Price A. The Eyes of the Fleet: a Popular History of Frigates and Frigate Captains. 1793-1815

New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. — 299 p. — ISBN: 0-393-03846-7.They had names like Arethusa, Iphigenia, and Imperieuse, dashing names “as long as the maintop bowline, and hard enough to break your jaw” (Captain Frederick Marryat). They inspired the creations of such heroic fictional captains as C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey. Admiral Nelson depended upon them so heavily that he once wrote, “Were I to die at this moment, ‘Want of frigates’ would be found engraved on my heart.”Frigates were the fastest warships in the British fleet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the key to Britain’s long dominance over the world’s other navies. These scouting cruisers were, according to Nelson, “the eyes of the Fleet.” But they were much more than that: true fighting ships, lightly built and heavily armed, ready for every task short of joining the set-piece battles involving the heavier ships-of-the-line.Nelson’s first command as a fully-fledged captain was of a frigate. For every young officer, command of such a ship was the essential first step toward fame, fortune, and an admiral’s rank. But it was a harsh life, full of danger and deprivations.From the bloody 1797 mutiny of the HMS Hermione crew, who murdered Captain Hugh Pigot and tossed him overboard after eight months of brutality, to the 1813 battle between the British frigate Shannon and the American Chesapeake in which the Chesapeake's Captain James Lawrence uttered the famous phrase, “Don’t give up the ship!” The Eyes of the Fleet gives us the absorbing story of the men who worked the frigates during their heyday and recounts with thrilling detail some of the most influential and exciting battles in naval history.