Download or read book Landsman Hay written by Robert Hay and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1803, at the age of fourteen, Robert Hay joined the Royal Navy and spent the next eight years at sea. His colorful memoir describes a sailor s hard life during the period and includes actions off the French coast and in the East Indies, where he was badly wounded. When his ship ran aground off Plymouth, he deserted but was quickly taken by a press gang, escaped, and eventually reached home in Scotland. A talented writer, Hay offers not only an entertaining yarn, but thoughtful observations of early nineteenth-century naval life and the human condition.
Download or read book Landsman Hay written by and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confederate Ironclads at War written by R. Thomas Campbell and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hampered by lack of materials, shipyards and experienced shipbuilders, even so the South managed to construct 34 iron-armored warships during the Civil War, of which the Confederate Navy put 25 into service. The stories of these vessels illustrate the hardships under which the Navy operated--and also its resourcefulness. Except for the Albemarle, no Confederate ironclad was sunk or destroyed by enemy action. Overtaken by events on the ground, most were destroyed by their own crews to prevent them from falling into Union hands. This account covers the design and construction and the engagements of the Confederate ironclads and describes the ingenuity and courage, as well as the challenges and frustrations of their "too little, too late" service.
Download or read book War Nationalism and the British Sailor 1750 1850 written by I. Land and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-08-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to systematically integrate 'Jack Tar,' the common seaman, into the cultural history of modern Britain, treating him not as an occasional visitor from the ocean, but as an important part of national life.
Download or read book The Man Who Discovered Antarctica written by Sheila Bransfield and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of the British naval officer who found the Antarctic shoreline in the early nineteeth century. Captain Cook claimed the honor of being the first man to sail into the Antarctic Ocean in 1773, which he circumnavigated the following year. Cook, though, did not see any land, and declared that there was no such thing as the Southern Continent. Fifty years later, an Irishman who’d been impressed into the Royal Navy at eighteen, and risen through the ranks to the position of master, proved Cook wrong, discovering and charting parts of the Antarctic shoreline. He also discovered Elephant Island and Clarence Island, claiming them for the British Crown. Edward Bransfield’s naval career included taking part in the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 onboard the 50-gun warship HMS Severn. Then, in 1817, he was posted to the Royal Navy’s Pacific Squadron off Valparaíso in Chile, and it was while he served there that the skipper of an English whaling ship, the Williams, was driven south by adverse winds and discovered what came to be known as the South Shetland Islands where Cook had said there was no land. Bransfield’s superior officer, Captain Sherriff, decided to investigate further. He chartered Williams and sent Bransfield with two midshipmen and a ship’s surgeon into the Antarctic—and the Irishman sailed into history. Despite many parts of Antarctica and an Antarctic survey vessel being named after him, and a Royal Mail commemorative stamp issued in his name, the full story of this remarkable man and his historic journey, have never been told—until now. Following decades of research, Sheila Bransfield MA, a member of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, has produced the definitive biography of one of Britain’s greatest maritime explorers. The book also includes a foreword by the Trust’s patron the Princess Royal. “Bransfield’s meticulous research gives us a detailed account of the daily routines of the Navy and the immense amount of maintenance required of a large wooden warship in the Age of Sail.” —Historical Novel Society
Download or read book The Command of the Ocean written by N. A. M. Rodger and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005 with total page 1022 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "N. A. M. Rodger provides reassessments of such famous figures as Pepys, Hawke, Howe, and St. Vincent. The particular and distinct qualities of Nelson and Collingwood are contrasted, and the world of the officers and men who made up the originals of Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower is brought to life. Rodger's comparative view of other navies - French, Dutch, Spanish, and American - allows him to make a fresh assessment of the qualities of the British."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Wager written by David Grann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-05-11 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
Download or read book Sociable Places written by Kevin Gilmartin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores how location shaped sociability in the Romantic period.
Download or read book City Limits written by Glenn Clark and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In essays that capture the multiple aspects of urban life, contributors examine European cities through the lenses of history, literature, art, architecture, and music. Covering topics such as governance, performance, high culture and subculture, tourism, and journalism, this volume provides new and invigorating ways to think about cities both past and present. An innovative and interdisciplinary work, City Limits crosses conventional critical boundaries to depict a vibrant and moving cityscape of historical urban experience.
