Word: spithead
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...finest navy the world had ever known, and its splendor was never more stirringly displayed. The year was 1897, the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and the Royal Navy assembled at Spithead, off Portsmouth, for review. Decks scrubbed white, brasswork gleaming, wheelhouse glass sparkling, the ships stretched along the coast in four lines seven miles long. There were 173 in all, including more than 50 battleships. At the same time, 160 other units of the Queen's Grand Fleet were on patrol in every sea in the world...
James Dugan's fine, wry, if somewhat overlong story re-creates the greatest mass mutiny in maritime history. It began in the Channel fleet stoppering Brest, spread like an infection through the anchorages at Spithead and the Nore, up to the North Sea and down 6,000 miles to ships lying off the Cape of Good Hope. Before it sputtered out, the mutineers numbered 50,000, controlled more than 100 vessels, blockaded London, and laid their country naked to her foes. Dugan's scrupulously unemotional narrative does not conceal his conviction that the mutinous seamen were right...
...against such intolerable conditions that the seamen struck. Better pay and decent food, shore leave, protection against brutality-these were among the modest demands of men who continued to show their deposed officers elaborate courtesy and swore unshakable fidelity to the Crown. After token conciliation at Spithead, the government set its chin. In the Nore anchorage at the Thames mouth, a troubled old admiral named Charles Buckner listened with some sympathy to the complaints presented by the elected "president" of the mutineers, Richard Parker, the son of a grain merchant who had once been an officer himself but got cashiered...
...Crate over Spithead...
Thirty-six years ago, as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, I saw the "mad major" test an incredible looking crate called a triplane- three wings, one below the other-top wing long, second shorter, third shortest. About 10,000 feet up over Spithead (the strip of water separating the mainland from the Isle of Wight) he made that crate do every trick . . . then put it in a dive and on the way down executed three close loops-one after the other...