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Admiral Lord Howe: A Biography. By David Syrett. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006. Pp. 176. Cloth, $29.95.)
Commodore John Rodgers: Paragon of the Early American Navy. By John H. Schroeder. (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 2006. Pp. 256. Cloth, $59.95.)
Reviewed by William S. Dudley
This review compares biographies of two naval officers of different eras, social origins, and navies in variant stages of national and institutional development. Both David Syrett and John Schroeder are senior scholars who are experts in their fields. Schroeder has already used American naval records extensively in his research on the United States Navy and America mercantile expansion in the early nineteenth century. He has written three books dealing with American naval and military history between 1815 and 1861: Air. Polk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846-1848 (Madison, WI, 1973); Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861 (Westport, CT, 1985); and Matthew Galbraith Perry: Antebellum Sailor and Diploma (Annapolis, MD, 2001).
Syrett was at the peak of his career as a military and naval historian when he died at the age of 65 in 2004. He had researched and written extensively on the Royal Navy during the era of the American Revolutionary War and on the World War II Battle of the Atlantic. His principle works are Shipping and the American War, 1775-1788 (London, 1970), The Royal Navy in European Waters during the American Revolutionary War (Columbia, SC, 1998), and The Defeat of the German U-Boats: The Battle of the Atlantic (Columbia, SC, 1994). In all three he dealt with the roles of opposing navies and the problems of naval escort of convoy operations. His interest in the subject commenced with his dissertation at the University of London, in which he delved into the question of why Great Britain had failed to suppress the American rebels in a war that had international repercussions. He approached the issue from the perspective of the inadequate and continually interrupted supply effort contributed by the Royal Navy, as well as that navy's shortage of blockading ships for the North American Station.
Admiral Richard Lord Howe (1726-1799), a veteran of the Seven Years' War, was the officer in charge of carrying out this difficult task from 1776...