Royal Navy Officers List (1793-1815)

For nearly two decades Patrick Marioné has been collecting information on the commissioned sea officers of the Royal Navy of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815, known to the British participants simply as the Great War. This quarter of a century of war, whose apogee was the Campaign of Trafalgar in 1805, saw the victory of sea power and set the course of European and world history for the next 100 years.

The Complete Navy List contains the names of more than 11,000 commissioned officers who served in the Royal Navy from 1787 onwards, up to those who entered the service before 1817. The information, which has been collected comprises individual’s careers, their personal lives, their parents and families, the honours and pensions they earned, and much more, and extends into what they did after the Great War.

This is fascinating information for students and scholars of the age of Nelson, Britain’s foremost naval hero who died at the Battle of Trafalgar, but the Complete Navy List will also be of great value and interest to sociologists, genealogists and collectors, to both general and medical historians and, of course, to naval historians.

Foreword by N.A.M. Rodger

For many years historians and readers have had a general idea of what it was like to be an officer in the Royal Navy during the Great Wars against France, but this idea, derived largely from the naval memoirs of the period, was necessarily impressionistic. The late Michael Lewis was able to sharpen the focus with his Social History of the Navy, 1793-1815 (London, 1960), based on the analysis of the printed works of Marshall and O’Byrne; but without using documents, and without a computer, there were narrow limits to what he could achieve. People interested in individual officers could trace their careers, given sufficient time, access to a good library and to the Public Record Office, but any sort of multiple or mass searching was out of the question.

Now Patrick Marioné’s Complete Navy List of the Napoleonic Wars transforms the situation. This is a remarkable example of what can be achieved by many years of personal dedication. It would be difficult to imagine that anything on this scale could have been generated either by commercial publishing or by academic research. Combining as it does the information from a wide range of sources, both original documents and scarce printed works, The Complete Navy List collects information not available in any single library or archive, in an easily searchable form. It will be indispensable for the historian, amateur or professional, and for the genealogist. It should open the way for a much more complete and secure understanding of how naval careers progressed than we have ever had. It will allow innumerable questions about individuals to be swiftly and painlessly answered. Had such a compilation been produced by a large team of workers, it would be sufficiently remarkable; it is doubly admirable that it is the work of one man.

N.A.M. Rodger