Life of a Sailor

Chamier was a Royal Navy officer, who like his exact contemporary Captain Marryat is best remembered for a series of naval novels. The Life of a Sailor was his first publication and is usually catalogued as fiction, which may be a tribute to Chamiers story-telling skills but it is wrong the book is an exact account of his naval career, with every personality, ship and event he describes corroborated by his service records. By the time he went to sea in 1809, the heroic age of Nelson was over, bu