Naval Gazing (1)

In an unrelated discussion thread, TFSmith explained his methodology for researching ship locations:

‘Do a search for "The Navy List" for the appropriate years (1861, 1862, whatever) on Google Books. They have all been scanned in; aside from the occasional finger, they are pretty amazing images, and - depending on your version of Acrobat - are searchable. If not, the indexes are completely accurate.

 The Navy List was published annually, even quarterly; assignments of ships (whether active, in reserve/ordinary, building, etc.) and the officers of the ships in commission are included, along with flag officers and their staffs for all the various fleets, squadrons, and detachments.’

Like his explanation of his economic model for the war, this is very helpful: it allows us to explain exactly where he goes wrong.

A warning to readers: this particular post may itself be accused of navel-gazing, as it considers in detail why TFSmith's use of sources is so misguided. If that doesn't interest you, you can ignore this post and wait for the follow-up, which deals with some of the things he's actually got wrong.

TFSmith is rabidly against the use of newspapers as primary sources. In the discussion linked above, he praises the Navy list as 'they are actually official documents - primary sources - not newspaper reports, which, depending on the publication, had many their own axe to grind [sic].' Elsewhere, he explains how:

'Newspaper reports are, at best, contemporaneous reports of what a given newspaper chose to provide its readers, for the purposes of its publisher - as anyone who has ever worked in journalism knows full well.

Seriously, relying on newspaper reports for order of battle information when (one would expect) the official records exist is ridiculous.

It would be akin to using German or British newspaper reports about the "score" in the Battle of Britain, for anything other than a survey of how propaganda was disseminated in wartime.'

Bear in mind that TFSmith purports to be an academic. However, he commits a number of mistakes in his handling of sources which even amateur historians generally avoid. Firstly, he makes a false dichotomy between 'accurate' official records and 'biased' newspaper reports. In reality, official records may well be mistaken, or deliberately skewed because of the cognitive biases of those creating them. Similarly - hard as it is to believe, newspapers may from time to time seek to report the truth. They may be even more keen to report facts (as distinct from the truth), because lying about Canadian militia flank companies having been called out, or about a ship being in a particular location, is a lie in which they can be found out- either by contemporaries, or by the historian.

Secondly, he dismisses an entire class of primary evidence because it may be biased. However, historians should be more than capable of dealing with bias or error in sources. Though the Times of 7 March 1862 places HMS Cossack in Bermuda on 19 February, a later report of 31 March places it in Table Bay on 23 February. With a little leg work, we can confirm that although Cossack was ordered home in the 1861 navy list, it only left the Cape on 29 May (per Times of 7 August 1862). This kind of cross-referencing to correct errors is perhaps the most basic aspect of the historical profession.


Though no historian would take sources on face value, neither would they dismiss them outright. For instance, the Times of 6 December 1861 describes how the men of the Tyne Royal Naval Reserve

determined to have a demonstration in the seaport of Shields that afternoon, and at half-past 1 o'clock they mustered in strong force upon the New Quay, North Shields, as fine a body of young fellows as it was possible to clap eyes upon. The officers of the 1st Northumberland Artillery kindly put their fine band at the service of the men, who had mustered an immense number of union jacks, ensigns of St. George, &c, and when the procession was formed it had quite a warlike appearance. About 2 o'clock the band struck up "Hearts of Oak," and the men proceeded to march through the principal streets of North and South Shields. They were met everywhere with the greatest enthusiasm by the seafaring population, especially in the neighbourhood of the quays and shipping. Above 1,000 seamen are now enrolled; in the books of the North Shields Shipping-office as Naval Reserve men.

What the historian would do is to cross-reference this source with others (official documents, other local newspapers, diarists and letters), as well as a healthy dose of common sense. For instance, because the working class have traditionally been seen as favouring the North, we might conclude that they were more likely to show a muted sense of patriotic duty when considering war with the Union. However, a good historian would also find evidence that could support the Times's account, and weigh the two. For instance, there were certainly a number of sailors in ports like North and South Shields prepared to ship aboard blockade runners: there were also three Royal Naval Reserve men on the Alabama, and at this time Admiral Milne wrote that 'the ships companies are in a high state of excitement for war, they are certainly all for the South'. This is the historian's job: to sift through evidence to discover how much truth it contains. What TFSmith would do with this source is to deny that the Royal Naval Reserve cannot have existed because there is no digitised contemporary membership list online, and to accuse anybody who was prepared to acknowledge its existence of being a sun-never-sets British imperialist.


TFSmith's third problem is that he fails to recognise that the two sources serve different purposes. The Navy Lists show what ships were assigned to a particular squadron on a particular date, but nothing more. They cannot tell us what ships were being worked up to be brought out of the reserve; they cannot tell us where a ship was on a particular date; they cannot tell us that a crew on the West African coast had been struck down by yellow fever and that invalids were being shipped to Ascencion Island to convalesce. Contemporary newspapers are not the repositories of official 'truth': they are much more than that. They give us the speculation, the rumours, the 'believable but not necessarily historical' on which the entire art of Alternate History is based. It is thanks to newspapers that interesting suggestions like the following have been preserved:

'It has been mooted as not improbable that the [51-gun frigate] Sutlej will be commissioned by the captain of the [86-gun battleship] Trafalgar should events reach their expected climax with America. Should this be carried into effect, a fine frigate would be at once manned, [and] 200 men left disposable for other vessels’ (Army and Navy Gazette, 14 December 1861)

If this suggestion is true, it may well have been discussed at the Admiralty and passed to the Army and Navy Gazette through its network of contacts in the Royal Navy. However, it may never have been written down, whether in official Admiralty documentation or in the personal letters and diaries of those involved. For TFSmith, this suggestion does not exist - cannot have existed. For him, there is the Navy List or nothing.

The underlying problem here is that TFSmith fails to recognise is that the station to which a ship was assigned often tells us very little about where it actually was at any particular point in time. In some cases, this makes little difference: in other cases, it makes a great deal. For instance, TFSmith is obsessed with the fact that there was a telegraph connecting San Francisco to the east coast. Because San Francisco was the base of the Pacific Squadron, he believes that the existence of this telegraph gives them an unassailable advantage.

However, the ships of the Pacific Squadron were not telepathically connected to San Francisco, and they were not sat in San Francisco. They were spread out along the east coast, from Acapulco in Mexico to Callao in Peru. The time taken to notify them is not the time taken for a message to pass to San Francisco, but the time for a mail ship to travel from San Francisco down the coast to notify them. However, the ships of the Royal Navy's Pacific Station were also spread out along the coast, in many cases standing between Union Navy ships and the safety of San Francisco, and with individual superiority in most potential ship-on-ship matchups.

What would almost certainly have ensued is a series of pell-mell ship-on-ship battles: Union ships running for San Francisco, Royal Navy ships desperately trying to keep them out of the safety of the port; confusion and individual gallantry ruling the day. What we get in Burnished Rows of Steel is the Union sitting smugly in San Francisco, and the British running their head against the wall. Even if TFSmith's prose had been better, the scenario he presents would still have been much less interesting than the more likely scenario given here.

This is not just a question of dramatic interpretation, however. In many cases TFSmith's refusal to even consider newspapers as a source means that he is factually correct. And, just as we could catch out any newspaper with 'their own axe to grind', we can also catch out TFSmith. At long last, we turn our atttention to doing so.