Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson 1793-1815

Every Man Will Do His Duty showed up in my daily BookBub as I was finishing The Last Stand of the Tin Can Soldiers, in which author James D. Hornfischer does a wonderful job of describing both navy battles and life on battleships. I was curious to read a similar account of another age. The book's description is of "Twenty-two enthralling stories of the Royal Navy, bringing to vivid life the greatest battles and daily struggles of seafaring in the Napoleonic era." Unfortunately, this anthology did not captivate me in the same way as Tin Can Soldiers - or at all.

Many of the anecdotes are presented in their original form; the men who wrote them were sailors, not writers. And in any age when every man was free to render his words with whatever spelling he liked, no less. It was enough to drive this modern reader to distraction. Even those which were clearly written lacked the pizzazz and passion of Hornfisher's stories (a high bar, I know), and it often felt like, "and then this happened and then this happened and then that happened." Ultimately, I gave up about half-way through.