This line from the Declaration of Independence, which we have just celebrated the 250th anniversary of, comes from the practice of trying certain cases relating to navigation, smuggling and the Stamp Act of 1765 in Vice-Admiralty Courts. These operated under a completely different legal system from that of the standard Common Law, and as you can guess from the quote, didn't have juries. From the perspective of actually getting the law enforced, this made a great deal of sense. In the nascent United States, the Stamp Act was wildly unpopular, as it imposed taxes on various kinds of goods to support British troops stationed in North America after the Seven Years War. Local juries would simply refuse to convict even obvious violations, so the Vice-Admiralty courts where judges from England could deliver verdicts directly were the obvious place to turn. And also an obvious instrument of repressive tyranny that fully justified the Revolution.

But how did it get to the point that there was this entirely separate system of laws that the British could turn to when they needed to bypass local juries? The idea of there being a separate Admiralty law, common among nations, is so old that nobody is quite sure how old it is. Nineteenth-century legal scholars often traced its origins to a code dating to 900 BC on the island of Rhodes, although there's not a ton of evidence that there was a coherent law code dating back quite that far. However, we do have references to a "Rhodian law" in a Roman law text from the third century AD, the idea that if some part of a vessel's cargo has to be jettisoned in an emergency, the loss will be shared among everyone who had cargo aboard. Astonishingly, this principle, known as General Average, continues to be part of maritime law today.

Even as the Roman Empire collapsed and the Mediterranean littoral fragmented, the law of trade and shipping remained surprisingly unified, with specialized courts set up by merchants operating in many ports and attempting to enforce judgements based on what was customary among merchants in the area. Whoever was running the port was generally content to let the merchants deal with their own disputes, at least so long as they paid their taxes, producing a genuinely international set of laws. This principle extended as maritime trade began to flourish in the waters of Northwestern Europe in the late Middle Ages, an important source being the Rolls of Oleron, traditionally ascribed to Eleanor of Aquitaine. In practice, she was probably not personally involved in regulation of the wine trade, but despite this, they became the basis of maritime law in every country in the area, and continue to form part of the foundation of the field to this day.

The Lord High Admiral

In England, maritime law came under the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral, the senior naval official of the country, and thus became known as Admiralty Law. But it was still an attempt to implement the international law being developed, and thus moved in step with developments in the rest of Europe, where Roman-inspired Civil Law used judges to deliver verdicts without the need for a jury. This caused obvious tension between the admiralty courts and the rest of the country, and in 1389, Parliament limited admiralty jurisdiction by statute to "a thing done upon the sea" to stop those courts intruding into land-based matters. Other courts interpreted this extremely narrowly, claiming that a contract for shipping signed on land was not "a thing done upon the sea". This more or less moved the traditional "law merchant" functions of the admiralty courts to the common-law courts, and limited them to dealing with prizes, salvage, seaman's wages and similar matters. As a result, the Admiralty courts in England¹ shrank as a specialized branch, and eventually ended up combined, rather oddly, with the Probate and Divorce division of the High Court.² Today, the only remaining dedicated admiralty court is that for the Cinque Ports, a truly baffling English oddity that looks to be entirely ceremonial today.

Americans deal with oppressive British officials

With the growth of Britain's North American colonies, it was obvious that admiralty courts would need to follow, and by 1763, there were nine Vice-Admiralty courts throughout the colonies, unbounded by the statute that limited their English counterparts. But they were never particularly popular, as they were the chief enforcers of British trade policy. Some of this was clearly absurd, like the belief that the colonists should pay taxes on imported goods, while in other cases, there were genuine abuses, such as when naval officers realized they could line their pockets by requesting papers from small coastal trading vessels that Parliament hadn't intended to include in the requirements for stricter documentation, then sending them to be condemned by the admiralty courts. In normal courts, the use of a jury would temper the implementation of London's policy, but that obviously wasn't the case in the admiralty courts.³ Things were made worse when the Stamp Act of 1765 deliberately gave jurisdiction over cases, which were not particularly maritime-related, to the admiralty courts. There was actually some basis for this. Britain had specialized courts for everything, including cases involving revenue, but there was no Court of Exchequer in America,⁴ and given colonial feelings, the admiralty courts were much more likely to actually enforce the law.

