Narratives of service, a century ago, written by private soldiers, are rare, but such by common sailors are almost unknown.
Samuel Leech’s narrative “Thirty Years from Home, a voice from the Main-Deck” is a unique book, and now scarce. It is a valuable contribution to our history, giving a sailor’s experience in both British and American navies, and being the sole account by a British seaman of the capture of the Macedonian by the United States, in 1812.
The revelations he makes of the cruel treatment of their men by British naval officers are unfortunately matched by the similar account of life on the same frigate United States, then under command of “Captain Claret” in 1843-44, given by Herman Melville in his remarkable book “White Jacket, or the World in a Man of War.” Though he is writing of an era thirty years later than Leech’s, the picture is equally distressing.
Leech also gives almost as bad a character to Captain David Porter (father of the late Admiral David D. Porter) as to the British tyrants.
It should be recorded in this connection, that flogging was abolished in the United States navy in 1851, through the efforts of Commodore Robert P. Stockton.
The book has never been reprinted before since its original appearance (1843.)
Editor.
—The late Rear Admiral S. R. Franklin (Memories of a Rear Admiral, 1898), who was midshipman on the United States when Herman Melville was of the crew, says Captain Claret was Captain James Armstrong, and the Commodore Thomas Ap Catesby Jones. He adds: “Melville’s White Jacket had more influence in abolishing corporal punishment in the Navy than anything else. A copy of it was placed on the desk of every member of Congress, and was a most eloquent appeal to the humane sentiment of the country.”