Download or read book The Real Jim Hawkins written by Roland Pietsch and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generations of readers have enjoyed the adventures of Jim Hawkins, the young protagonist and narrator in Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island, but little is known of the real Jim Hawkins and the thousands of poor boys who went to sea in the eighteenth century to man the ships of the Royal Navy. This groundbreaking new work is a study of the origins, life and culture of the boys of the Georgian navy, not of the upper-class children training to become officers, but of the orphaned, delinquent or just plain adventurous youths whose prospects on land were bleak and miserable. Many had no adult at all taking care of them; others were failed apprentices; many were troublesome youths for whom communities could not provide so that the Navy represented a form of floating workhouse. Some, with restless and roving minds, like Defoes Robinson Crusoe, saw deep sea life as one of adventure, interspersed with raucous periods ashore drinking, singing and womanizing. The author explains how they were recruited; describes the distinctive subculture of the young sailor the dress, hair, tattoos and language and their life and training as servants of captains and officers.More than 5,000 boys were recruited during the Seven Years War alone and without them the Royal Navy could not have fought its wars. This is a fascinating tribute to a forgotten band of sailors.
Download or read book The Seasick Admiral written by Kevin Brown and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horatio Nelson did not enjoy robust good health. From his childhood he was prone to many of the ailments so common in the eighteenth century, and after he joined the Navy he contracted fevers that further undermined his strength: he was even seasick whenever he first put to sea. Nevertheless, he saw more action than most officers, and was often wounded the loss of the sight in one eye and a shattered arm were the most public, but by no means his only injuries. This personal experience of sickness made him uniquely aware of the importance of health and fitness to the efficient running of a fleet, and this new book investigates Nelson's personal contribution to improving the welfare of the men he commanded.It ranges from issues of diet, through hygiene to improved medical practices. Believing prevention was better than cure, Nelson went to great lengths to obtain fresh provisions, insisted on cleanliness in his ships, and even understood the relationship between mental and physical health, working tirelessly to keep up the morale of his men. Many other people contributed to what became a revolution in naval health but because of his heroic status Nelson's influence was hugely significant, a role which this book reveals in detail for the first time.
Download or read book Convoys written by Roger Knight and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account of Britain’s convoys during the Napoleonic Wars—showing how the protection of trade played a decisive role in victory During the Napoleonic Wars thousands of merchant ships crisscrossed narrow seas and wide oceans, protected by Britain’s warships. These were wars of attrition and raw materials had to reach their shores continuously: timber and hemp from the Baltic, sulfur from Sicily, and saltpeter from Bengal. Britain’s fate rested on the strength of its economy—and convoys played a vital role in securing victory. Leading naval historian Roger Knight examines how convoys ensured the protection of trade and transport of troops, allowing Britain to take the upper hand. Detailing the many hardships these ships faced, from the shortage of seaman to the vicissitudes of the weather, Knight sheds light on the innovation and seamanship skills that made convoys such an invaluable tool in Britain’s arsenal. The convoy system laid the foundation for Britain’s narrow victory over Napoleon and his allies in 1815 and, in doing so, established its naval and mercantile power at sea for a hundred years.
Download or read book The Myth of the Press Gang written by Jeremiah Ross Dancy and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overturns the generally held view that the press gang was the main means of recruiting seamen by the British navy in the late eighteenth century. SHORTLISTED for the Society for Nautical Research's prestigious Anderson Medal. The press gang is generally regarded as the means by which the British navy solved the problem of recruiting enough seamen in the late eighteenth century. This book, however, based on extensive original research conducted primarily in a large number of ships' muster books, demonstrates that this view is false. It argues that, in fact, the overwhelming majority of seamen in the navy were there of their own free will. Taking a long view across the late eighteenth century but concentrating on the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815, the book provides great detail on the sort of men that were recruited and the means by which they were recruited, and includes a number of individuals' stories. It shows how manpower was a major concern for the Admiralty; how the Admiralty put in place a range of recruitment methods including the quota system; how it worried about depleting merchant shipping of sufficient sailors; and how, although most seamen were volunteers, the press gang was resorted to, especially during the initial mobilisation at the beginning of wars and to find certain kinds of particularly skilled seamen. The book also makes comparisons with recruitment methods employed by the navies of other countries and by the British army. J. Ross Dancy is Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University.