The highest admiralty court, 2022

The tension continued until the outbreak of open hostilities in 1775, when the Americans suddenly realized that they might need admiralty courts of their own if they wanted to be able to seize British ships as prizes without being considered pirates under international law. Massachusetts was among the first to set up such a court, although their version used a jury, at least for a few years, before it was decided that admiralty law was simply too complicated for "good and lawful men". Things were made even more complicated a few years later, when the Articles of Confederation assigned some parts of admiralty law, most notably dealing with prizes, to the Continental Congress. After those failed, the Constitution adopted in 1787 fully gave admiralty jurisdiction to the new Federal government, and it has become part of the normal powers of the Federal court system. In some areas, it forms a significant portion of the docket, but it's really only of interest to specialists and weirdos with absurd theories about the meaning of a fringe on a flag.

Overhauls are Jackie Fisher, Auxiliaries Part 2, Impressment, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and for 2025, my reviews of Fort Point and Nike Site SF88, Thoughts on the Israel-Iranian War and The Tanker War Part 1.

Canberra with 3rd Fleet a few days before being torpedoed

But the bigger problem was that the explosion was directly under one of the bearings for shaft 1, which was ripped from the reduction gearing forward and thrown upwards and inboard, tearing holes in the bulkheads of both the fore and aft engine rooms. Water began pouring into both, filling the aft engine room in 4 minutes and the forward one in 10. Although the boilers in the forward two rooms remained intact and continued to generate power, Canberra was dead in the water. Her rudder was also jammed over, the result of a last-minute attempt to dodge the torpedo, and while the emergency diesel generator would normally have provided power to the steering gear, breakers kept tripping. Eventually, the rudder was put amidships using the ship's roll, opening the hydraulic valves on the steering gear to allow it to swing amidships, then closing them to stop it swinging back. The electrical problems were not helped by numerous leaks in spaces fore and aft of the flooded machinery spaces, as the stuffing glands for electrical cables proved to be less watertight than expected. The leaks were all controlled fairly quickly, thanks to the cruiser's highly-trained damage control team, and only a few spaces saw more than a couple inches of water.

The bent shaft, looking aft

But although there was no particular danger of her sinking, Canberra was still stranded 90 miles off an enemy-held coast, and she was unlikely to move under her own power without a stint in drydock. Normal procedure would have been to simply take off the crew and scuttle the ship, but the strength of the American carrier force prompted Admiral Halsey to take a chance and order another day of air strikes on Formosa while Canberra was towed clear, allowing the ship to be repaired to fight another day. Fellow heavy cruiser Wichita was ordered to take the stricken ship under tow, and within 20 minutes, her crew had the necessary lines rigged out on deck. But the winds were high and a heavy swell was running, and while the initial messenger lines were passed successfully, at one point the two ships yawed apart so violently that a 4.5" manila line crushed three sailors,³ then knocked a fire hydrant loose, sending water spewing high into the air. The line then snapped, but Wichita’s quick-thinking crew passed another line and managed to get the towing wire across on their second attempt. Unfortunately, they hadn't sent their towing shackle, and Canberra’s was too big to fit into the eye on the rope. It took about two hours, but Canberra’s crew managed to attach the wire to the port anchor chain with a couple of spares and Wichita set off, slowly turning towards the southeast.

The diagram from the damage report. Click to enlarge.

The night was spent shoring up bulkheads, plugging leaks and dewatering spaces outside the machinery. Emergency power cables had already been strung before the attack, allowing quick restoration of power through most of the aft portion of the ship. Communication was harder to restore, as many of the relevant circuits had shorted out in the flooded spaces. And because all of the evaporators⁴ were inaccessible, extreme measures to conserve fresh water began immediately.

