Details: By: Peter Padfield

It is hard today to envisage the era when the Royal Navy ruled the seas, its cruisers and gunboats policing Britain's worldwide empire and trade, its battlefleet providing the force behind Britain's global power. It was a legendary service carrying an aura of invincibility from its victorious history culminating in Trafalgar even as its ships changed out of all recognition in response to the industrial age, Nelson's 'wooden walls' giving way to steel battleships, destroyers and submarines.

Peter Padfield describes this wholesale transformation and brings the lives of officers and men and the tasks they undertook vividly to the page. This classic account of a uniquely splendid service remains unsurpassed.