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George Vancouver

Captain George Vancouver (22 June 1757 – 10 May 1798) was a British Royal Navy officer best known for his 1791–1795 expedition, which explored and charted North America's northwestern Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of what are now the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California. The expedition also explored the Hawaiian Islands and the southwest coast of Australia.

Vancouver Island, the city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Vancouver River on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Vancouver, Washington in the United States, Mount Vancouver on the Canadian–US border between Yukon and Alaska, and New Zealand's fourth-highest mountain, also Mount Vancouver, are all named after him.

Early life
Vancouver was born on 22 June 1757 in the seaport town of King's Lynn in Norfolk, England, the sixth and youngest child of John Jasper Vancouver, a Dutch-born deputy collector of customs, and Bridget Berners. The surname Vancouver comes from Coevorden, Drenthe province, Netherlands (Koevern in Dutch Low Saxon).

Royal Navy
In 1771, at age 13, Vancouver entered the Royal Navy as a "young gentleman", a future candidate for midshipman. He was nominally an able seaman (AB) but, in reality, sailed as one of the midshipmen aboard HMS Resolution (Cook), on James Cook's second voyage (1772–1775) searching for Terra Australis. He also sailed with Cook's third voyage (1776–1780), this time aboard Resolution's companion ship, HMS Discovery (1774), and was present during the first European sighting and exploration of the Hawaiian Islands.

Upon his return to Britain in October 1780, Vancouver was commissioned as a lieutenant and posted aboard the sloop HMS Martin (1761), initially on escort and patrol duty in the English Channel and North Sea. He accompanied the ship when it left Plymouth on 11 February 1782 for the West Indies. On 7 May 1782 he was appointed fourth lieutenant of the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Fame (1759), which was at the time part of the British West Indies Fleet and assigned to patrolling the French-held Leeward Islands. Vancouver subsequently saw action at the Battle of the Saintes (April 1782), wherein he distinguished himself. Vancouver returned to England in June 1783.

Spanish Empire-sponsored voyages
In the late 1780s, the Spanish Empire commissioned an expedition to the Pacific Northwest. In 1789, the Nootka Crisis developed, and Spain and Britain came close to war over ownership of Nootka Sound on contemporary Vancouver Island, and – of greater importance – over the right to colonise and settle the Pacific Northwest coast. Henry Roberts had recently taken command of the survey ship HMS Discovery (1789) (a new vessel named in honour of the ship on Cook's voyage) with the prospect of another round-the-world voyage, and Roberts selected Vancouver as his first lieutenant, but they both were then posted to other warships due to the crisis. Vancouver went with Joseph Whidbey to the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Courageux (1761). When the first Nootka Convention ended the crisis in 1790, Vancouver was given command of Discovery to take possession of Nootka Sound and to survey the coasts.

Vancouver Expedition
Departing England with two ships, HMS Discovery and HMS Chatham (1788), on 1 April 1791, Vancouver commanded an expedition charged with exploring the Pacific region. In its first year the expedition travelled to Cape Town, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands), collecting botanical samples and surveying coastlines along the way. He formally claimed at Possession Point, King George Sound Western Australia, now the town of Albany, Western Australia for the British. Proceeding to North America, Vancouver followed the coasts of present-day Oregon and Washington northward. In April 1792 he encountered American Captain Robert Gray off the coast of Oregon just prior to Gray's sailing up the Columbia River.

Vancouver entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the present-day Washington state mainland, on 29 April 1792. His orders included a survey of every inlet and outlet on the west coast of the mainland, all the way north to Alaska. Most of this work was in small craft propelled by both sail and oar; manoeuvring larger sail-powered vessels in uncharted waters was generally impractical and dangerous.

Vancouver named many features for his officers, friends, associates, and his ship Discovery, including:
 * Mount Baker – after Discovery's 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker, the first on the expedition to spot it
 * Mount St. Helens – after his friend, Alleyne Fitzherbert, 1st Baron St Helens
 * Puget Sound – after Discovery's 2nd lieutenant Peter Puget, who explored its southern reaches.
 * Mount Rainier – after his friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
 * Port Gardner and Port Susan, Washington – after his former commander Vice Admiral Sir Alan Gardner and his wife Susannah, Lady Gardner.
 * Whidbey Island – after naval engineer Joseph Whidbey.
 * Discovery Passage, Discovery Island, Discovery Bay, Port Discovery and Discovery Park (Seattle).

After a Spanish expedition in 1791, Vancouver was the second European to enter Burrard Inlet on 13 June 1792, naming it for his friend Sir Harry Burrard. It is the present day main harbour area of the City of Vancouver beyond Stanley Park. He surveyed Howe Sound and Jervis Inlet over the next nine days. Then, on his 35th birthday on 22 June 1792, he returned to Point Grey, the present-day location of the University of British Columbia. Here he unexpectedly met a Spanish expedition led by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores. Vancouver was "mortified" (his word) to learn they already had a crude chart of the Strait of Georgia based on the 1791 exploratory voyage of José María Narváez the year before, under command of Francisco de Eliza. For three weeks they cooperatively explored the Georgia Strait and the Discovery Islands area before sailing separately towards Nootka Sound.

After the summer surveying season ended, in August 1792, Vancouver went to Nootka, then the region's most important harbour, on contemporary Vancouver Island. Here he was to receive any British buildings and lands returned by the Spanish from claims by Francisco de Eliza for the Spanish crown. The Spanish commander, Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra, was very cordial and he and Vancouver exchanged the maps they had made, but no agreement was reached; they decided to await further instructions. At this time, they decided to name the large island on which Nootka was now proven to be located as Quadra and Vancouver Island. Years later, as Spanish influence declined, the name was shortened to simply Vancouver Island.

While at Nootka Sound Vancouver acquired Robert Gray's chart of the lower Columbia River. Gray had entered the river during the summer before sailing to Nootka Sound for repairs. Vancouver realised the importance of verifying Gray's information and conducting a more thorough survey. In October 1792, he sent Lieutenant William Robert Broughton with several boats up the Columbia River. Broughton got as far as the Columbia River Gorge, sighting and naming Mount Hood.

Vancouver sailed south along the coast of Spanish Alta California, entered San Francisco Bay, later visiting Monterey; in both places, he was warmly received by the Spanish. Later he visited Chumash villages at Point Conception and near Mission San Buenaventura. Vancouver spent the winter in continuing exploration of the Sandwich Islands, the contemporary name of the islands of Hawaii.

Further explorations
The next year, 1793, he returned to British Columbia and proceeded further north, unknowingly missing the overland explorer Alexander Mackenzie by only 48 days. He got to 56°30'N, having explored north from Point Menzies in Burke Channel to the northwest coast of Prince of Wales Island. He sailed around the latter island, as well as circumnavigating Revillagigedo Island and charting parts of the coasts of Mitkof, Zarembo, Etolin, Wrangell, Kuiu and Kupreanof Islands. With worsening weather, he sailed south to Alta California, hoping to find Bodega y Quadra and fulfil his territorial mission, but the Spaniard was not there. The Spanish governor refused to let a foreign official into the interior. Vancouver noted that the region's "only defenses against foreign attack are a few poor cannons". He again spent the winter in the Sandwich Islands.

In 1794, he first went to Cook Inlet, the northernmost point of his exploration, and from there followed the coast south. Boat parties charted the east coasts of Chichagof and Baranof Islands, circumnavigated Admiralty Island, explored to the head of Lynn Canal, and charted the rest of Kuiu Island and nearly all of Kupreanof Island. He then set sail for Great Britain by way of Cape Horn, returning in September 1795, thus completing a circumnavigation of South America.

Later life

Impressed by the view from Richmond Hill, Vancouver retired to Petersham, which was then in Surrey and is now in London.

Vancouver faced difficulties when he returned home to England. The accomplished and politically well-connected naturalist Archibald Menzies complained that his servant had been pressed into service during a shipboard emergency; sailing master Joseph Whidbey had a competing claim for pay as expedition astronomer; and Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, whom Vancouver had disciplined for numerous infractions and eventually sent home in disgrace, proceeded to harass him publicly and privately.

Pitt's allies, including his cousin, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, attacked Vancouver in the press. Thomas Pitt took a more direct approach; on 29 August 1796 he sent Vancouver a letter heaping many insults on the head of his former captain, and challenging him to a duel. Vancouver gravely replied that he was unable "in a private capacity to answer for his public conduct in his official duty," and offered instead to submit to formal examination by flag officers. Pitt chose instead to stalk Vancouver, ultimately assaulting him on a London street corner. The terms of their subsequent legal dispute required both parties to keep the peace, but nothing stopped Vancouver's civilian brother Charles from interposing and giving Pitt blow after blow until onlookers restrained the attacker. Charges and counter-charges flew in the press, with the wealthy Camelford faction having the greater firepower until Vancouver, ailing from his long naval service, died.

Death
Vancouver, at one time amongst Britain's greatest explorers and navigators, died in obscurity on 10 May 1798 at the age of 40, less than three years after completing his voyages and expeditions. No official cause of death was stated, as the medical records pertaining to Vancouver were destroyed; one doctor named John Naish claimed Vancouver died from kidney failure, while others believed it was a hyperthyroid condition.

Vancouver's grave is in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Petersham, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England. The Hudson's Bay Company placed a memorial plaque in the church in 1841. His grave in Portland stone, renovated in the 1960s, is now Grade II listed in view of its historical associations.

