His souvenir slot-headed screw is on view at the museum: Japanese engineers eventually incorporated versions of that ingenious American product into warships.
In addition, many of the fishing vessels were converted into warships.
According to Expanded Universe material, the peaceful Mon Calamari converted their passenger liners into warships to support the rebellion against the Galactic Empire.
China was modifying a medium-range space-faring ballistic missile, the DF-21, so it could re-enter the atmosphere and nosedive, at about two kilometres a second, into a warship and detonate conventional explosives.
HMS Vigilant was a merchantman converted into a warship during the American Revolution.
When people jeered at the Japanese game-shows Clive James put on air, where men ate maggots and crawled through shit, he counseled us to remember: a generation before, these young men would have been using the same drive for danger to fly kamikaze planes into Allied warships.
Some publications, like the American Advocate of Peace, decried the dreadnought purchase for its cost, calling it "a showy and pretentious naval policy seemingly for the sheer indulgence of national pride" and continuing with "[sinking] money into useless warships when, it is understood, foreign money has had to be borrowed for city improvements in Rio de Janeiro is pitiful politics".
He was blamed for the audacious assault on the USS Cole in Yemen last year, when suicidal militants steered a dinghy full of explosives into the American warship in Aden harbour.
In 1872, the British government and the Royal Society launched the first major oceanic expedition, transforming a two-hundred-and-twenty-six-foot naval warship into a floating laboratory, equipped with microscopes and vats of pickling alcohol.
