Kydd (37 page)

Writing one’s first book is an adventure, but a perilous one — necessarily trusting untried skills and sailing into uncharted waters with no certainty that there will be a successful outcome to the voyage.

I count myself blessed by the help I have received from others in this odyssey, the chief of whom is certainly my wife, Kathy. She persuaded me to set forth, and her sureness of touch and unwavering vision have kept me from the doldrums of self-doubt and the rocks of ill-practice.

I readily acknowledge the debt I owe to the staff at the National Maritime Museum and the Public Records Office at Kew, the excellent services of the Society for Nautical Research and the Navy Records Society, and to that band of people on both sides of the Atlantic who have patiently distilled the overwhelming range of primary sources into a coherent, usable and fascinating account of this heroic period. I think particularly of Nicholas Rodger, Brian Lavery, John Harland, Peter Goodwin and Karl Heinz Marquardt, and others who are no longer with us — David Lyon, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Lewis — and William Falconer (lost at sea 1770), whose warmth and humanity transcended his century.

And, of course, the professionals: professor of eighteenth-century studies Jack Lynch; my literary agent, Stuart Krichevsky; marine artist Geoff Hunt; and finally my publisher, Scribner.