THE ROYAL NAVY CUTLASS.

[M ELEY]

Exactly, Ibrahiim. Thanks again for posting this information, especially the charts on cutlass drill. I think it is a welcome edition to this forum for future collectors and historians!

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Thanks M ELEY . Here is another picture.. I have to say that they do seem to have practiced the thrust manouvre ~

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Here is an interesting sketch~
Note the Pattern 1871 "Bayonets, Sword, Naval, with Cutlass Guard, for Martini-Henry Rifles"

~and that the terminology even so late in Victorian times was still the old style of wording; Sword Naval.

This sketch indicates that this was part of the Marmara contingent apparently practicing repelling enemy cavalry ashore..

[M ELEY]

Great additions, Ibrahiim. You brought up a good point that just because a weapon went to sea didn't mean its exclusive function in that regard. Obviously, marine troops on ships were used for land actions, as this 'Marmara' contingent you pictured would have done.

Many of the boarding type weapons long outlasted their supposed usefulness in regards to changing warfare (the obsolescence of the sword towards the later 19th c.), era and the end of Fighting Sail. Cutlasses and pikes still continued to find their way aboard merchant ships and tea clippers into the early 20th century. Still, one might recall that many of these trading ships were traveling to the East to possibly 'seedy' ports, through areas where piracy was still alive and well (Malay islands, South China Sea) and into tropical warrens where local tribes were possibly hostile to the European interlopers (Polynesia, Borneo, the Celebes, etc). There is an amazing and exciting descriptive encounter between whalers and Kingsmill islanders as they stormed the ship in Gilkerson's 'Boarder's Away', pg 135. The point being, these weapons were still relevant up unto the present era.

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

The best common sense training using a Sabre...same as a Cutlass..can be viewed on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7VBxc8WsXc There is an interesting first video from a RN vessel..showing some good snappy Cutlass drill movements. The second video is excellent.

[Ibrahiim al Balooshi]

Of Royal Naval Operations ashore~The Cutlass can be seen clearly in these sketches...particularly in the hollow square.

[Madnumforce]

The etymology given for the word "cutlass" is partly wrong. Cutlass, in it's current form, comes directly from French "coutelasse"/"coutelace" (thus the double S in English, if it had come from the more modern word "coutelas" it wouldn't carry the "S" sound), already attested in French in the 14th century. I find reference to variants such as "coutelesse", "courtelasse" (probably a sort of oral shift towards "courte", short, because it is a short sword/saber, and this is probably where the Dutch "kortelas" comes from in some way). It comes directly from the French "coutel", which itself comes from Latin cultellus. It evolved separately from the Latin root, it wasn't taken from Italian. By the way, the dialects of southern France and northern Italy were really a smooth transition from typical Italian to northern French (which later became the French language due to the fact it was the French spoken by the king and its civil officers, and the Parliament of Paris), forming a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum]dialect continuum[/URL]. But in every text there is, you'll find "coutelasse" or "coutelas" to mean a short sword or saber, exactly as in English, or maybe a sort of machete in 19th and 20th c. texts when talking about a colonial context.