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Sto caricando le informazioni... A Paymaster in the War in China: The 1900 Diary of Arthur W. Morrell Onboard HMS Auroradi Raymond J. W. Morrell
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As ship's paymaster onboard HMS Aurora, Arthur Wellesley Morrell had a front row seat to the dramatic action during the Boxer Rebellion when an eight-nation alliance raced against time to save the besieged legations in Pekin. Edited by his descendant, his eye witness account is presented for the first time. At sea since he was just a sixteen, Arthur Wellesley Morrell was a fourth-generation Royal Navy officer who served beginning with the height of the Victorian era, 1878, until just after World War I. His ship-borne travels brought him far and wide, and he studiously recorded many of his years, in various ships, and photographed and wrote about his experiences. One of his most fascinating and dangerous adventures was without a doubt the outbreak of war again with Imperial China. In the spring of 1900, while his ship, HMS Aurora was on the Pacific Station, the anti-foreigner peasant revolt led by the Boxers erupted, and before long the foreign legations in Pekin were under siege. The British, joined by the other nations that made up the eight-nation alliance, raced to respond in what would turn out to be a nasty, and brutal, if brief, conflict. This rare diary offers a glimpse of Victorian life aboard ship, in the wardroom, and on the front lines. Carefully transcribed, researched and edited by a descendant, it has now been preserved and published for the benefit of modern-day historians, military enthusiasts, and non-fiction fans of all stripes. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Many improvements to the layout and editing of this privately published book would have improved it. The Contents List does not correctly list all the pages - for example, Postscript 107 is actually on page 105 and other entries in the Contents are also wrong.
The index is very odd but one must be grateful that there is an index at all - many books from first-rate publishers have no index. On page 115, for example, the right hand column seems very odd until one realises that it is a list of entries related to Tientsin, itself listed at the bottom of the previous column. It is unusual indeed to see ships' names listed by the prefix HMS, SMS or USS - much more common is the convention of listing ships by names under the index-heading of Ships.
As to the diary itself, the first entry is 1 January 1900 and the first question the reader will ask is where is the ship? It does not say. Sure, Paymaster Morrell may not have stated this in his diary but it is essential information and any decent editor would have inserted such information at the head of each relevant date - e.g. Manila, on passage across the South China Sea to Hong Kong, at anchor in Hong Kong and so on. There is what the author calls an itinerary - Ship's Programme would have been better a title - on page 107 (page 109 according to the Contents List!) but this information should have been provided just before the first page of the diary, not as a sort of appendix.
There is much that the editor could have done better so that this book was a delight to read, rather than one that is just satisfactory. (