Navigation
Vancouver determined that the Northwest Passage did not exist at the latitudes that had long been suggested. His charts of the North American northwest coast were so extremely accurate that they served as the key reference for coastal navigation for generations. Robin Fisher, the academic vice-president of Mount Royal University in Calgary and author of two books on Vancouver, states: "He put the northwest coast on the map...He drew up a map of the north-west coast that was accurate to the 9th degree, to the point it was still being used into the modern day as a navigational aid. That's unusual for a map from that early a time."

However, Vancouver failed to discover two of the largest and most important rivers on the Pacific coast, the Fraser River and the Columbia River. He also missed the Skeena River near Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. Vancouver did eventually learn of the Columbia River before he finished his survey—from Robert Gray, captain of the American merchant ship that conducted the first Euroamerican sailing of the Columbia River on 11 May 1792, after first sighting it on an earlier voyage in 1788. However, neither the Columbia River nor the Fraser River were included on any of Vancouver's charts.

Stephen R. Bown noted in Mercator's World magazine's November/December 1999 issue that:

"How Vancouver could have missed these rivers while accurately charting hundreds of comparatively insignificant inlets, islands, and streams is hard to fathom. What is certain is that his failure to spot the Columbia had great implications for the future political development of the Pacific Northwest...."

While it is difficult to comprehend how Vancouver missed the Fraser River, much of this river's delta was subject to flooding and summer freshet which prevented the captain from spotting any of its great channels as he sailed the entire shoreline from Point Roberts, Washington, to Point Grey in 1792. The Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, with the 1791 Francisco de Eliza expedition preceding Vancouver by a year, had also missed the Fraser River although they knew from its muddy plume that there was a major river located nearby.

Indigenous peoples
Vancouver generally established a rapport with both Indigenous peoples and European trappers. Historical records show Vancouver enjoyed good relations with native leaders both in Hawaii – with King Kamehameha I as well as the Pacific Northwest and California. Vancouver's journals exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to the indigenous populations he encountered. He wrote of meeting the Chumash people, and of his exploration of a small island on the Californian coast on which an important burial site was marked by a sepulchre of "peculiar character" lined with boards and fragments of military instruments lying near a square box covered with mats. Vancouver states:

"This we naturally conjectured contained the remains of some person of consequence, and it much excited the curiosity of some of our party; but as further examination could not possibly have served any useful purpose, and might have given umbrage and pain to the friends of the deceased, should it be their custom to visit the repositories of their dead, I did not think it right that it should be disturbed."

Vancouver also displayed contempt in his journals towards unscrupulous western traders who provided guns to natives, writing:

"I am extremely concerned to be compelled to state here, that many of the traders from the civilised world have not only pursued a line of conduct, diametrically opposite to the true principles of justice in their commercial dealings, but have fomented discords, and stirred up contentions, between the different tribes, in order to increase the demand for these destructive engines... They have been likewise eager to instruct the natives in the use of European arms of all descriptions; and have shewn by their own example, that they consider gain as the only object of pursuit; and whether this be acquired by fair and honourable means, or otherwise, so long as the advantage is secured, the manner how it is obtained seems to have been, with too many of them, but a very secondary consideration."

Robin Fisher notes that Vancouver's "relationships with aboriginal groups were generally peaceful; indeed, his detailed survey would not have been possible if they had been hostile." While there were hostile incidents at the end of Vancouver's last season – the most serious of which involved a clash with the Tlingit people at Behm Canal in southeast Alaska in 1794 – these were the exceptions to Vancouver's exploration of the US and Canadian Northwest coast.

Despite a long history of warfare between Britain and Spain, Vancouver maintained excellent relations with his Spanish counterparts and even fêted a Spanish sea captain aboard his ship HMS Discovery (1789) during his 1792 trip to the Vancouver region.

Ship and cadet units

 * HMCS Vancouver Halifax-class frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy (Named for the city, which is named for the man.)
 * TS Vancouver, Australian Navy Cadets
 * 47 RCSCC CAPTAIN VANCOUVER, Royal Canadian Sea Cadets

Places
Many places around the world have been named after George Vancouver, including:

Australia

 * Vancouver Peninsula, Cape Vancouver and Vancouver Breakers in King George Sound, Western Australia

Canada

 * Mount Vancouver, in Yukon and neighbouring Alaska, eighth highest mountain in Canada
 * Vancouver, British Columbia, a major city on the mainland in southwestern British Columbia, the province's largest city
 * Vancouver Maritime Museum
 * Vancouver Bay, British Columbia, in Jervis Inlet, East of Powell River, named after Vancouver when Capt. George H. Richards resurveyed the area in 1860.
 * Vancouver Island, in British Columbia off the southwest coast of the mainland. North America's largest Pacific Island and location of the provincial capital at Victoria on its southern tip.
 * Vancouver River, a river flowing into the Jervis Inlet on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.

New Zealand

 * Mount Vancouver, the sixth highest mountain in New Zealand.
 * Vancouver Arm of Breaksea Sound, Fiordland, South Island

United Kingdom

 * Vancouver Road in Ham, London, near Petersham, his place of burial

United States

 * Vancouver, Washington, a city in southwest Washington across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon
 * Fort Vancouver, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established in 1825

Memorials

 * Statues of Vancouver are located in his birthplace of King's Lynn, in front of Vancouver City Hall, and on top of the dome of the British Columbia Parliament Buildings.
 * The Vancouver Quarter Shopping Centre bears his name in King's Lynn.
 * Canada Post issued a pair of 14-cent stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of Captain Cook's arrival at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island on 26 April 1978. George Vancouver was a crewman on this voyage.
 * Gate to the Northwest Passage, a commemorative statue by Vancouver artist Alan Chung Hung was commissioned by Parks Canada and installed at the mouth of False Creek in Vanier Park near the Vancouver Maritime Museum in 1980.
 * Canada Post issued a 37-cent stamp inscribed Vancouver Explores the Coast on 17 March 1988. It was one of a set of four stamps issued to honour Exploration of Canada – Recognizers.
 * The George Vancouver Rose, named in his honour and hybridised by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
 * First Capital Connect named Class 365 unit 365514 Captain George Vancouver, operating on the route between King's Lynn and London.
 * Virgin CrossCountry named Class 221 unit 221129 George Vancouver in 2003, it was denamed on transfer to Arriva CrossCountry in 2007.

 * A commemorative monument is located on the beach in North Kihei, Maui, Hawaii, commemorating George Vancouver's contribution of coffee and root vegetables to the islands of Hawaii, inscribed by Pierre Elliot Trudeau 2 December 1967.
 * Statue of George Vancouver (2000), Vancouver, Washington

Many collections were made on the voyage: one was donated by Archibald Menzies to the British Museum 1796; another made by surgeon George Goodman Hewett (1765–1834) was donated by Augustus Wollaston Franks to the British Museum in 1891. An account of these has been published.

250th birthday commemorations
Canada Post issued a $1.55 postage stamp to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Vancouver's birth, on 22 June 2007. The stamp has an embossed image of Vancouver seen from behind as he gazes forward towards a mountainous coastline. This may be the first Canadian stamp not to show the subject's face.

The City of Vancouver in Canada organised a celebration to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Vancouver's birth, in June 2007 at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The one-hour festivities included the presentation of a massive 63 by 114 centimetre carrot cake, the firing of a gun salute by the Royal Canadian Artillery's 15th Field Regiment and a performance by the Vancouver Firefighter's Band. Vancouver's then-mayor, Sam Sullivan, officially declared 22 June 2007 to be "George Day".

The Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Elder sɁəyeɬəq (Larry Grant) attended the festivities and acknowledged that some of his people might disapprove of his presence, but also noted:

"Many people don't feel aboriginal people should be celebrating this occasion...I believe it has helped the world and that's part of who we are. That's the legacy of our people. We're generous to a fault. The legacy is strong and a good one, in the sense that without the first nations working with the colonials, it [B.C.] wouldn't have been part of Canada to begin with and Britain would be the poorer for it."

Origins of the family name
There has been some debate about the origins of the Vancouver name. It is now commonly accepted that the name Vancouver derives from the expression van Coevorden, meaning "(originating) from Coevorden", a city in the northeast of the Netherlands. This city is apparently named after the "Coeverden" family of the 13th–15th century.

In the 16th century, a number of businessmen from the Coevorden area (and the rest of the Netherlands) moved to England. Some of them were known as Van Coeverden. Others adopted the surname Oxford, as in oxen fording (a river), which is approximately the English translation of Coevorden. However, it is not the exact name of the noble family mentioned in the history books that claim Vancouver's noble lineage: that name was Coeverden not Coevorden.

In the 1970s, Adrien Mansvelt, a former consul-general of the Netherlands based in Vancouver, published a collation of information in both historical and genealogical journals and in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Mansvelt's theory was later presented by the city during the Expo 86 World's Fair, as historical fact. The information was then used by historian W. Kaye Lamb in his book A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795 (1984).

W. Kaye Lamb, in summarising Mansvelt's 1973 research, observes evidence of close family ties between the Vancouver family of Britain and the Van Coeverden family of the Netherlands as well as George Vancouver's own words from his diaries in referring to his Dutch ancestry:

"As the name Vancouver suggests, the Vancouvers were of Dutch origin. They were descended from the titled van Coeverden family, one of the oldest in the Netherlands. By the twelfth century, and for many years thereafter, their castle at Coevorden, in the Province of Drenthe, was an important fortress on the eastern frontier. George Vancouver was aware of this. In July 1794, he named the Lynn Canal 'after the place of my nativity' and Point Couverden (which he spelt incorrectly) 'after the seat of my ancestors'. Vancouver's great grandfather, Reint Wolter van Couverden, was probably the first of the line to establish an English connection. While serving as a squire at one of the German courts he met Johanna (Jane) Lilingston, an English girl who was one of the ladies in waiting. They were married in 1699. Their son, Lucas Hendrik van Couverden, married Vancouver's grandmother, Sarah. In his later years he probably anglicized his name and spent most of his time in England. By the eighteenth century, the estates of the van Couverdens were mostly in the Province of Overijssel, and some of the family were living in Vollenhove, on the Zuider Zee. The English and Dutch branches kept in touch, and in 1798 (the date of Vancouver's death) George Vancouver's brother Charles would marry a kinswoman, Louise Josephine van Couverden, of Vollenhove. Both were great-grandchildren of Reint Wolter van Couverden.'"

