MY ADVENTURES DURING
THE LATE WAR
A NARRATIVE OF SHIPWRECK, CAPTIVITY
ESCAPES FROM FRENCH PRISONS, AND SEA SERVICE
IN 1804-14
BY
DONAT HENCHY O’BRIEN
CAPT. R.N.
Edited by CHARLES OMAN
FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE AND DEPUTY PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
NEW EDITION, ILLUSTRATED
WITH A PREFACE, NOTES, AND BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1902
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
While engaged during the last ten years in the task of mastering the original authorities for the history of the Napoleonic wars, I have had to peruse many scores of diaries, autobiographies, and journals of the British military and naval officers who were engaged in the great struggle. They vary, of course, in interest and importance, in literary value, and in the power of vivid presentation of events. But they have this in common, that they are almost all very difficult to procure. Very few have been reprinted; indeed, I believe that the books of Lord Dundonald, Kincaid, John Shipp, Gleig, and Mercer are well nigh the only ones which have passed through a second edition. Yet there are many others which contain matter of the highest interest, not only for the historical student, but for every intelligent reader. From among these I have made a selection of ten or a dozen which seem to me well worth republishing.
Among these is the present volume—the narrative of the three escapes of Donat O’Brien from French captivity, and of his subsequent services in the Mediterranean during the last years of the great French war. I imagine that no prisoner—not excluding Baron Trenck himself—ever made three such desperate dashes for liberty as did this enterprising Irish midshipman. It is fortunate that he found the leisure, and had the skill, to narrate all his adventures. He had a talent for minute description, a wonderful memory, and a humorous way of looking on the world which will remind the reader of the spirit of Captain Marryat’s naval heroes.
It is not, I think, generally known that O’Brien’s escapes actually suggested to Marryat a great part of the plot of one of his best known books—Peter Simple. In that excellent romance the narrator (it will be remembered) actually escapes from Givet in company with an Irish naval officer, and goes through a hundred perils before reaching safety. It was a strange liberty to take with a living comrade, that Marryat actually names Peter Simple’s comrade O’Brien, and utilises many touches from the real Donat’s adventures to make his tale vivid. In the end the fictitious O’Brien plays a great part in the story and marries the hero’s sister. What the retired captain thought, or said, on finding himself thus liberally dealt with in a novel is not recorded. But I fancy that he must have considered it hard that Peter Simple should be reprinted some thirty times, while his own most interesting book never saw a second edition.