any future conflict, and that the capital ship had had her day—a glimpse of what was to happen in the Second World War to the Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Hood. The mine, the torpedo, and the submarine had already set the pace of change; and at the Coronation Review of 1953 only one British battleship remained, the 42,000-ton Vanguard, which had never seen action. Accompanied though she was at Spithead by five major aircraft carriers, these great ships lay among myriad smaller vessels of a versatility of purpose which would have won the approbation of a Fisher—and a Nelson.

David Denis Aldridge

Bibliography

Grove, E. , Vanguard to Trident (1987);
Hattendorf, J. B., and Knight, J. B. (eds.), British Naval Documents 1204–1960 (Aldershot, 1993);
Lewis, M. , The Navy of Britain (1949).

navy Britain's place in the ‘Viking World’ was rendered most definitive through the person of Cnut (1016–35). King, or overlord, also in Denmark (1019) and Norway (1028), no English monarch had such distant dominions again until Charles II in the later 17th cent. Cnut's navy seems not to have been a personal apanage but an auxiliary. In 1051 it was dispensed with by Edward the Confessor out of economy. William I had continuous trans‐channel ferry needs during his reign, after the first crucial shipment of an army to Pevensey in September 1066; and he, William II, and Henry I may have made some 40 Channel crossings in all. Portsmouth, a nascent naval base by the reign of John (1199–1216), or Southampton were their usual destinations. By the end of the 12th cent. the Cinque Ports had long enjoyed privileges from the crown in return for an annual provision of ships and men. Through the 13th cent. these ports, joined by Winchelsea and Rye, provided the ‘drive’ for assembling royal fleets. By this time the oared single sail ‘long ship’ or galley was ceding place to wider‐beamed and higher‐sided vessels, furnished with fore and stern castles. These were more difficult to manœuvre than galleys, but they could carry bowmen and projectiles in their castles and were more suitable for boarding an enemy. Edward III's victory over the French at Sluys in 1340 must have featured such ships; and before the 14th cent. was out there was vital development of the three‐masted ship. The age‐old side rudder also gave place to the stern‐post rudder aligned on the keel, facilitating steering a few points off the wind.

The evolution of the navy in the 15th cent. has to be seen in the context of an ever‐increasing volume of trading voyages, to Iceland, the Baltic ports, to the Basque coast and Portugal, and then the Newfoundland Banks. More distant trades made big ships economic. The three great ships of Henry V were each over 550 tons; the Grace Dieu of 1420, whose timbers yet lie in the Hamble river, was of over 1,000. But around 170 years later, when England faced the Armada in 1588, only 14 of the 177 private ships enlisted for service were over 200 tons, and only 5 of the 34 ‘Queen's Ships’ exceeded 500 tons. The late medieval small ship had a durable progeny in the navy of the Tudors, the dynasty which truly founded the navy with its yards at Portsmouth, Chatham, Deptford, and Woolwich. In 1546, Henry VIII's last year, the Navy Board was formed from the navy's principal officers: it was destined to serve as the executant of the fleet's construction, maintenance, and supply, the country's largest industrial undertaking until the 19th cent. The critical change in warship design came during the 40 years before 1588, the removal of the medieval ‘castles’ in favour of a lower superstructure, with ships' sides pierced for guns on wheeled carriages. Through to the coming of the steam‐powered‘ironclad’ this was the basic character of the warship; the teamwork, ensuring high rates of fire, made a singular contribution to Britain's awesome repute at sea in the century of Vernon, Hawke, Rodney, and Nelson.

At long last, and following Trafalgar, the book was closed on one of the most abiding and distracting of Britain's strategic preoccupations: the security of the West Indies possessions had exercised the minds of all thinking naval officers since the age of William III. This concern lay close to the beginnings of Britain's commercial empire in the 16th and 17th cents.—the Levant Company 1592, the Virginia Adventurers 1609, the Royal Africa Company 1660, above all the East India Company 1600—all undertakings calling for ships which must dwarf the warships of Elizabeth I. By the time of Pepys's ‘30 ship’ building programme of 1677 there may have been an average burthen tonnage of 1,200 for ships of over 70 guns as against 940 in 1660. The navy finally became ‘royal’ in name under Charles II.