In 2006 John Robson, a librarian at the University of Waikato, conducted his own research into George Vancouver's ancestry, which he published in an article in the British Columbia History journal. Robson theorises that Vancouver's forebears may have been Flemish rather than Dutch; he believes that Vancouver is descended from the Vangover family of Ipswich in Suffolk and Colchester in Essex. Those towns had a significant Flemish population in the 16th and 17th centuries.

George Vancouver named the south point of what is now Couverden Island, Alaska, Point Couverden during his exploration of the North American Pacific coast, in honour of his family's hometown of Coevorden. It is located at the western point of entry to Lynn Canal in southeastern Alaska.

Works by George Vancouver
The Admiralty instructed Vancouver to publish a narrative of his voyage which he started to write in early 1796 in Petersham. At the time of his death the manuscript covered the period up to mid-1795. The work, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World, was completed by his brother John and published in three volumes in the autumn of 1798. A second edition was published in 1801 in six volumes.
 * A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 1
 * A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 2
 * A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 3

A modern annotated edition (1984) by W. Kaye Lamb was renamed The Voyage of George Vancouver 1791–1795, and published in four volumes by the Hakluyt Society of London, England.

title: George Vancouver


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Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels were changed. Some consonant sounds also changed, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonantal changes.

The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.

Causes
The causes of the Great Vowel Shift are unknown and have been a source of intense scholarly debate; as yet, there is no firm consensus. The greatest changes occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, and their origins are at least partly phonetic.

 * Population migration: This is the most accepted theory; some scholars have argued that the rapid migration of peoples to the southeast of England from the east and central Midlands of England following the Black Death produced a clash of dialects that made Londoners distinguish their speech from the immigrants who came from other English cities by changing their vowel system.
 * French loan words: Others argue that the influx of French loanwords was a major factor in the shift.
 * Middle-class hypercorrection: Yet others assert that because of the increasing prestige of French pronunciations among the middle classes (perhaps related to the English aristocracy's switching from French to English around this time), a process of hypercorrection may have started a shift that unintentionally resulted in vowel pronunciations that are inaccurate imitations of French pronunciations.
 * War with France: An opposing theory states that the wars with France and general anti-French sentiments caused hypercorrection deliberately to make English sound less like French.

Overall changes
The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English (Received Pronunciation) is in the value of the long vowels.

Long vowels in Middle English had "continental" values, much like those in Italian and Standard German; in standard Modern English, they have entirely different pronunciations. The differing pronunciations of English vowel letters do not stem from the Great Shift as such but rather because English spelling did not adapt to the changes.

German had undergone vowel changes quite similar to the Great Shift slightly earlier. Still, the spelling was changed accordingly (e.g., Middle High German bīzen → modern German beißen "to bite").

This timeline uses representative words to show the main vowel changes between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the lower half of the table, between 1400 and 1600–1700.

The changes after 1700 are not considered part of the Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

Middle English vowel system
Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels,. The vowels occurred in, for example, the words mite, meet, meat, mate, boat, boot, and bout, respectively.

The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from those in Modern English:
 * Long i in mite was pronounced as, so Middle English mite sounded similar to Modern English meet.
 * Long e in meet was pronounced as, so Middle English meet sounded similar to modern Australian English met but pronounced longer.
 * Long a in mate was pronounced as, with a vowel similar to the broad a of ma.
 * Long o in boot was pronounced as, so Middle English boot sounded similar to modern Southern England, Australian and New Zealand English bought.

In addition, Middle English had:
 * Long  in meat, like modern short e in met but pronounced longer.
 * Long  in boat, with a vowel similar to aw in modern Northern England English law, or like modern Southern England, Australian and New Zealand English bot but pronounced longer.
 * Long  in bout, similar to Modern English boot.

Changes
After around 1300, the long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation as follows:

 * Diphthongisation – The two close vowels,, became diphthongs (vowel breaking).
 * Vowel raising – The other five,, underwent an increase in tongue height (raising).

These changes occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels and the close-mid vowels :  were raised to, and  became the diphthongs  or. The second phase affected the open vowel and the open-mid vowels :  were raised, in most cases changing to.

The Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger, so Middle English before the vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift.

After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging. Immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as.

However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like great, which is pronounced with the vowel as in mate rather than the vowel  as in meat.

This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English (late ME), Early Modern English (EModE), and today's English (ModE). Pronunciations in 1400, 1500, 1600, and 1900 are shown. To hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols.

Before labial consonants and also after, did not shift, and  remains as in soup.

First phase
The first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels, as in beet and boot, and the close vowels , as in bite and out. The close-mid vowels became close, and the close vowels  became diphthongs. The first phase was completed in 1500, meaning that by that time, words like beet and boot had lost their Middle English pronunciation and were pronounced with the same vowels as in Modern English. The words bite and out were pronounced with diphthongs, but not the same diphthongs as in Modern English.

Scholars agree that the Middle English close vowels became diphthongs around 1500, but disagree about what diphthongs they changed to. According to Lass, the words bite and out after diphthongisation were pronounced as and, similar to American English bait  and oat. Later, the diphthongs shifted to, then , and finally to Modern English. This sequence of events is supported by the testimony of orthoepists before Hodges in 1644.

However, many scholars such as, , and argue for theoretical reasons that, contrary to what 16th-century witnesses report, the vowels  were immediately centralised and lowered to.

Evidence from Northern English and Scots (see below) suggests that the close-mid vowels were the first to shift. As the Middle English vowels were raised towards, they forced the original Middle English  out of place and caused them to become diphthongs. This type of sound change, in which one vowel's pronunciation shifts so that it is pronounced like a second vowel, and the second vowel is forced to change its pronunciation, is called a push chain.

However, according to professor Jürgen Handke, for some time, there was a phonetic split between words with the vowel and the diphthong, in words where the Middle English  shifted to the Modern English. For an example, high was pronounced with the vowel, and like and my were pronounced with the diphthong. Therefore, for logical reasons, the close vowels could have diphthongised before the close-mid vowels  raised. Otherwise, high would probably rhyme with thee rather than my. This type of chain is called a drag chain.

Second phase
The second phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English open vowel, as in mate, and the Middle English open-mid vowels , as in meat and boat. Around 1550, Middle English was raised to. Then, after 1600, the new was raised to, with the Middle English open-mid vowels  raised to close-mid.

Later mergers
During the first and the second phases of the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels were shifted without merging with other vowels, but after the second phase, several vowels merged. The later changes also involved the Middle English diphthong, as in day, which often (but not always, see the pane-pain merger) monophthongised to , and merged with Middle English as in mate or  as in meat.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, several different pronunciation variants existed among different parts of the population for words like meet, meat, mate, and day. Different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation in each pronunciation variant. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in the table below. The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation. In Modern English, meet and meat are merged in pronunciation and both have the vowel, and mate and day are merged with the diphthong , which developed from the 16th-century long vowel.

Modern English typically has the meet–meat merger: both meet and meat are pronounced with the vowel. Words like great and steak, however, have merged with mate and are pronounced with the vowel, which developed from the shown in the table above. Before historic some of these vowels merged with, , ,

Northern English and Scots
The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects and the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England, the shift did not operate on the long back vowels because they had undergone an earlier shift. Similarly, the dialect in Scotland had a different vowel system before the Great Vowel Shift, as had shifted to  in Early Scots. In the Scots equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowels, and  shifted to ,  and  by the Middle Scots period and  remained unaffected.

The first step in the Great Vowel Shift in Northern and Southern English is shown in the table below. The Northern English developments of Middle English and  were different from Southern English. In particular, the Northern English vowels in  bite,  in feet, and  in boot shifted, while the vowel  in house did not. These developments below fall under the label "older" to refer to Scots and a more conservative and increasingly rural Northern sound, while "younger" refers to a more mainstream Northern sound largely emerging just since the twentieth century.

The vowel systems of Northern and Southern Middle English immediately before the Great Vowel Shift were different in one way. In Northern Middle English, the back close-mid vowel in boot had already shifted to front  (a sound change known as fronting), like the long ö in German   "hear". Thus, Southern English had a back close-mid vowel, but Northern English did not: In Northern and Southern English, the first step of the Great Vowel Shift raised the close-mid vowels to become close. Northern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – in feet and  in boot – which were raised to  and. Later on, Northern English changed to  in many dialects (though not in all, see ), so that boot has the same vowel as feet. Southern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – in feet and  in boot – which were raised to  and.

In Southern English, the close vowels in bite and  in house shifted to become diphthongs, but in Northern English,  in bite shifted but  in house did not.

If the vowel systems at the time of the Great Vowel Shift caused the difference between the Northern and Southern vowel shifts, did not shift because there was no back mid vowel  in Northern English. In Southern English, shifting of to  could have caused diphthongisation of original, but because Northern English had no back close-mid vowel  to shift, the back close vowel  did not diphthongise.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Great Vowel Shift


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Gilbert Arthur à Beckett

Gilbert Arthur à Beckett (April 7, 1837 – October 15, 1891) was an English writer.

