Commemorating the Seafarer: Monuments, Memorials and Memory

摘要

It is not surprising that British maritime power, though recently in precipitate decline, has left behind it many memorials to the seafarers of the past, and since 1978 the National Maritime Museum, where the author of the present work was formerly Curator of Antiquities, has been encouraging the compilation of a database of them. In her retirement she has brought together this book, which offers both a general history of the topic and a guide to the most striking, or typical, examples of public and ecclesiastical monuments which commemorate British seafarers, shipbuilders, and victims of shipwreck from the sixteenth century to the present, mostly, but not exclusively, in Britain and Ireland. In the case of monuments specifically featured, each reference gives a short account of the importance of the person commemorated, the circumstances of the erection of the memorial, and a description of its design, often with a photograph, although the lighting conditions for some of the interior shots have evidently been less than ideal.