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

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, 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.

Also photographed here is Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, proudly preserved at Portsmouth. Victory survived the great fleet action at Trafalgar, as Nelson himself did not, and is still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy. 280 color illustrations and photographs.

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.


A Voyage of Discovery   December 25, 2002
Panopticonman (Brooklyn, NY USA)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

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.