In February 1744 the War of Jenkins’s Ear over British trading opportunities in Spanish America, hitherto confined at sea to Great Britain versus. Spain, blended into the existing (since December 1740) War of the Austrian Succession, over the disposition of Habsburg territories, with a French declaration of war on Great Britain. All the Seas of the World sheds new light on all aspects of the naval operations of the Spanish, British, and French navies in all theaters of the war which lasted from October 1739 to October 1748. Volume 1 covered naval battles and campaigns from 1739 to 1745 in the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel, Mediterranean, and the Pacific Ocean, and from 1739 to 1743 in the West Indies. Volume 2 treats the remainder of the war in the Atlantic and Mediterranean; French, Spanish, and British naval operations in the Caribbean, 1744–48, and operations in the Indian Ocean, the first time that two European powers had engaged in naval battles there (in the previous War of the Spanish Succession, the French and British trading companies had arranged a local truce).
Notable single-ship actions as well as the campaigns of fleets and squadrons are treated in detail, with full orders of battle for all engagements as well as some campaigns that ended without fighting. The study exposes errors in previous accounts based on only one side’s documents, including convoys and fleets that never existed, overestimates and exaggerations of opposing forces and casualties, and misunderstandings of enemy plans and intentions. Use of a wide range of sources reveals naval campaigns omitted from previous literature, such as the continued success of the Spanish campaign in 1746 and 1747 to supply their forces in Italy by sea despite British interdiction attempts, the abortive French ‘first squadron’ in the Indian Ocean, and the Dutch mobilization to prevent a French invasion of the islands of the province of Zeeland.
Volume 2 includes 30 maps showing long-range fleet and squadron movements and the maneuvers of individual ships in fleet, squadron, and single-ship actions, many of them never previously charted. Over 100 tables list the ships assigned to fleets, stations, and squadrons or present at major battles, compare the size and strength of potential or actual opposing forces, list operations or movements over time, or provide detailed information about the ships taking part in notable battles. A three-panel table lists for the first time all of the trans-Atlantic French convoys that were frequently the objects of British cruises and attacks in an eighteenth-century ‘Battle of the Atlantic’.
Albert Parker earned his PhD in history at Washington University, St Louis, Missouri. During a career as a sample survey research professional, he pursued naval history as an avocation. He has been investigating the naval campaigns of 1739–48 for over 20 years. He is also the author of essays on Bourbon seaborne support for the 1745 Jacobite uprising in Scotland and on Spanish naval operations, 1732–1750 that will be published in forthcoming Helion collections, and of a pending study of naval operations in the Russo-Swedish War of 1741–43.