Biography
Beckett was born at Portland House Hammersmith, on 7 April 1837, the eldest son of the civil servant and humorist Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and the composer Mary Anne à Beckett, daughter of Joseph Glossop, clerk of the cheque to the hon. corps of gentlemen-at-arms. His brother was Arthur William à Beckett. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, as a Westminster scholar in 1860. He was entered at Lincoln's Inn on 15 October 1857, but gave his attention chiefly to drama, producing Diamonds and Hearts at the Haymarket Theatre in 1867; this was followed by other light comedies. His adaptation of a French operetta by Émile Jonas called The Two Harlequins opened the new Gaiety Theatre, London in 1868, together with his distant cousin, W. S. Gilbert's, Robert the Devil and another piece.

Beckett's pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr. C. V. Stanford. With the composer Alfred Cellier, Beckett wrote the operetta Two Foster Brothers (St. George's Hall, 1877).

In 1879, he had been asked by Tom Taylor, the editor of Punch, to follow the example of his younger brother Arthur, and become a regular member of the staff of Punch. Three years later he was 'appointed to the Table.' The Punch dinners 'were his greatest pleasure, and he attended them with regularity, although the paralysis of the legs, the result of falling down the stairway of Gower Street station, rendered his locomotion, and especially the mounting of Mr. Punch's staircase, a matter of painful exertion'. To Punch he contributed both prose and verse; he wrote, in greater part, the admirable parody of a boy's sensational shocker (March 1882), and he developed Jerrold's idea of humorous bogus advertisements under the heading 'How we advertise now.' The idea of one of Sir John Tenniel's best cartoons for Punch, entitled 'Dropping the Pilot,' illustrative of Bismarck's resignation in 1889, was due to him.

Apart from his work on 'Punch,' he wrote songs and music for the German Reeds' entertainment, while in 1873 and 1874 he was collaborator in two dramatic productions which evoked a considerable amount of public attention.

On 3 March 1873, The Happy Land was given at the Court Theatre, 1873, a daring political satire and burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's The Wicked World. In this amusing piece of banter three statesmen (Gladstone, Lowe, and Ayrton) were represented as visiting Fairyland in order to impart to the inhabitants the secrets of popular government. The actors representing 'Mr. G.,' 'Mr. L.,' and 'Mr. A.' were dressed so as to resemble the ministers satirised, and the representation elicited a question in the House of Commons and an official visit of the Lord Chamberlain to the theatre, with the result that the actors had to change their 'make-up.'

In the following year, he furnished the 'legend' to Herman Merivale's tragedy 'The White Pilgrim,' first given at the Court in February 1874. At the close of his life he furnished the 'lyrics' and most of the book for the operetta La Cigale, which at the time of his death was nearing its four hundredth performance at the Lyric Theatre.

In 1889, he suffered a great shock from the death by drowning of his only son, and he died in London on 15 October 1891, and was buried in Mortlake cemetery.

Legacy
Punch devoted some appreciative stanzas to his memory, bearing the epigraph 'Wearing the white flower of a blameless life' (24 Oct. 1891). His portrait appeared in the well-known drawing of 'The Mahogany Tree' (Punch, Jubilee Number, 18 July 1887), and likenesses were also given in the 'Illustrated London News' and in Spielmann's 'History of Punch' (1895).

Family
He married Emily, eldest daughter of William Hunt, J.P., of Bath, and his only daughter Minna married in 1896 Mr. Hugh Clifford, C.M.G., governor of Labuan and British North Borneo.

title: Gilbert Arthur à Beckett


text:
Glaucus (disambiguation)

In Greek mythology, Glaucus was a Greek prophetic sea-god.

Glaucus, often transliterated to Glafkos, may also refer to:

People

 * Glaucus, son of Aepytus of Messenia
 * Glaucus (son of Sisyphus), of Potniae
 * Glaucus (son of Minos), of Crete
 * Glaucus (son of Hippolochus), of Lycia, grandson of the hero Bellerophon
 * Glaucus of Carystus, an ancient Greek athlete
 * Glaucus of Chios (c. 7th century BCE), Greek sculptor in metal
 * Apollonius Glaucus, 2nd-century Roman physician
 * Glafcos Clerides (1919–2013), former President of Cyprus

Rivers

 * Glafkos (river), a river in Patras, Greece
 * Glaucus (river of Asia Minor), rivers in Asia Minor

Ships

 * Greek submarine Glafkos (Υ-6), a Protefs-class submarine of the Hellenic Navy
 * SS Glaucus (1871), shipwrecked in 1921
 * USS Glaucus (1863), a steamship of the Union Navy during the American Civil War

Other

 * 1870 Glaukos, a Trojan asteroid
 * Glaucus (gastropod), a genus of nudibranchs in the family Glaucidae
 * Glaucus (mythology), characters named Glaucus in Greek mythology
 * Glaucus (sculpture), a sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin
 * The protagonist in the 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
 * Glaukos Linea, a linea on Europa
 * Glaucus Sinus, now Gulf of Fethiye in Turkey
 * Project Glaucus, an underwater habitat in Plymouth Sound

title: Glaucus (disambiguation)


text:
George Gordon, 1st Earl of Aberdeen

George Gordon, 1st Earl of Aberdeen (3 October 1637 – 20 April 1720), was a Lord Chancellor of Scotland.

Early life
Gordon, born on 3 October 1637, the second son of Sir John Gordon, 1st Baronet, of Haddo, Aberdeenshire, (executed in 1644); and his wife, Mary Forbes. He graduated MA, and was chosen professor at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1658. Subsequently, he travelled and studied civil law abroad.

Career
At the Restoration the sequestration of his father's lands was annulled, and in 1665 he succeeded by the death of his elder brother as the 3rd Baronet Gordon, of Haddo and to the family estates. He returned home in 1667, was admitted advocate in 1668 and gained a high legal reputation. He represented Aberdeenshire in the Parliament of Scotland of 1669 to 1674, the Convention of Estates of 1678 and the following parliamentary assembly of 1681/82. During his first session he strongly opposed the projected union of England and Scotland. In November 1678 he was made a Privy Counsellor for Scotland, and in 1680 was raised to the bench as Lord Haddo. He was a leading member of the Duke of York's administration, was created a Lord of the Articles in June and in November 1681 Lord President of the Privy Council. The same year he is reported as moving in the council for the torture of witnesses.

In 1682 he was made Lord Chancellor of Scotland, and was created, on 13 November, Earl of Aberdeen, Viscount Formartine, and Lord Haddo, Methlick, Tarves and Kellie, in the Scottish peerage, being appointed also Sheriff of Aberdeen and Sheriff of Edinburgh later the same year.

Burnet reflected unfavourably upon him, writing of him, "...a proud and covetous man ... the new chancellor exceeded all that had gone before him.

He executed the laws enforcing religious conformity with severity, and filled the parish churches, but resisted the excessive measures of tyranny prescribed by the English government; and in consequence of an intrigue of the Duke of Queensberry and Lord Perth, who gained the duchess of Portsmouth with a present of £27,000, he was dismissed in 1684.

After his fall he was subjected to various petty prosecutions by his victorious rivals with the view of discovering some act of maladministration on which to found a charge against him, but the investigations only served to strengthen his credit. He took an active part in parliament in 1685 and 1686, but remained a non-juror during the whole of William's reign, being frequently fined for his non-attendance, and took the oaths for the first time after Anne's accession, on 11 May 1703.

In the great affair of the Union in 1707, while protesting against the completion of the treaty till the act declaring the Scots aliens should be repealed, he refused to support the opposition to the measure itself and refrained from attending parliament when the treaty was settled.

He is described by John Mackay as, "...very knowing in the laws and constitution of his country and is believed to be the solidest statesman in Scotland, a fine orator, speaks slow but sure.

His person was said to be deformed, and his want of mine or deportment was alleged as a disqualification for the office of Lord Chancellor.

Family
He married Anne Lockhart, daughter and (eventual) sole heiress of George Lockhart of Tarbrax and Anne Lockhart. They had several children:
 * John Gordon (1673–1675)
 * George Gordon, Lord Haddo (1674 – after 1694), d.v.p.s.p.
 * Lady Anne Gordon (1675–1709), married Alexander Montgomerie, 9th Earl of Eglinton
 * James Gordon (1676–?), d.v.p.s.p.
 * Lady Jean Gordon (1678–?)
 * William Gordon, 2nd Earl of Aberdeen (1679–30 March 1746)
 * Lady Martha Gordon (1681– ?), married John Udny of Udny in March 1701
 * Lady Mary Gordon (1682–1753), married Alexander Fraser, 13th Lord Saltoun, 26 October 1707
 * Lady Margaret Gordon (d.1738)

His only surviving son, William, succeeded him as 2nd earl of Aberdeen. He died on 20 April 1720, having amassed a large fortune.

title: George Gordon, 1st Earl of Aberdeen


text:
George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen

George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (28 January 1784 – 14 December 1860 ), styled Lord Haddo from 1791 to 1801, was a British statesman, diplomat and landowner, successively a Tory, Conservative and Peelite politician and specialist in foreign affairs. He served as Prime Minister from 1852 until 1855 in a coalition between the Whigs and Peelites, with Radical and Irish support. The Aberdeen ministry was filled with powerful and talented politicians, whom Aberdeen was largely unable to control and direct. Despite his trying to avoid this happening, it took Britain into the Crimean War, and fell when its conduct became unpopular, after which Aberdeen retired from politics.

