Every Man Will Do His Duty
Edited by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. 425 pp. Ind. Notes. Ulus. $27.50. ($24.75) hardcover, $15.95 ($14.35) paper.
Reviewed By Rear Admiral Joseph F. Callo, U.S. Naval Reserve, (Retired)
The title page describes Every Man Will Do His Duty as “An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson.” The 22 individual, highly personalized stories that it contains cover the years from 1793 to 1815, a span that includes the War of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic War, and the War of 1812. And although the book’s title is taken from a signal made by Vice Admiral Lord Nelson at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar, most of the portrayals do not directly involve the hero of the battles of The Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. Each chapter presents an insider’s view of an event or situation—ranging from deadly combat to the “small stuff’ of life at sea—that adds a human dimension to the many general accounts of this era of naval history. The prose may not always be polished, but these vignettes of life and combat during the Nelson era work like oral history in that they establish a tone and texture of events that go beyond the facts.
Taken individually, each story is interesting, and at times, highly dramatic. Taken as a whole, they illuminate the professionalism, bravery, sense of humor—at times grim—that were all part of the Royal Navy as it reached global preeminence. One of the book’s interesting features is that it illustrates many situations common to naval service over the ages.
For example, a segment entitled “History of Shakings, the Middies’ Cur,” contains an amusing “inside story” involving an ageless scenario, junior officers—in this case midshipmen—finding creative avenues of retribution against the perceived injustices of their seniors. Later in the book, the same author, Basil Hall, provides very different insights, when he observes the battle of Corunna as a lieutenant serving in HMS Endymion. Woven into his descriptions of this land battle and subsequent naval evacuation of the British army units, is respect for the professionalism of the British soldiers involved. The end of this chapter also provides both a general view, and a very specific example, of the concept of “brothers in arms.”
Arguably, the book’s most dramatic chapters are “The Battle of Trafalgar,” by a seaman, William Robinson, and “The Death of Lord Nelson,” by Dr. William Beatty. Robinson’s “lower deck” perspective of the combat from HMS Revenge, a 74-gun ship-of-the-line, illuminates the “awful and interesting” scene from the point of view of an ordinary seaman. Dr. Beatty’s description of the several hours between Nelson’s wounding by a French sniper and his final moments in the orlop of HMS Victory has become the definitive account of that event. Beatty’s description also immortalized Nelson’s last words, “Thank God 1 have done my duty.” Every Man Will Do His Duty is fascinating reading for anyone who enjoys getting beyond the chronology of naval history to the kind of details generally obscured by time. It is a valuable reminder that naval history is not created by historians or biographers, but by real people— famous and obscure—doing their duty.
Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia.
Lincoln P. Paine. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. 680 pp. Bib. Gloss. Ind. Photos. $50.00 ($45.00).
Reviewed by A. D. Baker III
Ships of the World sails under false colors, delivering far less cargo than its handsome production, obligatory Patrick O’Brien jacket blurb, and elegant prose promise. In the too-brief preface, the author carefully sidesteps defining his criteria for the inclusion of the exactly 1,000 ships and small craft for which entries are provided, and the reader can conclude only that Paine himself is unable to explain his preferences. If, for example, one wants the Missouri (BB-63) or Iowa (BB-61), there are excellent entries, but sisters New Jersey (BB-62) and Wisconsin (BB-64) did not make the cut, despite the former having been brought back for duty in Vietnam and the latter performing nobly during Desert Storm.
Less than a fourth of the entries are illustrated and each of the ship entries is followed by a list of only one or two sources from which its contents were drawn. All the sources are gathered in an extensive bibliography. Most of them are solidly reliable but others much less so. An example of the latter would be Paine’s dependence on the bizarre conspiracy theory expounded in Robert A. Liston’s 1988 The Pueblo Surrender, wherein the United States is said to have deliberately sought the capture of the beleaguered intelligence collector. Paine appears more comfortable with merchant ships than warships and with the ships of the sail through early steam era than with modem warships and merchant vessels, which are too conspicuous by their absence from his pages. For the warships, there are a few unfortunate whoppers, such as his assertion that Admiral Jackie Fisher’s World War I “large cruisers,” the Courageous, the Glorious, and the Furious, were designed to bombard Berlin from the Baltic some 85 miles away—this with 15- and 18-inch guns with ranges barely over 30,000 yards.
Many—probably too many—of the entries relate the histories of ships whose principal claim to fame is that they were lost. This predilection, and his format, occasionally trap the author, as when he has similar, separate entries for the Royal Navy armored cruisers Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue, otherwise obscure except that all three were sunk on the same morning by the same submarine at the outset of World War I. Ah, well, 997 entries to go. . . .
Ships of the World also devotes space to an overly generous selection of decidedly unfamous archaeological relic craft, for which, of course, operational histories are obscure at best, so that the articles are mostly descriptions of the small woodenhulled Viking, Roman, or Phoenecian craft. Included at the back of the book is a four-page listing of fictional ships and craft ranging from Captain Queeg’s the Caine and Jack Aubrey’s Surprise to Edward Lear’s “Pea Green Boat” in the children’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” and McHale’s Navy’s PT-73. There is also a highly eclectic 13-page chronology of maritime history from 2500 B.C. to 1994.
Nonetheless, readers seeking a quick description and history of a popularly ‘famous’ ship can find most of them in Ships of the World, from the Titanic to the topsail schooner Amistad made notable in the 1997 Stephen Spielberg movie. Further, the characteristics listings that precede each article are, while necessarily limited in scope, accurate and consistently formatted. Paine’s entries are concise but highly readable and usually manage to include the essential histories of the ships that made his cut.
Ships of the World would be a useful and reasonably-priced reference for an intermediate- or high-school library and might inspire young readers to further research (although the paucity of illustrations works against that). As a complete and fully reliable reference source, however, the book falls short. It is just one place to look up information, but not the place.