Women's close connection with textiles in the medieval West, as spinners, weavers, wearers, and bearers of fabric, was underpinned by a theological association between the feminine and the sensory. This connection was established in the earliest days of Christianity, and, in turn, Christianity located the roots of this tradition in the origins of the world: in Genesis’ portrayal of the archetypal female sinner, Eve. The quintessential Christian model of female transgression (or, even, of transgression as female), Eve was consistently used throughout the Late Antique and medieval periods to perpetuate a pejorative conception of women as what Constance Classen so succinctly and astutely describes in the epigraph to this chapter as ‘all body, all feeling’, a conception that flourished in opposition to the celebration of masculinity as ‘inherently rational’. The senses and sensory interpretation, as exemplified by Eve, led mankind towards transgression and sin. From within this misogynistic and restrictive framework, however, can be found the seeds of potential for another tradition: one that recognised that these sensory faculties could be used for the purposes of spiritual interpretation and enlightenment. And, time and time again, we find textiles and clothwork at the centre of this tradition.

The image of Eve as a clothworker is prevalent in, and even ubiquitous to, Christian art from the medieval period. Indeed, as Brian Murdoch explains, ‘Typically a biblical sequence might have the creation of the world, of Adam, of Eve from Adam's side, Adam naming the beasts, the temptation by the serpent, the expulsion, and then Adam and Eve at work, Adam digging the ground (as in Gen. 3: 23) and Eve with a distaff.’ We continually find images of Eve spinning incorporated within the Genesis narrative in medieval manuscript illuminations and Church artwork, and the roots of this iconography can, in fact, be traced back to early Christian art. The sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (d. 359), for example, in the crypt of St Peter's in the Vatican is carved with a depiction of God sending Adam to harvest the land, and Eve to spin wool (see Figure 1).

At the beginning of the 1930s the Mediterranean Fleet, Great Britain's premier naval force, was still operating in the atmosphere of what would soon seem to have been the halcyon days of the 1920s. The fleet in many of its training and exercises seemed to be preparing for a repetition of Jutland with squadrons of heavy warships and massed destroyer flotillas engaged against their enemy counterparts. At the same time, the Navy was endeavouring to integrate new weapons, notably aircraft, into its battle practices. It was, however, a period of world depression and the financial stringency was felt in the fleet, particularly in deferred spending on the defences of the bases of Malta and Gibraltar. It would be difficult to remedy these deficiencies. The world situation was also changing. In 1931 the Japanese, a former ally, embarked on aggressive expansion and in subsequent years became an apparent threat to the British position in the Far East. In the event of war with Japan, the Mediterranean Fleet was designated to move to the Far East. In 1932 the ‘Ten Year Rule’ – that Britain would not face a major war within ten years – was abandoned. In 1933 Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany and began policies that would lead to war in less than a decade. The technological progress of aviation also cast a growing uncertainty over traditional naval operations: how well were warships equipped to meet the new threat?

The first major crisis came in 1935 with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, a member of the League of Nations. There was a very real possibility the Mediterranean Fleet would be engaged in hostilities against the Italians in support of League policies. The lasting effect of the crisis was that Italy went from being a traditional friend to a potential enemy. This had enormous consequences for the Mediterranean Fleet because of Italy's central position in the Mediterranean. The principal base of the Mediterranean Fleet at Malta was now in easy striking distance of the Italian air force. While the exact effectiveness of air power was still uncertain, and possibly underestimated, the potential danger to a fleet caught at anchor in harbour was apparent and the Mediterranean Fleet for the duration of the crisis shifted its major base far eastward to Alexandria.

It can be argued that the ‘great days’ of naval warfare, encounters between battle fleets, in the Mediterranean were over for good when our story opens in October 1943; it saw the close of two centuries of major warship engagements, culminating in Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham's command of the Mediterranean Fleet between June 1939 and March 1942, with its high peaks of Taranto (November 1940) and Matapan (March 1941). His leadership of a battle fleet from Alexandria against the size-able and balanced Italian fleet was paralleled by the command of Force H from Gibraltar by his friend and contemporary Admiral Sir James Somer-ville (June 1940 to February 1942). In our period the only capital ships in the middle sea were superannuated dreadnoughts of British, American and French navies (used solely for bombardment of shore targets), for the Italian fleet was, in the words of Cunningham's famous signal, ‘under the guns of the fortress of Malta’; it was defeated, much of it was disarmed and reduced to a care-and-maintenance basis, and a handful of its light forces supplemented those of the Allies in the continuing fight against the Germans. It was, though, a diplomatic football, as President Franklin Roosevelt, eager to establish good relations with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, ahead of post-war diplomatic arrangements, had promised rashly to hand over one-third of the Italian fleet to the Soviet navy. He appears to have done this without adequate consultation with Prime Minister Churchill or the Combined Chiefs of Staff; much time and effort was spent trying to row back from this over-hasty commitment [187, 190–91, 194, 201]. In the event, the Soviets were fobbed off with obsolete British and American vessels, pending the end of hostilities worldwide; the Russians received Italian vessels after 1945. Roosevelt's cavalier offer did not take into account Italian pique at the proposed transfer without their consent, the current co-operation of the Italian Navy, the use of its light forces and its dockyards and its mercantile marine, nor the unsuitability of vessels designed for the Mediterranean for service in the Soviet Arctic.