Born into a wealthy family with the largest estates in Scotland, his personal life was marked by the loss of both parents by the time he was eleven, and of his first wife after only seven years of a happy marriage. His daughters died young, and his relations with his sons were difficult. He travelled extensively in Europe, including Greece, and he had a serious interest in the classical civilisations and their archaeology. His Scottish estates having been neglected by his father, he devoted himself (when he came of age) to modernising them according to the latest standards.

After 1812 he became a diplomat, and in 1813, at age 29, was given the critically important embassy to Vienna, where he organised and financed the sixth coalition that defeated Napoleon. His rise in politics was equally rapid and lucky, and "two accidents — Canning's death and Wellington's impulsive acceptance of the Canningite resignations" led to his becoming Foreign Secretary for Prime Minister Wellington in 1828 despite "an almost ludicrous lack of official experience"; he had been a minister for less than six months. After holding the position for two years, followed by another cabinet role, by 1841 his experience led to his appointment as Foreign Secretary again under Robert Peel for a longer term. His diplomatic successes include organizing the coalition against Napoleon in 1812–1814, normalizing relations with post-Napoleonic France, settling the old border dispute between Canada and the United States, and ending the First Opium War with China in 1842, whereby Hong Kong was obtained. Aberdeen was a poor speaker, but this scarcely mattered in the House of Lords. He exhibited a "dour, awkward, occasionally sarcastic exterior". His friend William Ewart Gladstone, said of him that he was "the man in public life of all others whom I have loved. I say emphatically loved. I have loved others, but never like him".

Early life
Born in Edinburgh on 28 January 1784, he was the eldest son of George Gordon, Lord Haddo, son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. His mother was Charlotte, youngest daughter of William Baird of Newbyth. He lost his father on 18 October 1791 and his mother in 1795, and he was brought up by Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, and William Pitt the Younger. He was educated at Harrow, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1804. Before this, however, he had become Earl of Aberdeen on his grandfather's death in 1801, and had travelled all over Europe. On his return to Britain, he founded the Society of Athenian Travellers. In 1805, he married Lady Catherine Elizabeth, daughter of John Hamilton, 1st Marquess of Abercorn.

Political and diplomatic career, 1805–1828
In December 1805, Lord Aberdeen took his seat as a Tory Scottish representative peer in the House of Lords. In 1808, he was created a Knight of the Thistle. Following the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1812 he joined the Foreign Service. He was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Austria, and signed the Treaty of Töplitz between Britain and Austria in Vienna in October 1813. In the company of the Austrian Emperor, Francis II, he was an observer at the decisive Coalition victory of the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813; he had met Napoleon in his earlier travels. He became one of the central diplomatic figures in European diplomacy at this time, and he was one of the British representatives at the Congress of Châtillon in February 1814, and at the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris in May of that year.

Aberdeen was greatly affected by the aftermath of war which he witnessed at first hand. He wrote home:"The near approach of war and its effects are horrible beyond what you can conceive. The whole road from Prague to [Teplitz] was covered with waggons full of wounded, dead, and dying. The shock and disgust and pity produced by such scenes are beyond what I could have supposed possible...the scenes of distress and misery have sunk deeper in my mind.  I have been quite haunted by them."

Returning home he was created a peer of the United Kingdom as Viscount Gordon, of Aberdeen in the County of Aberdeen (1814), and made a member of the Privy Council.

In July 1815, he married his former sister-in-law Harriet, daughter of John Douglas, and widow of James Hamilton, Viscount Hamilton; the marriage was much less happy than his first. During the ensuing thirteen years Aberdeen took a less prominent part in public affairs.

Political career, 1828–1852
Lord Aberdeen served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between January and June 1828 and subsequently as Foreign Secretary until 1830 under the Duke of Wellington. He resigned with Wellington over the Reform Bill of 1832.

He was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the first Peel ministry (December 1834 - April 1835), and again Foreign Secretary between 1841 and 1846 under Sir Robert Peel (second Peel ministry). It was during his second stint as Foreign Secretary that he had the harbor settlement of 'Little Hong Kong', on the south side of Hong Kong Island, named after him. It was probably the most productive period of his career; he settled two disagreements with the US: the northeast boundary dispute by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), and the Oregon dispute by the Oregon Treaty of 1846. He enjoyed the trust of Queen Victoria, which was still important for a Foreign Secretary. He worked closely with Henry Bulwer, his ambassador to Madrid, to help arrange marriages for Queen Isabella and her younger sister the Infanta Luisa Fernanda. They helped stabilize Spain's internal and external relations. He sought better relations with France, relying on his friendship with Guizot, but Britain was annoyed with France on a series of issues, especially French colonial policies, the right to search slave ships, the French desire to control Belgium, disputes in the Pacific and the French intervention in Morocco.

In opposition
Aberdeen again followed his leader and resigned with Peel over the issue of the Corn Laws. After Peel's death in July 1850 he became the recognised leader of the Peelites. In August 1847, a general election of Parliament had been held which resulted in the election of 325 Tory/Conservative party members to Parliament. This represented 42.7% of the seats in Parliament. The main opposition to the Tory/Conservative Party was the Whig Party, which had 292 seats.

While the Peelites agreed with the Whigs on issues dealing with international trade, there were other issues on which the Peelites disagreed with the Whigs. Indeed, Lord Aberdeen's own dislike of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill, the rejection of which he failed to secure in 1851, prevented him from joining the Whig government of Lord John Russell in that year. Additionally, 113 of the members of Parliament elected in 1847 were Free Traders. These members agreed with the Peelites on the repeal of the "Corn Laws", but they felt that the tariffs on all consumer products should be removed.

Furthermore, 36 members of Parliament elected in 1847 were members of the "Irish Brigade", who voted with the Peelites and the Whigs for the repeal of the Corn Laws because they sought an end the Great Irish Famine by means of cheaper wheat and bread prices for the poor and middle classes in Ireland. Currently, however, the Free Traders and the Irish Brigade had disagreements with the Whigs that prevented them from joining with the Whigs to form a government. Accordingly, the Tory/Conservative Party leader the Earl of Derby was asked to form a "minority government". Derby appointed Benjamin Disraeli as the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the minority government. The general election in July 1852 had no clear winner.

When in December 1852 Disraeli submitted his budget to Parliament on behalf of the minority government, the Peelites, the Free Traders, and the Irish Brigade were all alienated by the proposed budget. Accordingly, those groups suddenly forgot their differences with the Whig Party and voted with the Whigs against the proposed budget. The vote was 286 in favour of the budget and 305 votes against the budget. Because the leadership of the minority government had made the vote on the budget vote a vote of confidence, the defeat of the Disraeli budget was a "vote of no confidence" in the minority government and meant its downfall. Lord Aberdeen was asked to form a new government; Gladstone became his Chancellor.

Prime Minister, 1852–1855
Following the downfall of the Tory/Conservative minority government under Lord Derby in December 1852, Lord Aberdeen formed a new government from the coalition of Free Traders, Peelites, and Whigs that had voted no confidence in the minority government. Lord Aberdeen was able to put together a coalition that held 53.8% of the seats of Parliament. Thus Lord Aberdeen, a Peelite, became Prime Minister and headed a coalition ministry of Whigs and Peelites.

Although united on international trade issues and on questions of domestic reform, his cabinet also contained Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, who were certain to differ on questions of foreign policy. Charles Greville wrote in his Memoirs, "In the present cabinet are five or six first-rate men of equal, or nearly equal, pretensions, none of them likely to acknowledge the superiority or defer to the opinions of any other, and every one of these five or six considering himself abler and more important than their premier"; and Sir James Graham wrote, "It is a powerful team, but it will require good driving", which Aberdeen was unable to provide. During the administration, much trouble was caused by the rivalry between Palmerston and Russell, and over the course of it Palmerston managed to out-manoeuvre Russell to emerge as the Whig heir apparent. The cabinet also included a single Radical, Sir William Molesworth, but much later, when justifying to the Queen his own new appointments, Gladstone told her: "For instance, even in Ld Aberdeen's Govt, in 52, Sir William Molesworth had been selected, at that time, a very advanced Radical, but who was perfectly harmless, & took little, or no part.... He said these people generally became very moderate, when they were in office", which she admitted had been the case.

One of the foreign policy issues on which Palmerston and Russell disagreed was the type of relationship that Britain should have with France and especially France's ruler, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Bonaparte was the nephew of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become dictator and then Emperor of France from 1804 until 1814. The younger Bonaparte had been elected to a three-year term as President of the Second Republic of France on 20 December 1848. The Constitution of the Second Republic limited the President to a single term in office. Thus, Louis Bonaparte would be unable to succeed himself and after 20 December 1851 would no longer be president. Consequently, on 2 December 1851, shortly before the end of his single three-year term in office was to expire, Bonaparte staged a coup against the Second Republic in France, disbanded the elected Constituent Assembly, arrested some of the Republican leaders, and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III of France. This coup upset many democrats in England as well as in France. Some British government officials felt that Louis Bonaparte was seeking foreign adventure in the spirit of his uncle, Napoleon I. Consequently, these officials felt that any close association with Bonaparte would eventually lead Britain into another series of wars, like the wars with France and Napoleon dating from 1793 until 1815. British relations with France had scarcely improved since 1815. As prime minister, the Earl of Aberdeen was one of these officials who feared France and Bonaparte.

