damerell

I think it's pretty clear now I much prefer reading books to writing something about each one afterwards, so I'm going to just try and write (here) about anything particularly odd.

The companion volume to the diary of Samuel Pepys, then, includes an entry for one Col. John Fitzgerald of whom it was written by a contemporary source that "Hee owed his ende to a modesty which would not suffer him to discover a clapp till a gangreen made it publick to the world and mortal to himselfe". So remember, don't be too modest to go to the doctor.

And the last gasp of writing them up, Brian Tunstall and Nicholas Tracy, "Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail, The Evolution of Fighting Tactics 1650-1815", which is quite a mouthful, and it's a big book, edited by Tracy mostly from notes left by Tunstall before his death. If the authors have a thesis, it's that signals and tactics evolved hand in hand; almost every page of the book discusses the signals used or available, which earlier in the period severely limited the tactics that could actually be used.