Canberra and Houston under tow

Things were made more complicated when light cruiser Houston, detailed to take over Canberra's spot, was torpedoed the next day,⁵ and again the decision was made to tow her clear. The two cruisers were assigned to what was known as "CripDiv (Cripple Division) 1" and provided with air cover from a pair of CVLs and some light cruisers and destroyers as escorts, while they were slowly towed out of the range of enemy aircraft. On the morning of the 15th, tugs Munsee and Pawnee arrived, with Munsee taking over the tow from Wichita. Aboard Canberra, the crew continued the slow work of dealing with the problems of a ship with the middle full of water, which occasionally meant things like manually rebuilding pipes to keep salt water out of the boilers.

Canberra in drydock at Manaus, with destroyers Claxton and Killen

On the 20th, a week after she was torpedoed and halfway to the forward base at Ulithi, salvage ship Current came alongside, transferring extra pumps and divers who were able to go in and salvage several pump motors from the forward engine room, as well as doing preliminary work on a patch for the hole in that space. A first attempt while at sea failed, but the second, made the day after reaching Ulithi, succeeded, and then it was a simple matter of pumping out the space and shoring up the bulkhead, the main complication being that asbestos insulation in the water kept plugging up the pumps. The motors were used to put one of the evaporators back in operation, giving the ship fresh water for the week's tow to Manaus, where she was finally drydocked. The extent of the damage could finally be fully understood, the holes were patched, any salvageable equipment was preserved to make it easier to restore to operation, all three surviving shafts were put back in operation, and in January, she departed for Boston Navy Yard under her own power. Repairs would ultimately stretch past the end of the war, and Canberra would go on to serve as one of the first platforms for the Terrier missile.

Canberra in the 50s, showing her missiles aft

But Canberra's was not the most dramatic survival story that played out in the eastern reaches of the Philippine Sea in October 1944. Houston was hit not once but twice, and lost not only her propulsion but also all boilers. We'll look at her story next time.

The fort's parade ground, from one of the towers

Website

The fort's last war was the War of 1812, when it spent a while fighting artillery duels with Fort George, its British counterpart on the other side of the Niagara River before the British managed to capture it. It was returned to the Americans after the end of the war, and while the position was improved a couple of times during tension with Britain in the rest of the 19th century, first when rebellions broke out in Canada in 1837-1838 which saw a stone wall built along the riverfront, and then during the Civil War, which saw a brick casemate wall constructed along the fort's landward side. Since then, things with Canada have been peaceful (so far), and the fort was turned into a museum.

The French Castle

The site itself is neat to see, if sometimes confusing because of the layers of history present. There's a visitor center with a small museum, and then you're let out into the area in front of the various fortifications, the outermost of which are star fort style trenches dug during the Seven Years War, and redug more recently by the site. Behind them is the Civil War-era brick wall, and behind that are the buildings. The most notable of these, all the way in the back, is the French Castle, the original building on the site, which was a trading post/barracks/fortification in case the locals attacked. They've done a good job of recreating the various spaces that had been present, mostly when the French ran the place and it was on the edge of the world. Other attractions include various artillery batteries, a couple of redoubts added by the British, and a really detailed model of the site as it was during the Revolutionary War.

A British solider in America. Hopefully, we can take care of this soon.

There's also a fairly strong living history aspect. There was a musket demonstration, which is well worth it if you've not seen a black powder musket fired before (although be aware that it is very loud) and a couple of guides in period dress wandering around. They were competent, as was the normal tour guide, and the signage was all reasonably well done, if a bit sparser than I would like. There's also a lovely view out over Lake Ontario, with bits of Toronto barely visible on the horizon.

Bulbasaur thought Niagara Falls was impressive

So on the whole, Fort Niagara is worth a visit, although there are two other things in the region that bear mentioning. First, Niagara Falls, which is about 20 minutes south and quite impressive. But if you're not a waterfall person and/or have extra time to kill in the Buffalo area, the Fort is a decent way to spend a couple hours. Second, and probably more importantly, there's the Buffalo Naval & Military Park, with missile cruiser Little Rock, destroyer The Sullivans and submarine Croaker. That had absolutely topped my list for things to do in the Buffalo area, but at this point they are only open on weekends, and we were through on a Tuesday. At some point, I will get back and pay them a proper visit.