However, other British government officials were beginning to worry more about the rising political dominance of the Russian Empire in eastern Europe and the corresponding decline of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Palmerston at the time of Louis Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup was serving as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Whig government of Prime Minister Lord John Russell. Without informing the rest of the cabinet or Queen Victoria, Palmerston had sent a private note to the French ambassador endorsing Louis Bonaparte's coup and congratulating Louis Bonaparte himself on the coup. Queen Victoria and members of the Russell government demanded that Palmerston be dismissed as Foreign Minister. Russell requested Palmerston's resignation and Palmerston reluctantly provided it. In February 1852, Palmerston took revenge on Russell by voting with the Conservatives in a "no confidence" vote against the Russell government. This brought an end to the Russell Whig government and set the stage for a general election in July 1852 which eventually brought the Conservatives to power in a minority government under the Earl of Derby. Later in the year, another problem facing the Earl of Aberdeen in the formation of his own new government in December 1852 was Lord John Russell himself. Russell was the leader of the Whig Party, the largest group in the coalition government. Consequently, Lord Aberdeen, was required to appoint Russell as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which he had done on 29 December 1852. However, Russell sometimes liked to use this position to speak for the whole government, as if he were the prime minister. In 1832, Russell had been nicknamed "Finality John" because of his statement that the 1832 Reform Act had just been approved by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords would be the "final" expansion of the vote in Britain. There would be no further extension of the ballot to the common people of Britain. However, as political pressure in favour of further reform had risen over the twenty years since 1832, Russell had changed his mind. Russell had said, in January 1852, that he intended to introduce a new reform bill into the House of Commons which would equalise the populations of the districts from which members of Parliament were elected. Probably as a result of their continuing feud, Palmerston declared himself against this Reform Bill of 1852. As a result, support for the bill dwindled and Russell was forced to change his mind again and not introduce any Reform Bill in 1852.

In order to form the coalition government, the Earl of Aberdeen had been required to appoint both Palmerston and Russell to his cabinet. Because of the controversy surrounding Palmerston's removal as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Palmerston could not now be appointed Foreign Minister again so soon after his removal from that position. Accordingly, on 28 December 1852, Aberdeen appointed Palmerston as Home Secretary and appointed Russell as Foreign Minister.

The "Eastern Question"
Given the differences of opinion within the Lord Aberdeen cabinet over the direction of foreign policy with regard to relations between Britain and France under Napoleon III, it is not surprising that debate raged within the government as Louis Bonaparte, now assuming the title of Emperor Napoleon III. As Prime Minister of the Peelite/Whig coalition government, Aberdeen eventually led Britain into war on the side of the French and Ottomans against the Russian Empire. This war would eventually be called the Crimean War, but throughout the foreign policy negotiations surrounding the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which would continue throughout the middle and end of nineteenth century, the problem would be referred to as the "Eastern Question".

The cabinet was bitterly divided. Palmerston stirred up anti-reform feeling in Parliament and pro-war public opinion to out-maneuver Russell. The result was that the weak Aberdeen government went to war with Russia as the result of internal British political rivalries. Aberdeen accepted Russian arguments at face value because he sympathised with Russian interests against French pressure and was not in favour of the Crimean War. However, he was unable to resist the pressure that was being exerted on him by Palmerston's faction. In the end, the Crimean War proved to be the downfall of his government.

The Eastern Question flared up on 2 December 1852, with the Napoleon's coup against the Second Republic. As Napoleon III was forming his new imperial government, he sent an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire with instructions to assert France's right to protect Christian sites in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The Ottoman Empire agreed to this condition to avoid conflict or even war with France. Aberdeen, as Foreign Secretary in 1845, had himself tacitly authorised the construction of the first Anglican church in Jerusalem, following his predecessor's commission in 1838 of the first European Consul in Jerusalem on Britain's behalf, which lead to series of successive appointments by other nations. Both resulted from Lord Shaftesbury's canvassing with substantial public support.

Nevertheless, Britain became increasingly worried about the situation in Turkey, and Prime Minister Aberdeen sent Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, a diplomat with vast experience in Turkey, as a special envoy to the Ottoman Empire to guard British interests. Russia protested the Turkish agreement with the French as a violation of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1778, which ended the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). Under the treaty, the Russians had been granted the exclusive right to protect the Christian sites in the Holy Land. Accordingly, on 7 May 1853, the Russians sent Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov, one their premier statesmen, to negotiate a settlement of the issue. Prince Menshikov called the attention of the Turks to the fact that during the Russo-Turkish War, the Russians had occupied the Turkish-controlled provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia on the north bank of the Danube River, and he reminded them that pursuant to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, the Russians had returned these "Danubian provinces" to Ottoman control in exchange for the right to protect the Christian sites in the Holy Land. Accordingly, the Turks reversed themselves and agreed with the Russians.

The French sent one of their premier ships-of-the-line, the Charlemagne, to the Black Sea as a show of force. In light of the French show of force, the Turks, again, reversed themselves and recognised the French right to protect the Christian sites. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was advising the Ottomans during this time, and later it was alleged that he had been instrumental in persuading the Turks to reject the Russian arguments.

As war became inevitable, Aberdeen wrote to Russell: "The abstract justice of the cause, although indisputable, is but a poor consolation for the inevitable calamities of all war, or for a decision which I am not without fear may prove to have been impolitic and unwise. My conscience upbraids me the more, because seeing, as I did from the first, all that was to be apprehended, it is possible that by a little more energy and vigour, not on the Danube, but in Downing Street, it might have been prevented."

Crimean War 1853–1856

In response this latest change of mind by the Ottomans, the Russians on 2 July 1853 occupied the Turkish satellite states of Wallachia and Moldavia, as they had during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Almost immediately, the Russian troops deployed along the northern banks of the Danube River, implying that they might cross the river. Aberdeen ordered the British Fleet to Constantinople and later into the Black Sea. On 23 October 1853, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. A Russian naval raid on Sinope, on 30 November 1853, resulted in the destruction of the Turkish fleet in the battle of Sinope. When Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to abandon the Danubian provinces, Britain and France declared war on Russia on 28 March 1854. In September 1854, British and French troops landed on the Crimean peninsula at Eupatoria, north of Sevastopol. The Allied troops then moved across the Alma River on 20 September 1854 at the battle of Alma and set siege to the fort of Sevastopol.

A Russian attack on the allied supply base at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 was rebuffed. The Battle of Balaclava is noted for its famous (or rather infamous) Charge of the Light Brigade. On 5 November 1854, Russian forces tried to relieve the siege at Sevastopol and defeat the Allied armies in the field in the Battle of Inkerman. However, this attempt failed. Dissatisfaction as to the course of the war grew in England. As reports returned detailing the mismanagement of the conflict, Parliament began to investigate. On 29 January 1855, John Arthur Roebuck introduced a motion for the appointment of a select committee to enquire into the conduct of the war. This motion was carried by the large majority of 305 in favour and 148 against.

Treating this as a vote of no confidence in his government, Aberdeen resigned, and retired from active politics, speaking for the last time in the House of Lords in 1858. In visiting Windsor Castle to resign, he told the Queen: "Nothing could have been better, he said than the feeling of the members towards each other. Had it not been for the incessant attempts of Ld John Russell to keep up party differences, it must be acknowledged that the experiment of a coalition had succeeded admirably. We discussed future possibilities & agreed that nothing remained to be done, but to offer the Govt to Ld Derby,...". The Queen continued to criticise Lord John Russell for his behaviour for the rest of his life; on his death in 1878 her journal records that he was "A man of much talent, who leaves a name behind him, kind, & good, with a great knowledge of the constitution, who behaved very well, on many trying occasions; but he was impulsive, very selfish (as shown on many occasions, especially during Ld Aberdeen's administration) vain, & often reckless & imprudent".

Relations with the United States
British-American relations had been troublesome under Palmerston, but Aberdeen proved much more conciliatory, and worked well with Daniel Webster, the American Secretary of State who was himself an Anglophile. In 1842, Aberdeen sent Lord Ashburton to Washington to settle all disputes, especially the border between Canada and Maine, the boundary along the Great Lakes, the Oregon boundary, the African slave trade, the Caroline affair about boundaries in 1837 and the Creole case of 1841 involving a slave revolt on the high seas. The Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842 solved most of the problems amicably. Thus Maine got most of the disputed land, but Canada obtained a vital, strategic strip of land connecting it to a warm water port. Aberdeen helped solve the Oregon dispute amicably in 1846. However, as prime minister, Aberdeen had trouble with the United States. In 1854 an American naval vessel bombarded the mosquito port of Greytown, Nicaragua in retaliation for an insult; Britain protested. Later in 1846, the United States announced its intention of annexing Hawaii, and Britain not only complained but sent a naval force to make the point. Negotiations for reciprocal trade agreement between the United States and Canada dragged on for eight years until a reciprocity treaty was reached in 1854.

Legacy
Aberdeen was generally successful as a hard-working diplomat, but his reputation has suffered greatly because of the lack of military success in the Crimean War and from the ridicule of enemies such as Disraeli who regarded him as weak, inefficient, and cold. Before the Crimean debacle that ended his career, Aberdeen scored numerous diplomatic triumphs, starting in 1813-14 when as ambassador to the Austrian Empire he negotiated the alliances and financing that led to the defeat of Napoleon. In Paris, he normalized relations with the newly restored Bourbon government and convinced London it could be trusted. He worked well with top European diplomats such as his friends Klemens von Metternich in Vienna and François Guizot in Paris. He brought Britain into the center of Continental diplomacy on critical issues, such as the local wars in Greece, Portugal, and Belgium. Simmering troubles on numerous issues with the United States were ended by friendly compromises. He played a central role in winning the Opium Wars against China, gaining control of Hong Kong in the process.

