Nautical Research Journal
partnership with Wikipedia to help update them at
https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/ Vwsswla_xii.pdf (i through xii). If you have the ability to merge all twelve fi les into a single pdf, you can search the combined pdf easily on your computer with an appropriate version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar pdf soſt ware. I have found this very useful for sorting out the identities of other Royal Navy ships that accompanied my ship. Beware of duplicate entries!
Pulling your trusty copy of Winfi eld from the bookshelf, you fi nd the following entry for Swiſt on page 282, but are dismayed to learn from the index that there were ten vessels named Swiſt in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy. T is might lead to wasted time at the archives, trying to separate documents for your Swiſt from all those others. (Table 1)
Using Winfi eld’s text for Swiſt , build a timeline like that in Figure 1. Winfi eld suggests the names and sequence of Swiſt ’s commanders, but is very unclear about the precise duration of their commands. On the timeline, this uncertainty is indicated with dashed lines for command tenures. Because you know that information from the Warship Histories ought to be verifi ed from other sources, your timeline is at best a hypothesis about what the history of your Swiſt was really like. Hopefully, your work at TNA will help clarify timeline details.
T e index entries show that for ships named Swiſt , the Royal Navy mostly followed its practice of not having two ships with the same name at the same time. T e only exception here is the 1763-1770 period when both a ship-sloop and a cutter were assigned the name. Winfi eld does not say, but it would be a reasonable hypothesis to suggest that the 4-gun cutter was already named Swiſt when it was purchased for local coastal duty in Great Britain while the ship-sloop, the type vessel for the Swiſt class, was already under construction.
For your research, any contemporary documents dated from roughly mid-1773 through 1778 are likely candidates you should consider for your Swiſt .
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Table 1. Archive websites are your friends
To get the most out of your time at the archives, skill using their websites is essential. T ey are your interfaces to collection contents from both inside and outside the archives. Knowing their general structure, features, contents, and search capabilities
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