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

by James P. McGuane

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393047490
• ISBN13: 9780393047493
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 10.2" x 11.3"

Customer Reviews

THANK YOU James McGuane!!

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!

A Voyage of Discovery

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.

What a wonderful gift!!!

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.

A marvelous visual journey into Nelson's navy

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.

Spectacular

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.