Nelson: The Admiral

Horatio Nelson was one of the most successful leaders Britain has ever produced. A legend in his own lifetime, he has inspired many hundreds of books, but few of these concentrated on him as a naval commander. After that much new material emerged, both as a result of the ground-breaking Nelson Letters Project and in a series of international conferences on Nelson’s battles involving French, Spanish and Danish historians. In particular, the discovery of Nelson’s personal order books and battle plans transformed our understanding of his command methods. Colin White was at the forefront of all these developments and made many of the most exciting new discoveries himself. He was ideally placed as Director of the Royal Naval Museum to offer a fresh analysis of Nelson’s tactics and leadership style. He presented gripping new narratives of all three of Nelson’s great battles, the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801) and Trafalgar (1805) and brilliantly showed how the British triumph at Trafalgar was the culmination of years of thought and experimentation on Nelson’s part, and by his contemporaries and predecessors.

White demonstrated Nelson’s remarkable administrative skills and his abilities as a diplomat and intelligence officer – aspects of his leadership not fully highlighted before. The result is an enthrallingly different portrait of Nelson as an admiral – more rounded and more insightful than any yet achieved. Officially endorsed by the Royal Navy and the Royal Naval Museum, this book is lavishly illustrated in colour and black and white with over seventy images drawn from the collections of the Royal Naval Museum and National Maritime Museum, and with specially drawn diagrams illustrating Nelson’s battles and campaigns.