The first steam‐powered vessels in the navy were the paddle‐driven frigates/sloops of the 1820s, but the navy's ships in the Crimean War did not look much different from those of 75 years before. Even Warrior, Britain's first screw‐driven ironclad (1860), retained sail‐power after modifications in 1887. During the incipient naval race with Germany in the 1890s there emerged, in the fascinating and powerfully prophetic educator John Arbuthnot Fisher, the man who drove the navy into the 20th cent. What has to be understood about his 18,000-tons displacement Dreadnought, with her 21-knot speed (launched February 1906), is that such a ship was waiting to be built: turbine and not reciprocated engine driven, and with a provision of uniformly heavy guns ensuring straddling salvoes of the highest possible accuracy. Yet Dreadnought was rapidly overtaken by more powerful and faster sisters, and she herself played little part in the First World War. But at the end of his life (1920) Fisher was convinced that air power was inseparable from sea power in any future conflict, and that the capital ship had had her day—a glimpse of what was to happen in the Second World War to the Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Hood. The mine, the torpedo, and the submarine had already set the pace of change; and at the Coronation Review of 1953 only one British battleship remained, the 42,000-ton Vanguard, which had never seen action.

navy originally, all ships of a nation, whether for war or commerce; the term navy now designates only such vessels as are built and maintained specifically for war. There have been three major developments in naval vessels. From ancient times to the late 16th cent., navies consisted mostly of galleys; from the late 16th to the late 19th cent., they consisted mostly of side-gunned sailing vessels; and from 1865 until recently, they consisted of steam warships. Currently, diesel-powered ships dominate the world's navies, although many ships are nuclear-powered.

Navies began in the Mediterranean, with its access to three continents and favorable climatic conditions. Although the first recorded naval battle was c.1200 BC between the Egyptians and the Sea People, ships were probably used to transport and supply armies much earlier. Ancient warships usually relied on ramming, although sometimes catapults were used to fire missiles or incendiaries, and their crews fought as infantry. Galleys dominated the Mediterranean at least through the battle of Lepanto (1571) between the Christians and Muslims. In China, junks (high-pooped ships with battened sails) were used as fighting platforms for sea battles and for invasion fleets, such as the Mongol attempt to take Japan in 1281. In northern Europe the Norse perfected oared Viking ships with square sails and strong keels that were used to transport raiders or for boarding at sea, but they could not ram or carry as many fighters as a galley. They were organized into small but effective fleets. It was to meet their attacks that Alfred the Great, in the 9th cent., organized a royal fleet and became the first to realize that a navy was essential to England's security.

The reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth saw further naval developments. Between the 13th and 16th cent. the commercial trading vessels of Northern Europe evolved into effective warships, with rudders, keels, and complex sails. They soon became dominant around the world because of their increased maneuverability, their load-carrying capacity, and their suitability for carrying cannon. The Spanish and Portuguese navies dominated at different times until the destruction of the Spanish Armada (1588). From then on the British navy was the strongest in the world. Although challenged often, first by the Dutch and then the French, it ruled the seas for 300 years. British naval power rested not so much on numbers or superior ship construction, but on its professional seamen and officers. While Britain remained dominant, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States developed strong navies.

In the late 19th cent., the emergence of Japan and Germany as major naval powers encouraged the United States to establish a strong navy. In 1898, the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Spanish-American War and emerged as the second strongest sea power in the world. At this time, such modern naval weapons as the torpedo, the rifled naval gun, and the submarine were developed. World War I was partially a contest between the naval strengths of Britain and Germany, with the submarine the crucial factor. Germany lost its navy at the end of the war.

After World War I naval tactics were revolutionized by the development of the airplane. Previously, the decisive naval weapons had been the heavily gunned cruisers and battleships . In World War II, it became the aircraft carrier , as proven when U.S. carrier-based aircraft dominated the Pacific and did much to cripple German submarine strength in the Atlantic. At the end of World War II, Germany, Italy, and Japan were stripped of their navies, Britain was economically weakened, and the United States emerged with the strongest navy in the world. By the early 1970s the USSR (now Russia) had the second most powerful navy; it was weakened, however, by the collapse of the USSR (1991) and Russia's subsequent economic difficulties. The development of nuclear-powered vessels, especially the submarine, together with nuclear weaponry, has altered the role of the navy in a nation's strategy and tactics .

Bibliography: See A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890); B. Brodie Naval Strategy (1942); H. T. Lenton, Warships of the British and Commonwealth Navies (1966); L. W. Martin, The Sea in Modern Strategy (1967); F. Pratt and H. E. Howe, Compact History of the United States Navy (rev. ed. 1967); P. Padfield, Guns at Sea (1973); C. Reynolds, Command of the Sea (1974); J. Guilmartin, Galleys and Gunpowder (1975); N. A. M. Rodgers, The Wooden World (1986); R. H. Spector, At War at Sea: Sailors and Naval Combat in the Twentieth Century (2001); I. W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (2006).

navy A fleet of ships and its crew, organized for war at sea. In the 5th and 4th centuries Athens and Corinth relied on TRIREMES (galleys with three banks of oars) and high-speed manoeuvrable quinqueremes (five-banked galleys) were developed by the Macedonians. At the Battle of SALAMIS an Athenian fleet won a decisive victory over the Persians, established Greek control over the eastern Mediterranean, and the fleet remained the crucial basis of Athenian supremacy. The Roman empire, though essentially a land-based power, fought Carthage at sea in the First PUNIC WAR, and gained control of the Mediterranean.

