Turning a Blind Eye

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The Great Gamble: Nelson at Copenhagen

I'm very partial to a good history book, and I've just come to the end of one of the best that I've read. It has the three criteria that I think make for a good history book: it's meticulously researched; it paints a picture of the broad context of the period, without which any history book can descend to being a list of facts; and it's well-written (sadly, there's a lot of turgid prose out there on the History shelves).

The book is "The Great Gamble: Nelson at Copenhagen" by Dudley Pope. Hard to get hold of these days, and you might think an odd subject for a post here, but as the battle of Copenhagen led to the phrase "turning a blind eye", there is some broader relevance. At the height of the battle, the commanding Admiral (Sir Hyde Parker, who was four miles away, and because of the conditions, coming up very slowly) ordered the attacking fleet to disengage. Nelson ignored this, at one point putting the telescope to his blind eye and saying "I really do not see the signal". Hyde Parker was a cautious commander, judged by Pope to be the wrong man for the job: Pope has a lovely analogy that Parker crossed the North Sea at the start of the mission at the same pace as a child dawdling to school, because of his nervousness over losing ships onto the coast. 

The signal to cease the attack occupies a large chunk of the book plus an Appendix, to debunk a subsequent tale told in Hyde Parker's defence, that the signal was to be obeyed at Nelson's discretion. Pope destroys this with a mix of eye-witness accounts and sound reasoning (the signal was made to the whole fleet, not to Nelson alone, and some ships obeyed it). 

Pope's account of the careers and personal lives of Nelson and Parker, and the background diplomatic failures that led to the battle, are absolutely superb. The battle itself does degenerate into a list of facts as to which ship attacked which, but that's almost unavoidable. 

So I very much enjoyed this.  It won't appeal to all readers, but it certainly has a place on my shelves. 

The Admiral and his Weapon

Following our recent thread of great (or not) book titles, I've just finished a book entitled The Admiral's Secret Weapon. As I put it down, I suddenly regressed to age 14, and realized with a snigger that the title was a lovely unintentional double entendre.

It could so easily have been the title for a piece of humorous naval erotica. Don't get any ideas: I hereby copyright the idea of using a sailor in erotic fiction, throughout the Universe. (I once signed a copyright transfer form containing that very phrase, and I still feel that I was cheated over the Andromeda Galaxy.)

Anyway, smutty gags aside, this is a lovely piece of historical fact (another current thread), looking at the origins of chemical warfare in the Secret Plans developed by Thomas Cochrane, one of the most colourful characters in the history of the Royal Navy, and another of the inspirations for Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. Cochrane came up with the idea of using clouds of sulphur to overcome fortifications. His plans were dismissed and shelved, then re-presented by his heir in the First World War. Germany got there first in the implementation, though there's a fascinating coda as to whether they may have been influenced by a set of the plans stolen by a conniving butler.

Wonderful stuff.

The Greatest Seaman of his Age

This post is perhaps a bit off-topic, so apologies in advance. I’ve just finished reading Commander, by Stephen Taylor, a biography of Edward Pellew, later Lord Exmouth, renowned as one of the greatest fighting Captains in Britain’s Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. If you’re familiar with C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, the real-life Pellew is used as a mentor for the fictional Hornblower; he’s also cited as one of the inspirations for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey.

I read a fair amount of history and biography from this period. As you can imagine, the quality varies, and even well-researched books can be a tedious read. This one stands out for two reasons: firstly, Pellew isn’t widely written-about, and this is, I believe, the first modern biography; and secondly, it’s wonderfully set up.

The start of the book looks forward to Pellew’s final voyage, sailing against Algiers in the war against the taking of Europeans into slavery. Would he succeed? Would he even return? So the denouement of the book is as tense as any fiction. I didn’t know the outcome, so every page was gripping. It’s not absolutely the best book I’ve read about the period (that goes to Quiberon Bay, by Geoffrey Marcus: long out-of-print, but a page-turner to match any Tom Clancy thriller), and the writing edges on the florid occasionally, but for a fascinating account of the life of a great seaman during the Napoleonic wars, you can’t do much better.