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Flying flags upside down

Inverted Ensigns

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Do countries other than the US and UK use the inverted ensign as a sign of a ship in distress? Some navies in the age of sail apparently inverted the ensign of an enemy ship after they captured it, although the normal procedure was to hoist their own ensign above the enemy ensign aboard the prize. On the other hand, it would obviously be useless to invert the French ensign as either a distress signal or as a sign of capture, while the fact that some others were inverted (Spain, Italy, Portugal) would only be visible at very close range. Not to mention that there are a few flags whose inversion would simply make them someone else's flag.

I believe, although virtually without evidence, that inverting the ensign to signal distress originated with the UK and was borrowed by the US, but would be interested in anyone's insights on the history and extent of this aspect of flag usage.
Joe McMillan, 13 April 2000

Upside down flags may have been used as distress signals in the past, but they are not used as distress signals anymore. (There are 16 different standardized distress signals used in shipping, the most common flag signal is "NC" with international letter flags, another "flag like" one is "something square over something round").

During my years of service in the German merchant fleet I encountered one case of an upside down flag: it was a shipwrecked and abandoned US sailing boat in the North Sea. My captain at this time explained it as follows:

If a crew abandons a ship in distress to save their life, the last thing to do (if they have time to do so) is to turn the flag upside down. This means that they give up any right on the vessel or cargo and anybody who manages to rescue the ship afterwards could keep it.

Now, after reading about upside down flags as a distress signal I'm not sure if he was right.

I'm also not sure if there is some hard law about this flag signal, but I think I have an explanation for the use of it: Sometimes ships are found without crew. There are different reasons. It happened during the California gold rush and there have been some recent cases of piracy (yes, still) too. By law, a company looses claim of property on a ship abandoned by her captain. If the flag on a ship were still flying the right way, this would indicate that the crew did not leave in distress and therefore did not give up possession of the vessel, but rather that something odd happened. Therefore the company would have a stronger case in court to claim the right on the vessel back.
Volker Moerbitz Keith, 13 April 2000

Inverting an ensign was only one of a number of ways of signaling distress, the essence of which was to display something unusual. Sails might be arranged in an un-seamanlike manner, the ensign flown (upright) in an unusual place such as at the main topmast-head or in the shrouds, but according to Perrin the earliest commonly agreed distress signal was to tie a knot in the ensign, making it into what was known as a wheft.

The word is not the same as weft in weaving, but another form of waift/wayft/waft which were variants of waif, which originally meant, "a piece of property which is found ownerless, e.g. an article washed up on the sea shore." In 1708 the "causes competent to the Adm