Sublime

"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in. war." — Admiral Hyman G. Rickover | 1986

‘Now, gentlemen, this is a delicate business: we must not offend the Company’s officers, and some of them are very touchy – the least sense of ill-feeling would be disastrous. The men must be made to understand that thoroughly: no pride, no distance, no reference to tea-waggons, or how we do things in the Navy. Our one aim must be to keep their

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and now his name had been brayed out in public – not even in the comparative privacy of the Board, but in a far more miscellaneous gathering – with the question openly directed at the chief of naval intelligence. It was unqualifiable. To rely on the discretion of these sailors whose only notion of dealing with an enemy as cunning as Bonaparte was

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Author John Shedd on taking risks:

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.”

if ever this war is to be won, it must be won at sea. Bonaparte has about forty-five ships of the line, and we have eighty-odd, which sounds well enough. But ours are scattered all over the world and his are not. Then again the Spaniards have twenty-seven, to say nothing of the Dutch; so it is essential to prevent them from combining, for if

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He looked hard over the sea at the distant corvette: she vanished in a drift of rain, and he shifted his gaze to the two-decker. What was in Linois’s mind? He was running east-south-east under easy sail: topsails, forecourse clewed up. One thing Jack was certain of was, that Linois was infinitely more concerned with catching the China fleet than

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