Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Thomas Whitcombe, Robert Dodd and Peter Monamy. How a small island came to hold the sea: Alfred's ships, the Armada, Blake and the Dutch wars, Rodney, Nelson and the ironclads, told for boys by a novelist who spent his life writing about the sea. Kingston wrote over a hundred books and edited a boys' magazine; the naval detail here is his stock in trade. The chapters on the press-gang and prize money are unusually frank for a patriotic history. Fifty-eight paintings by Turner, Aivazovsky and their peers follow the same course as the text, from seventeenth-century sea fights to the ironclads of 1900.