Contemporary Chroniclers

In addition to travellers' tales the eighteenth century saw a boom in the publication of voyage anthologies and – a field which, according to Thomas Lediard, had hitherto suffered from ‘blind neglect’ – naval histories. The first of these histories was Josiah Burchett's Complete History of the Most Remarkable Transactions at Sea, published in 1720, some fifteen years before Lediard's own Naval History of England. These works were followed, in comparatively quick succession, by Samuel Colliber, A Critical History of the English sea-affairs (London, 1739), John Campbell, Lives of the Admirals, four volumes (London, 1742 and 1750) and George Berkley, The Naval History of Britain (London, 1756).

An Appeal to the Publick; or Burchett and Lediard Compar'd by a Lover of Truth and a Friend to both these Authors was published shortly after Lediard's book, and purports to be an impartial comparison. It is, in fact, a blatantly partisan puff for Lediard's book, almost certainly written by Lediard himself, which claims it is in every way superior to Burchett's. Thus the fact that Burchett was Secretary of the Navy at the time he was writing, far from giving the work authority, merely showed that he had either devoted too little time to his book or too little to the navy, and his accounts of events (such as the circumstances in which Benbow's officers deserted him) were fatally influenced by his concern to preserve the reputations of friends. Apart from these flawed passages, the critic contends, Burchett had relied heavily on copying from uncited documents. An Appeal to the Publick is an interesting early example of literary rivalry but it is also a useful illustration of how the naval histories of this time were never merely records of events. They proclaimed in their prefaces and revealed in their selections their political and patriotic motives. They contributed to the debates on administration, naval strategy and the ‘obsolete issue’ of gentlemen versus tarpaulins.