Captain Marryat: Seaman, Writer and Adventurer

by Tom Pocock

Frederick Marryat was a novelist, for both adults and children, between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. He was also known as Captain Marryat, naval hero of the great war with France, who went on to become a celebrated figure in Dickens' literary circle. A man about town, a journalist, duellist, courtier, and an acutely observant traveller in the United States, he finally settled as a farmer deep in the English countryside. This is his biography. Marryat's life was as extravagant as anything in his books.

As a boy he went to sea with Lord Cochrane, a dashing frigate captain, and saw action in several engagements. He fought the Americans in 1812, but was later lionised by them as a famous author - only to be reviled for helping to suppress a French-Canadian rebellion. A man of charm and wit,Marryat also showed a hot, violent temper and was fined for brawling in London streets.

Spending his way through three inherited fortunes, making and wasting huge earnings from his writing, he finally gambled away his smart London house to become a farmer in Norfolk. There, he planned house parties for his famous friends, but what transpired in that remote corner of England forms an appropriate but poignant surprise conclusion.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Tom Pocock was the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent.

Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19, the youngest of the Second World War.

After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, he moved to the Daily Mail as feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent, becoming Naval Correspondent of The Times in 1952. In 1956, he was a foreign corresponent and special writer for the Daily Express and from 1959 was on the staff of the Evening Standard,as feature writer,Defence Correspondent and war correspondent. For the last decade of his time on the Standard he was Travel Editor.

He wrote his first book, NELSON AND HIS WORLD in 1967 on his return from reporting the violence in Aden and his interest in Nelson has continued. Indeed, eight of his books are about the admiral and his contemporaries; his HORATIO NELSON was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987.

Tom Pocock has contributed to many magazines and appeared on television documentaries about Nelson and the subject of another of his biographies,the novelist and imperialist Sir Rider Haggard.