Читать книгу The Ionian Mission - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 8

The Royal Navy of Nelson’s time was much given to music and poetry: no wardroom was complete without half a dozen German flutes and every month the Naval Chronicle published several pages of verse by officers on active service or half-pay. These poems presumably show naval talent at its highest, and they provide excellent material for a writer who wishes to show this perhaps unexpected side of the sailor’s life but who feels that his own pastiches cannot possibly give the same impression of authenticity. Yet the somewhat less accomplished pieces that never reached print are even more valuable: I have come across a certain number of them in the library at Greenwich, but to my knowledge there is no mine so rich as the Memoirs of Lieutenant Samuel Walters, RN, which remained in manuscript until 1949, when the Liverpool University Press published them, admirably edited by Professor Northcote Parkinson, to whom I make all proper acknowledgements for the lines I have borrowed.