The museum's very effective entrance

Website (Outdated)

To cut to the heart of the matter, I like the new museum less than the old one. It's not a bad museum by any means. If I was the state of Oklahoma and mostly wanted a museum as a recruiting tool for my Guard units (and also was trying to shut up the Air Guard's complaints about the pro-Army bias of the 45th Infantry Museum), I would probably be pretty happy with what I'd gotten for my money. The exhibits are generally done fairly well, it's spacious and modern and doesn't have weird dead-end rooms, and everything is freshly painted. A school field trip could go there without having to budget an hour on the back end for search parties. And the sort of corridor of vehicles in front of the building is really well-done, probably the best military museum entrance I've ever seen.

They also occasionally seemed confused about what planes were which

But one of those vehicles is also a good showcase for the museum's flaws. The F-86D they have on display has the name Fred Haise painted on the side, a former pilot of the type for the OK ANG that you've probably heard of for his other work. But the sign spends half of its space talking about some Oklahoman who flew the Saber in Korea, then says "After the Korean War, the F-86 was redesignated the F-86D"² and proceeds to give a poor and occasionally ungrammatical account of the air-defense mission of the Oklahoma ANG. Notably absent from the signage? Fred Haise.³ That was probably the worst sign I saw, but there were quite a few others that could use some work, such as one that said "Allied control [of Italy] would cut off Axis supplies into Italy and North Africa." I understand that the war in the Mediterranean is kind of hard to explain, particularly if you want to put a positive spin on it, but that sentence combines a tautology and a flat untruth.⁴

They also did something I really like and haven't seen before, using a QR code to steer people to a public domain document. More museums should do that.

Now, that's easy enough to fix (I am available if they want me) and there are some other definite advantages to the new museum. They have a lot more administrative and storage space than they used to, which is going to make it a lot easier to update exhibits. There's a rotating gallery, currently showing photos from Korea, but I wouldn't be surprised if they started getting more substantial things in there now that the main work of getting open is done, and one of the docents told me that they also plan to rotate some stuff in the main exhibits.⁵ Coverage of the Air National Guard has been significantly improved, and some of the exhibits there are quite nice, although others are pretty sparse. And for those who are interested, there's a much heavier focus on individual people's stories.⁶

As part of the recruiting focus, they have a lightly-loaded MOLLE pack you can put on. It's a neat touch.

So what's the verdict? Well, as I said above, it's not a bad museum, and if you're an Oklahoma-based reader, I certainly wouldn't recommend against going.⁷ But the magic that the old museum had is gone. The massive gun collection in largely not on display, simply because it didn't really have a strong connection to the Oklahoma National Guard, and the weird and wonderful collection of vehicles outside is largely not present, although I think it may still be accessible at the old museum. The Bill Mauldin and Dachau exhibits have both been cut down, and the Vietnam-era M113 is missing the Playboys. Ultimately, the issue is that the previous museum was a very strong recommend if you were passing through and had a couple hours, and now, I'm not sure it stands out.⁸ But I hope they continue to improve, and I will keep this updated as things change.

Oh, and one logistical note. Google Maps is somewhat confused about where the museum is right now. If you want to find it, ask for directions to either the Oklahoma National Guard Joint Force Headquarters or the Oklahoma Railway Museum, and then look for the building with all the planes and tanks out front.

Keeping Nimitz in paint

If you ask a linguist, they'll tell you that the use of "she" for ships is a remnant of when English used to be gendered, like most European languages. But English lost that a thousand years ago or so, when Vikings and Frenchmen invaded, each bringing their own gendering system with them, and it eventually just made sense to ditch the whole thing. And that makes sense, as far as it goes, but raises the question of why it was ships that survived with their gender most strongly intact.

