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

James P. McGuane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2002

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047490
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047493
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,140,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A marvelous visual journey into Nelson's navy, November 4, 2002

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy (Hardcover)

James McGuane's "Heart of Oak" is a marvelous visual journey into, as the subtitle has it, "A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy". The book is filled with photographs of artifacts from British nautical museums (plus a number taken aboard HMS Victory and at other naval-related sites), pictures not of static, dead objects on dusty museum shelves, but photographs artfully dynamic, almost as if the tools portrayed were set down a few minutes ago and a horny-handed seaman might return shortly to resume his work. Many of the most fragile artifacts, such as a leather bucket and handmade trousers of light sailcloth, were recovered from the wreck of HMS Invincible lost in 1758, decades before the era of Horatio Nelson and Jack Aubrey, but nonetheless strongly representative of what would have still been found aboard a Royal Navy ship during the Napoleonic Wars. The range of articles pictured is remarkable: a tar brush, pistols and boarding pikes, sailmakers' fids, a surgeon's bleeding bowl, cable laid rope, a glim (the thick glass lens set into a powder magazine enclosure to admit light but not flame), a seaman's knit woolen cap, a ship's lead, hourglasses (well, 28-minute glasses, to be accurate), a square wooden plate with raised rim (keeps the food in place when the ship rolls), sailors' knives, a cat-o'-nine-tails, a pressgang's cosh, and much, much more. "Heart of Oak" is not a highly structured analysis of the physical accoutrements of nautical life two centuries ago, but it is a bit of a time machine, transporting the modern student of naval history (or a lover of the novels of Patrick O'Brian or C.S. Forester) back into that vanished world.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Voyage of Discovery, December 24, 2002

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy (Hardcover)

Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin novels are unsurpassed for their historical accuracy, their swashbuckling plots, and for piquing the desire of non-sailors (like me) to learn more about the nautical technology of the Napoleonic era. HEART OF OAK answers the need of the nautically-challenged for an illustrated glossary of this technology. But even better, it offers both the non-sailor and sailor alike an "insider's view" of life on board a typical British warship of the time. Through its brilliant photographs of common everyday items, it answers the small but nagging questions raised by O'Brien's descriptions of shipboard life, such as what did the grog cup of a common sailor look like, how big is a holystone, and what's a deadeye and how does it work? HEART OF OAK is a great improvement over the usual dry nautical encyclopedias that merely catalog the naval equipment of the time. Like the Aubrey and Maturin novels, it pumps blood into the sinews of history. Handsomely designed, elegantly and sparely written, McGuane has given us a treasure trove of images and visceral insights that enhances O'Brien's works, but also stands solidly on its own as a poetic pictorial history of Nelson's navy.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a wonderful gift!!!, December 11, 2002

By 

a reader of good books (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heart of Oak: A Sailor's Life in Nelson's Navy (Hardcover)

I'm so glad I found this fabulous book for my husband who is a HUGE Patrick O'Brien fan. Not knowing much about naval history myself, I found myself immersed for an hour or so in this great, visual history book. The photographs are wonderful - the subject matter is by turns exciting, majestically beautiful, and sometimes a bit gruesome! - the writing is concise and leaves you wanting to learn more. I'm now inspired to hit the O'Brien books myself! A perfect gift for history buffs.