Celebrated Naval and Military Trials

This is historical true crime before the genre had a name. Peter Burke assembles courtroom dramas from the age of sail where naval honor, military discipline, and political survival collided in ways that still resonate today. The book opens with Admiral Benbow, whose own captains abandoned him during a 1702 battle in the West Indies while he fought alone, mutilated, and dying. A French officer's letter praised his courage while condemning the cowardice that doomed him. The subsequent court-martial of those captains reads like a treatise on duty and its betrayal. Then comes Captain Kidd, the Scottish sailor commissioned to hunt pirates who became one himself. His 1701 Old Bailey trial reveals the tangle of legal arguments and political theater that led to his execution. Later sections examine bitter friction between soldiers and civilians in post-revolutionary Scotland, where juries weighed murder against military authority. The book culminates with Admiral Byng, whose execution for failing to relieve Minorca became a scandal that still echoes. For readers who love Hornblower or Patrick O'Brian but want the real thing: this is the eighteenth century in all its brutality, glory, and moral ambiguity.