‘HMS Caryatid went to Portland to join Blue Fleet for manoeuvres.’ So begins Rudyard Kipling’s satirical account of visits he’d paid to the Channel Fleet in 1897 and 1897, subsequently published as the short story ‘Their Lawful Occasions’. The story relates how a diminutive torpedo boat inadvertently left behind in port manages to sneak up on and ‘torpedo’ (using white paint marks) two of the squadron’s battleships. The Caryatid was a parody of the name of the actual warship the writer had been a guest aboard, on the invitation of her skipper Captain Edward Bayly. That ship, HMS Pelorus, was the lead-ship in a class of eleven 3rd class cruisers, ten of which, like Kipling’s fictional Caryatid, bore names pertaining to ancient Greece. Britain’s ‘Poet of Empire’ was poking fun at the Royal Navy’s long-standing penchant for naming its ships after figures from classical history and mythology; or what might be called Greco-Roman identifiers (GRIs). These pages explore the origins of a nautical nomenclature so commonplace and enduring that for the average Briton it became ‘the richest seam of identification with classical figures.’ [1]
The origins of a ‘royal navy’ can be traced to the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47). Almost all of the carrack-style warships built for this monarch carried royal names, most notably the Mary Rose (1510), which was apparently dedicated to the king’s sister, the Queen of France. Built around the same time as this legendary ship was the Peter Pomegranate, whose name was both a reference to St Peter and to the fruit emblematic of Henry’s Catholic wife Catherine of Aragon. Other ships in Henry’s fleet included Regent, Sovereign, and Henry Grace a Dieu, also known as the Great Harry; names that reflected the exalted ego of the Tudor monarchy. These ships participated in several actions against the French, including the Battle of the Solent in 1545, where the Mary Rose famously capsized. By the time of the Spanish Armada, however, less political nomenclature that expressed martial attributes had become the norm. Among those vessels resisting King Philip’s invasion fleet in 1581 were the Warspite, Revenge, Foresight, Swiftsure and Dreadnought.
Given the Royal Navy’s 500-year history, It is a challenge to identify the first British warship to bear a name pertaining to classical antiquity. However, there is a record of a 16th century galley given the name of Mercury; the messenger of the gods more commonly known by the Greek name Hermes. The 20-gun Hector, which honoured the Trojan warrior from Homer’s Iliad, reputedly entered service with the English navy in 1644. Centurion (1650) was a 4th rate frigate constructed in London by the renowned shipwright Peter Pett. In 1670, she was evidently part of an Anglo-Dutch fleet that attacked a group of Barbary corsairs, an action recorded by a contemporary Dutch painter.
It seems likely that some of the earliest Greco-Roman names carried by English and British warships originated in foreign navies. For example, the first English warship to bear the name Mars was probably a captured Dutch vessel that entered service around 1665. Triton and Sirène were French ships captured by an Anglo-Dutch force during The Battle of Vigo Bay in 1702; the former would serve as Her Majesty’s Ship Triton until 1709.
GRIs were still very rare in the Royal Navy prior to the 1st and 2nd Battles of Cape Finistere in May and October of 1747. In fact, only one vessel among the respective British battle-fleets commanded by Vice-Admiral George Anson and Rear-Admiral Edward Hawke bore a classical name; the fire-ship Vulcan. These engagements, however, yielded no fewer than six French prizes named after Greco-Roman figures – Neptune, Trident, Jason, Chimère (Chimera), Apollon (Apollo) and Thétis. Most of these names would subsequently grace British-built warships.
It’s no coincidence that such names gained currency during the 18th century. It was in the midst of this Age of Enlightenment that amateur archaeologists and antiquarians began documenting and plundering ancient sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, scholars and poets studied and reimagined Greco-Roman mythology and legend, and artists and architects fell under the aesthetic influence of neo-classicalism. Due to the endeavours of individuals such as Johann Winckelmann, John Keats, and Sir John Soane, the lost nomenclature of ancient Rome and Hellenistic Greece was slowly revived.
The individual deemed most responsible for promoting Greco-Roman nomenclature in the Royal Navy during the 18th century was John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792). Like many of his class, Montagu was educated at Eton and Cambridge. In 1739, at the age of 21, he’d entered the House of Lords, and five years later had taken up a junior position at the Admiralty under the Whig government headed by Henry Pelham. In 1748, he’d become the First Lord of the Admiralty, the government’s senior adviser to the Royal Navy. Ousted from the role three years later, Montagu remained quietly connected to naval affairs throughout the Seven Years War (1754-1763), and was briefly restored to an Admiralty position in 1763. In 1771, after filling further governmental and administrative roles, Montagu was again appointed First Lord, a post he would hold until 1882. The Earl’s performance during this crisis-strewn decade, like the rest of his career in politics, has been the subject of some criticism. The propagation of classical nomenclature may be his greatest legacy.