Navies were needed to protect trading vessels against pirates: the BYZANTINE EMPIRE maintained a defensive fleet to retain control over its vital trade arteries. In England, King ALFRED created a fleet in the 9th century in defence against Scandinavian invasions. The CINQUE PORTS supplied the English navy from the 11th to the 16th centuries and it was organized and enlarged under successive Tudor monarchs. The Italian city-states kept squadrons of galleys and adapted carracks (merchant ships) to defend their ports against the Ottoman Turks and the Battle of LEPANTO saw a Christian fleet decisively beat the Ottomans. The 17th century saw naval reorganization in England under PEPYS, and the Dutch and French also expanded their fleets as trade and colonial expansion accelerated in the 18th century.

From the early Middle Ages the warship altered from being a converted merchant ship, modified by the addition of ‘castles’, fortified with land artillery, and manned by knights, into a specially armed vessel. By the 14th century ships were being fitted with guns and by the 16th century special warships were being built with heavy armaments. Success or failure in battle, however, was determined by tactical skill as all sailing ships were at the mercy of the wind.

At the time of the NAPOLEONIC WARS, naval vessels were sailing ships, built of wood and armed with cannon that fired broadsides. They engaged at close quarters and ratings were armed with muskets and handgrenades. Following the Battle of TRAFALGAR (1805), the British navy dominated the oceans of the world for a century. Change came slowly. Steam power replaced sail only gradually, while in 1859 the French navy poineered the protection of the wooden hull of a ship with iron plates (Iron clads). With the development of the iron and steel industry in the late 19th century, rapid advances were made in ship design and the armament of ships. At the same time the submarine, armed with torpedoes, emerged as a fighting vessel. When Germany challenged the supremacy of the British navy, the latter responded with the huge steel Dreadnought battleships (1906), equipped with guns with a range of over 32 km (20 miles). During World War I the German submarine (U-boat) fleet was checked by the CONVOY SYSTEM to protect Allied merchant shipping, but the major British and German fleets only engaged in the inconclusive Battle of JUTLAND (1916). Between the wars aircraft were rapidly developed and naval warfare in World War II was increasingly fought by aircraft from aircraft carriers, particularly in the great naval battles of the Pacific Campaign. Since World War II, the development of submarines armed with long-range nuclear missiles has reduced the number of surface ships and revolutionized naval strategy as submarines are difficult to detect and destroy. Most countries retain fleets of small, fast vessels for coastal patrol. The USA and the former Soviet Union, however, competed in the size and armament of their navies. The FALKLANDS WAR (1982) revealed the extent to which there remained a place for a conventional navy, but also showed how exposed surface ships were to missile attack. During the GULF WAR the navies of the Allied forces played an important strategic role. Six aircraft carriers provided launch sites from which air strikes against Iraqi ground targets were made.

na·vy / ˈnāvē/ • n. (pl. -vies) 1. (often the navy or the Navy) the branch of a nation's armed services that conducts military operations at sea. ∎  the ships of a navy: a 600-ship navy | we built their navy. ∎ poetic/lit. a fleet of ships. 2. (also navy blue) a dark blue color: [as adj.] a navy-blue suit.

navy †ships, shipping; (arch.) fleet XIV; state's ships of war XVI. — OF. navie ship, fleet — popL. nāvia ship, boat, coll. formation on L. nāvis ship; see NAVAL, -Y3.

navy n. pl. -ies
1. (often the navy or the Navy) the branch of a nation's armed services that conducts military operations at sea.

2. the ships of a navy: a 600-ship navy.

Navy

a fleet of ships, 1330; the sailors or crew, collectively, 1648.

navy See Navy; Royal Navy

Navy. See Military, The.

navy •navvy, savvy •ave, Garvey, Harvey, larvae, Mojave •bevvy, bevy, Chevy, heavy, levee, Levi, levy, top-heavy •envy •cavy, Davy, Devi, gravy, navy, slavey, venae cavae, wavy •bivvy, chivvy, civvy, divvy, Livy, privy, skivvy, spivvy •Sylvie • ivy • grovy •groovy, movie •covey, lovey, lovey-dovey, luvvy •anchovy • Muscovy • Pahlavi •curvy, Nervi, nervy, scurvy, topsy-turvy