A brief summary is given of efforts in the field of naval architecture on the problem of determining the vibratory forces and moments produced by a ship propeller, and an account of the principal contributions made by aeronautical researchers on the problem of computing the fluctuating pressure field near a propeller. This pressure is derived from a lifting-line representation and the expressions are then interpreted in terms of the fields of two doublet distributions. It is shown that this result can be verified by specializing the expressions for the sound-pressure field of a propeller. Some characteristics of the pressure field are discussed briefly. Detailed evaluations and comparison with experiment will be presented in a subsequent paper.