Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Volume One: 660-1649: v. 1 (The Safeguard of the Seas: Naval History of Britain) - Tapa dura

The interaction of England’s national, political history with the development or atrophy of her sea-power is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of her long history astonishingly, this is the first book to seize on it.

There have of course been histories of England by the dozen: but hitherto none have treated the presence or absence of sea power as the permanent, inescapable condition of the country’s political history existence. There have been histories of the Navy, but in them the country’s political history has been at best relegated to the status of noises heard offstage. It is Nicholas Rodger’s achievement in this landmark book to show how flimsy, how contrived, how untrue, any account of either must be without the other .

This alone would be more than enough to substantiate a claim to be a work of the first historical importance. But the book is far, far, more. Through its fresh insights it opens up glittering perspectives of historical choice and chance. The traditional view of our history, resting so often on the unspoken, unexamined axiom that whatever happened was somehow bound to happen, is blown away in these pages like leaves in an autumn gale. The vast possibilities of what didn’t happen but might have, that untravelled world whose margin forever fades, give an exhilarating sense of space. Familiar figures, or figures one had thought familiar, appear suddenly restored to flesh and blood. Who would have thought that Edward the Confessor was an astute and capable manager of the country’s maritime strength, or that William the Conqueror, that symbol of Norman massiveness, let his sea defences fall to such abject impotence that he had to buy off the invaders with Danegeld? Henry V we know from Shakespeare to have been an inspiring fighting leader: but did we also realise he was a strategic thinker of rare quality who, in less than a decade, transformed English sea power into a dominant force the like of which would not be seen for another two and a half centuries?

And what about the Tudors? Was Henry VIII, as he was so often hailed in Victorian and Edwardian history books, the founder of the Royal Navy that won our Empire and preserved our liberties? Was Queen Elizabeth the indecisive, cheese paring obstructionist that her men of war so exasperatedly argued?

The riches and surprises of this book are too many to summarise. Not only are policies, institutions and above all people firmly delineated and strongly characterised; there is, besides, a marvellously lucid and well documented account of ships, weapons, logistics. Diet, health, pay, recruitment, promotion all find a place in this amazing book which, for all its encyclopaedic learning, moves with speed and force, and tells a gripping story.

N.A.M. Rodger was born in 1949, and works as an Assistant Keeper at the Public Record Office. He is the author of 'The Wooden World', a history of the British Navy in the eighteenth century, and 'The Admiralty', which was chosen by the US Naval Institute as one of the best books of 1980. He has contributed papers on naval history to journals in Britain and France, one of which was awarded the Corbett Prize for naval history in 1982.