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97 page book with 53 illustrations, supplied as a PDF document on CD-ROM.
PREFACE.
IN the balmy days of England's naval history, when every Gazette brought tidings of triumphs at sea, historians, ballad-writers, playwrights, and artists alike discovered that their audiences welcomed with never-flagging appreciation those incidents, scenes, and pictures in which Jack Tars were the leading actors; hence there appeared at the period—when our undaunted naval warriors were most popularly to the fore—an extensive literature and art inspired by the actions of our intrepid defenders. The phase of pictorial art, broadly described as humorous, presents a rich vein of these favourite topics in which the more amusingly characteristic episodes in the lives of jolly Jack Tars, both at sea and ashore, are treated with harmless pleasantry, and, from the mass, a selection is offered extending over a century. The "True British Sailor" is treated by the graphic humorists on the identical lines taken up by the ocean Bards. To emphasise the stirring ballads of the Dibdins and the sea-sketches of "old salts," like Captain Barker, we are favoured with the pictorial commentaries on nautical life furnished by the pencils of Gillray, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks, and those merry artistic wags whose spirits are at their brightest when delineating the humours of our light-hearted Tars. |