My basic answer is that it's because a ship rapidly become almost like a person to her crew, and it would be extremely weird to call a person "it". You can see this in daily life by looking at pets. Even a reluctant pet owner, like yours truly, would be disturbed by someone who insisted on referring to my cat, Dean, as "it". And yes, you could argue that's because cats do actually have genders, but it's not quite that simple. If someone referred to a dairy cow as "it", that would not set off any alarm bells, even though the cow's gender is integral to its status as a dairy cow. And this, ultimately, is because the dairy cow isn't a person, at least not to most people.¹

I also think the use of the feminine gender contributed to its survival with respect to ships. Up until the last 50 years, ship's crews were almost entirely male, and while the ship is a person, we're talking about a person of a very different type from all the guys around you. So the obvious assumption is that if they're all male, the ship must be female. Speaking personally, it also just feels that way. When I was in LA, I was single, and we jokingly referred to Iowa as "the girlfriend".² Obviously, there's probably some cultural conditioning to me feeling this way, but it does seem to work.

And a little bit of me believes that's because ships really are female, and get irritated when you gender them incorrectly. There's evidence for this, in a really interesting correlation between how a language genders ships and how its speakers perform at sea. Every single global naval power of the last 500 years, be it Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain or America, has spoken a language that universally genders ships as female, and as we know, the last two even kept it while other gendered words are driven out. Less successful powers may break this rule. In traditional German, ships gained the gender of the thing they were named after, although this went away in the 1600s after the fall of the Hanseatic League, when the English practice became standard, as it more or less is to this day. Occasionally, a regress will happen, as in 1913, when Whilhelm II bullied HAPAG into using the masculine pronoun for their new liner Imperator, and he was appropriately punished. Later, Bismarck's captain had similar thoughts about his ship, and we can all see how that worked out for him.³ And Slavic languages like Russian always gender ships as male, which explains a great deal about their inability to build successful navies.

Of course, there's the question of what happens to non-Indo-European languages which don't gender inanimate objects.⁴ The results of Japanese warfare in the first half of the 20th century implies that not gendering ships sits somewhere between properly gendering them and systematically referring to them as male in terms of effectiveness.

The big event since I was last here was the Naval Gazing meetup in Dayton. Everyone had a great time, and I'm looking forward to next year. I also am curious how much people want me to start posting extracts from my tour script as blog posts versus waiting for me to get the audio we recorded out as a podcast with slides.

Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 3, Battleship Aviation Part 2, A Brief History of the Submarine, FFG(X), Tomahawk Parts one and four, NWAS - Poseidon, my review of Greyhound, Don't Overread Moskva and for 2024 Pentagon Wars and Procurement, Simplified Ships and Shipbuilding, my review of the Western Museum of Flight and my thoughts on Hornet and visitor experience.

Back in the Pacific, we see the battleships getting into the action against the Japanese mainland, as well as the sad tale of Indianapolis, by far the most overdone story of the Pacific War relative to its importance. (I have seen libraries where their entire naval section was three SEAL memoirs and two books on this tragedy.) More fun is the discussion of the massive underway replenishment effort, a subject I've always loved.

I would describe Morison's take on the Japanese surrender as pretty accurate to more recent scholarship, although with a bit of Hirohito-mythologizing thrown in, as was standard at the time. We simply don't know what Hirohito actually thought, basically as a result of a conspiracy by both Japanese and Americans in the immediate postwar years to protect him from any war guilt. (There's probably more evidence in favor of him being reluctant than gung-ho, but we don't know much either way.) There's also decent evidence that in the days before the Japanese surrender, as the scale of casualties from an invasion became apparent to American planners, the idea of a direct invasion of the Japanese home islands was being reevaluated, and probably wouldn't have actually taken place.

Morison also skips over Truman's scandalously nepotistic decision to hold the surrender ceremony aboard Missouri, thus denying Iowa her rightful place. And I don't love that he dates the start of the war to the attack on Pearl Harbor, instead of the Japanese attack on China in 1937.

