Worthless noting

As we have seen, if TFSmith thinks the British are in danger of gaining an advantage, he quickly takes action to correct this. In most cases, this simply involves making a proportion of the British force vanish. For instance, regular British battalions discover urgent commitments at home while both the British and Canadian militia are handwaved into non-existence. Naturally, this technique is also adopted elsewhere: most of a British MP's description of the Army of the Potomac is mysteriously lost, the St Lawrence takes a brief holiday so that Union troops can attack Montreal, and the considerable levels of contemporary racism in the North seem to be missing. However, the Royal Navy is by no means immune to the effects of this phenomenon.


In Chapter 5, part 2 we are given details of the British blockade effort:

For his part, Milne asked for as many as 106 ships, almost all of them smaller types, including as many as 24 frigates, 16 corvettes, 24 sloops, and 32 smaller gunboats and the like. Worth noting is that the Navy List for 1861, including ships in ordinary, named 35 frigates and 57 corvettes and sloops, as well as some 75 smaller ocean-going ships, not including the various ironclads (whether ocean-going or for coastal and harbor defense), sailing ships, or the tiny steam gunboats built for operations in the Baltic and Black seas during the war with Russia.

Please remember that this excerpt is intended to be from a published book, Irene Musicant's 'Contested Waters: A Naval History of the Anglo-American War'. What kind of professional editor would ever allow a sentence fragment like 'worth noting' to go past them? What is worse is that 'worth noting' is quintessential TFSmith- he used the phrase at least 240 times during his brief but active stay on AH.com, and four times in one post in one of his many new homes. The phrase also survived the process of revision to become part of the second version. Does TFSmith really have so little respect for his audience that it would be too much effort to attempt to modify his style when writing as another author?

Being a bad writer is a flaw - and refusing to improve is a worse one - but hardly on a par with the usual level of problems showcased in this blog. A more serious oversight is the decision to dismiss c.150 Crimean War gunboats without a second thought, although in reality they would form the backbone of any blockade. The Royal Navy's considerable number of screw battleships are also overlooked, when a 91-gun two-decker battleship, making 11 knots like the Revenge class or the broadened Caledonias, would be a formidable opponent for even the most powerful Union ship.

Though egregious, these are still not the worst problems contained in this single short paragraph. In fact, TFSmith's figures about the number of British frigates, corvettes and sloops are an outright lie. Nor is it particularly difficult to discover the lie, with access to the December 1861 Navy List. In brief:

• Instead of 35 frigates, there are 47 (an increase of 34%)
• Instead of 57 corvettes and sloops, there are 63 sloops and 33 corvettes: a total of 96, representing an increase of 68% over TFSmith's figures.
• Instead of 75 smaller ocean-going vessels, there are 86 (an increase of 15%). This figure also excludes various tenders, dispatch and survey vessels, tugs, yachts, and mortar vessels, a level of rigour which TFSmith does not apply to his estimates of the Union navy, of which almost undoubtedly more later.

With these accurate figures, the proportion of the Royal Navy engaged in the blockade drops from 70% (corvettes/sloops), 69% (frigates) and 43% (smaller vessels) to 51% (frigates), 42% (corvettes and sloops) and to 37% among smaller vessels.

Even with TFSmith's inflated figures for the blockade's requirements, it is amazing how much more achievable Britain's task becomes when it is set in the context of the truth rather than TFSmith's fabrications.