Drawings Archive

  • Spanish Naval Uniforms During the Napoleonic Era

    Spanish Naval Uniforms During the Napoleonic Era

    While the heroes of our beloved series have little direct interaction with the Spanish navy, they often share the waves with them, knowingly or not. The following is a guide describing the various uniform regulations that applied to the Spanish navy during our time period. There are images that go with the description as well. [...]

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  • A Brief Guide to Men and Officers in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    A Brief Guide to Men and Officers in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    Current scholarship (thanks in part to the title of N. A. M. Rodger’s influential book) often refers to the ships of Aubrey’s Royal Navy as “the wooden world”. This is a highly accurate description of a complicated self-contained society with strict rules of conduct and hierarchy. Entire articles can be and have been written about [...]

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  • Hey There, Hot Shot: A Guide to Ammunition in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    Hey There, Hot Shot: A Guide to Ammunition in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    While many readers of our beloved series are already experts in Napoleonic Era naval warfare by the time they discover the novels (seriously, many more than you’d expect!), others like myself stumbled upon the world of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin with only Hollywood as our guide. Perhaps due to the Pirates of the Carribean [...]

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  • Anatomy of a Man-of-War in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    Anatomy of a Man-of-War in Aubrey’s Royal Navy

    Most if not every edition of every novel in our beloved series has a useful little diagram of a typical British man-of-war somewhere in the front or back. However, I thought it might be useful to have an online reference as well. In a way this doubles as a vocab list because it includes a [...]

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  • The Secret Diary of a Midshipman

    The Secret Diary of a Midshipman

    Behold a delightful series of drawings made in 1820 by Captain Frederick Marryat (author of “Mr. Midshipman Easy”) about his life as a midshipman circa 1806 – 1812. They are definitely not “high art”, but that’s exactly the charming thing about them – they are honest and straightforward, without the pathos and glorification of the [...]

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