PMarione Site Admin
Joined: 26 Mar 2007 Posts: 883
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Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:22 pm Post subject: Naval biographies: a note |
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As a general remark for all the contemporary biographies (except for The Naval Atalantis by Nauticus Junior, 1788-1789, which is a pamphlet) Campbell, Charnock, Ralfe, Marshall, O'Byrne, the Naval Chronicle... were all compiled from information given by the officers or their relatives and at least received an "imprimatur" from them before publication.
So they have always to be taken with a pinch of salt and checked with other sources: you'll never find trace of CM (except for major ones like Keppel's) or other trouble in them, only brilliant achievements.
All the naval entries in the old DNB were written by J. K. Laughton (an exploit in itself) but is then a "one man" work with many mistakes and bias in the choice of the people included.
The new version has been corrected by many contributors and new entries added but there are still some mistakes.
The Commissioned Sea Officers of the RN 1660-1815 by Syrett and DiNardo, NRS, 1994 is a simple re-edition of a scarce typescript (50 copies) of a card index by David Bonner Smith published under the same name by the NMM in 1954 and annotated by C G Pitcairn Jones.
My copy has some hundreds of corrections. |
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