Family
Lord Aberdeen married Lady Catherine Elizabeth (10 January 1784 – 29 February 1812; daughter of Lord Abercorn) on 28 July 1805. They had four children.
 * Lady Jane Hamilton-Gordon (11 February 1807 – 18 August 1824) died at the age of seventeen years old
 * Lady Charlotte Catherine Hamilton-Gordon (28 March 1808 – 24 July 1818) died at the age of ten years old.
 * Lady Alice Hamilton-Gordon (12 July 1809 – 21 April 1829) died at the age of nineteen years old.
 * unnamed Gordon, Lord Haddo (23 November 1810 – 23 November 1810)

He remarried Harriet Douglas (paternal granddaughter of James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton and maternal granddaughter of Edward Lascelles, 1st Earl of Harewood) on 8 July 1815. They had five children:
 * George John James Hamilton-Gordon, 5th Earl of Aberdeen (28 September 1816 – 22 March 1864). He married Lady Mary Baillie (younger sister of George Baillie-Hamilton, 10th Earl of Haddington) on 5 November 1840. They had six children.
 * General Sir Alexander Hamilton-Gordon (11 December 1817 – 19 May 1890). He married Caroline Herschel (daughter of Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet) on 9 December 1852. They had nine children.
 * Lady Frances Hamilton-Gordon (4 December 1818 – 20 April 1834) died at the age of fifteen years old.
 * Reverend Hon. Douglas Hamilton-Gordon (13 March 1824 – 6 December 1901). He married Lady Ellen Douglas (maternal first cousin) on 15 July 1851.
 * Arthur Charles Hamilton-Gordon (26 November 1829 – 30 January 1912). He married Rachel Emily Shaw-Lefevre on 20 September 1865. They had two children.

The Countess of Aberdeen died in August 1833. Lord Aberdeen died at Argyll House, St. James's, London, on 14 December 1860, and was buried in the family vault at Stanmore church. In 1994 the novelist, columnist, and politician Ferdinand Mount used George Gordon's life as the basis for a historical novel, Umbrella.

Apart from his political career, Aberdeen was also a scholar of the classical civilisations, who published An Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Grecian Architecture (London, 1822) and was referred to by his cousin Lord Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) as "the travell'd thane, Athenian Aberdeen." He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen in 1827 and was President of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Religious interests
Aberdeen's biographer Muriel Chamberlain summarises, "Religion never came easy to him". In his Scots landowning capacity "North of the border, he considered himself ex officio a Presbyterian". In England "he privately considered himself an Anglican"; as early as 1840 he told Gladstone he preferred what Aberdeen called "the sister church [of England]" and when in London worshipped at St James's Piccadilly. He was ultimately buried in the Anglican parish church at Stanmore, Middlesex.

He was a member of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 1818 to 1828 and exercised his existing rights to present ministers to parishes on his Scottish estates through a time when the right of churches to veto the appointment or 'call' of a minister became so contentious as to lead in 1843 to the schism known as "the Disruption" when a third of ministers broke away to form the Free Church of Scotland. In the House of Lords, in 1840 and 1843, he raised two Compromise Bills to allow presbyteries but not congregations the right of veto. The first failed to pass (and was voted against by the General Assembly) but the latter, raised post-schism, became law for Scotland and remained in force until patronage of Scots livings was abolished in 1874.

It was under his prime ministership that the revival of the Convocations of Canterbury and York began, though they did not obtain their potential power until 1859.

He is said in the last few months of his life, after the Crimean War, to have declined to contribute to building a church on his Scotland estates because of a sense of guilt in having "shed much blood", citing biblically King David's being forbidden to build the Temple in Jerusalem.


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GnuCash

GnuCash is an accounting program that implements a double-entry bookkeeping system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit, Inc.'s Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting. Recent development has been focused on adapting to modern desktop support-library requirements.

GnuCash is part of the GNU Project, and runs on Linux, GNU, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and other Unix-like platforms. A Microsoft Windows (2000 or newer) port was made available starting with the 2.2.0 series.

GnuCash includes scripting support via scheme, mostly used for creating custom reports.

History
Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was in 1998. Small Business Accounting was added in 2001. A Mac installer became available in 2004. A Windows port was released in 2007.

GnuCash for Android and GnuCash Mobile
GnuCash for Android was initially developed as part of a Google Summer of Code Project. This was an expense-tracking companion app for GnuCash, as opposed to a stand-alone accounting package, and is now discontinued. Currently, there are more than 100,000 downloads on the Play Store.

In 2022 a companion version dubbed GnuCash Mobile is also available on the App Store and Play Store and unlike previous iterations was released under the MIT License. GnuCash Mobile is developed using Flutter. Beyond mentoring the original GnuCash for Android developer and providing some publicity there was no connection between Gnucash for Android and the GnuCash project, nor is there any for the current so-called GnuCash Mobile app.

Backwards compatibility issues
GnuCash maintains the ability to read older data files between major releases, as long as major releases are not skipped. If a user wishes to access historical data saved in old GnuCash files, they must install intermediate versions of GnuCash. For example, upgrading from 2.2 to 4.1 may not be possible; the user should upgrade from 2.2.9 to 2.4.15, then to 2.6.21, then 3.11, then 4.1. The other alternative is for users to export transactions files to a CSV format prior to upgrading GnuCash. Exporting of the account tree must be done as a separate step.

Features

 * Double-entry bookkeeping
 * Scheduled Transactions
 * Mortgage and Loan Repayment Assistant
 * Small Business Accounting Features
 * OFX, QIF Import, CSV Import
 * HBCI Support
 * Transaction-Import Matching Support
 * SQL Support
 * VAT/GST tracking and reporting
 * Multi-Currency Transaction Handling
 * Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios
 * Online Stock and Mutual Fund Quotes
 * Built-in and custom reports and charts
 * Budget
 * Bank and Credit Card reconciliation
 * Check printing

Small business accounting features

 * Invoicing and Credit Notes (Credit note functionality was added with version 2.6)
 * Accounts Receivable (A/R)
 * Accounts Payable (A/P) including bills due reminders
 * Employee expense voucher
 * Limited Payroll Management through the use of A/Receivable and A/Payable accounts.
 * Depreciation
 * Mapping to income tax schedules and TXF export for import into tax prep software (US)
 * Setting up tax tables and applying sales tax on invoices

Technical design
GnuCash is written primarily in C, with a small fraction in Scheme. One of the available features is pure fixed-point arithmetic to avoid rounding errors which would arise with floating-point arithmetic. This feature was introduced with version 1.6.

Users
Users on the GnuCash mailing list have reported using it for the United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations successfully. However, the reports need to be exported and edited.

In April 2011, the Minnesota State Bar Association made their GnuCash trust accounting guide freely available in PDF format.

Download statistics
As of July 2018, SourceForge shows a count of over 6.3 million downloads of the stable releases starting from November 1999 Also, SourceForge shows that current downloads are running at ~7,000 per week. This does not include other software download sites as well as Linux distributions that provide download from their own repositories.

Project status
Open Hub's analysis based on commits up to May 2018 (noninclusive) concluded that the project has a mature, well-established code base with increasing year-over-year development activity. Moreover, "Over the past twelve months, 51 developers contributed new code to GnuCash. This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub."

title: GnuCash


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George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

George Robert Aberigh-Mackay (25 July 1848 – 12 January 1881) was a British educationalist and writer resident in India during his short adult life.

Biography
George Robert Aberigh-Mackay was the son of the Reverend James Aberigh-Mackay D.D., B.D. and his first wife Lucretia Livingston née Reed. He was educated privately in Scotland, and then at Magdalen College School, Oxford and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Entering the Indian education department in the North-Western Provinces in 1870, he became professor of English literature in Delhi College in 1873, tutor to the Raja of Rutlam in 1876, and principal of the Rajkumar College at Indore in 1877. He was appointed fellow of Calcutta University in 1880.

He wrote a number of educational works, and extensive manuals giving first-hand data about the princely states and their rulers. He also wrote, mainly for The Pioneer newspaper, but also for other English and Indian papers, including letters in the Bombay Gazette under the nom de plume "The Political Orphan".

He is best known for his book Twenty-one Days in India (1878–1879), a satire upon Anglo-Indian society and modes of thought. This book gave promise of a successful literary career, but the author died at the age of thirty-three.

On 8 January 1881 he developed symptoms of tetanus after playing polo and tennis on the previous 2 days, and died on 12 January 1881 in Indore.

Family
George Robert Aberigh-Mackay married Mary Ann Louisa Cherry on 13 October 1873 at Simla, Bengal, India; their children were:
 * 1) Mary Livingston (Miss Patty) Aberigh-Mackay (1874–1952)
 * 2) Frances Lilian Aberigh-Mackay (1875–?)
 * 3) Beatrice Georgiana Aberigh-Mackay (1878–1948)
 * 4) Katharine Madeline Aberigh-Mackay (1879–1945) married 1st Montague Tharp 2nd James Herbert Everett Evans.

Works

 * Handbook of Hindustan (1875)
 * Notes on Western Turkistan (1875)
 * A Manual of Indian Sport (1878)
 * The Native Chiefs and Their States in 1877: A Manual of reference (1878)
 * Twenty One Days in India serialised in Vanity Fair from 1878—1879
 * The Chiefs of Central India (1879)
 * Serious Reflections and Other Contributions (1881) - posthumous publication of Aberigh-Mackay's writings as "The Political Orphan"

title: George Robert Aberigh-Mackay


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Gallon

The gallon is a unit of volume in British imperial units and United States customary units. Three different versions are in current use:
 * the imperial gallon (imp gal), defined as $4.546 litres$, which is or was used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some Caribbean countries;
 * the US gallon (US gal), defined as 231 in3), which is used in the United States and some Latin American and Caribbean countries; and
 * the US dry gallon ("usdrygal"), defined as $1/8$ US bushel (exactly $4.405 litres$).

