From 1923 onwards, the Mediterranean fleet was the major naval force under British control. In the North Sea the elimination of the German navy in 1918–1919, by the surrender and scuttling of its ships, had cleared the sea of the most serious enemy; in the Far East there was apprehension at the growth of both Japan's and the United States’ naval power, though these two tended to cancel each other out, being mutually hostile; the naval base at Singapore formed the basis for British power in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. These two regions, therefore, were not held, in naval terms, very strongly, and their reserve strength was the Mediterranean fleet. Positioned as it was, its ships could sail quickly into the Atlantic and British waters, or reinforce the Indian Ocean and the Far East. The Rock of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal were therefore seen even more than before as essential imperial maritime links, and Malta was the main naval base.

In order for the Mediterranean fleet to be of use in a crisis, it had to be large, well-trained, and fully equipped. It was put through constant exercises, in many parts of the sea, and kept up-to-date in equipment so far as possible. It received the reinforcement of aircraft carriers from the beginning; the original carrier, Argus, was already being used in the Russian and Turkish troubles in 1921–1923, and the fleet received as its commanders the most capable admirals. But as the political situation developed, especially after 1930, its clear maritime advantage of the 1920s gradually eroded.

This was the classic age of the Mediterranean fleet. Sailors and officers were professionals, the disciplinary regime was benign, sailors received regular leave, and were rotated into different ships and through regular educational and retraining programmes. There were annual visits by parts of the fleet to places all around the sea – Greece and Turkey were favourites, though France and Yugoslavia and Italy were included; the visits were social occasions as much as exercises, promoting good international relations, at least supposedly (but they were also exercises in intelligence gathering). The ships were polished and painted to impress, but exercised in evolutions, firing practice, and navigation as well. Plans were developed to cope with possible naval operations. For ten years or so after 1923 the fleet rode the Mediterranean unchallenged and with vast confidence.

The return of Minorca to British control in 1763 restored the geopolitical position of Britain in the Mediterranean only superficially. The wide British triumph in the Seven Years’ War stimulated further dislike among its European rivals. Both France and Spain busily developed their navies during the subsequent peace with the clear intention of seeking revenge for defeat, the Dutch retreated even more determinedly into neutrality, and other states – Prussia, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Austria – were deeply disturbed by the new power which Britain now appeared to wield.

They did not really need to worry, for that power was as fragile as that of any other suddenly prominent state. The military triumph in North America was followed by an assault on long-cherished local autonomies in the British colonies. The dispute began as soon as the war ended with quarrels over taxes on sugar and molasses, and developed through disputes and arguments into riots and overt threats, aggressiveness on both sides and eventually into fighting, beginning at Boston in 1775. The newly expanded British Empire was thus shown to be as hollow as any other – indeed more so than most - and this provided the opportunity for Britain's European enemies to bring down the sudden giant.

The approach to a wider conflict was, as usual, slow and indirect. The fighting in North America – the American Rebellion, or the War of Independence – had been going on for three years before the French made a decisive move into belligerency, though clandestine and not so clandestine help had gone to the American rebels from the start, both officially and privately. That is to say, the war crept up on its future participants in irregular, incremental stages, with neutrality cloaking careful moves to achieve an early advantage. French ships were at sea, cruising to protect American shipping for a year before France went to formal war. It was therefore no surprise to the British government when formal war finally began in February 1778. As France became increasingly hostile between 1775 and 1778 the usual precautions had to be taken – line-of-battle ship squadrons in the Channel, blockades, reinforcements sent to the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean is one of those seas which is instantly familiar to every European who has had any sort of education or has been on holiday. Its shape, its weather, its food, its waters, its beaches, are all as familiar to any European as his and her own homeland. Not only that, but it has long been one of the most important strategic regions of the world, a region of warfare from its earliest mention in history. Control of the Mediterranean has long been one of the keys to world power – as it still is; and that was one of the keys to the development and maintenance of the British Empire. This sea is the scene of this book, but there are certain additional points which must be made at the start.

The instrument of power used by the British in the Mediterranean was always the Royal Navy. For a century and a half from the defeat of Napoleon that force dominated the sea, and for three centuries before that English, then British, sea power was an intermittent intruder into the complex conflicts and relationships of the sea's other powers. The purpose of this account is therefore to consider the extent, the purpose, and the vicissitudes of British naval power in the Mediterranean. But it is first necessary to understand some of the geography of the sea and to modify to some extent the general understanding of that geography.

