Title continues: "Preceded by a Cursory Examination of the American Accounts of Their Naval Actions Fought Previous to that Period: To which is added An Appendix; With Plates." English lawyer and historian William James wrote this book to counter what he considered the bombastic and false version of the war put forward by American authors. To free the war from the "foulest aspersions" of the Americans, James used his legal mind to pick through a wealth of evidence and came to the conclusion that "no American ship of war has, after all, captured a British ship of the same force" (p. 528). Many of the work's more controversial and vociferous passages were deleted or toned down for his six-volume history of the Royal Navy published in 1826, but this work which includes more than one hundred contemporary official documents allows readers to appreciate the full force of James's original arguments. Sabin 35717.
