Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy

by James P. McGuane

From tar-ladles and snuff-boxes to sailmaker's fids and carronades: a gorgeous photographic essay onthe nautical worlds of Jack Aubrey. The extraordinary photography in this book was inspired by the author's reading of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. In small museums along the English coast, and in private collections, James McGuane has recorded artifacts recovered from shipwrecks and preserved by modern conservation techniques. Taken together, these unique treasures provide a window onto the everyday life of sailors and officers in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic era. Thanks to advances in marine archaeology, it is often possible to establish the exact identity of a wrecked warship, along with the date and circumstances of its sinking. We are thus provided with a moment frozen in time: tools, clothing, utensils, weapons, and fragments of the ship itself startlingly intact. These photographs bring home to the reader―as words alone cannot―what a sailor's life in that time was really like. Also photographed here is Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship HMS Victory , proudly preserved at Portsmouth. Victory survived the great fleet action at Trafalgar, where Nelson himself died, and it is still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy. Photographs

Genres: History, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[E]

Beautiful color plates of equipment and ships rigging.

Really not much written on the actual day to day life of a sailor during Nelson's Navy.

[Michael Smith]

I’ve been a historian for a long time but my interest is much less in grand theories and international politics and much more in local history, especially material culture -- also known as artifacts. That’s one of the reasons I became interested in local preservation and old cemeteries, and why I got certified as an archivist after earning my library science graduate degree. I’m also a longstanding fan of Napoleonic sea stories, having begun in junior high with my father’s collection of C. S. Forrester. But most good naval adventure novels can’t pause to explain the jargon of sail-handling or the parts of a frigate. And if you don’t understand the difference between a Turk’s head and a cathead, if you can’t visualize a young sailor avoiding the lubber’s hole on his way to the top, you’re going to miss much of the flavor of the story, not to mention misunderstanding much of the action. (This is a regular complaint among younger readers attempting Patrick O’Brien’s books -- “I don’t know what’s happening!”) Anyway, books like McGuane’s lavishly illustrated volume can help. He toured museums and private collections all over southern England in search of surviving or recovered bits of physical naval history, arranged for high-quality photography, and wrote up the accompanying explanatory text. Many of the examples depicted came from the sunken Invincible, which went down after running on the shoals off Southampton in 1758 -- two generations too early for the Napoleonic period, but you take what you can get. McGuane also makes use of Victory itself, but not nearly enough. Why not use Nelson’s flagship to explain deck layout and parts of the ship? In terms of what he does include, everyone at the time saved their mementos of Lord Nelson and Trafalgar, of course, so those take up the whole first chapter. The following chapters deal with navigation, deck gear and rigging, sails, guns and gunpowder, officers and men, leisure and recreation, and so on. There are some amazing items here, including examples of original ship’s biscuit (which demonstrates how tightly a cask could be sealed). In general, the explanatory text is very good in its descriptions and morsels of history, though the phrasing is a little awkward at times. The author also goes a little astray, in my opinion, with photos of gravestones and surviving port buildings which have changed radically in the past two centuries. Still, this is a lovely oversized book that will answer questions for novices and bring pleasure to old salts.

[Rachel]

This is a beautiful coffee table book that would be more aptly-titled "A Ship's Life in Nelson's Navy." Every last detail of a ship-of-the-line is chronicled with delicate photography and brief, elegant descriptions, citations, and historical footnotes. The HMS Victory features prominently in this collection as do many other famous ships of war. The emphasis of the book is on craftsmanship, not the gilded trappings of the sea officer. Although fine presentation swords and bullion fridge and splendid figureheads receive their due, most of the photographs depict much humbler items: well-worn caulking tools, hand-made brooms, a sailor's stained, patched trousers. There is also a chapter lovingly dedicated to sailor's folk art, and the objects made by prisoners of the French are particularly interesting. A breathtakingly intricate model guillotine is a haunting image, a bit of grim humour from a sailor who might easily have been sent to the guillotine himself.

The book presents a comprehensive view of a ship in a piecemeal fashion, loosely based on everyday life in the Royal Navy. It is not really about "a sailor's life" - the focus of the book is objects, not people. Perhaps its only flaw is you don't get much sense of a complete ship - there are no descriptions of battles or majestic photographs of sailing vessels. It is light on technical information, but a beautiful enough book that the more detailed-oriented, hardcore naval types will still find enjoyment in the beautiful photographs and concise histories of each object.

[Margaret Pinard]

What a beautiful book! I was attracted to the beautiful photographs as a history-lover, then entranced by the little bits of history in each of the explanations. I love learning about daily habits or traditions that have been given over, and this book was full of everyday details of the sailors in Nelson's navy, as well as the ships they guided through many a battle. It made me want to visit some of the museums that house the artifacts presented, too.