by David West | May 6, 2026 | News
On the 6th of May, 1801, Captain Thomas Cochrane in the 14-gun HMS Speedy captured the 32-gun Spanish frigate El Gamo. Thomas Cochrane (1775–1860) was one of the most audacious and controversial naval commanders of the age of sail, a man whose exploits during the...
by David West | May 5, 2026 | News
On the 5th of May, 1260, Kublai Khan became ruler of the Mongul Empire. Kublai Khan (1215–1294) was one of the most formidable rulers in world history, a man who transformed the vast, mobile conquests of the Mongols into a structured imperial state and became the...
by David West | May 4, 2026 | News
On the 4th of May, 1436, the Swedish rebel Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson was assassinated. My mother was a fan of Englebert Humperdink, but I know little about Englebrekt. I have posted about my Danish DNA, but I don’t have any from Sweden. Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson was a...
by David West | May 3, 2026 | News
The birthday of Henri Pitot on the 3rd of May, 1695, has caught my attention today. That’s for two reasons. I was a civil engineer and so was he. I have written about my passion for aviation, and he invented the Pitot tube which is how you measure an aircraft’s...
by David West | May 2, 2026 | News
We take GPS for granted now, don’t we? I haven’t used a paper map in the car for, probably, decades? We have paper charts on our boat for planning purposes, but Admiralty charts are no longer available to purchase in paper form. It was on the 2nd of May, 2000, that...
