Editor’s Foreword This Trafalgar Chronicle, whose focus is very much on those two historic and heroic corps, the Royal Marines and the United States Marine Corps, will I trust, meet the reader’s expectation of new research and new images about the men and women, and the navies – and marines – of the age of sail. Following the international motif of the Trafalgar Chronicle, I am pleased to report that half of the writers are from overseas, mostly from North America. Naturally, much of the action which is narrated takes place at sea or abroad, and, in this edition, this means in North America, during what in Britain was called the American Wars. Contributors include members of The 1805 Club, distinguished historians from across the world, and enthusiasts writing and being published for the first time. I especially welcome as readers members of the Royal Marines Historical Society who may be seeing the Trafalgar Chronicle for the first time, and the large number of new readers in North America to whom the Trafalgar Chronicle is available through the United States Naval Institute Press. Tony Bruce opens the core of this edition with a detailed description of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a victory for British marines, but a battle so wellfought that many Americans count it as a battle honour. Charles Neimeyer and ‘JB’ Armstrong outline some of the earliest actions of the USMC and the USN, and Britt Zerbe tells us of the marines’ role at the Battle of Trafalgar. Two of this year’s contributors, Allan Adair and Thomas Fremantle, have ancestors who fought at Trafalgar, and a third contribution is a rare survival of a memoir by a Royal Marine, Stephen Humphries, who also fought at Trafalgar. Humphries’ memoir contrasts with John Rawlinson’s life, told through pictures, of an almost contemporaneous marine officer. The Royal Marines were so successful that they were formed into battalions who fought in the Peninsular War and the War of 1812, as Bob Sutcliffe and Alex Craig show the reader. Many readers will know of references in literature to the Sea Fencibles and others will have read about ‘blue colonels’, naval officers who held commissions in the Marines: here 8
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