Merchant seamen’s health, 1860–1960: medicine, technology, shipowners and the state in Britain

a clergyman (63). Sir John Franklin, on his final voyage, impressed those who heard him ‘read the Church service’ (194). Such attachment to liturgy within the Navy may have laid the foundations for a chaplaincy that Blake concedes was increasingly Tractarian in the later nineteenth century. At the very least, it suggests that seafaring piety was frequently manifested in idioms that were not evangelical. Nevertheless, Blake’s study is to be commended for its range. Sections on obscurer topics such as the place of Roman Catholics in the Navy and of religion on polar expeditions are illuminating. He even finds a place for broad church Anglicanism, pointing out that the Duke of Somerset, First Lord of the Admiralty and the author of a work of liberal theology, did much to reinvigorate the naval chaplaincy in the 1860s (137). Blake also suggests that the religious implications of this era in the Navy’s history were evident well into the twentieth century, relating instances of spontaneous prayer at key moments in the Second World War (241–2). Yet one is left wondering, was ‘the predominance of evangelicalism’ (x) really at the root of this? Or was there a wider Protestant tradition within the nineteenth-century Navy, of which ‘the evangelical idiom’ was but one expression? More research is required to address this issue fully. For such a line of enquiry, Blake’s painstaking work will constitute an invaluable starting point.