Action of 16 May 1797

Danish air forces are currently engaged in combat operations in Libya, but this is not the first time we've been there. 214 years ago at Tripoli a Danish naval squadron was victorious over a Tripolitan squadron that outnumbered them in terms of the number of vessels. The reason why was simple enough, the Bey of Tripoli, Sidi Yussuf was what is today known as a Barbary pirate, and despite the 'gift ships' with which the Europeans were wont to pay off the Muslim pirates of North Africa, Sidi Yusuf was enslaving Danish merchant sailors anyway (since they were Christians they were fair game for him) so Denmark sent Captain Lorenz Fisker in the heavy frigate Thetis (40 guns) to Tripoli to put a stop to his infernal capers.

The first attempt failed so Captain Steen Andersen Bille (who would one day become Prime Minister of Denmark) was sent in the heavy frigate Najaden (40 guns) along with Captain Charles Christian De Holck in the brig Sarpen (18 guns). At Malta, which was then held by Napoleon, to whom the Danes were allied, the Danish squadron hired a Xebec frigate of six guns and manned it with a crew drawn from their own ships. History doesn't record the name of the Xebec, which is unfortunate as Xebecs are a most interesting ship type. Command of the hired vessel was given to one of Sarpen's officers, a Lieutenant Hans Munck.

The squadron sailed from Malta and made a rendezvous with Thetis off Lampedusa (the island which is currently swamped with immigrants from Tunisia seeking entry into Europe, much to the annoyance of the Italians who own the island). Fisker transferred command of Danish forces in the Mediterranean to Bille and then sailed for home. It must have been frustrating for Bille to watch Fisker leave with the Thetis but he pressed on and on the 16th of May Najaden sailed into the Tripoli harbor and opened fire on the six armed vessels the Danes found there. The Tripolitan forces consisted of the 28-gun xebec Meshuda, two other xebecs of similar size and three smaller vessels.

Although the Danish cannon fire caused extensive casualties among the Tripolitans, they nevertheless managed to get close to the Danish vessels and almost managed to board Najaden. Hoppe's deft maneuvering forestalled defeat. Although the two smaller Danish ships were more of a hindrance than a help, the Tripolitans retreated after two hours. Danish casualties were one killed and one wounded

Captain Bille then blockaded Triploi and effectively stopped its trade. Subsequent negotiations resulted in a peace treaty on 25 May where Denmark agreed to continue to pay tribute, but at a reduced rate and Bille was able to buy the freedom of the Danish prisoners.

A febec frigate of the period

Captain Blood

By Rafael Sabatini

A true classic of historical storytelling, this novel by a skilled writer leans up against a real life figure, but is an original work of fiction. As pirate stories go, its a curious example as it creates an empathy for the pirate, but within the context of rebelling against slavery, then this is understandable. Some of the naval warfare in the book is dubious, most especially the effect of cannon fire, but its a minor detail and not something I minded... much.

Danish military news

On January 14th, the Inspection frigate Thetis of the Royal Danish Navy set out on a 7,000 nautical mile journey to take up her duties for the UN, protecting food supply ships from the notorious pirates who operate out of Somalia. She is expected to arrive on February 1st in time to take over the job from the French Navy. Travelling with the ship are an undisclosed number of Danish special forces soldiers from the Frømandskorpset whose job will be to travel on civilian freighters in case these are attacked.

Head of Søværnets Operative Kommando, Rear-admiral Nils Wang (what a name!) is quoted on the HOK site; "The mission is a very important task which the crew of the Thetis, the Frømandskorps and the Military Police are well equipped to face. I am pleased that the Navy can help bring emergency food and aid to one and a half million people. It makes good sense".


Thetis is a hardy little warship whose usual duties are in the far north where she patrols NATO waters, last year in a storm off the Faeroe islands a storm wave ripped off the top of her main gun's cupola! No doubt the warmer weather off Africa will bring its own challenges but at least the crew won't have to worry about being cold.

Thetis is armed with a main 76mm gun (the forward cupola), two 37mm guns, and she has been fitted with up to 12 .50 calibre machine guns for this mission as the pirates are known to operate in smaller vessels. She is also equipped with a Lynx helicopter, can launch depth charges (though I doubt these will be of any use) and carries Stinger AA missiles.

