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Book Review: ‘O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea’: Original Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt

ships named during May 1679 possibly reflected the tensions of the ongoing Exclusion Crisis. Similarly, the daily business of naval administration, and the men in charge of it, depended very much on contemporary political circumstances – and on the king’s own location, as Charles II issued orders to his officials even while indulging in his passion for horseracing at Newmarket. Davies in turn considers the wider significance of Charles’s and James’s naval activities for our understanding of their reigns, arguing, for example, that these monarchs ‘have often been perceived as mere puppets of Louis XIV, but at sea, nothing was further from the truth’ (p. 164). Davies also presents a healthy scepticism towards Samuel Pepys’s version of events: though undoubtedly an important figure, and one of the major sources of historical evidence through his diary and surviving papers, Pepys’s own rather self-serving depiction of his important role in naval administration has been accepted a little too readily, and Davies offers a corrective to this tendency. On this point there is, however, one perplexing aspect of the book. Davies highlights important new evidence that ‘Pepys’s minutes invariably downplay ... the influence of the Duke of York’ (p. 147), so much so that ‘all histories of the navy in [the 1670s] ... may need to be rewritten’ (p. 113), but places this evidence in an appendix (pp. 257–61) and barely refers to it in the main text. Since the evidence in question requires a very detailed technical discussion to appreciate its significance, it may be appropriate to deliver that discussion in a separate appendix as Davies does, but the full significance of it could have been explored more thoroughly in the main body of the book, given its revisionist implications and the way it supports Davies’s central thesis. Moreover, this particular point is tied to the way that the book does not spend much time establishing an overall narrative of the two reigns, due to the thematic structure of the chapters. Such a narrative was evidently not Davies’s purpose, and they are readily available elsewhere, but the stories told in each chapter might have been tied together into more of a whole – and the lack of a distinct conclusion, summarising the main thrust of the book, compounds this. Neither of these points substantially detracts from the quality of this book or its value to scholars, whether interested specifically in the royal navy or in the Stuart monarchy more generally. Kings of the Sea will undoubtedly serve as an enduring reference work for this topic, sets a standard for maritime history of this period, and offers a reinterpretation of the relationship between the Stuart monarchs and the sea with implications to which all scholars of early modern Britain should pay attention.