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About this book:
Drawing on many contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts, this book examines the lives of the ordinary sailors of the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), covering their attitudes, duties, comforts, hardships, vices, and virtues. The popular image of the British sailor of this time is of a press-ganged wretch living off weevil-infested, rotting food, motivated only by prize money, compelled to endure years of boredom and back-breaking work, and facing constant hazards aboard a floating hell where discipline was maintained by the lash. The extent to which this enduring image accords with reality is revealed here.