There are two pints in a quart and four quarts in a gallon. Different sizes of pints account for the different sizes of the imperial and US gallons.

The IEEE standard symbol for both US (liquid) and imperial gallon is gal, not to be confused with the gal (symbol: Gal), a CGS unit of acceleration.

Definitions
The gallon currently has one definition in the imperial system, and two definitions (liquid and dry) in the US customary system. Historically, there were many definitions and redefinitions.

English system gallons
There were a number of systems of liquid measurements in the United Kingdom prior to the 19th century.
 * Winchester or corn gallon was 272 in3 (1697 act 8 & 9 Will. 3. c. 22)
 * Henry VII (Winchester) corn gallon from 1497 onwards was 154.80 impfloz
 * Elizabeth I corn gallon from 1601 onwards was 155.70 impfloz
 * William III corn gallon from 1697 onwards was 156.90 impfloz
 * Old English (Elizabethan) ale gallon was 282 in3 (Ale Measures Act 1698 (11 Will. 3. c. 15))
 * London 'Guildhall' gallon (before 1688) was 129.19 impfloz then
 * Old English (Queen Anne) wine gallon was standardized as 231 in3 in the 1706 act 6 Ann. c. 27:
 * Jersey gallon (from 1562 onwards) was 139.20 impfloz
 * Guernsey gallon (17th century origins until 1917) was 150.14 impfloz
 * Irish gallon was 217 in3 (Poynings' Act 1495 (10 Hen. 7. c. 22 (I)) confirmed by 1736 act 9 Geo. 2. c. 9 (I))

Imperial gallon
The British imperial gallon (frequently called simply "gallon") is defined as exactly 4.54609 dm3 (4.54609 litres). It is used in some Commonwealth countries, and until 1976 was defined as the volume of water at 62 F whose mass is 10 lb. There are four imperial quarts in a gallon, two imperial pints in a quart, and there are 20 imperial fluid ounces in an imperial pint, yielding 160 fluid ounces in an imperial gallon.

US liquid gallon
The US liquid gallon (frequently called simply "gallon") is legally defined as 231 cubic inches, which is exactly 231 in3. A US liquid gallon can contain about 3.785 kg of water at 3.98 C, and is about 16.7% less than the imperial gallon. There are four quarts in a gallon, two pints in a quart and 16 US fluid ounces in a US pint, which makes the US fluid ounce equal to $1⁄128$ of a US gallon.

In order to overcome the effects of expansion and contraction with temperature when using a gallon to specify a quantity of material for purposes of trade, it is common to define the temperature at which the material will occupy the specified volume. For example, the volume of petroleum products and alcoholic beverages are both referenced to 60 F in government regulations.

US dry gallon
Since the dry measure is one-eighth of a US Winchester bushel of $2,150.42$ cubic inches, it is equal to exactly 268.8025 cubic inches, which is $4.405 L$. The US dry gallon is not used in commerce, and is also not listed in the relevant statute, which jumps from the dry pint to the bushel.

Imperial gallon
As of 2021, the imperial gallon continues to be used as the standard petrol unit on 10 Caribbean island groups, consisting of:

 * four British Overseas Territories (Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Montserrat)  and
 * six countries (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ).

All 12 of the Caribbean islands use miles per hour for speed limits signage, and drive on the left side of the road.

The United Arab Emirates ceased selling petrol by the imperial gallon in 2010 and switched to the litre, with Guyana following suit in 2013. In 2014, Myanmar switched from the imperial gallon to the litre.

Antigua and Barbuda has proposed switching to selling petrol by litres since 2015.

In the European Union the gallon was removed from the list of legally defined primary units of measure catalogue in the EU directive 80/181/EEC for trading and official purposes, effective from 31 December 1994. Under the directive the gallon could still be used, but only as a supplementary or secondary unit.

As a result of the EU directive Ireland and the United Kingdom passed legislation to replace the gallon with the litre as a primary unit of measure in trade and in the conduct of public business, effective from 31 December 1993, and 30 September 1995 respectively. Though the gallon has ceased to be a primary unit of trade, it can still be legally used in both the UK and Ireland as a supplementary unit. However, barrels and large containers of beer, oil and other fluids are commonly measured in multiples of an imperial gallon.

Miles per imperial gallon is used as the primary fuel economy unit in the United Kingdom and as a supplementary unit in Canada on official documentation.

US liquid gallon
Other than the United States, petrol is sold by the US gallon in 13 other countries, and one US territory:
 * the Caribbean countries of Dominican Republic and Haiti,
 * the Central American countries of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua,
 * the South American countries of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru,
 * the Pacific Ocean countries of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau, which are associated countries of the United States,
 * the African country of Liberia, a former protectorate of the United States, and
 * the US territories of American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico ceased selling petrol by the US gallon in 1980.

The latest country to cease using the gallon is El Salvador in June 2021.

The Imperial and US liquid gallon
Both the US gallon and imperial gallon are used in the Turks and Caicos Islands (due to an increase in tax duties which was disguised by levying the same duty on the US gallon (3.79 L) as was previously levied on the Imperial gallon (4.55 L)) and the Bahamas.

Legacy
In some parts of the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, 18.9-litre water cooler bottles are marketed as five-gallon bottles.

Relationship to other units
Both the US liquid and imperial gallon are divided into four quarts (quarter gallons), which in turn are divided into two pints, which in turn are divided into two cups (not in customary use outside the US), which in turn are further divided into two gills. Thus, both gallons are equal to four quarts, eight pints, sixteen cups, or thirty-two gills.

The imperial gill is further divided into five fluid ounces, whereas the US gill is divided into four fluid ounces, meaning an imperial fluid ounce is $1⁄20$ of an imperial pint, or $1⁄160$ of an imperial gallon, while a US fluid ounce is $1⁄16$ of a US pint, or $1⁄128$ of a US gallon. Thus, the imperial gallon, quart, pint, cup and gill are approximately 20% larger than their US counterparts, meaning these are not interchangeable, but the imperial fluid ounce is only approximately 4% smaller than the US fluid ounce, meaning these are often used interchangeably.

Historically, a common bottle size for liquor in the US was the "fifth", i.e. one-fifth of a US gallon (or one-sixth of an imperial gallon). While spirit sales in the US were switched to metric measures in 1976, a 750 mL bottle is still sometimes known as a "fifth".

History
The term derives most immediately from galun, galon in Old Norman French, but the usage was common in several languages, for example jale in Old French and gęllet (bowl) in Old English. This suggests a common origin in Romance Latin, but the ultimate source of the word is unknown.

The gallon originated as the base of systems for measuring wine and beer in England. The sizes of gallon used in these two systems were different from each other: the first was based on the wine gallon (equal in size to the US gallon), and the second one either the ale gallon or the larger imperial gallon.

By the end of the 18th century, there were three definitions of the gallon in common use:
 * The corn gallon, or Winchester gallon, of about 268.8 cubic inches (≈ 4.405 L),
 * The wine gallon, or Queen Anne's gallon, which was 231 cubic inches (≈ 3.785 L), and
 * The ale gallon of 282 cubic inches (≈ 4.622 L).

The corn or dry gallon is used (along with the dry quart and pint) in the United States for grain and other dry commodities. It is one-eighth of the (Winchester) bushel, originally defined as a cylindrical measure of $18 1⁄2$ inches in diameter and 8 inches in depth, which made the bushel 8 in × ($9 1⁄4$ in)2 × $\pi$ ≈ 2150.42017 cubic inches. The bushel was later defined to be 2150.42 cubic inches exactly, thus making its gallon exactly $268.803 in3$ ($4.405 L$); in previous centuries, there had been a corn gallon of between 271 and 272 cubic inches.

The wine, fluid, or liquid gallon has been the standard US gallon since the early 19th century. The wine gallon, which some sources relate to the volume occupied by eight medieval merchant pounds of wine, was at one time defined as the volume of a cylinder 6 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter, i.e. 6 in × ($3 1⁄2$ in)2 × π ≈ 230.907 06 cubic inches. It was redefined during the reign of Queen Anne in 1706 as 231 cubic inches exactly, the earlier definition with π approximated to $22⁄7$.

$$ \pi r^2h \approx \frac{22}{7}\times\left ( \frac{7 ~ \mathrm{in}}{2} \right )^2\times6 ~ \mathrm{in} = 231 ~ \mathrm{in}^3.$$

Although the wine gallon had been used for centuries for import duty purposes, there was no legal standard of it in the Exchequer, while a smaller gallon (224 cu in) was actually in use, requiring this statute; the 231 cubic inch gallon remains the US definition today.

In 1824, Britain adopted a close approximation to the ale gallon known as the imperial gallon, and abolished all other gallons in favour of it. Inspired by the kilogram-litre relationship, the imperial gallon was based on the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at 30 inches of mercury (14.7345 pound-force per square inch) and at a temperature of 62 F.

In 1963, this definition was refined as the space occupied by 10 pounds of distilled water of density $0.999 g/mL$ weighed in air of density $0.001 g/mL$ against weights of density 8.136 g/mL (the original "brass" was refined as the densities of brass alloys vary depending on metallurgical composition), which was calculated as $4.546 L$ to ten significant figures.

The precise definition of exactly $4.546$ cubic decimetres (also $4.546 L$, ≈ $277.419 in3$) came after the litre was redefined in 1964. This was adopted shortly afterwards in Canada, and adopted in 1976 in the United Kingdom.

Sizes of gallons
Historically, gallons of various sizes were used in many parts of Western Europe. In these localities, it has been replaced as the unit of capacity by the litre.

title: Gallon