A Sailor of King George

Frederick Hoffman joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in October 1793, served twenty-one years, and wrote it down at Dover in 1838. Seven of those years went on the West Indies station, where yellow fever took him twice and a boat action off St Domingo left him deaf in one ear. At Trafalgar he was senior lieutenant of the lower deck in HMS Tonnant, and was slightly wounded. Later came the West African coast, command of the sloop Favourite, and the last convoy of slave ships to the Caribbean. In May 1812 the Apelles grounded in fog near Etaples and he spent the rest of the war a prisoner, running a school for captured midshipmen at Verdun. The journals waited more than sixty years for a publisher, and what they give is plain, unheroic detail of naval life.