USS Merrimack, or variant spelling USS Merrimac, may be any one of several ships commissioned in the United States Navy and named after the Merrimack River.
The De Zeven Provinciën class was a class of light cruisers. They were built by Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM) and Wilton-Fijenoord for the Royal Netherlands Navy. The name De Zeven Provinciën refers to the seven provinces which formed the Dutch Republic in 1581.
The fourth USS Montgomery (C-9), the lead ship of her class, was an unprotected cruiser in the United States Navy authorized in the Naval Appropriations Act of September 7, 1888. Montgomery served during the Spanish–American War and in World War I and was named for Montgomery, Alabama.
Aktien-Gesellschaft Vulcan Stettin was a German shipbuilding and locomotive building company. Founded in 1851, it was located near the former eastern German city of Stettin, today Polish Szczecin. Because of the limited facilities in Stettin, in 1907 an additional yard was built in Hamburg. The now named Vulcan-Werke Hamburg und Stettin Actiengesellschaft constructed some of the most famous civilian German ships and it played a significant role in both World Wars, building warships for the Kaiserliche Marine and the Kriegsmarine later.
USS Merrimac, sometimes incorrectly spelt Merrimack, was a cargo steamship that was built in 1894 in England as Solveig for Norwegian owners, and renamed Merrimac when a US shipowner acquired her in 1897.
Several ships of the Chilean Navy have been named Blanco Encalada after Manuel Blanco Encalada (1790–1876), a Vice Admiral and Chile's first President
Aircraft carriers have their origins during the days of World War I. The earliest experiments consisted of fitting temporary "flying off" platforms to the gun turrets of the warships of several nations, notably the United States and the United Kingdom. The first ship to be modified with a permanent flight deck was the battlecruiser HMS Furious, which initially had a single flying-off deck forward of the original superstructure. Subsequently, she was modified with a separate "landing on" deck aft and later with a full flush deck. Other ships, often liners, were modified to have full flush flight decks, HMS Argus being the first to have such modification begun. Those first faltering steps gave little indication of just how important the aircraft carrier was to prove to be. During the inter-war years, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States built up significant carrier fleets so that by the beginning of World War II, they had 18 carriers between them. The 1940 Battle of Taranto and 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor in retrospect showed the world that the aircraft carrier was to be the most important ship in the modern fleet. Today, aircraft carriers are the capital ships of the navies they serve in, and in the case of modern US "supercarriers", they embark an air group that is effectively a small air force.
