"Mad Jack": The Biography of Captain John Percival, USN, 1779-1862

by David F. Long

A respected writer of naval history, Long is most qualified to write this first biography of Mad Jack, an unusual and controversial figure in the early days of the U.S. Navy. Using family accounts and primary materials, Long recounts the 40-year naval career of this maverick naval officer and in doing so gives the low-down on how the Navy worked in its nascent years. Anyone interested in eighteenth and nineteenth century military history will find this engrossing reading.

This popularly written but scholarly study covers the unusual Navy captain, whose career spanned the globe. Long provides a chronological account of Captain Percival's early years; his command during the War of 1812; his administrative duties at the Boston Navy Yard; his trips to the Pacific; mutinies; an incident with missionaries in Hawaii and the subsequent trial; cruises to the Caribbean; South America; and the Mediterranean; a trek around the world in the mid-1840s; his retirement; and his final years. Extensive notes and a bibliographical essay guide the reader to other important sources for those studying the period. Numerous maps are also provided.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 1993

About the author

David Foster Long, Ph.D. (Columbia University; AB, Dartmouth University, 1939) was professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, specializing in American History and History of Foreign Relations.

Reviews

[QOH · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not Professor Long's best work, and I believe it was his last book. His biography of Porter, written many years earlier was fabulous. Here, not only is Long hampered by having a disagreeable subject--irascible may have been invented to describe him--Percival left very little documentation for a historian, who is thus left with the duty correspondence, conflicts, court martial testimony, and other people's (usually negative) opinions of Percival. About Percival's personal life we're left with pretty much nothing but guesswork.

And the disagreeableness continues into an apparent professional spat with Linda (McKee) Maloney (the insistence on including the McKee EVERY TIME seems to be a pointed reference that she's somehow related to Christopher McKee, another naval historian, like that matters), the biographer of Isaac Hull. Maloney apparently disagreed with Long in various respects vis-a-vis Bainbridge and Hull. Because of the vagaries of interlibrary loan due dates, I'm in the middle of reading both Long's biography of Bainbridge at the same time as Maloney's biography of Hull. I don't know if I've ever seen a historian in a biography so consistently call out a fellow *male* biographer of a different person so pointedly, which gave it a "get off my lawn, woman" sort of vibe. (I don't really want to form an opinion about the biographer when I read a biography--that's not why I'm reading the bio--but this book made me think I wouldn't invite Long to a dinner party if he were still alive.)

There's quite a bit of "I'm not going to go into any detail about this here but see my chapter in X book and Y chapter in another book," and regarding a mutiny, he points out that most of his written material about the mutiny has been cut from the manuscript. It's not only sloppy and lazy writing, but it left me thinking what the hell the editors were smoking when they let that slip past.

For all that: what was documented about Percival was well-documented, and Long had probably forgotten more about naval history when he wrote this than I'll ever know. I didn't learn much about the pre-1820 navy, but it's a good source for antebellum information. This is worth hunting down via ILL, but not even the sources and notes are worth the high price the book is commanding on the used market.