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any obtainable book. A discount of 10 per cent is allowed on books published by the Institute, and 5 per c^;tute, books of other publishers (government publications excepted). Address Secretary-Treasurer, U. S. Naval Insu Annapolis, Maryland.
est splendour upon French naval history. It admirably adapted to the nation’s tempera®^
CORSAIRES Henri Malo, Fr. 3.75.
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ET FLIBUSTIERS. By Paris: Flammarion. 1932.
Reviewed by Dr. Ing. Wladimir V.
Mendl
Since the war, France has been making frantic efforts to create an efficient naval literature, and she has succeeded, not only in building up a library of translations from all the important foreign writings about the war, but also in publishing excellent popular publications, the propaganda value of which cannot be emphasized too much.
The book under review is one of this latter type, written by a man who knows his job. Of course, it is not such an elaborate biography as the famous book, Un Capitaine Corsaire: Robert Surcouf, by his descendant R. Surcouf. Perhaps it does not speak enough of this latter famous corsair, being devoted mainly to events of the seventeenth century and giving but one chapter each to the foremost exploits of Jean Bart and Duguay Trouin.
But it does give an excellent idea of what corsairs really were, how they worked and why they are worth while. Moreover, the text has been chosen very cleverly from the most brilliant times of the French Navy.
After 1815 privateering was dead, real privateering, having cast during four centuries the bright-
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It allowed Frenchmen to display their qua! of initiative, courage and energy. ... It was a school for our sailors. If it did not obtain i®P°0[ tant results from the purely military point ^ view, at which moreover it did not aim, it ac efficiently upon the enemy, ruining his commerCj’ his banks, and his morale, destroying his vesS60{ and his merchandise, and depressing the value his money.
But times have changed and in fact, today, being given the powerful means action of the contemporary navy and the prl. of shipping, it does not seems possible for in ^ viduals to equip and man a vessel in order to her a-privateering. Only the government is r'c enough to do so.
After these words, the author speaks a very few words about what he thinks be modern privateers. Unfortunately, ^ does not seem to have clearly understoo the fundamental differences between 3 merchant vessel, even if she has got “letter of marque,” and a man-of-war.
The Goeben and Breslau cannot be spoken of as corsairs, any more than the Emden and the Karlsruhe or the arme auxiliary cruisers, none of which is meij tioned. However, not even the armed raid ers Wolf and Mowe were corsairs in tbe fullest sense of the word, for they 'vfrC_ really disguised men-of-war. It is a that this error at the very end spoils al1 otherwise good impression.
Book Reviews
1933]
Letter-books and order-book
OF GEORGE, LORD RODNEY, ADMIRAL OF THE WHITE SQUADRON, 1780-1782. Two vols. New York: Publications of the Naval History Society, 1932.
The material selected for this latest Publication of the Naval History Society c°nsists of two manuscript volumes of Otters to and from Admiral Rodney, and °Ue manuscript order-book, all belonging 1° the period of his command in the West ladies during the American Revolution. Ehese manuscripts were purchased recently in England and were acquired in 1930 by the Naval History Society. The liters, but not the order-book, have duplicates or originals in the British Public Record Office.
The correspondence in the two letter- books covers two different periods, the first extending from July, 1780, to February, 1781, including the two months’ stay °f Rodney’s squadron in New York from ^id-September to mid-December, 1780, aUd subsequent events leading up to his capture of the Dutch island of St. Eusta- tius, center of contraband trade in the ^est Indies, February 3,1781. During the ten-month break between this and the second collection of letters, Rodney was °ccupied chiefly in disposing of the immense store of goods captured at St. Rustatius, estimated at about three million pounds sterling, the Crown’s share in Miich was given to the army and naval officers who took part in the capture; and Oiost of Rodney’s correspondence of this Period was published subsequently as a Part of his defense against the suits of British merchants whose goods had been legally seized. From August to December, 1781, Rodney was temporarily back lu England.
