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Hulme also provides with a similar image: He also gives his own historical description of the flag, but no insights into the appearance of the a crown in the image on the silk.
Gordon's book finally provides us with the closest image we have yet to find in any of our sources: He also offers us an explanation for its appearance.
"Thus Italy regained the old tricolour for its merchant flag, which would be as Napoleon left it, were it not for the difficulty about that of Mexico, to distinguish it from which itbears the Savoy shield without a crown. The ensign has the crown. The jack is square, being a white cross on red with a broad blue border taking the place of the border of the shield."It would appear that the flag with the shield and crown was in use by Italy from 1848 until the disagreement with Mexico over the rights to use the image, butthat date is not given in any of our sources. We know from Smith, however, that the Savoy shield was in use until 1946.
This flag of three vertical stripes with no emblems proves relatively easy to find in all of our sources. The World Flag Database furnishes us with its nationality:
Interestingly, none of our sources can provide us with an exact match for this flag, which features the British "Union Jack" in the upper left, adjacent to five whitestars of varying sizes on a field of blue. And yet every one of our sources can provide us with dozens of flags that resemble it very closely. Consider this figure from Smith: The style, called a canton, is relatively old; it includes an image in the upper left hand corner approximately one quarter the size of thewhole. According to Smith, the use of the Union Jack as a canton designated everything from the position of a particular ship in a fleet to the identity ofa protectorate, dominion or colony in her Empire. The closest to our flag is that of Australia, but we will need to explore other sources for the identity ofthis elusive flag. Suffice it to say, at this point, that the flag is in line with our collected references to the British Empire and leave its officialidentity until we have collected more information about the rest of the flags and their relationship to one another.
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