Abstract
It was encouraging to discover Pen & Sword Books supporting a new naval historian author by publishing a further book about Admiral Sir James Saumarez. Like a number of other distinguished admirals of the Napoleonic Wars, Sir James has in the last few years begun to escape the smothering effect of Nelson’s brilliance and appear again in bookshops with the products of fresh research; he was a remarkable man who deserves to be more widely known and respected. His resurrection into nautical fame started fifty years ago in 1968 with the Navy Records Society’s The Saumarez Papers. The editor, Anthony Ryan, concentrated on the five years Saumarez was Commander-in-Chief of a large British Baltic Fleet, flying his flag in HMS Victory, the last admiral to have that seagoing honour. It was a remote station but he played a distinguished and independent role in Napoleon’s disastrous ‘March on Moscow’.
Ryan drew largely from the family’s former official correspondence, now held in the Suffolk Record Office in Ipswich or in the Admiralty section of the National Archives at Kew. Most of the rest came from the two-volume Memoirs of Admiral de Saumarez by Sir John Ross, published in 1838 as the official biography, two years after the Admiral’s death. Ross the Arctic explorer was a close friend and as liaison officer for Saumarez with the Swedish admiral and a fluent Swedish speaker, well placed to write the book. However, it was not liked by the family who considered it unworthy of his lordship.
Ryan had been preceded by Ludovic Kennedy’s Nelson and his Captains in 1951 which centred on the Battle of the Nile. Saumarez appears again in 2005 in Le Fevre and Harding’s British Admirals of the Napoleonic Wars. A much fuller study of Sir James came out in paperback the next year. Its author, David Shayer, described it as ‘a chronological narrative without footnotes or extensive quotations’. He intended it as a succinct and readable source for Guernsey people, having discovered that few of them knew what their most famous islander had actually done. He modestly denied it being a work of original historical scholarship but it admirably served its purpose.
The next publication, in 2008, was full of quotations and footnotes as it was based on a PhD thesis by this reviewer, which he had edited to widen its scope and make it more readable than most theses. The publishers had refused to let it become a full biography because they considered that Saumarez did not have enough scandal attached to him. As a result, it too was predominantly about his five years in the Baltic, hence its title, Admiral Saumarez versus Napoleon: The Baltic, 1807–12 (2008). He did in the end manage to squeeze in the rest of Sir James’ life. He also brought in a new and revealing stream of Swedish letters from the young Governor of Gothenburg, Count von Rosen, to the Chancellor von Engeström. This was the link between Saumarez as the quasi-British Ambassador and the former French Marshall ‘Belle-Jambe’ Bernadotte, initially Swedish Crown Prince and later created King Karl XIV Johan. Three more books followed that touched on Saumarez. In 2012, James Davey’s specialised study of the problems of supplying ships or squadrons in distant waters like the Baltic, The Transformation of British Naval Strategy: Seapower and Supply in Northern Europe, 1808–1812; two chapters in John D. Grainger’s The British Navy in the Baltic, a summary in 2014 of the British Navy’s experiences in the Baltic from Canute to some minor actions in support of the White Russians in 1919–20 and Peter Hore’s Nelson’s Captains in 2015, an updating and widening of links to all the captains who served under Nelson. Saumarez also gets a mention of honour earlier this year in Andrew Lambert’s Admirals for his two actions at Algeciras.
Where then does Sullivan’s Man of War fit into this historiographic scene and what were its objectives? The publishers see it as ‘the true story of one of the most remarkable individuals of the great days of sail’, but like many publishers’ cover-puffs it has more wind than weight. The author himself has usefully produced the results of further research, especially at the beginning and end of Saumarez’s life in Guernsey. More importantly, on pp. 222–223, he reveals a reason why Grey was unable at first to persuade the new ‘Sailor King’ William that Saumarez should be awarded a ‘coronation’ peerage as representative for the Navy. It is disappointing that he does not make more of this and link it with St. Vincent’s refusal to recommend him for a peerage for the turnaround from defeat to victory at Algeciras thirty years earlier.
Sullivan in his final paragraph, having dismissed earlier historians’ work as inadequate, claims that his is ‘the only in depth study of Saumarez’s career’. Another such study would indeed have been welcome for there are a number of gaps in present knowledge and understanding of this indeed ‘remarkable’ man that need to be filled and at a price like this one rather than the ‘Boydell’ price of British nautical history publications. But Sullivan’s is one of breadth rather than depth. The text largely consists of abstracts of words or thoughts from other publications. These have been ably and usefully put together but add very little to the overall picture since there is little that is newly-found. This weakness shows clearly in his list of quotation end-notes, chapter by chapter, which apart from Ross are predominantly from secondary sources rather than primary ones. Ross appears most often. At 107 notes (a third of the total) he beats Voelcker comfortably at 80; yet he was the historian Sullivan damns so severely for his inaccuracy. Kennedy, Ryan, Shayer, Davey and other secondaries play their part, leaving just 33 not recently published
Strangely, he uses these secondary sources for the references rather than the primary ones, making it less handy for the academic world, and for a great number he gives no reference at all. A post-graduate’s supervisor would have rapidly complained: ‘too much narrative, not enough analysis’. Most of the analysis had already been done by the earlier historians whose work he follows. The general reader, however, might well say ‘too many facts’. Do we need to know the name of each ship’s captain when they don’t play any part in the story? Or the hour at which a ship sails when it has no bearing on the following action. It does not make for enjoyable reading.
Sadly, it is a disappointment. There are many questions still to be asked about Saumarez. Familiar as he should have been with the fluky winds of the Mediterranean from his years there as a Midshipman and in the pursuit of Napoleon’s army before the Battle of the Nile, should he have made the initial attack at Algeciras under the forts? Did memories of that failed attack also deter him from attacking the Russian fleet under the defences of Rogervik seven years later? What were the French or Spanish naval reports of the two actions? The coverage of foreign views and information is thin throughout the book, especially Scandinavian ones, and there are a number of errors in foreign names. It would have been interesting if he had linked with the Danish world of naval history who are currently interested in that period. A further hunt for the letters from von Engeström to which von Rosen was replying would have been valuable. There is room for a study of the pattern of convoys and their escorts, the key to the blockade system.
Overall, it leaves an impression of inadequate editing. Certainly the copy editing is extremely slack – I reached 28 typos, misspellings, repetitions and grammatical oddities before I stopped counting. Another pair of eyes looking at the whole approach before publishing could have made something of it. Should this not have been the role of Pen & Sword’s editor?