The second series of letters—and also fibe order-book, which is of less value since A deals almost wholly with matters of beet routine—cover the period from Rod
279 ney’s return to his command in December, 1781, until he struck his flag in Bristol Channel September 21, 1782. They deal with the events leading up to and following his victory over De Grasse at the Saints’ Passage, April 12, 1782, in which the seventy-two year old British commander won his chief title to fame, and which went far toward restoring England’s “empire of the ocean” seriously endangered by the earlier war.
To the student of naval history, and especially of American naval history, these letters and orders will inevitably prove somewhat disappointing. This is partly because most of the important letters have already been printed, in Mundy’s Life of Rodney (1830) or elsewhere, and have long been familiar to students of the period. It is also because the material now printed is concerned so largely with every-day matters of fleet administration, discipline, supplies, repairs, and routine movements of ships and squadrons.
These, it is true, have a perennial interest to the student of old naval life and customs, but for the British Navy they have already been pretty thoroughly pictured in the many publications of the British Navy Records Society, and also in the Graves Despatches of our own Naval History Society, with its excellent interpretative introduction by Rear Admiral French Chadwick. Furthermore, it is to be assumed that the Naval History Society— though not so limited in its name—is primarily concerned with American naval history. And for the student of American naval history, biography, genealogy, and customs, the value of these papers would be vastly enhanced if they dealt with American ships and American personnel, and not with a British fleet engaging a French foe. Now that the society has so well covered the Revolutionary period, with the Out-Letters of the Marine Committee, the Graves Despatches, the Fanning Narrative, the Conyngham Papers, the logs
said)
‘eye upon his captains,” as he once
Your anger at my partial interfering (as y°u term it) with the American War not a little s®r prises me. I came to interfere in the America® War, to Command by Sea in it, and to do $$ best Endeavours toward putting an end thereto-
of Jones’s vessels, and these Rodney papers, it may perhaps be inclined to turn to important unpublished American material even if of somewhat later date, such for example as the manuscript volumes of correspondence in the Navy Department Library relating to the construction of our first national Navy (1794-98); the manuscript volume of letters of Commodore Tingey when in command in the West Indies during our naval war with France, or the store of Captains’ Letters of the period 1812-15. From such sources, material could be found comparable to the society’s invaluable Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus V. Fox for the period of the Civil War.
One would like to see such material treated with the same admirable editorial care which has been given to the publication now under review, with its beautiful format, its painstaking attention to the text, and its detailed description not only of the manuscripts published but of all the Rodney manuscript material. Especially praiseworthy (when one recalls the Fox Correspondence where the lack of an index has cost investigators many hours of needless page-thumbing) is the elaborate index for these volumes, covering 67 pages—a page of index for every 13 pages of text.
If the Rodney papers throw little new light on major questions relating to his West Indian campaigns, such as the old problem as to how much credit is due him for breaking the enemy line at the Saints’ Passage, they illuminate certain lesser matters, for example his quarrel with Admiral Arbuthnot on the New York station, the ill treatment of naval prisoners at New York, and the character of that able, irascible officer Rodney himself, whose “had more dread than the enemy’s fir®- One notes the energy with which, despfl® gout and old age, he supervised the mult1 tudinous details of fleet command. sees his temperament, or temper, in comment on Hood’s hurried withdraw3 from St. Kitt’s—“a very unofficer Hke action, and tending to discourage tb® Fleet in General, by a British Fleet of 2 Sail of the Line, cutting their cables, Put' ting out their lights, and running away from an Enemy’s fleet of only 27 Sail 0 the Line.” One sees it also in his icy re' marks to Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, wb° resented Rodney’s appearance at Ne^ York because it deprived him of his share of prize money as senior officer:
And again to the Admiralty:
I am ashamed to mention what appears the real cause and from whence Mr. Arbuthnot’s Cha grene proceeds, but the proofs are so plain tha Prize Money is the occasion. . . .
Rodney himself, however, was not lack' ing in an appetite for the “loaves ah fishes.” Indeed the letters now publish re-emphasize the evils from which tb® British Navy suffered in this period of Jts adversity: the influence of political factioh in selections and promotions, the attempt to run distant campaigns from the Ad' miralty offices in London; and the gte® for prize money which one of Rodney ® flag captains described as “the bane of a public service.”
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