The Spanish Town Papers

The Cresset Press, 1959-01-01. Hardcover. Good/Good. The Cresset Press, 1959. Hard cover, 199 pp. First edition. Good+ in good dust jacket. Tan cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges and corners of covers. Binding tight. Previous owner's name in green ink on top corner of front free end paper. Copyright line on copyright page has been black out with black tape. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and light creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing, aging and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival quality Brodart cover. NOT Ex-Library. No remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Nearly a thousand bundles of old sailing-ship documents—Log Books full of lovely phrases; love-letters written by the crews of fighting ships; a very peculiar note from young Horatio Nelson, along with a still more remarkable Clearance Paper signed by George Washington—these are among the Spanish Town Papers. None of them has been copied or written about before. Each bundle represents a prize captured by the Royal Navy or the British privateers from the rebellious colonists in the War of American Independence. Together they provide a unique footnote to history and, for the general reader, an engrossing picture of life ashore and afloat in the eighteenth century. Of the people who return to life in these pages, the author writes: 'By the purest chance of survival their names have come down to us. . . . Just for a moment or two, as these papers arebrought into the light of today their names become like a gleam of sunlight reflected from the window of a house, far away across a frontier which cannot be enfranchised. . . . We know that men and women more or less like ourselves once bore those names, felt cold and hunger, were happy or unhappy in love, went bravely or meanly or cruelly about the world, barred to all but our sympathy by the barrier of time. More we cannot know.For almost two hundred years this extraordinarily varied cache has been neglected and left to moulder in the West Indies. In this book Miss E. Arnot Robertson presents for the first time a transcription of the most interesting of the Spanish Town documents against a background which gives them coherence and perspective.