The Royal Navy, Vol. 5 of 6: A History From the Earliest Times to the Present (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Royal Navy, Vol. 5 of 6: A History From the Earliest Times to the Present

The present volume contains the record of the whole of the great naval struggle with the empire of the first Napoleon, from the beginning of the renewed war in 1803, when, indeed, Napoleon had not yet assumed the imperial dignity, up to the summer of 1815, when the peace of Europe was secured by the deportation of the wonderful Corsican to St. Helena. I had hoped also to include in the volume the history of the war between Great Britain and the United States of America, 1812-1815; but, owing to the considerable length to which it necessarily extends, I have found myself unable to do so without swelling this section of the book to extravagant proportions. Governor Roosevelt's account of the American War, therefore, will occupy the first place in the next and final volume of the work. Nor do I much regret that I am not now able to include it, seeing that the contents of the present volume are already, so far as they go, complete in themselves, and that, although the two were waged simultaneously, our wars with France and with America in the early years of the nineteenth century had little or no connection one with the other, and were of fundamentally different origin and character.

I am personally responsible for the whole of the instalment of the History now given to the reader. It was originally arranged that my friend, Mr. H. W. Wilson, should contribute the record of the minor operations of the war of 1803 - 15; and he actually wrote so much of it as brought the story up to nearly the close of the year 1810 but he was unable to revise what he had written, or to complete the account and that task, in consequence, remained for me. I much regret that pressure of other engagements should have thus deprived me of his co-operation.

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