Fiddlers and Whores -- The Candid Memoirs of a Surgeon in Nelson's Fleet

 

Not much mention of the fiddlers, but plenty of the other.

James Lowry never intended for his memoir to his brother, a Presbyterian minister, to be nothing more than personal correspondence. In fact, he says the original was much longer but lost in a shipwreck on his way home to Ireland. 

Lowry chronicled the British Royal Navy sailing between 1797-1804 in the Mediterranean. Much of the attention was around shore leave in Sicily, near Naples, Malta, and France where he was also kept prisoner for a while.

For its time, Fiddlers is not bad travel literature. On p. 138-139, of the 182 pages, Lowry noted the personal growth afforded one who travels.

"It is necessary for every young man that goes abroad, who wishes to be acquainted with the manners and customs of the people, to enter into their society and amusements, for which he must spare no expenses, otherwise he will leave the city or place as ignorant as when he went in," he wrote.

Some of the writing was in a style very difficult to read. This is over 250 years old. Languages change a lot, and he entered the Royal Navy using a rural Irish English dialect. 

Editor John Millyard noted that some adjustments were necessary, and Lowry's travels amounted to a poor man's grand tour. Lowry never married or had children.