Here are 79 books that Nelson's Navy in 100 Objects fans have personally recommended if you like
Nelson's Navy in 100 Objects.
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I wanted to go to the sea ever since I can remember. In the hope of having the nonsense knocked out of me, my father sent me at the tender age of fourteen to the ‘Indefatigable’, a tough sea-training school. This only strengthened my resolve for a life at sea, and I joined the Royal Navy at 15. My family emigrated and I transferred to the Royal Australian Navy and saw service around the world. Although I no longer have an active involvement with the navy, I sail in my imagination through my sea-faring novels.
This book holds a special place in my bookshelves. Reprinted many times it is a classic reference to the period. Lavery’s description of life at sea is unparalleled, depicting a world far removed from the hardships and cruelty that is often attributed to conditions on the lower deck.
Patrick O'Brien provides the forward to this edition of the most successful Conway Maritime title. This book is the perfect guide to Nelson's Navy for all those with an interest in the workings of the great fleet. The book is eminently readable and is the first single-volume work to cover in such depth this vast and complex subject. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on the sailing navy the book contains considerable original research to give a clear and authentic picture of the Senior Service as a whole. With a foreword by one of the most successful maritime…
I wanted to go to the sea ever since I can remember. In the hope of having the nonsense knocked out of me, my father sent me at the tender age of fourteen to the ‘Indefatigable’, a tough sea-training school. This only strengthened my resolve for a life at sea, and I joined the Royal Navy at 15. My family emigrated and I transferred to the Royal Australian Navy and saw service around the world. Although I no longer have an active involvement with the navy, I sail in my imagination through my sea-faring novels.
A useful companion to Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy – my personal copy is quite well-thumbed! The book offers a definitive guide to every aspect of the handling of a man-of-war, explaining just how the ships of Nelson’s navy were actually sailed. Superb line drawings by the maritime artist Mark Myers enhance the text.
Numerous successful reprints of contemporary works on rigging and seamanship indicate the breadth of interest in the lost art of handling square-rigged ships. Model makers, marine painters, and enthusiasts need to know not only how the ships were rigged but how much sail was set in each condition of wind and sea, how the various maneuvers were carried out, and the intricacies of operations like reefing sails or 'catting' an anchor.
John Harland has provided what is undeniably the most thorough book on handling square-rigged ships. Because of his facility in a remarkable range of languages, Harland has been able…
I’m an author of queer historical fiction and I love to explore stories set on the sea. I adore the drama of it, the beauty, the awe, the timelessness, and the wild backdrop that allows characters to confront themselves and their journeys. Having lived by the sea all my life on an island rich with nautical and smuggling history, it has never been far away from me. I like to read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction; both have strongly influenced my own writing. The books on this list capture the diverse reasons I am drawn to sea tales!
A lot of the fiction and non-fiction around the Age of Sail and the Georgian navy focuses on the officers and the larger battles, so this book, discussing the lives of ordinary sailors, is very refreshing.
I read it for research for my own writing and really enjoyed the excerpts from the letters and other documents of the diverse groups of men (and women) who sailed on the ships of the line.
There is an intimacy there of seeing how these various stories and lives played out against the backdrop of wider events and political issues. It is something I always bear in mind while writing my own (fictional) narratives.
The Royal Navy to which Admiral Lord Nelson sacrificed his life depended on thousands of sailors and marines to man the great wind-powered wooden warships. Drawn from all over Britain and beyond, often unwillingly, these ordinary men made the navy invincible through skill, courage and sheer determination. They cast a long shadow, with millions of their descendants alive today, and many of their everyday expressions, such as 'skyscraper' and 'loose cannon', continuing to enrich our language. Yet their contribution is frequently overlooked, while the officers became celebrities. JACK TAR gives these forgotten men a voice in an exciting, enthralling, often…
I wanted to go to the sea ever since I can remember. In the hope of having the nonsense knocked out of me, my father sent me at the tender age of fourteen to the ‘Indefatigable’, a tough sea-training school. This only strengthened my resolve for a life at sea, and I joined the Royal Navy at 15. My family emigrated and I transferred to the Royal Australian Navy and saw service around the world. Although I no longer have an active involvement with the navy, I sail in my imagination through my sea-faring novels.