The modern battleships and aircraft carriers may have departed many months before this story opens and there may have been no actions between surface ships in the last eighteen months of the Mediterranean war but it is not to say that the naval contribution to the fighting was not considerable.

Part of the tale of the three spindles, Solomon's prophecy in Malory's ‘Tale of the Sankgreal’ looks to the coming of the Virgin Mary as the hallowed woman who can redress and make amends for the sins of womankind. Framed by the King's lamentations of marriage to an ‘evil wife’, the inheritor of Eve in more ways than one, the prophecy alludes to a much wider phenomenon in Christian theology. Far from unique to Malory's Grail Quest, the typological juxtaposition of the first woman with the Holy Virgin has long been, and continues to be, ubiquitous to Christian writing. Scholars have long noted, for example, what Gibson refers to as the ‘Eve-Ave reversal’,3 explained so eloquently in the fifteenth-century Middle English lyric poem ‘Heyl, levedy, se-stoerre bryht’:

In name and deed, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary quite literally reversed the sins of Eve. Most significantly, as the lyric illustrates, this reversal began at the Annunciation, the moment of Christ's conception. This moment, the miracle of the Incarnation, is the primary focus of this chapter. We persistently find this alignment of Ave and Eva, Mary and Eve, centred on the Incarnation within the corpus of medieval English Marian literature, as the Virgin follows her predecessor as a clothworker in birthing Christ. Clothwork becomes another alternate exegetical hermeneutic, a means of reading and interpreting Christ's incarnate body, as Mary spins and knits, sews and weaves, her son's flesh.

Humpty Dumpty and Alice's discussion about the meaning of words in Lewis Carroll's 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass illustrates a fundamental issue with defining concepts: words can mean several things to different people, and different things to the same people. Variance in time, language, place, religion and cosmological outlook makes this even harder. How, then, can something as broad as ‘divination’ be defined when it has meant different things to different people in different times and places? ‘Onomancy’, too, is hard to define and categorise since it is a Renaissance term projected backwards onto medieval material – as far as can be discerned, there was no medieval word for number–letter divination, even if compilers and scribes copied different onomantic devices together, seeing a link between them.

To illustrate the problem at hand, if you posed the question ‘what is divination and how is it different from magic, astrology, science and religion?’ to a member of ancient Greek society in the fifth century BCE, they might well be puzzled at the idea that divination was somehow separate from religion, because consulting the oracle at Delphi was how people communicated with the gods – divination was an integral part of state religion. Augustine, in fourth-century CE North Africa, would probably say there was no fundamental difference between divination, astrology and magic, and that all three were antithetical to his own religion – Christianity – since they all essentially operated via the power of demons, although there might be exceptions. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, would be very clear on the distinctions between divination on the one hand, which was antithetical to his religion, and astrology used for certain purposes such as weather prediction or medical prognosis on the other, which was a branch of science (natural philosophy). If you stopped someone in the street in London in 2023 and asked them, they might well say that all four categories – religion, magic, astrology and divination – belong in the realm of superstition, and are antithetical to the category of ‘science’.

The date of this document is after the agreement mentioned between General Maitland and Toussaint, which was concluded in 1798. (It is filed at the National Maritime Museum in the Duckworth documents of 1794.) It appears to be a bureaucratic discussion paper concerning the trading conditions between Britain and Jamaica on one side, St Domingo as an independent state on the second, and the United States on the third. The date must therefore be between 1798 and 1802, when the French expedition arrived to attempt to reconquer the former colony. It was a problem which Duckworth as commander-in-chief had to cope with when he first arrived at Jamaica, and for several years afterwards, and this must explain its presence in his documents.

[DUC/2]

[Undated]

The intercourse at present permitted to American vessels with the British colonies in the West Indies is not under the sanction of any law passed for that purpose, but under the authority of the King in Council, and an Act of Parliament passed annually to indemnify all those officers of the Crown who are acting under the same.