The geography of the Mediterranean is complex and intricate; it is an area of bays and gulfs, islands and peninsulas and subordinate seas, narrow passages and straits. It is well over 2000 miles long from west to east, but from north to south it varies from 600 miles between the heel of Italy and the Libyan coast of the Gulf of Sirte, to only sixty miles between eastern Sicily and Cape Bon. It is also much subdivided into distinct sections. Starting from the east there is the Eastern Basin, an open sea with only one island – Cyprus – which stretches from Syria and Egypt to the Sicilian Narrows, where Sicily and Malta and Tunisia compete for strategic importance and to control those narrows.

In the last year and a half of Hitler's War the Mediterranean theatre was steadily downgraded in importance. The U-boats withdrew late in 1944, and by the time of the German surrender in Italy on 2 May 1945 the only active naval operations were in the northern end of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Genoa, and the Aegean, where some small German ships were able to operate for short periods before being found and usually sunk. The demands of the Normandy and North Sea campaigns from early 1944 pulled most British naval strength to those areas; then the need to finish off Japan quickly took the main British naval strength to the Pacific.

The Mediterranean was thus a quiet area in the greater scheme of things in the last year of the fighting, but then a series of specifically Mediterranean problems developed and brought the Royal Navy back to the sea. These issues were largely concentrated in the eastern part of the sea – in effect, they were the continuation of, or relics of, the Eastern Question and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire - and their resolution compelled the navy eventually to retire from the region. There were three main problem areas – Greece, Palestine, and Egypt – and several minor ones – Trieste and Libya, for example – and over all these came the gradual realisation that the navy no longer had the power to impose itself on events, though the attempt was usually made. That is, the navy still carried with it the attitude which had made it so powerful before 1939, but it did not have the political support at home. Its role was now taken up by the United States Navy, after a time at least, and to its admirals the Royal Navy was only a minor, if rather annoying, ally. For ten years the two navies jockeyed for influence; the larger, as usual, won.

Civil warfare in Greece involved British forces from December 1944. This was both an outcome of the German and Italian conquest in 1941 and their subsequent occupation of the country and a precursor for the British of the end of their power in the Mediterranean.

That the Ottoman navy during most of the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century had clear dominance of the eastern Mediterranean was through possession of the surrounding coastline and many of the islands in that region. This provided the galley squadrons of the Ottoman navy with an endless choice of local ports, so negating the normal disadvantage of the galley, that of having a reach restricted by the availability of friendly replenishing ports. Conversely, enemy galleys were prevented from carrying out plundering raids within the greater part of this region through their own lack of a supply port that would permit the taking on of water and other supplies. This dominance primarily took effect from around 1517 when the coastline surrounding the eastern Mediterranean came fully into the possession of the Ottomans, a result of the successful conquest of Egypt and the Levant, territories previously held by the Mamluk sultanate. In turn, most of the islands in the eastern bay of the Mediterranean, and not already in possession of the Ottomans, were captured, with Rhodes falling into their hands in 1523. This was an important acquisition, the island having been used by the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John in a long drawn out sea war against the Ottomans legitimised under the concept of a perpetual crusade. The Knights, a corporately financed international force with a small but highly efficient navy, through possession of Rhodes had been a danger to all Ottoman ships entering the Mediterranean. In 1570, Cyprus had also been successfully captured, but an attempt to conquer Malta in 1565, the new home of the Knights of St John, failed after a four-month siege. While the taking of Rhodes and Cyprus had been made possible through their proximity to existing Ottoman territory, and so within easy range of a galley fleet carrying an invading military force, Malta proved more difficult, as, in lying outside the protected eastern bay of the Mediterranean, it was also much closer to enemy ports from which a counter-expedition under the auspices of the Papacy could be mounted.

A fundamental problem confronting the major Islamic powers in the development of an effective navy during the age of fighting sail was that of having fully embraced the idea of land being the source of all wealth. Here, reference is made to the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires, all three failing to develop a maritime-based leadership that fully understood how a navy could work on equal terms with a land-based army to achieve long-term overall objectives. For the Mughals, the value of the navy never went beyond its use as a tool to counter threats posed by enemies within the coastal waters that bordered its territorial land mass, while frequently calling upon the more maritime-proficient European trading companies to bolster their own maritime forces. As for the Persians, a period of naval expansion under Nādir Shah never saw his fleet venturing outside of the Gulf and, through heavy dependence upon ethnic Arabs to man his ships, he was too reliant upon those of no immediate affinity to the Persian state over which he ruled.

