Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

You've done history great service and truly inspired me. Publishers stamp out millions of cheaply rendered books and -- while most have "some redeeming features" -- only one in one-thousand is this inspired.

The Queen should track you down and knight you!

The main attraction of the book is the photography. Large, well-reproduced photos of important or interesting naval items. Most are dynamic and excellent shots, though a few have depth-of-field problems--Lengthy objects sometimes have the close or far end slightly out of focus.

The accompanying text for each item is brief, basically a lengthy caption. In some cases, I wanted more detail. Some of the petty details that are included are very interesting, though. My favorite was the reaction of dockworkers in England to the Navy effort to build ships of long-lasting teak in the Far East. When their jobs were threatened by foreign competition, the English shipwrights began spreading rumors of how teak splinters were poisonous!

The selection of subjects is EXCELLENT, with almost all of them in wonderful shape. The collections of a number of museums were used, as well as the ship HMS VICTORY at Portsmouth. Oddly, I don't remember any items from the outstanding naval museum at Portsmouth, however.

Highly recommended for the illustrations, though if you really want to know details of how items of rigging and such were used, you will want to supplement this book with another that has better text (and probably has greatly inferior illustrations). The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea would be a good choice.

The photography is absolutely beautiful. You are given an up close and personal look at this fascinating time in history. An absolutely gorgeous and well written book.

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.

Outstanding accompaniment to the O'Brian series. Wonderful photographs, background information and historical tidbits bring the 1800's British Navy into even clearer view.

I'll make this short and simple and say the same about this gem as I did a couple of years ago about Brian Lavery's "Nelson's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1793-1815": if you're interested in this period, just buy the book. Your only possible disappointment might be that it isn't twice as long.

I bought this book for research purposes and the photographs are excellent for that. If you are interest in seamen, Royal Navy, late 18th Century sailing - you will enjoy this book.