Book Review:
British Napoleonic Ship-of-the-Line

By Angus Konstam
Artwork by Tony Bryan

 

For anyone who has seen the Hornblower TV series and fallen in love with the age of sail and fighting ships, then Osprey has got a very good book that can help fill in a lot of the nautical details.

British Napoleonic Ship-of-the-Line would be my recommendation for a first-stop guide as it not only looks at the vessels themselves - the largest man-made structures in the pre-industrialised era - but also their numbers, their crews, how they were sailed, how they were rated and a very good glossary.

During the Napoleonic Wars all that stood between Britain and a threatening France was the wooden walls of the Royal Navy and much time and money was spent making that force the most professional and powerful on the planet.

But, as author Angus Konstam points out, the British didn't have it all their own way and in fact their enemy made far better ships. The French designs were so good that from 1793 the Royal Navy copied their designs from captured ships!

Konstam explains how the great ships were built - and there is an excellent cut-away artwork of the Victory by Tony Bryan to show how complex these vessels were - follows the expansion of the Royal Navy and has an extremely useful list of all the major ships that served in it between 1792 and 1815.

There are eight pages of colour plates done by Tony Bryan and these include both action pictures and details images. The latter are very handy if you don't know your main topgallant from your main course ... and I didn't.

Keep her steady Mr Hornblower ...

- Richard Moore

8.5/10