I’m greatly drawn to the caricaturists and satirists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the days before the internet they were often vehicles for witty, sometimes very pointed, commentary on all aspects of society. This book, with prints from the National Maritime Museum, focuses on the Royal Navy during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Broadsides explores the political and cultural history of the Navy during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through contemporary caricature. This was a period of intense naval activity - encompassing the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the War of 1812. Naval caricatures were utilised by the press to comment on events, simultaneously reminding the British public of the immediacy of war, whilst satirising the same Navy it was meant to be supporting. The thematic narrative explores topics from politics to invasion, whilst encompassing detailed analysis of the context…
I am a physician assistant and paramedic with ten brothers and sisters, an all-consuming love of the outdoors and adventure, and a fascination with history, particularly early US history. I love reading and writing the kind of books that I would like to read. My debut novel, Firefax, was written in large part as an escape from the horrors of serving in the hospital as a physician assistant during the delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I hope it provides my readers with an escape from their own struggles as well.
I can hardly recommend the first book without recommending the entire series.
The historical accuracy of these books will blow you away, as will the depths and complexities of every character involved, from Dr. Maturin with his fascination with languages, music, and the natural world, to the stalwart, steady Captain Aubrey, who lets his drive to serve king and country push him to the very heights of his profession.
Their wild, dangerous adventures will hook you and each time you finish a novel you’ll hardly be able to wait for the next adventure, until at last the final book ends the tales. The heights and depths of this story of true, lifelong friendship will ring true to any soul reading these tales of high adventure in a world at war upon the seas.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
When I was very young, in our tiny hamlet on the Canadian prairies, I recall riding with other children in the Dominion Day parade. Each child was given a little flag to wave, but even then I noticed that while half were given the old dominion flag, the other half were waving the Union Jack. I couldn’t put it into words then, naturally, but later I recognized it as a feeling of being part of something grand – something far larger than myself or even my own country. Those were the dying days of the Empire and the world has moved on, but a fascination for our history lingers to this day.
Forester is the perfect author for a young reader of Historical Fiction, pertaining to the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars in particular. The action is so riveting you’ll swear you can hear the crash of the broadsides, and the defiant growls of the salty tars as they weigh into the enemy with cold steel. However, his real gift is his knowledge of those stately old square-riggers in which Horatio Hornblower sailed. Indeed, I was so engrossed, that by the time I finished the series, I felt that I had a working knowledge of them from stem to stern.
Called "as gripping and realistic a sea tale as you are likely to run across" by the New York Times, C. S. Forester's Beat to Quarters finds Hornblower faced with a near-impossible mission off the coast of Nicaragua. June 1808, somewhere west of Nicaragua -- a site suitable for spectacular sea battles. The Admiralty has ordered Captain Horatio Hornblower, now in command of the thirty-six-gun HMS Lydia, to form an alliance against the Spanish colonial government with an insane Spanish landowner; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and "to take, sink, burn or destroy" the fifty-gun…
For fifty years I've studied the British sailing navy, fascinated by its workings, the slow communications, the vagaries of the winds and tides. In parallel with my work in archives, I've sailed in most of the European waters described in Convoys. I worked at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for 27 years, leaving as Deputy Director in 2000. Since then, I've taught postgraduates and written about Nelson and the British government (Britain against Napoleon), and became convinced that Britain came very close to being defeated by Napoleonic France. If Napoleon had not thrown it all away by his invasion of Russia in 1812, I might be writing this in French, with a very different script!
It is an extraordinary fact that no one had written a book on the naval war after 1803 for nearly two hundred years.
In the same time period, hundreds of books have covered Trafalgar and Nelson, and some good books have appeared on parts of the war. But until James Davey’s extensive documentary research in this book, nobody had seen it as a whole. Engagingly written, full of telling stories, this tells the story of a worldwide war.
Battles, blockades, convoys, raids: how the indefatigable British Royal Navy ensured Napoleon's ultimate defeat
Horatio Nelson's celebrated victory over the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 presented Britain with an unprecedented command of the seas. Yet the Royal Navy's role in the struggle against Napoleonic France was far from over. This groundbreaking book asserts that, contrary to the accepted notion that the Battle of Trafalgar essentially completed the Navy's task, the war at sea actually intensified over the next decade, ceasing only with Napoleon's final surrender.