The Ottomans, in creating, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, a large fleet of warships fully dependent on sail, were slow to integrate into this fleet essential elements of organisation, training and management that had been successfully developed outside of the Islamic world. Through the conservative elite that dominated the Divan-ı Humayun and other influential bodies, a distancing from the Christian west had been maintained, resulting in a failure to detect some of the more important advances, but especially those within the more hidden areas of naval administration. This, quite naturally, disadvantaged the Ottoman navy when it came into conflict with navies making greater use of such developments, with new ways of thinking only apparent when crisis in battle prompted a need to bring about improvement. The very moves that led to the Ottomans embracing large sail-powered warships, a fatwa of 1650 and the naval kanun of 1701, were both a reaction to significant naval failings in a series of wars against Venice and her allies fought at sea.

A major defeat of the Ottoman navy at Çeşme certainly energised those who recognised a need to reform the navy, but the pace of reform was tediously slow and continued to be subjected to constant opposition.

The Crimean War highlighted many of the new conditions in which the British navy operated, but developments soon after the war produced much more crucial changes. In the Crimean War, considerable numbers of ships in both the British and French fleets were powered by steam, though many of these were small paddle steamers which were used as handmaids of the traditional windpowered line-of-battle ships, pulling them into position or into and out of harbour. The next stage in this development, the replacement of paddle power by screw propulsion, had begun, though it was going to be some time before the biggest ships used such power. The paddle steamers had proved to be all too vulnerable to enemy fire, their paddle wheels being very exposed; the screw ships had greater speed and potentially more power and manoeuvrability.

In 1853 Admiral Dundas had sent his messages from Malta to London, first by ship to Marseilles, whence they were sent by telegraph to London. By 1855 cable telegraphy had reached Constantinople and the Crimea, and the admirals found that orders could be sent to them directly from their governments. Napoleon III was notoriously liable to second-guess his commanders, effectively stifling their initiative, unless, like General Pelissier, they were tough-minded enough to ignore him. The British government does not seem to have been quite so interfering, though the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, had a distinct tendency that way.

These changes – steam power, telegraph, iron ships – tend to be regarded as violently altering naval affairs, but in fact they were the culminating developments of a long line of gradual changes. It took over a century to get from the first small fragile steamships to oil-powered battleships like the Dreadnought; in other words, the speed of change was fairly gradual, and it followed on from continuing changes in ship construction, improvements in the sail plan, better charts and navigation, more accurate means of communication, and copper-sheathing, which had characterised the eighteenth century. The engine for these changes was, of course, the never-ending competition of repeated warfare, and that was also something which continued.

The Ottomans were able to prevent the Portuguese gaining a secure position in the Red Sea, but their failure to develop a deep-water navy capable of operating in the wider Indian Ocean, or a navy to operate in the Persian Gulf, left the Portuguese in a general position of strength. Only at Basra did the Ottomans possess a naval port that gave them direct access into the Persian Gulf, this through taking possession of this port in the early sixteenth century following the conquest of Baghdad. With the Portuguese at that time holding and fortifying several of the islands at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, including Kish, Kishm (Qeshm) and Hormuz, this effectively prevented the Ottomans making full use of Basra as a naval base. Piri Reis, in an expedition that set out from Suez in 1551 with a force of thirty galleys, while managing the capture of Kish, was unsuccessful in an attempt on Hormuz, unable to take the fortress that gave protection to the harbour and the Portuguese warships stationed there. In sailing on to Basra, where he anchored, Piri subsequently lost part of his fleet when it was attacked by pursuing Portuguese warships, Piri eluding capture by taking just three of his galleys, and the plunder they carried, back into the Red Sea, but losing one further vessel before reaching Suez. His reward for abandoning his fleet, and giving priority to the safety of the plunder he had taken during the campaign, was his arrest and, under order of Suleiman I, beheading. A subsequent attempt by Sidi Ali Reis to return the surviving ships of Piri's fleet, after battle-damaged repairs had been undertaken at Basra, met with further losses, when it was out-fought by a Portuguese fleet off Hormuz before entering the Indian Ocean, and virtual destruction when it headed into a hurricane and was driven onto the shores of Gujarat.

Starting in November 1804, the administration of the Ottoman state navy was completely reorganised by Selim III through the introduction of a series of wide-sweeping reforms that really began to tackle the institutionalised systemic failings that had bedevilled the Ottoman navy from the very onset of the age of fighting sail. In doing so, he also ruffled the feathers of an entrenched elite, those who had long benefited from a system that had allowed them to profit from the old ways of doing things. Both those within the civilian departments (purchasing, procurement and shipbuilding) and those who held rank at sea had developed various ways to ensure personal lucrative advantages from the managerial positions they held. It was before these reforms could bite, however, that Selim was removed from office, with those primarily responsible for his overthrow opposed to a generality of modernising reforms that were far from restricted to the navy.

