Photograph album covering Cowan’s service as a midshipman on HMS ALEXANDRA (1875), flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, in the period 1886-1889. There is a series of photographs showing the grounding and sinking of HMS SULTAN (1870) on rocks off the island of Comino in 1889. The other vessels featured include HMS JUMNA (1866), HMS SEAFLOWER (1873), HMS TAMAR (1863) and HMS TEMERAIRE (1876), and some Italian ironclads. There are topographical views of Naples, Lisbon, Genoa, Pompei, Syracuse, Taormina, Smyrna and Athens.
Includes two studio photographs of men in traditional Albanian dress, jointly captioned ‘Albanian Swashbucklers', plus another photograph entitled ‘Montenegrin Swashbuckler’.