Because it's short, I'm also going to cover the conclusion here. This is where Morison seems to fully switch to editorial mode and start polishing the halos really hard, although I was also amused by his comments on the need for gunfire support in amphibious landings and confused by his complaints about the lack of torpedoes on ships bigger than destroyers. King's section seems the most overtly political, with references to the postwar situations in Malaya and Indonesia, as well as a tiny bit of MacArthur-bashing. Beyond that, it's mostly a catalog of Admirals who did a good job (Fletcher being notable by his absence, which is better than the alternative) and a call for a strong Navy, which I can't really disagree with.

Hope everyone has enjoyed this series. I'm going to take a couple weeks off before I start another book.

Website

The main pavilion is focused on Dayton's engineering history, from its status as a manufacturing hub in the mid-19th century to the invention of the cash register by the company that became NCR (they have a really cool display of models sold all over the world) to more modern stuff. It was great, and made me wonder why there isn't a National Museum of Engineering, because that should totally be a thing and I would go there a lot. The exhibits were done well, and cover a lot of subjects in a way that felt accessible without being patronizing, a sadly common problem in science-type museums.

Outside, they have a whole bunch of smaller buildings covering various aspects of the town's history in a rather pretty park that it was slightly too hot to appreciate properly. Many are originals moved from elsewhere, although some are replicas, and they represent everything from the early settlers to an 1830s paper mill to the work of WAVES in the NCR factory assembling Enigma-decrypting machines in WWII. Particularly notable is the Wright Brothers museum, which contains replicas of their shop, the world's largest collection of their artifacts, and the 1905 Flyer III, whose restoration was overseen by Orville shortly before his death. There's also a building with a disassembled NCR payroll machine, which I really enjoyed, and an operational steam train that circles the grounds, which we didn't go on. My only real criticism is that they should have had like a big cutaway model of a mechanical cash register so you could see how it worked, and they didn't. We only had a couple hours, and saw less than a third of the stuff outside. It's not the best museum in town (the competitive bar there is insanely high) but it's definitely worth adding to a trip to the area.

Oh, and as for the park's name, it started around a Carillon, a traditional bell tower, and they apparently do concerts with it from time to time if that's your thing.

There's lots of other stuff around Dayton, much of it tied to the National Aviation Historic Trail, which I'm hoping to get a separate review of at some point soon. But outside of that, if you happen to be in the area, I also have a reader recommendation for Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, which is "a big forest full of trails with a gorge near the edge of it. You can go down into the gorge if you want more exciting terrain, and there is a small cave down there somewhere. Also a beaver dam making a big lake." In any case, Dayton is a fun place, and I'd recommend going, not just for the Air Force Museum.

I was also intrigued by his comments about the New York Fire Department providing the impetus for the development of fog nozzles, which I don't think came up when I wrote about the subject. I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while nothing Morison says is technically wrong, the framing is extremely weird. The fog nozzle was pushed on Adm. Cochrane at BuShips by Harold J. Burke, who was a member of the New York City Fire department, but was a Lieutenant in the Naval Reserve at the time, and he did go on to run the damage control school with Lt. Thomas Kilduff, who was formerly of the Boston Fire Department. As far as I can tell, there was no particular institutional involvement by either city's fire department in the DC school or program, which would explain why I'd never heard about this.

I certainly appreciate Morison's skillful portrait of the Okinawa landing, and of the destruction of Yamato, although I have to nitpick his comment that "not another battleship was ever built". Both Vanguard and Jean Bart were completed after the war, and I maintain that the battleship remained important for a decade or so after this. I also feel compelled to point out that the effectiveness of the armored flight decks on British carriers is overstated, and that the smaller air wings imposed by said decks meant they were hit about as often as the Americans, despite having far fewer ships.

And then we come to the horror of the kamikaze attacks on the Americans off Okinawa, one of the most brutal battles of the war. I don't have much to add to Morison's account, except to call him out for ignoring the loss of the William D. Porter, a favorite here at Naval Gazing. But with that campaign closed, next week will be our final chapter in the book.