It was the janissaries, the premier units of infantry recruited under the devşirme system, who took the lead in trying to bring an end to the reforms, their own concern being the creation of a new-style military force, the Nizam-I credit or New Army, which was trained in Western European military doctrine and practices. The janissaries were totally opposed to such foreign ideas, believing that they diminished soldiering by expecting them to fight as part of a machine rather than to show individual bravery. As within the navy, there was a further factor that fostered their opposition to the Nizam-I credit, that of this military force superseding them, resulting in the janissaries losing the various privileges that they had gained since their formation in the fourteenth century and which now made them a virtual law unto themselves. It was a rebellion led by the janissaries, but supported by other anti-reforming elements, including those within the navy, that forced Selim III to abdicate.

The three British possessions in the Mediterranean – Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu – had all been acquired by the British navy, and the first two were retained primarily for the navy's use. All three were also human communities which were only partly dependent on the British navy for their livelihood. They were composed of people of varied origins, and these were in large part not British in persons or religion or language.

Gibraltar by the end of the Napoleonic wars had been a British possession for over a century. It had suffered several sieges by Spanish (and French) troops, during which most of the people of Spanish origin had been driven out as unreliable, or potentially so. In at least two of the sieges the civilian town had been largely battered into ruin, and then rebuilt. The place was essentially a fort, with the town crouching behind solid fortifications which had stood up to the Spanish bombardments much more successfully than anything in the town. Its people were dependent on imported supplies from Spain, if the border was open and the Spanish government permitted commercial traffic to pass, or from North Africa; in wartime supplies had to come from Britain as well. There was not enough space on the Rock to develop a local indigenous food supply other than some vegetable patches.

Malta was an archipelago of islands – three were inhabited – which contain monuments which predated the development of civilisation anywhere in the world. The population was at least in part descended from the makers of these monuments, a people therefore which had inhabited the islands for at least seven thousand years. They spoke a language of North African origin, much affected by Arabic, which was transliterated into Latin characters in a very awkward way, and they were Roman Catholic in religion. They had, for nearly three centuries, been ruled by the violent crusading order of the Knights of St John of the Hospital, which had developed from a group aiming to assist pilgrims in the Holy Land into an aristocratic coterie of celibate warriors. The Maltese had been unenthusiastic subjects, liable to heavy taxation, conscripted to public works and the galleys, and all too often kidnapped by the enemies of those Knights.

While the galley remained the primary weapon of the ghāzī states during the sixteenth century, this was to quickly change during the following century. Admittedly, if the ghāzī sea warriors had continued to operate from the smaller, secluded coastal bays to which they had been restricted during the early period of their endeavours, then the galley would have continued to dominate their naval arsenals, given that this was the best vessel for navigating the shallower entrances and narrow creeks that characterised those early ports of the Maghreb, used for conducting either a razzia (a plundering raid against Christian coastline territory) or capture of merchant ships. The acquisition of larger harbours during the middle years of the sixteenth century allowed for the establishment of secure deep-water harbours that would also permit a transfer to sailing ships, with their high-sided, deep-draughted hulls.

The adoption of sail by the North African ghāzī states would appear, from evidence put forward by Jamieson and others, to have been fairly rapid. Jamieson indicates that Algeria, home to the greatest number of ghāzīs, was by 1634 harbouring a fleet dominated by sail. He compares the situation with the year 1581, when Algiers possessed some thirty-six galleys and galiots. Similarly, Jamieson indicates that by the 1630s Tunis had a fleet of forty sailing ships, with only five galleys retained, while Salé, at the time of its declared independence, possessed forty to fifty sailing ships. Possibly, in his reference to Algiers, Jamieson is using evidence produced by the French historian Pere Dan who, during a visit to Algiers in 1631, counted in the harbour of Algiers only two galiots and eight galley frigates.

But other evidence would dispute the transition to sail being quite as rapid as is suggested. While there can be no doubt that North American ghāzīs were certainly entering the Atlantic and fully able to do this through the adoption of sail over oar, in the Mediterranean the situation was very different.