The trade permitted to American vessels with the British colonies is to import to them articles the growth or produce of America only, not being manufactures, and to export from the said colonies the produce of them only, excepting dyewoods, mahogany and cotton, which being articles essential to the British manufacturies, are restricted from being sent elsewhere.

Considering America, with relation to St Domingo and the trade about to be opened, between that country, Great Britain and Jamaica, in which America is to partake, the strongest reasons present themselves for America becoming shortly professed thereof, nearly to the exclusion of Great Britain and her colonies.

American vessels navigate at about one half less expense than Brit-ish vessels, and as no restriction can be lain upon their vessels, as to the articles to be by them imported into St Domingo, they will carry the different manufactures of German linen obtained at Hamburgh, (which are more acceptable to the French than goods of British manufacture). These they will carry to St Domingo upon such terms as to undersell the British merchants, importing these articles even direct from Great Britain, and to the exclusion of the English manufactures in a certain degree.

Most histories of the Royal Navy, those of the Navy Records Society included, concentrate on the service's wartime activities. This volume does not. Rather, it is centred upon a man who never participated in combat operations during his sixty-year naval career. For an officer during the period 1650–1815, or 1900–1945, this would have been an extraordinary achievement. For Alexander Milne and his contemporaries too young to have served during the Napoleonic Wars, it was the rule, rather than the exception.

In turn, Milne's service career serves as a microcosm for the Navy during the years 1815–1900, often dubbed the Pax Britannica by diplomatic historians. This period witnessed the wholesale transformation of the Navy's materiel, and of many other facets, personnel and administration among them. Those portions of its history have received substantial historical scrutiny, especially in recent years. What the Navy did with its ships and men, however, has attracted much less attention. This volume seeks to address that lacuna.

During the wars of the long eighteenth century, the British government used naval power in ways that repeatedly antagonised not only enemies but neutral states as well. The ‘Rule of 1756’, which prohibited wartime transport of goods to destinations by parties barred from doing so in peacetime, and Britain's unilateral policy regarding visit and search of neutral vessels on the high seas had been major factors in the formation of leagues of armed neutrality in 1780–81 and 1800–1801, and, along with impressment, were among the casus belli of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the Royal Navy was as large as the rest of the world's navies combined and, had it chosen, Britain could have continued to use its power in similarly highhanded fashion. It did not, although the initial omens were hardly encouraging.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, as in previous conflicts, British naval power had been employed in combined operations to seize enemy possessions overseas. At the Congress of Vienna the British delegation unilaterally barred any discussion of restitution. Were colonies to be returned to their former rulers, the British alone would make the decision. And, given the Royal Navy's hegemonic position, there was nothing any other European power could do about this fait accompli other than impotently to resent it.

Vice-Admiral Sir Dudley North (1881–1961) was appointed Flag Officer Commanding North Atlantic Station, based on Gibraltar, on 1 November 1939, and had his appointment extended in May 1940, being promoted to full Admiral. On 15 October 1940 (though the changeover was delayed until 14 December), the Admiralty relieved him early, alleging that he had permitted the free passage of a French squadron through the Strait of Gibraltar on 11 September 1940; as a consequence the Board had lost confidence in him, accusing him of not performing his duty and of failing to show a sense of initiative. He retired on 25 December 1941. North rejected the reasons advanced by the Admiralty for his early relief and requested a Court Martial or a Court of Enquiry on several occasions; he spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name, being supported by most of the living Admirals of the Fleet and several other senior officers. Through his efforts and theirs he achieved partial absolution from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, in 1957. After leaving Gibraltar and later the Royal Navy, North served humbly in the Home Guard before being recalled in 1943, as a retired officer, as Flag Officer Yarmouth. In 1946 King George VI re-appointed him Admiral of the Royal Yachts, a post he had held between 1936 and 1939.

The immediate cause of North's early relief was the unmolested passage of three French cruisers and three large destroyers from Toulon to Dakar via the Strait of Gibraltar on 11 September 1940. North had incurred already the wrath of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the First Lord (A. V. Alexander) and the First Sea Lord (Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound) for his critical views – expressed after the event – on the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 by Force H, commanded by his great friend Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville and also based on Gibraltar [1, 2]. He was reprimanded by the Board of Admiralty for protesting officially about a decision already taken but Pound resisted calls for his replacement from Churchill and Alexander, feeling that there were insufficient grounds for his relief and that he deserved a second chance [3, 8, 9]. Though he did not realise it, North therefore remained in post throughout the summer of 1940 pending another error of judgement.