Empire of the Deep, by Ben Wilson – review

‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious: the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest praise or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible.’ Thus wrote the 22-year-old Charles Darwin of Robert Fitzroy, the 26-year-old captain of the Beagle, a good but not unusual example of captains during the Royal Navy’s zenith in the decades following Trafalgar.

Part of the value of Ben Wilson’s excellent account is that he shows how exceptional those decades of nautical dominance were during the long run of Britain’s relations with the troubled seas around her coasts; also, how our present diminished state has brought us back full circle to our period of greatest naval weakness in the Middle Ages.

During Saxon and Viking times the sea was the threat to these islands rather than its defence, as we later came to think.