T&T: Anchoring and Clearing and French

[Candy Chapman]

Todd Mains asked:

<snip> ..."Force Majeure."... <snip>

 Why are these terms always French?  I never think of France as a major
player in naval history.

REPLY:

Throughout much of the last several hundred years, french has been the lingua
franka -- the common language of international diplomacy -- beginning well
before Napoleon's time.  Prior to that latin was the universal language of
intellectual and diplomatic conversation because the Roman Catholic church
then dominated europe.  Today English is the common diplomatic language and it
began replacing french when the US gained international prominence and then
dominance when France (and England, Germany and the Netherlands as well) lost
their empires in the early to mid twentieth century.  Lingua franka literally
means "French language" in latin.  Those several hundred years when diplomats
used French to bridge between incompatible native languages were also the
times when much of the admiralty law, and the laws governing international
behavior were first settled.

Regarding French naval history, recall that France fought numerous wars with
Great Britain from perhaps Henry VIII's time through Napoleon's defeat.  Naval
actions were prominent in these wars from the mid seventeenth century on,
although the French often lost the naval battles.  Regarding French naval
activity interacting with US history, recall that in the late summer of 1771,
the French fleet arrived from the Caribbean and attacked the British navy in
Chesapeake Bay. On September 5, after soundly defeating the British navy,
French Admiral de Grass repositioned his fleet and began bombarding the
British forts under General Cornwallis and his troops.  Cornwallis was trapped
between the American army and the French navy. By mid-October, Cornwallis was
running out of food and ammunition and on October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis
and 8,000 British troops surrendered.  This battle is generally considered the
victorious moment in the American Revolution, and everyone involved felt that
the American forces could not possibly have prevailed against Cornwallis dug
into his fortifications and with the British Navy resupplying him without the
French Navy.  The US Navy commemorated two battles of the Revolutionary War by
naming two of its WWII era CVA carriers after the battles that began and that
ended the war with Britain -- Lexington and Yorktown.

You asked....

Gary Bell, AKA Mister Science