Great Britain. Royal Navy - Fiddlers & Whores

GETTING JAMES LOWRYS journal into print has for me been a labour of love with an exceedingly long gestation time. I first conceived the possibility around 1990 when researching and writing a corporate history of a family-owned publishing company in Toronto. In the process I interviewed Dorothy Stewart, an elderly woman who was related to the companys founder.

Crippled in her youth by the scourge of polio that ran rampant in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century, Dorothy was nevertheless charming and cooperative. During our chat she mentioned offhand that she had squirreled away something interesting written by a relative: her great great grandfathers brother. She rolled her wheelchair across the room and from a cupboard dug out an old journal. It was about 250 closely handwritten pages, browning with age between two pieces of stiff cardboard and held together with frayed string threaded through three holes in the margins. She followed that up with a wooden box almost two feet long and fitted with two-tiered velvet inlays encasing a set of extremely old medical instruments.

It was truly exciting to touch these old pages and read the words that a young Irish physician had penned for his brother at the peak of Britains struggle against Napoleon, and which highlighted one of Napoleons primary nemeses, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. Those words vividly and idiosyncratically described a world that existed almost 200 years before that day in Dorothys apartmentnot a fictional, fabricated world created by a novelists imagination, but a very real, very authentic and tangible one as seen though the eyes of James Lowry, a young man who had actually lived the words and deeds he documented in these yellowing pages.

The classically educated young man-turned-ships-surgeon in Lord Nelsons Mediterranean fleet jotted down observations both of his adventures afloat and his military and romantic conquests ashore. He was intrigued by the varied peoples and customs he observed in all the countries and ports of call he visited during his six years in a Royal Navy that much of the time was battling the French under Napoleon.

Unfortunately, Dr. Lowrys ship was savaged by a ferocious storm as he returned to England after six years away, and he lost his original diary and sketches in the wreck. Fortunately rescued, he retired from the navy after he reached home and settled down in the seaside town of Deal in Kent, practising medicine. He then reconstructed this account from memory to send to his clergyman brother in Ireland, to pass on some idea of the exciting (and sometimes bloody) experiences of his time at sea, not to mention a few romantic liaisons on land. He later moved to Maidstone, where he died in 1855.

Lowry never mentions in the journal what prompted him to leave home and hearth as an eighteen-year-old to take part in the momentous struggle that was threatening Britain (which at that time included Ireland). Napoleon was on the rampage in Europe, so perhaps being young and patriotic, Lowry was eager to participate in the fight against the French. Though fresh from schooling in the classics, he may well have conceived the idea that a quick medical course would provide an agreeable shortcut to becoming qualified for admission to the Royal Navy as an officer.