In 1744, Britain and France finally went to war officially. They had been sparring ever since the War of Jenkins’ Ear began in 1739, and more seriously since the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe in 1740. An accumulation of events such as the brief fire-fight between Captain Curtis Barnett's squadron and several French ships near Gibraltar, and the British blockade of Toulon – technically a blockade of the Spanish warships which had taken refuge there - had finally brought both countries to a decision for open war. Even so, it was only after a failed French attempt to invade Britain (in peacetime) and a full-scale naval battle between their fleets (also in peacetime) that a final declaration of war was made. That the declaration came from France is scarcely relevant; nor, after all the sniping and hostility of the previous five years, is the actual moment of the declaration of war important. But it was the battle of Toulon which was the real start of their war.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear was only one of a series of separate wars, involving in the end most of Europe, which finally coalesced in 1744 into the general European war. In 1740 Prussia invaded Austrian territory and stole Silesia; in 1741 Sweden attacked Russia, and Austria began fighting Bavaria; Bavaria invited France to come to her assistance, and jointly they attacked Austria; later in the year Spanish troops were landed in Italy (see chapter 5), though Commodore Martin's threat to bombard Naples kept the fighting restricted to the north of the peninsula. Until then the two wars, the Anglo- Spanish and the Austro-Prussian, were more or less separate, with most participants fighting each other but not formally at war – a British army fought a French army at Dettingen in in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) in 1743, getting away with it by being classified as a German army. But the link was finally made early in 1744 when a French invasion of Britain across the Strait of Dover was planned and almost carried out. In March France declared war on Britain and Hanover, in May on Austria; the two wars had at last become one.

The North African coast became the source of a particular set of sea raiders at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Ottoman authority over the provinces of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers established the region as part of the Ottoman Empire by the 1560s, but this scarcely lasted to the end of the century in anything like an effective form. Instead local rulers emerged from the local military/ naval garrisons, with Ottoman pashas appointed to supervise, not always with much effect. These places had been bases for part of the Ottoman naval forces in the sixteenth century, but as the Ottoman imperial presence faded, naval activity in the region emerged as an official piracy. The raiders were called corsairs.

It took rather more than official neglect to drive the development of corsair activity. For one thing the Ottoman naval power was based on galleys, which were, as the Levant Company ships (and others) had by now demonstrated, vulnerable to well-armed sailing ships – and the biggest ships were the biggest prizes. But a new ingredient arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the form of European pirates and privateers who had been infesting Atlantic and Mediterranean waters during the wars with Spain. These were from most of the lands north of Spain – France, the Netherlands, England, even Scotland and Scandinavia – and they were men who had found the privateering life congenial and satisfying, and were keen to continue in it. They had found that peace was not conducive to their activities, and as peace spread over Western Europe – the Franco-Spanish treaty ended one war in 1599, the Anglo-Spanish treaty brought peace in 1604, and the Dutch–Spanish armistice ended their fighting in 1609 – they had to find a new base, not being welcome any more to operate from their homelands. The one war which did not end was that between Spain and the Ottoman Empire. A combination of the slackening of Ottoman authority in North Africa, unemployed European pirates, and vulnerable merchant ships now led to the development of corsairs and corsair states.

The English had been trading with Morocco for half a century, and had even organised the Barbary Company to regulate the trade for a time.

The Royal Navy was active in the Mediterranean for almost three and a half centuries, from the first expedition to combat the activities of the Algerian corsairs to the final humiliation of the Suez crisis. In fact, of course, it continued with occasional forays into the Mediterranean after 1956, including intervening in Libya in 2012 in order to assist the overthrow of a particularly unsavoury dictator and rescuing desperate refugees from Africa afterwards; and if one counts the Levant Company's ships as representative of the English kingdom from 1580, it had also been present in the sea for forty years before the Algerian expedition of 1620.

For much of that time the British naval presence in the Mediterranean was only occasional in strength, and otherwise minimal. Only in major wars, and not always then, did the Royal Navy arrive in the Mediterranean in real strength. The earliest cases were the contrasted presence of the armed ships of the Levant Company and the English privateers/pirates who infested the sea and bothered the Venetians. Both of these were a mix of private and public enterprise: privateers were licensed by the English government until the peace of 1604, but they slipped into piracy when out of the government's view, and became openly piratical once the Spanish war ended; the Levant Company operated as a near independent arm of the English state, and its ships were deliberately sizeable and well-armed because of the threat posed by corsairs, privateers, and pirates. Both of these groups were privately financed; it is difficult to separate public and private participation.

This may be considered the earliest phase of the English naval presence, one of essentially private naval actions, but with significant input by the English state. The increased threat of the corsairs (whose capabilities were enhanced by English and other European skills), after about 1600 coalesced into their widespread activity, throughout the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. The suppression of this threat was the object of successive naval expeditions from 1620 to the 1680s. These anti-corsair campaigns constitute the second phase of British naval involvement, a series of intermittent campaigns directed at the corsairs, with only limited success, lasting until the 1680s.