Book Review: Running a Big Ship: The Classic Guide to Managing a Second World War Battleship

‘the British Empire and the Royal Navy became twin symbols in the popular mind’ (p. 247). The Royal Naval Exhibition was propaganda intended to project an optimistic image and justifications for the increasing expense of maintaining the Navy. Lewis-Jones isolates the exhibition’s Franklin Gallery as ‘promise, history, myth and human potential combined’ (p. 260), harnessing the power of bear stories to simultaneously assert the Royal Navy’s reputation and reignite public interest in polar exploration. Indeed, maritime historians will find food for thought throughout the book, particularly in its initial positioning of the Arctic as ‘a new theatre of war in which the Navy could refashion a role for itself’ (p. 9), and its allusions to the role of Arctic expeditions in training naval men and in ‘offering rousing images of the nation’s Navy and comforting proof of the vitality of the “national spirit”’ (p. 101). The book is attractively presented, with an astonishing 99 reproductions of contemporary illustrations (albeit in black-and-white). The illustrations reflect the breadth of source-material consulted by the author, including explorers’ first-hand accounts, visual sources, biographies, playbills, public monuments, contemporary fiction and poetry. Overall, the book forms a useful synthesis, but with the exception of Chapters 4 and 5, it does not shed much new light on the well-trodden paths of nineteenth century polar exploration. The copious notes alone indicate the breadth of material published on the topic in recent decades. The themes of polar aesthetics, Arctic visual culture, media reporting and Arctic heroes have been well treated in a stream of scholarship in the past two decades, including Beau Riffenburgh’s The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (1993), Francis Spufford’s I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996), Robert G. David’s The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (2000), Russell Potter’s Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (2007), and Janice Cavell’s Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (2008) to name just a few. This attractive volume will make a good synthesis for those seeking a solid introduction to the topic, and those readers will find the extensive footnotes and visual materials very useful.