Shipscribe Home Page.

Photo Supplement to the French Warships Books

French armored cruiser Victor Hugo at Jamestown, Va., on 12 June 1907

One of the few limitations on published books is that space for illustrations is scarce and expensive. This is not the case on the web, and this opportunity is being taken to post photographs and other illustrations that are relevant to the books but could not be included in them. Photographs and plans shown in the books at full page width are generally not duplicated here, but some of the ones printed in half-page width are presented here in larger format to show additional details. Nearly all of the photos necessarily relate to the 1859-1914 volume. Of the multiple sections planned the following have been posted, partly or in full:

Squadron Battleships Station/Cruising Battleships Coast Defense Battleships Armored Gunboats (Pending)

----------
Sources
1. The "NH" photo collection of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) in Washington, D.C., most of which is now posted on the NHHC website. Most of the images presented here were scanned from the originals long before a contractor scanned and posted the NH mountcards, some of which contain photographic copies of the originals and some of which curled noticeably while being scanned.
2. A remarkable collection of 1270 glass plate images between 1870 and 1917 from the files of the Direction de la construction navale at the Rochefort Arsenal and now viewable on the Mémoire des hommes website of the Service historique de la Défense with call numbers from MR_5_G_1 to 1270. This site is referred to here as "SHD Rochefort." Many of these photos had also been posted on the Facebook "French Warships" group, and it is those copies that are presented here.
3. Small sellers online, Facebook, and other locations on the internet.

Rights
The author has made a diligent effort to identify and credit the original sources of these images, including by consulting websites of known image suppliers, but with incomplete success. The U.S. Navy's NH collection contains albums of items collected by naval attachés in Europe in the 1890s, on many of which the source credits are absent, not visible, or unknown today. The items purchased online, many of which are postcards, mostly bear credits to commercial publishers who are unknown today, and Facebook posts rarely report their original sources. The author believes that the photos here with inadequate sourcing can be considered "orphan works" as defined in the French Code of Intellectual Property and hereby asssigns to them the status DR (Droits réservés). He offers his apologies in case his efforts have failed to turn up a holder of legitimate rights to an image presented here and, if notified, will immediately withdraw the image while the matter is being resolved.