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The Amsterdam Battery was the most important of the military installations built by the Dutch East India Company to protect Table Bay. It marked the beginning of coastal defense in South Africa.
Only a piece of the walls of the battery, the oldest structure in the area, remains. It lies by the entrance to the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront and the Port of Cape Town, behind a shipyard and north-northeast of the Castle of Good Hope. Battery Park lies between Port and Dock Roads and Alfred Street. It was located in a very strategic place and helped provide cover fire for adjacent fortifications.
The battery was built with the help of the French vice-admiral Pierre André de Suffren (1726–1788) and the architect Louis Michel Thibault from 1781 to 1787. The wall was 17.5 m high with arrowslits and could withstand heavy enemy fire. Canons lay on the top floor. Ammunition and cannonballs were stored in the basement and in the gunpowder magazine behind the battery. The main guns were 12.5 m above sea level. Two hundred soldiers could be housed in the front barracks. However, military operations never needed to be launched from the fortress. When the artillery were first tested, however, two soldiers died and Gov. Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff was wounded. In 1827, the weaponry was removed, and the building was used from then on as a prison.
Drawings of the Amsterdam Battery can be found in the MuseuMAfricA as well as in the Cape Town Archives Repository.
The Second Battle of Fort Fisher was a successful assault by the Union Army, Navy and Marine Corps against Fort Fisher, south of Wilmington, North Carolina, near the end of the American Civil War in January 1865. Sometimes referred to as the "Gibraltar of the South" and the last major coastal stronghold of the Confederacy, Fort Fisher had tremendous strategic value during the war, providing a port for blockade runners supplying the Army of Northern Virginia.
A fortification is a military construction designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from Latin fortis ("strong") and facere.
Castillo San Felipe del Morro, most commonly known as El Morro(The Promontory), is a large fortress and citadel in the historic district of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Commissioned by Charles I of Spain in 1539, it was first built as a fortified tower in honor of Philip II, who oversaw its expansion into a hornwork fort by 1595. Over the next 200 years, especially in the reign of Charles III, El Morro continued to be developed to reach its current form in 1787. Rising 140 ft from the Atlantic shoreline with 18 to 25 ft thick walls, it stands on a steep, rocky headland promontory on San Juan Islet guarding the entry to San Juan Bay, the harbor of Old San Juan. El Morro, alongside La Fortaleza, San Cristóbal, El Cañuelo, and other forts part of the Walls of Old San Juan, protected strategically and militarily important Puerto Rico, La Llave de las Indias , from invasion by competing world powers during the Age of Sail.
The Noon Gun has been a historic time signal in Cape Town, South Africa since 1806. It consists of a pair of black powder Dutch naval guns, fired alternatingly with one serving as a backup. The guns are situated on Signal Hill, close to the centre of the city.
Fort Fisher was a Confederate fort during the American Civil War. It protected the vital trading routes of the port at Wilmington, North Carolina, from 1861 until its capture by the Union in 1865. The fort was located on one of Cape Fear River's two outlets to the Atlantic Ocean on what was then known as Federal Point or Confederate Point and today is known as Pleasure Island. The strength of Fort Fisher led to its being called the Southern Gibraltar and the "Malakoff Tower of the South". The battle of Fort Fisher was the most decisive battle of the Civil War fought in North Carolina.
A bastion fort or trace italienne is a fortification in a style that evolved during the early modern period of gunpowder when the cannon came to dominate the battlefield. It was first seen in the mid-fifteenth century in Italy. Some types, especially when combined with ravelins and other outworks, resembled the related star fort of the same era.
The Battle of Eupatoria occurred on 17 February 1855 during the Crimean War when the army of the Russian Empire unsuccessfully attempted to capture the Crimean port city of Eupatoria held by the forces of the Ottoman Empire.
The Castle of Good Hope is a bastion fort built in the 17th century in Cape Town, South Africa. Originally located on the coastline of Table Bay, following land reclamation the fort is now located inland. In 1936 the Castle was declared a historical monument and following restorations in the 1980s it is considered the best preserved example of a Dutch East India Company fort.
