Jack Tar: Life in Nelson's Navy
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews | Author: Roy Adkins, Lesley Adkins List Price: £20.00 Our Price: £14.00 You Save: £6.00 (30%) Availability: Usually dispatched within 6 to 10 days  |
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 | Product Details: Hardcover 480 pages Release Date: 02 October 2008 Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 1408700549 Rating:  Sales Rank: 7526 | | Look for similar books by subject:
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| | Customer Reviews: Another excellent history of Nelson's Navy (01 January 2009)This is the second of Roy & Lesley Adkins excellent popular histories of the Royal Navy in Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that I have read, the first having been "The War for All the Oceans". The Adkins treat their subject - the common sailor - in a thematic approach, covering such areas as recruitment and selection (aka the Press Gang), basic training (learning the ropes), diet (salt junk and grog), the daily routine (bells and whistles) etc. They present letters and memoirs from a surprising number of simple sailors, supplemented by those from junior officers as well, inevitably, as the more senior. The Adkins leave never miss an opportunity to explain the derivation of expressions that have survived to modern times, but the book is none the worse for that. The book deals with the Navy over the period from 1771, when Horatio Nelson joined as a cabin boy at the age of 12, to 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. This is an entertaining and very readable book, but the thematic approach does have the disadvantage of hiding developments made during the course of the period. Thus, for example, the term Master & Commander is explained as a temporary rank given to substantive lieutenants when appointed to command ships too small to justify a post captain, overlooking the fact that Commander became a proper rank in its own right in 1794. The requirements for midshipmen to "pass for gentlemen" as well as passing their exams for promotion to lieutenant was one that, as I have read elsewhere, changed over the period, as the Navy's officer corps became more socially exclusive, and men who would have been commissioned at the beginning of the period were denied promotion by the end. This, however, is a minor criticism and, dealing as it does with officers, is not in any event the main focus of the book. This is an excellent depiction of the life of the common sailor in Nelson's Navy, and is well worth reading. Jack Tar (11 December 2008)If you read only one book of history this year that commemorates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Nelson, read Jack Tar. During the Great War (1793-1815), the Royal Navy was the backbone of the defence of the British Isles and took a major part in the final victory. Just as the great battles from Valmi to Waterloo were won by the troops in the field, the naval battles were in the end won by the crews - and not by the Nelsons, Hoods or Cochranes. Roy and Lesley Adkins have worked like the archaeologists they are, unearthing hundreds of sources, extracting hundreds of relevant pieces, then carefully glueing them together until the whole image is reconstructed: the portrait of rough, hard-working men (women and children) living a perilous life on board a primitive, claustrophobic machine in a hostile environment. Apart from the constant danger from man and nature, ships' companies appear more like small rural communities than the "rum, lash and sodomy" society depicted in "miserabilist" books like Masefield's one. Jack Tar was no saint but the product of the very harsh 18th-century society. His voice is seldom heard in history books. When you turn the last page, you'll have envisioned the complete life of Jack Tar from his entry as Johnny Newcome to his later life in Greenwich hospital (if he was lucky), told in his own words. If you have no previous knowledge of the naval history of the period, don't worry, Roy and Lesley have everything at hand for you: maps, diagrams, explanation of all the nautical terms you'll need. | |