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Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, things are hotting up for Danish troops. Quietly, Denmark finally sent the tanks which were debated so hotly in the Danish parliment last year after repeated requests by the troops on the ground for tank support (in other words the socialists failed to prevent Danish troops from getting the tools they need to do what the Socialists say they are in favour of them doing). The few Leopard II's actually sent have now seen combat supporting Danish and British troops in Helmand province. On January 5th three tanks along with a unit from the Danish mechanized infantry group engaged Taliban forces from the east side of the Helmand river. According to Christian Reinhold, press officer at HOK, once the tanks began firing across the river,the Taliban then attempted to out flank them, no doubt to bring their RPG's to bear. Losing a Danish tank at this early stage, or any other, would be a serious propaganda coup for the Taliban, and also for the told-you-so Socialists back here in Denmark (and I wonder which of them would be the happier).

The Taliban failed. The Danish tanks were placed in such a position that they had both the high ground and plenty of space to move. They were easily able to defend themselves. Helmand is now said to be quiet as the cold weather has settled in.

Captain Kidd

Dir: Rowland V. Lee

Filmed in 1945, this is a black and white swashbuckling adventure starring Randolph Scott (he plays the hero Adam Mercy) and Charles Laughton who plays the captain (see above image). Its a fairly run of the mill film, typical of the genre and the time in which it was made, which is to say, its a piss poor movie with few redeeming special effects, a nauseatingly predictable plot and not really worth the effort of straining one's attention long enough to view. Of particular annoyance is the ease with which the sanctimonious hero Adam Mercy, out wits Captain Kidd by deux ex machina and has the female role (played with mind numbing ineptitude by Barbara Britton) fawning over him for no other reason than his 'noble bearing'. No sooner does Lady Anne Dunstan meet Adam Mercy than she 'recognises him as a gentleman' leaving all Captain Kidd's nefarious plans void. Mercy is in fact the son of one of Kidd's victims seeking revenge by pretending to be a pirate, and despite his upper class accent and 'noble bearing', none of the pirates he is hiding amongst ever realize this. A suspension of the laws of disbelief so blatent that the character becomes an immediete thorn in one's side.

Its hard to believe that people in 1945 were so numb to the limits of cinema that they watched this sort of rubbish as entertainment. I guess when you've just won the worst war in history you don't care about such details and you want the good guys to be easy to spot and always winning, but I'll never understand why, if the criminal elements in this type of film are not allowed to win, then why bother making a pirate film!? Whats the bleeding point? Who cares about pirates who are bound by convention to lose? Its a mockery for any one entertaining the notion that Kidd's convoluted schemes can ever hope to thwart a brainless hero who wins simply because he is the hero. When conventional morality dictates nobility equals good and good equals winner, then whats the deal with making a film about a pirate captain?

Naturally I was rooting for the pirates the whole film through and gnashing my teeth at the sickening sight of ill deserved victory being handed down by the oh so noble king to his sycophantic subjects who manage to defeat the pirate captain with out even trying. Kidd strands the nepotistic bastards in Madagascar, sails back to England after having utterly out witted them and yet they still manage to reach the king and tell their tale first by no means satisfactorily explained. What? They have an aeroplane?

Intolerable!



edited to add:


The Scarlet Pirate

Dir: Robert Siodmak

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

If 'Captain Kidd' was bad, then this is worse, only here its in technicolour! In this swashbuckling tale, Burt Lancaster lives up to his gay icon status playing the ever bare chested Captain Vallo (a.k.a. the Crimson Pirate) who spends almost the entire film performing the sort of acrobatics one might usually associate with a circus. This film was made in 1952 and it shows. The tedious sermonizing is similar to that proudly displayed in Captain Kidd, but we have now progressed to the point where a film about a pirate captain, actually has the pirate as hero. The bad guy being an authority figure with no morals. Alas, Captain Vallo must still tread the righteous path of honesty and goodness to get the girl so he's a peculiar sort of buccaneer if you ask me, especially so when you consider the hysterically conservative females these films offer up as choice morsals for pirate appetites.

The film is pretty horrendous and despite its ambitious nature fails to deliver in the special effects department. Amazingly the effects and props in this film are no where near as good as in 'Captain Kidd'. Captain Vallo's ship in particular is a most bizzare spectacle appearing to be a rebuilt fishing boat of some kind.




Long John Silver

Dir: Byron Haskin

Made a mere two years after 'The Scarlet Pirate', this film is about as far from the swashbuckling extravaganza as its possible to get since the main character has lost a leg and doesn't seem to fancy the mass produced heroines of other pirate films. No indeed, Long John's fancy turns to a woman who's rear end is as big as a golf course and naturally when the prospect of treasure comes his way, he quickly discards any notions of romance and sails his way as a good pirate should! For this alone I grant this film three stars. The fact that I just happen to approve of well endowed females with acres of cotton stretched across their curvacious physical attributes is neither here nor there! The fact of the matter is Robert Newton is the best pirate captain in this particular trio of films. He plays his role almost as easily as Walther Matthau plays Captain Red and Johnny Depp plays Captain Jack Sparrow

This film is meant to be a sequel to Treasure Island and see's the worthy captain returning to find the rest of Flint's treasure. Whether or not he finds it is up to you to discover. You'll not pry the answer from me matey, d'ya see the course I lay!?