The South African Overseas Expeditionary Force (SAOEF) was a volunteer military organisation in World War I.
The Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife was an amphibious assault by the Royal Navy on the Spanish port city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Launched by Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson on 22 July 1797, the assault was defeated, and on 25 July the remains of the landing party withdrew under a truce, having lost several hundred men. Nelson himself had been wounded in the arm, which was subsequently partially amputated: a stigma that he carried to his grave as a constant reminder of his failure.
The recapture of Bahia was a Spanish–Portuguese military expedition in 1625 to retake the city of Bahia in Brazil from the forces of the Dutch West India Company (WIC).
Dozens of fortifications were built in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula between the 1650s and the 1940s. Most have gone, but a few still stand.
The Chavonnes Battery was a fortification protecting Cape Town, South Africa, built in the early 18th century. It is now a museum and function venue.
The siege of Viborg took place in the spring of 1710 during the Great Northern War (1700–1721), as a second attempt by the Russians to capture the fortress port of Viborg, near the modern border between Russia and Finland, after a failed attempt in 1706. After the outbreak of the war, Swedish forces had fortified themselves in the port of Viborg. In order to assure safety for the newly founded city of Saint Petersburg, Peter the Great ordered the Swedish fort to be secured. A first unsuccessful attempt was made in 1706. Later plans were put on hold because of other ongoing conflicts but, after the Russian success at the Battle of Poltava in June 1709, the men and resources were available to capture the town.
The Todt Battery, also known as Batterie Todt, was a battery of coastal artillery built by Nazi Germany during World War II, located in the hamlet of Haringzelles, Audinghen, near Cape Gris-Nez, Pas de Calais, France.
Fuerte de Isla Verde was a military installation formerly located in Algeciras, Spain. It occupied the Isla Verde, which gave its name to the city as a whole. The elongated island, which stood a short distance offshore of the city's old town, was already the site of an artillery battery in 1720. In 1734 the fort was constructed on the island to the plans of the military engineer Juan de Subreville. Further remodeling took place in 1745 under Lorenzo de Solís. The installation, which followed the roughly triangular shape of the island, was initially equipped with three batteries. These were:
The Gibraltar peninsula, located at the far southern end of Iberia, has great strategic importance as a result of its position by the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. It has repeatedly been contested between European and North African powers and has endured fourteen sieges since it was first settled in the 11th century. The peninsula's occupants – Moors, Spanish, and British – have built successive layers of fortifications and defences including walls, bastions, casemates, gun batteries, magazines, tunnels and galleries. At their peak in 1865, the fortifications housed around 681 guns mounted in 110 batteries and positions, guarding all land and sea approaches to Gibraltar. The fortifications continued to be in military use until as late as the 1970s and by the time tunnelling ceased in the late 1960s, over 34 miles (55 km) of galleries had been dug in an area of only 2.6 square miles (6.7 km2).
The Capture of Santiago was a military engagement that took place between 11 and 28 November 1585 during the newly declared Anglo-Spanish War. An English expedition led by Francis Drake captured the port town of Cidade Velha in the Cape Verde islands that had recently belonged to the Crown of Portugal. He sacked it and then marched inland before doing the same at São Domingos and Praia. Afterwards Drake left and continued his expedition to successfully raid the Spanish possessions in the Americas.
The Invasion of the Cape Colony, also known as the Battle of Muizenberg, was a British military expedition launched in 1795 against the Dutch Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope. The Dutch colony at the Cape, established and controlled by the United East India Company in the seventeenth century, was at the time the only viable South African port for ships making the journey from Europe to the European colonies in the East Indies. It therefore held vital strategic importance, although it was otherwise economically insignificant. In the winter of 1794, during the French Revolutionary Wars, French troops entered the Dutch Republic, which was reformed into the Batavian Republic.
