Kâtip Çelebi, Svatopluk Soucek (ed.). The History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks by Ian Dew

Abstract

Dombey and Son, Sydney emerges as a distinctive personality. When a toddler he accompanied his family on a seaside holiday and was observed "casting a faraway look over the ocean" (164). He was promptly nicknamed "Ocean Spectre." Dickens thought the boy "an odd child" but one with "a great deal of originality and character" (167). Despite his beloved public persona, Dickens was a "quixotic" father, prone to depression, distraction, and strange practical jokes (165). Among the latter was the suggestion that three-year-old Sydney walk down to the train station to see if an expected guest had arrived. The boy went some distance before the family retrieved him.The woefully undersized Sydney went to naval school to become a midshipman at the tender age of 12. He genuinely wanted to join the navy, so his father helped arrange it. Two years later Sydney departed on the steam frigate HMS Orlando. Dickens senior quipped that the lad boarded with a sea chest "in which he could easily have stowed himself and a wife and family of his own proportions" (174). The boy appears to have been well-liked by his shipmates who, inspired by the 1861 publication of Great Expectations, good-naturedly nicknamed him "Little Expectations" (176). Unfortunately, the moniker proved apt. Sydney drank and ran up gambling debts to such an extent that his father despaired and actually wished him dead. At only 25, Sydney obliged, the cause "general debility" according to an official report. His body was "committed to the Indian Ocean" (184). Brendon makes it clear that a sailor's life made harsh emotional as well as physical demands, and Sydney, alas, was poorly prepared to meet them.Children at Sea is a heartbreaking read. One is thankful to live in a modern society that no longer condones enslavement of children or routinely sends them to sea as convicts or naval officers. At the same time, one marvels at the determination of the human spirit, nowhere as manifest as in the life of Joseph Emidy, to endure and achieve some measure not simply of survival but triumph. John S. Sledge Fairhope, Alabama Kâtip Çelebi. Svatopluk Soucek (ed.). The History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, www.markuswiener. com, 2012. 184 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography. US $97.49, paper; ISBN 978-1-55876-548-1.The objective of Svatopluk Soucek, the modern editor, and the publishers of this work is to introduce a classic text of Turkish maritime history and its author to a general English-speaking audience. At the time of its writing in the seventeenth century, it was intended to exhort the leaders of the Empire how to