by

James P. McGuane

1st. 2002 W. W. Norton & Company Inc., New York

ISBN 0 393 04749 0

260 mm. x 28 5mm. 20 mm. 192 pages
1.3 kilo unwrapped

£12.50 + P & P

ISBN 0-393-04749-0 $49.95 USA $72.99 Can.

"Fids, deadeyes, seam rubbers— these might seem merely mute, opaque relics. But as James McGuane marshals scores of such tools in Heart of Oak, they not only prove curiously beautiful, but offer us an intimate, wholly accessible vision of working life in Nelson's navy, and bear eloquent testament to that great, globe-girdling enterprise's continuing power to awe and stir us."
—.RICHARD SNOW, editor in chief, American Heritage

From tar-ladles and snuff-boxes to sailmaker's lids and carronades: a gorgeous photographic essay on Jack Aubrey's world.
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 P. McGuane has recorded artifacts recovered from ship-wrecks and preserved by modern conservation techniques. Taken together, these unique treasures provide a win' dow 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. These photographs bring home to the reader—as words alone cannot—what a sailor's life in that time was really like.
Also photographed here is Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, proudly preserved at Portsmouth. Victory survived the great fleet action at Trafalgar, where Nelson himself died, and is still a commissioned ship in the Royal Navy.

Jacket design by Kavanagh Design/NY Jacket photographs by James P. McGuane Author photograph by Karl Peiler
Printed in Hong Kong

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