Frigate Commander

Rating:
Summary: An fascinating insight into life on board ship.
Review: Graham Moore was regarded as what we would call today a "Star Performer" as he served aboard HM Frigates between 1793 and 1804. He was present during the Naval Mutiny of 1797 and helped destroy the French Fleet off Ireland the following year. Six years later he captured a Spanish Frigate carrying a fortune in treasure and as commander of HMS Indefatigable was involved in the opening stages of the Trafalgar campaign.

This book is based on his private journals written during his time as a Lieutenant through to Captain RN and gives modern historians a valuable insight into the problems associated with turning one of HM Frigates - with it's largely motley crew, into an efficient and effective fighting machine.

Tom Wareham was born in Portsmouth, the son of a serving Naval Officer and was, therefore, raised in an environment of Royal Navy culture, practises and traditions. In 1991 he was awarded a PhD by Exeter University for his research into the activities of the Royal Navy's Frigate commanders during the Great War with France. He is currently Curator of Docklands Museum, London.

Frigate Commander is a hardback book measuring approx 9½in x 6½in and is packed with over 280 pages of text with a small collection of relevant photographs set together in the middle. Beginning in 1784, the author takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Moore's life in which his own extremely readable narrative style is interspersed with direct extract from Moore's journal.

Altogether a well written and fascinating insight into life on board a series of Royal Navy ships and the life that went with them at one of the most interesting times in British naval history.

NM

Rating:
Summary: An intimate look at the life of a real frigate captain
Review: In 2001 Tom Wareham published "The Star Captains", a detailed study of Royal Navy frigate captains during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, comparing them with their comrades who did not command one of these glamorous vessels, or at most did so for only a short time. That book is filled with facts, some of them presented in chart or graph form, but its academic tone -- it originated as a PhD thesis -- may have proved dry for the general reader. As Wareham himself notes in the foreword to a new work: "one reviewer commented, fairly, that the book did not really take the reader close to the spirit of the frigate captains themselves." In part, Wareham's new book, "Frigate Commander", is an effort to redress this lack. And, I think, Wareham has succeeded. In "Frigate Commander" he presents the detailed story of a single officer, Graham Moore, who, except for a break during the Peace of Amiens, commanded frigates for more than a dozen years, from 1794 to 1806, his ships being the Syren, 32, the Melampus, 36, and the Indefatigable, 44. (Moore had earlier commanded the sloops Orestes and Bonetta.)

Wareham's narrative of Moore's career is illuminated by frequent and generous excerpts from a remarkable source -- thirty-seven volumes of Moore's handwritten diary, beginning in 1784 as a lieutenant and following him through his promotions to Master and Commander in 1791 and to Post Captain in 1794. The book effectively ends with Moore's relinguishment of command of the Indefatigable in 1806, only briefly surveying his later career on ships-of-the-line and as an admiral.

Inevitably, comparison must be made between Moore and his fictional counterparts such as Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. The serious, even gloomy, and introspective Moore is perhaps closer in personality to Hornblower than the sanguine, hearty Jack Aubrey, and Moore's deep interest in literature and painting certainly would not resonate with a man who could mistake Shakespeare's Hamlet" for a comedy. Yet, Moore had a strong tinge of romanticism, and many of his diary comments could well pass for something Jack Aubrey might write in his serial letters to his wife. Moore abhorred flogging, but recognized its necessity as part of a firm, consistent discipline. The struggles against sea and storms and the enemy and difficult admirals are all here in Moore's story and diary. We read of Moore's dealings with incompent subordinates, his pain over the loss of men to accident and battle, the loneliness of command ... I don't think that Patrick O'Brian or C.S. Forester ever read Moore's journals, but they would have instantly recognized so much of what is in them.

I cannot imagine that any fan of Hornblower or Aubrey would fail to appreciate Wareham's "Frigate Commander" for its intimate look at the real-life world of a Royal Navy frigate captain.