To some extent, the use of GRIs in the Royal Navy reflected the rarefied educational backgrounds of those in the upper echelons of the service. Montagu, along with most of the senior naval officers he mixed with, would have been schooled in Latin, Ancient History, and possibly some Classical Greek. However, it’s unlikely the Earl or any of his Admiralty peers conjured such names solely from scholastic memory. According to legend, the First Lord selected these names from a copy of John Lemprière’s Bibliotheca Classica he kept on his desk. First published in 1815, Lemprière’s ‘classical dictionary’ aimed ‘to give the most accurate and satisfactory account of all the proper names which occur in reading the Classics, and by a judicious collection of anecdotes and historical facts to draw a picture of ancient times, not less instructive than entertaining.’
The Royal Navy’s adoption of names from classical antiquity was entirely reasonable considering the maritime origin or connection of many classical figures. Neptune was of course the Roman God of the Sea (known as Poseidon in Greek tradition), and Trident commemorated this powerful deity’s famed fishing spear. Triton was Poseidon’s son. Thetis, a name that would grace a dozen Royal Navy vessels, was a Nereid or ‘sea nymph’ as well as the mother of Achilles. Jason was the leader of the Argonauts, whose perilous voyage in search of the Golden Fleece was recorded by the 3rd century BC poet Apollonius Rhodius. Other Greco-Roman figures personified or exemplified the martial attributes already common to Royal Navy nomenclature. Mars was a synonym for Warspite, while Achilles personified Revenge. Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae and another figure drawn from The Iliad, stood generically for the unassailable power of monarchy.
The use of GRIs was not only apposite but also requisite. There was a pressing need for new names in a Royal Navy that grew exponentially throughout the 18th century to counter growing French naval power. It’s estimated the number of British warships doubled from around 300 to 600 during this period. This was followed by a further expansion in response to the French Revolution, to the extent that by 1810 there were at least one hundred ‘ships-of-the-line’ alone, and up to 800 smaller vessels flying the Union Jack. All of these ships, from 120-gun three-decker 1st raters to 10-gun two-masted brig-sloops, required identifiers that would not only distinguish them but also embolden those serving on them.
GRIs were well-established in the Royal Navy by the end of the 1750s. Forming the line of battle at The Battle of Quiberon Bay, the decisive engagement of the Seven Years War, were the 74s Mars, Hercules, and Hero, the 36-gun frigate Venus, and the 32-gun Minerva. However, it was during the Earl of Sandwich’s lengthy tenure as First Lord in the 1770s that classical nomenclature became most widely applied. The Navy’s smaller warships were the most common recipients of such names. To illustrate, 12 of the 20 units of the 44-gun Roebuck Class and 13 of the 18 Amazon Class (32 guns) were given GRIs. These are shown below:
| Roebuck Class (44 guns) Launched 1770-84 | Amazon Class (32 guns) Launched 1773-1783 |
| Romulus Actaeon Janus Charon (i) Ulysses Endymion Serapis Argo Diomede Gladiator Regulus Charon (ii) | Amazon Thetis Cleopatra Amphion Orpheus Juno Iphigenia Andromache Syren Iris Meleager Castor Terpsichore |
The apparent randomness of the First Lord’s selection of GRIs can be seen from the above ship lists. The Amazon Class utilised the names of a real person (Cleopatra), goddesses (Iris and Juno), a poet (Orpheus), a sea creature (Syren), a patron of sailors (Castor), a hero (Meleager), male and female warriors (Amphion and Amazon), a princess (Iphigenia) and a muse (Terpsichore). Similarly, the GRIs of the Roebuck Class referred to a battle (Actaeon), a Greco-Egyptian god (Serapis), a Roman combatant (Gladiator), a ship (Argo), and a ferryman (Charon).
Best remembered among the aforementioned warships is the Serapis, which was famously captured by the American man-of-war Bonhomme Richard during the Battle of Famborough Head in 1779. Although the British ship had initially gained the upper hand, the American captain John Paul Jones refused to strike his colours, eventually forcing the other’s surrender but losing his own ship in the process.
[1] Hall, E. and Stead, H. A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939. Routledge (2020)
Bow Creek to Anatahan 