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest

Dir: Gore Verbinksi

There's one thing really bugs me about the 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest'. It isn't the curse of Davy Jones or the power of the goddess Calypso with her maelstrom or the half fish half men crew of the Flying Dutchman or the whole pirate court thing. All that fits nicely into the internal logic of the tale. No, what bothers me is this:


The ship in the middle, named Endeavour, is a triple decker (which actually means four gun decks). I count 45 gun ports in the top image, that makes it, without counting bow and stern chasers, or the upper deck cannons, at least 90 guns and thus a second rate ship-of-the-line ( a first rate would have 100+ guns). This is the bad guy's ship and the bad guy is the leader of the East India Company. Now, its a known fact that the EIC were not shy about using military methods to get what they wanted, but to go from hired armies in India where man power was easy to be had, to building and maintaining a second rate ship-of-the-line stretches my incredulity to the point of indignation.

That that warship is then dispatched by two pirate ships is unforgivable. Pirate ships were usually sloops, brigantines or captured traders fitted with a gun deck. Pirates seldom if ever got into battles because the whole purpose of piracy was to avoid the authorities whilst preying on fat merchants who couldn't defend themselves. In the film, the Flying Dutchman and the Black Pearl appear to be over decorated frigates, that is to say they are war ships which have a single gun deck with smaller guns on the upper deck (thats a 28 gun frigate in the title image for my blog). Expanding our magnanimous nature to allow the script writer the benefit of the doubt, this would give them perhaps 28 guns each, only half of which they can bring to bear given the nature of the broadside battery.

Thus, the pirates can bring some 28 guns and perhaps as many carronades to bear on a ship that towers above them, has a crew of 750 trained men and marines (you don't operate a second rate without a full crew) and can bring 90 guns and probably 40 carronades and swivel guns to bear. The conclusion in the film flies in the face of logic. In reality, the ship-of-the-line would cripple both pirates on its first pass, yet the ship-of-the-line is not only destroyed instantly, its crew flee's in panic and its magazine then explodes, yet miraculously failing to generate an explosion big enough to destroy the two pirate ships. Pedantic perhaps you might say, "the audience knows no better. Who cares?"

Well I do! In reality the Flying Dutchman was not a warship. No private company ever had the means to maintain a ship-of-the-line, and certainly not a second rate. Pirates never had frigates and seldom even a crew big enough to fight a frigate (to fight a frigate you needed at least 200 men), and worst of all two frigates could never hope to tackle a second rate ship-of-the-line and if by some miracle they did manage to ignite the powder magazine on such a war ship the resulting explosion would instantly obliterate all three ships.

Apart from that the film was great. Cap'n Jack FTW!!!



Incidently and sligtly related. Oleg and I ran some Napoleonic naval skirmish battles on thursday and both were interesting. The first battle saw the British win by firing one volley. Thats all it took to defeat the French admiral and cause the rest of the French fleet to flee. Our fastest war game ever.

The second battle was a more prolonged event which featured multiple ships-of-the-line, including a French first rate. Both sides had 2 sloops, 5 frigates and then a line of battle. The British had four ships and the French had three. The French first rate however proved to be an absolute combat monster. With three superior batteries and two flanking ships-of-the-line each adding a battery, the French despite being one ship down, out gunned the British by 5 batteries to 4. If anything this game helped to increase my outrage at the miserable sight of two pirate ships tackling a ship-of-the-line.

Treasure Island

By RL Stevenson.

The greatest pirate story of them all, I had to read it. It was getting annoying that I hadn't for I am a big fan of pirates and other morally dubious characters. I've had a lot of time recently for (big surprise) we've been ill all week with a confusing cocktail of colds, coughs and chest pains. No throwing up this week though.

Its a good story and I can see that if I'd read it as a child it would have gripped me as 'The Hobbit' once did. Alas, now I am older and stagnating, I found it quite difficult to read. Worryingly, I actually found it difficult to slow my mind down enough to get to grips with the story. I've never had such a problem before. I've always found good books easy to read. This time however, the flow of words just didn't want to settle down and I rode white water from start to finish.

Still enjoyed it though, especially the piratical dialogue and I noted a lot of the phrases were familiar because they had been stolen word for word for Roman Polanski's film 'Pirates'.