33. Royal Tars, by Brian Lavery
Owned: No, library
Page count: 348
My summary: Belowdecks in the Royal Navy, there were men working tirelessly and invisibly. Much ink has been spilled over the officers and senior men commanding the ships, but there is less focus on the men who actually kept the ships going despite the poor conditions in which they lived. These are their stories.
My rating: 4/5
My commentary:
Another research book! I'm full of information about sailors and pirates and the Caribbean circa 1600-1700. This one particularly I was searching for the lives of sailors - even more specifically, common sailors as opposed to the officers and gentlemen who are so often the focus of media about the Age of Sail. It's for an understandable reason, I suppose - officers were more likely to be literate, more likely to leave evidence of their lives behind, whereas the men before the mast were less likely to leave much documentation of their lives, and where they did, it wouldn't necessarily be collected or highly regarded the same way that the lives and memoirs of officers would be. Still, there is more connecting the average person alive to day to that ordinary sailor than there is to the officer, and in more recent years the lives of the regular men in the Navy have been examined, and for good reason. This is one such volume attempting to give that scrutiny to the ordinary lives of sailors. So, how does it do?
Pretty well, as it turns out. I am always disappointed in theses sort of books with the lack of what for me would be the holy grail - a precise accounting of exactly how these men lived, what clothes they wore, what food they ate, how they talked, what they thought of their jobs and their conditions - but such a thing is near-impossible to create credibly, there just isn't as much evidence for it. This, then, focuses on what we can know of the common sailor in the British Navy, and it's interesting in its scope, starting with the origins of the Navy in the medieval period going all the way through to the start of the Age of Steam. I am particularly interested in the accounts of Age of Sail protests and mutinies from common sailors over their conditions, lack of food, lack of clothes and the like - some of which were even successful! It's a social history the likes of which I haven't quite seen before, and I'm grateful to it. There are also accounts from the men in their own words, where such things exist - letters sent from men aboard ships to loved ones ashore and the like, which shed a deal of light onto their lives. It's a good and worthy look at a less-documented topic, and I am glad I read it!
Next, it's the end of the world, and you are alone in the rubble.
