Portsmouth Point

Originally published in 1949, Portsmouth Point: The British Navy in Fiction, 1793-1815 is a captivating look into the naval experience during the Napoleonic wars. The author, C.N. Parkinson, uses excerpts from the writings of real officers, midshipman and crew members during the late 18th and early 19th centuries to create a semi-fictitious collection of naval stories. The dialogue, characters, and events within the book are not historical fact, but as Parkinson writes in the preface, a truly good novelist “writes boldly the sort of talk there might have been and so creates— as compared with the biographer— an impression more vivid, and in a sense, more true.”