Post by Goblin, esq. on Feb 21, 2008 16:23:36 GMT -5
I'm essentially copying the review I wrote for a live-journal community, as it may be of interest here.
I just finished reading The Trafalgar Companion by Mark Adkin. This is an ox-stunner of a book at 555 pages, but it covers a lot of detail. The big win for me was the illustrations of uniforms, not only of the Royal Navy, but of the French and Spanish navies as well. The book has chapters on Ships and Seamanship, Officers and Seamen, Guns, Gunnery and Tactics, Command and Control, and a very long chapter detailing the actual battle of Trafalgar with many diagrams, and a full page description of each ship that took part. All of this is interspersed with a biography of Nelson, with diagrams and descriptions of the battles of Copenhagen and the Nile. The volume is fully illustrated with diagrams, maps and paintings of ships, and there are also a large number of primary source quotes as well.
It seems to me to be quite accurate; I did spot a couple of errors, but they seemed to be editing or layout mistakes more than anything else; I suspect the book was rushed into print for the Trafalgar Bicentennial in 2005.
www.amazon.com/Trafalgar-Companion-Historys-Famous-Admiral/dp/1845130189/
I just finished reading The Trafalgar Companion by Mark Adkin. This is an ox-stunner of a book at 555 pages, but it covers a lot of detail. The big win for me was the illustrations of uniforms, not only of the Royal Navy, but of the French and Spanish navies as well. The book has chapters on Ships and Seamanship, Officers and Seamen, Guns, Gunnery and Tactics, Command and Control, and a very long chapter detailing the actual battle of Trafalgar with many diagrams, and a full page description of each ship that took part. All of this is interspersed with a biography of Nelson, with diagrams and descriptions of the battles of Copenhagen and the Nile. The volume is fully illustrated with diagrams, maps and paintings of ships, and there are also a large number of primary source quotes as well.
It seems to me to be quite accurate; I did spot a couple of errors, but they seemed to be editing or layout mistakes more than anything else; I suspect the book was rushed into print for the Trafalgar Bicentennial in 2005.
www.amazon.com/Trafalgar-Companion-Historys-Famous-Admiral/dp/1845130189/