In this dramatic account of naval contributions between 1803 and 1815, James…
I’m an author of queer historical fiction and I love to explore stories set on the sea. I adore the drama of it, the beauty, the awe, the timelessness, and the wild backdrop that allows characters to confront themselves and their journeys. Having lived by the sea all my life on an island rich with nautical and smuggling history, it has never been far away from me. I like to read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction; both have strongly influenced my own writing. The books on this list capture the diverse reasons I am drawn to sea tales!
Patrick O’Brian is the master of nautical fiction. I enjoyed every one of his Aubrey—Maturin series but this one shines out.
I believe that, in maritime fiction, the sea should be its own character, and this book brings to life every face of it. His intricate prose captures the daily life onboard Napoleonic-era ships in painstaking detail and throws the reader into a totally immersive world.
But mostly, I love how this book embodies the friendship between Jack and Stephen. Although they are such different characters, they have such a beautiful connection and when they are separated from their ship, they rely on each other to survive.
I love exploring the various relationships of men and women, in platonic, familial, and romantic senses.
The war of 1812 continues, and Jack Aubrey sets course for Cape Horn on a mission after his own heart: intercepting a powerful American frigate outward bound to play havoc with the British whaling trade. Stephen Maturin has fish of his own to fry in the world of secret intelligence. Disaster in various guises awaits them in the Great South Sea and in the far reaches of the Pacific: typhoons, castaways, shipwrecks, murder, and criminal insanity.
I’m an author of queer historical fiction and I love to explore stories set on the sea. I adore the drama of it, the beauty, the awe, the timelessness, and the wild backdrop that allows characters to confront themselves and their journeys. Having lived by the sea all my life on an island rich with nautical and smuggling history, it has never been far away from me. I like to read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction; both have strongly influenced my own writing. The books on this list capture the diverse reasons I am drawn to sea tales!
This non-fiction book about the mutiny on HMS Hermionewas a massive inspiration behind Leeward which features a fictional mutiny in the Caribbean.
I read it after listening to a podcast featuring Angus Konstam and was instantly hooked. The historical events were shocking and brutal and had far-reaching political consequences at the time. Angus Konstam describes them so cinematically and with such intriguing historical detail that I absolutely devoured the book.
I became immersed in my own research and started imagining what it would have been like on those ships – both the Hermioneand the Surprisewhich hunted her down.
'A vivid account of a forgotten chapter of British naval history.' Dan Snow, Historian, TV Presenter and Broadcaster
The true story of one of the most notorious mutinies in naval history, which provided inspiration for Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin and C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels.
In 1797 the 32-gun Royal Navy frigate HMS Hermione was serving in the Caribbean, at the forefront of Britain's bitter sea war against Spain and Revolutionary France. Its commander, the sadistic and mercurial Captain Hugh Pigot ruled through terror, flogging his men mercilessly and pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance. On the night of 21…
I first found fantasy literature about the same time as I got into tabletop gaming, for me this was AD&D. Edgar Rice Burroughs, J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Lieber, and Roger Zelazny were just a few of the authors that showed me what was possible. Writing my first novel cemented my understanding that I wanted to create the kinds of worlds that readers would want to experience. The kinds of worlds that would let them get away from their lives, if only for a few hours, where they could live a life of adventure and discovery. Just like the novels I recommended here did for me.
This is a novel of historical fiction set in the time of the French revolution. The series is named after the main character, Alan Lewrie. This novel introduces you to this rapscallion of a character, someone who is a spoiled, and indolent 16-year-old young man. Against his will he will find his place in the world and it will be in the very last place he would have imagined, commanding a ship of the Royal Navy. The novels follow his travels and adventures as he rises through the ranks, and it was incredibly fun to watch the young man evolve and grow into the man he becomes.
His exploits echo with the bustle of crowded ports and the crash of naval warfare...
It is 1780 and seventeen-year-old Alan Lewrie is a brash young libertine with a head full of dreams. When he is found in bed with the wrong woman, he is forced to leave his profligacy behind for a new life at sea.
Though sickness and hard labour await him aboard the tall-masted Ariadne, Lewrie finds himself gradually adapting to the world of a midshipman.
But as he heads for the war-torn Americas into a hail of cannonballs, will he ever catch wind of the plot…
