7 Editor’s Foreword On 23 June 1800, during the USA’s Quasi-War with France, Commodore Thomas Truxton wrote from USS Constellation to George Cross commanding the US frigate JohnAdams: A good understanding with the British Navy officers is highly necessary as we are acting in one common cause against a perfidious enemy, and we should endeavour to cement our union by acts of kindness, civility and friendship to each other on all occasions for it is unquestionably our interest and their interest always so to do. Then in 1859 Rear-Admiral Josiah Tatnall USN, who had fought against the British in the War of 1812, remarked during an incident in the Second Opium War, when he and his sailors voluntarily served British guns against the Chinese, that blood is thicker than water. Blackwood’s magazine responded: ‘Gallant Americans! You and your Admiral did more that day to bind England and the United States together than all your lawyers and pettifogging politicians have ever done to part us!’ For your editor, these two quotations sum up the special relationship which has existed down two centuries between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, a relationship which, as Truxton reminds us, started as soon as the ink dried on the Treaty of Paris in 1783, in the era of the Georgian navy which has been the focus of the Trafalgar Chronicle over its twenty-five years. I therefore have much pleasure in dedicating this edition to North America and North Americans in the era of the Georgian sailing navies. There are two articles about the Star-Spangled Banner – the first time that the flag was seen at sea, and the writing of the words to the US national anthem, another article which challenges accepted wisdom about impressment as the cause of the War of 1812, two about charting under sail, and, as much of what we know about the sailing navy has come down to us via the marine painters of the age, there is a superbly illustrated article about Thomas Buttersworth. Several other articles address the great men
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