The Stone Frigates of Sebastopol
Ernest A. Gray analyses the Navy’s role on land and sea in the Crimean Campaign.
A recent film, The Charge of the Light Brigade, shows the British Expedition against Sebastopol disembarking in Calamita Bay, and sailors in straw hats and white ducks carrying Lord Raglan and General Airey ashore. ‘The cool customer’, as Raglan admiringly describes him, the solitary Russian officer, taking notes, is the only hint that the Expedition is occupied on anything more than an exercise in Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight. Yet on that bright autumn morning, September 14th, 1854, as the Allied armies disembarked on the white Crimean sands, a few miles down the coast gunners of the British Main Division were watching the powerful Russian fleet in Sebastopol Roads.
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