The Battle Cruiser was the result of the naval arms race and the realisation that England's undisputed mastery of the seas was over. The ship was the next logical step in the evolution of the Cruiser. Historians have generally considered this type of warship as an expensive mistake. While it was not as successful as its creators might have hoped, neither was it the disaster claimed by many of its critics. Once the British chose to build these ships, not only did they have no choice but to keep building more of them, but they also had to build larger, more powerful and expensive Battle Cruisers in order to maintain the lead in the arms race with Germany.

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Naval history,like military history, has until recently concerned itself largely with battles, or at least with wars. The implicit assumption was presumably that the key to history was to be found in these turning-points, rather than in the piping times of peace. A fighting service was only really of interest when fighting. In recent years this approach has been largely abandoned, and it is now recognized that warfare is an extension, not only of politics, but of most other activities of man; that it is in itself one of his most characteristic activities, and may be studied to reveal most of his characteristics. The present study falls into this pattern. In that it traces the progress of warship design, it may be taken as a traditional technical study. In that it covers the formation of grand strategy and naval policy it may be thought of as an essay in the moulding of government decisions. As a survey of the administrative development of the Admiralty, it falls into another possible category. Finally, in charting the rise of professional studies and the intellectual growth of the Victorian naval officer it touches directly on social history. It is the writer's belief that a fighting service, especially one with so distinct and independent a character as the Navy, may be studied as a society in itself, or as a microcosm of society in general. It was with these considerations in mind that the years 1865 to 1890 were chosen. Paradoxically enough from the viewpoint of the old approach to naval history,they were years of general peace; it is contended that they were not the less interesting for that,but rather the more. One may almost say that the absence of major naval battles or campaigns allowed naval development to proceed along a steady course,undisturbed by adventitious factors. The influences at work upon the Navy and its policy are the more easily discerned without the distractions of actual operational experience. It is this which lends peculiar interest to the period; in no other age of British history were naval officers more remote from the experience of naval war. Of the thirty or so officers who sat at the Board of Admiralty "between 1866 and 1890,none had ever fought in a naval battle of any importance. They had "been present at numerous "bombardments,they had led landing parties and boat actions,stormed cities and stockades, fought in river,swamp and jungle, against pirates, savages, and slavers; but they had no experience of naval warfare on the high seas. This gives a unique quality to the age; to borrow a metaphor from medicine, it was sterile, uncontaminated with reality. [Continued in text ...]

Long term ocean cruisers are self defined as people who have accepted, adopted or chosen a cruising lifestyle, who live aboard their own sailing vessels, have independent means, are self sufficient and have been away from their port of departure for an extended period of time. As a group, cruisers, constitute a subculture (Macbeth, 1985). Why do people choose to adopt a cruising lifestyle? Using the principles of grounded theory analysis, this study found that cruisers were motivated by a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations as well as by their social background and status in society. Cruisers were motivated by a need to escape the pressures and constraints of their home society as well as to pursue a lifestyle which offered freedom and a sense of personal control, a need to add some adventure or challenge to their lives or to fulfil a dream. They were also motivated by relationship commitments and a desire to travel and experience new cultures, people and settings. Their age, gender, family life cycle stage, education, income and former lifestyle pursuits also motivated them. In setting about and maintaining the fulfilment of their motivations, cruisers exhibited personal agency in their choice to move from a life in the centre of mainstream western societies to one in the margins. Overall, cruisers were found to be social actors who exhibit agency and self governance in decision making as to whether or not to maintain a sense of 'connectivity' with and without various social settings. Cruisers' responses to feelings of anomie and alienation in their home societies, to their feelings of under or non-actualisation at the individual level, and to their need for belonging with a partner activated these people to make choices and decisions regarding the negotiation and direction of their own social realities. Based on the cruisers who participated in this study, such agency and self governance can be described as 'empowered connectivity'. Empowered connectivity is the action of exhibiting agency in order to achieve connectivity with the space in which an individual currently finds her or himself. It can be both a holding on to and a letting go of connections. Empowered connectivity is not a 'theory' per se, but rather a generic representation of a process that accounts for 'plurality, multiplicity and difference'(Tong 1989) in the actions of both women and men as they negotiate the spaces they choose to occupy. Moreover, this study informed by the interpretive social sciences paradigm and, a 'feminist methodology’ enabled an indepth understanding of cruising women's experiences to be counterpointed against cruising men's experiences. Subsequently, cruising women became subjects in their own right rather than'other’. Further, the interpretive social sciences paradigm and 'feministmethodology' emphasised the need for tourism research, in particular, to use bothernic and etic perspectives in data collection and analysis. This ethnographic study of cruisers was conducted between 1985 and 1999 on theeastern seaboard of Australia. The study involved participant observation, semi-structured indepth interviews and self-completion questionnaires relating tosociodemographics, vessel inventories, budgets and touristic experiences.

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