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While engaged during the last ten years in the task of mastering the original authorities for the history of the Napoleonic wars, I have had to peruse many scores of diaries, autobiographies, and journals of the British military and naval officers who were engaged in the great struggle. They vary, of course, in interest and importance, in literary value, and in the power of vivid presentation of events. But they have this in common, that they are almost all very difficult to procure. Very few have been reprinted; indeed, I believe that the books of Lord Dundonald, Kincaid, John Shipp, Gleig, and Mercer are well nigh the only ones which have passed through a second edition. Yet there are many others which contain matter of the highest interest, not only for the historical student, but for every intelligent reader. From among these I have made a selection of ten or a dozen which seem to me well worth republishing.

Among these is the present volume—the narrative of the three escapes of Donat O’Brien from French captivity, and of his subsequent services in the Mediterranean during the last years of the great French war. I imagine that no prisoner—not excluding Baron Trenck himself—ever made three such desperate dashes for liberty as did this enterprising Irish midshipman. It is fortunate that he found the leisure, and had the skill, to narrate all his adventures. He had a talent for minute description, a wonderful memory, and a humorous way of looking on the world which will remind the reader of the spirit of Captain Marryat’s naval heroes.

It is not, I think, generally known that O’Brien’s escapes actually suggested to Marryat a great part of the plot of one of his best known books—Peter Simple. In that excellent romance the narrator (it will be remembered) actually escapes from Givet in company with an Irish naval officer, and goes through a hundred perils before reaching safety. It was a strange liberty to take with a living comrade, that Marryat actually names Peter Simple’s comrade O’Brien, and utilises many touches from the real Donat’s adventures to make his tale vivid. In the end the fictitious O’Brien plays a great part in the story and marries the hero’s sister. What the retired captain thought, or said, on finding himself thus liberally dealt with in a novel is not recorded. But I fancy that he must have considered it hard that Peter Simple should be reprinted some thirty times, while his own most interesting book never saw a second edition.

It is now very rare: in ten years of systematic searching of second-hand book shops, in quest of old military and naval autobiographies, I have only come on three copies of the work. I trust that by this edition it may be brought once more to common knowledge.

The reader will find in it a most wonderful study of the life of a hunted man, “a sort of Nebuchadnezzar living on cabbage stalks,” as O’Brien styles himself, during his miserable lurking in the cliffs of the Vosges. Almost as interesting is the sketch of the gloomy existence of the thousand “refractory” British prisoners in the souterrains of the rock-fortress of Bitche. French writers have often denounced the Portsmouth pontoons, on which so many of their compatriots were forced to dwell. But they compare favourably with the underground dungeons in which Napoleon confined O’Brien and many another British sailor. In strong contrast with this part of the story is the short narrative of life in Verdun, where the détenus on parole seem to have been allowed as much, and even more, liberty than was good for them. Roulette tables and race meetings were demoralising luxuries for men suffering from enforced idleness. From other sections of O’Brien’s narrative the reader may obtain curious side-lights on many features of the Napoleonic régime in France—the ubiquity of the gendarme and his natural prey, the escaped conscript, the bare and squalid life of the peasantry, the estrangement between the military caste and the bourgeoisie. There are also glimpses of Germany during the existence of the Rheinbund, when the people were united in a sort of tacit conspiracy against the governments who had made themselves the tools of Bonaparte. Not least interesting are the final chapters, in which O’Brien, free at last, shows us how British naval ascendency was maintained in the Adriatic, and helps us to realise the truth of the saying that “wherever a boat could float Bonaparte’s power found its limit.” It was to no purpose that he called himself king of Italy, annexed Dalmatia and Illyria, and established his brother-in-law at Naples: three or four British frigates, based on the island stronghold of Lissa, dominated the whole seaboard, ransacked every estuary, and destroyed whatever naval force was sent against them—even though it was on paper twice their own strength. Hoste’s battle of 13th March 1811 was, as far as mere disparity of numbers goes, a victory that can be compared to St. Vincent alone among all the long list of British successes at sea.

I have ventured to cut short O’Brien’s narrative at the end of the Napoleonic war. It went no further in his own first draft, which (as I have stated in the succeeding biographical note) was compiled before 1815. When he published his two-volume book, in 1839, he subjoined to his narrative of captivity and naval service three long chapters, detailing his visits and rambles in England and Ireland during the years of his middle age, his cruise to Brazil and Chile in 1818-21, and his continental tour with his wife in 1827. In these 150 pages there is so little matter to interest either the historical student or the general reader, that I have thought it well to omit them. For O’Brien, as for so many other British soldiers and seamen, “the joy of eventful living” ended in 1815.

For this excision, and for certain other small cuttings, I think that I may appeal with a clear conscience for the pardon that editors are wont to demand.

C. OMAN.

Oxford, September 1902.