Download or read book Teaching Laboring Class British Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries written by Kevin Binfield and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind our contemporary experience of globalization, precarity, and consumerism lies a history of colonization, increasing literacy, transnational trade in goods and labor, and industrialization. Teaching British laboring-class literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries means exploring ideas of class, status, and labor in relation to the historical developments that inform our lives as workers and members of society. This volume demonstrates pedagogical techniques and provides resources for students and teachers on autobiographies, broadside ballads, Chartism and other political movements, georgics, labor studies, satire, service learning, writing by laboring-class women, and writing by laboring people of African descent.
Download or read book Evangelicals in the Royal Navy 1775 1815 written by Richard Blake and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious activity flourished in the eighteenth-century navy; this book examines the reasons why and its manifestations. The Evangelical Admiral Gambier, notorious for distributing tracts to his fleet in a theatre of war, is commonly seen as a misfit in a fighting service that had scant time for fervent piety. In fact, the navy of the Revolutionaryand Napoleonic Wars showed a level of religious observance not seen since the days of Queen Anne. Evangelical laymen provided one dynamic for this change: concentrating first on public worship, they moved to active proselytism insearch of converts amongst sailors, and in a third phase developed a loose network of prayer groups in scores of ships, uniting officers and seamen in voluntary gatherings that transcended rank. This book explores the effect this new piety had on discipline and human governance, on literacy, on the development of chaplains' ministry and on the mindset of the officer corps. It also looks at the larger question of how its values were absorbed into the ethos of the navy as a whole. It draws on sources both familiar and unusual - logs, letters, minutes, memoirs, tracts and sermons, Regulations - to explain how evangelical influence affected officer corps, lower deck andAdmiralty, showing how a movement that began by promoting public worship at sea became an agency for mass evangelism through literature, preaching and off-duty gatherings, where officers and men met for shared Bible reading and prayer a mere decade after the great Mutinies.
Download or read book Shipboard Literary Cultures written by Susann Liebich and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected within this volume ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and also how they forge that experience. Individual chapters explore the literary worlds of naval ships, whalers, commercial vessels, emigrant ships, and troop transports from the seventeenth to the twentieth-first century, revealing a rich history of shipboard reading, writing, and performing. Contributors are interested both in how literary activities adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard experiences are structured through—and framed by—such activities. In this respect, the volume builds on scholarship that has explored reading as a spatially situated and embodied practice. As our contributors demonstrate, the shipboard environment and the ocean beyond it place the mind and body under peculiar forms of pressure, and these determine acts of reading—and of writing and performing—in specific ways.
Download or read book Feeding Nelson s Navy written by Janet Macdonald and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of How to Cook from A-Z disproves the myth of British navy culinary misconduct in “a work of serious history that is a delight to read” (British Food in America). This celebration of the Georgian sailor’s diet reveals how the navy’s administrators fed a fleet of more than 150,000 men, in ships that were often at sea for months on end and that had no recourse to either refrigeration or canning. Contrary to the prevailing image of rotten meat and weevily biscuits, their diet was a surprisingly hearty mixture of beer, brandy, salt beef and pork, peas, butter, cheese, hard biscuit, and the exotic sounding lobscouse, not to mention the Malaga raisins, oranges, lemons, figs, dates, and pumpkins which were available to ships on far-distant stations. In fact, by 1800 the British fleet had largely eradicated scurvy and other dietary disorders. While this scholarly work contains much of value to the historian, the author’s popular touch makes this an enthralling story for anyone with an interest in life at sea in the age of sail. “Overall this is an excellent examination of this crucial aspect of British naval power, and I’m certainly going to try out some of the recipes.” —HistoryOfWar.org
