The Two Admirals (Paperback)

This collector-quality edition includes the complete text of James Fenimore Cooper's classic tale of the adventures of two Royal Navy officers and the British fleet in action in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a large 7.44"x9.69" page size, this Summit Classic edition is printed on hefty bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design. Page headers and proper placement of footnotes exemplify the attention to detail given this volume. With the publication of "The Spy" in 1821, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) became the first great American novelist, widely read and critically acclaimed in both the New World and the Old. The series of novels which became known as "The Leatherstocking Tales" made him the first chronicler of the American frontier experience. And with the publication of "The Pilot" in 1824 he became the father of the "sea tale." "The Two Admirals" actually evolved from Cooper's long-held intent to write a "queer sort of tale" in which the ships themselves were the characters, but once he started the actual composition of the work he quickly abandoned the idea and proceeded with human characters and an "ordinary sea tale." The concept, though, remains embedded in the story, as the ships which feature prominently in Cooper's narrative are at times imbued with individual traits and characteristics and function almost like human characters. Cooper's general intent was to write a book about the movement of fleets on a grand scale, and he offered a none-too-subtle criticism of the United States' failure to establish and maintain a saltwater fleet by going out of his way to explain that the lack of such a fleet forced him to set his story in the navy of some other nation. Yet Cooper, probably the most widely-read author of the first half of the 19th century, was savvy enough to appreciate the importance of maintaining his audience on both sides of the Atlantic and set the story before the American Revolution, when the colonies also thought of the Royal Navy as their navy. On its face, "The Two Admirals" is an adventure story which follows the careers and friendship of British naval officers Sir Gervaise Oakes and Richard Bluewater, loosely based on composites of Collingwood and Nelson, with the main fleet action set during "The 45," the Jacobite rising in Scotland in 1745 occasioned by the last attempt by the Stuarts to regain the Scottish crown. The main naval battle portrayed by Cooper, between the British and French fleets in the English Channel, is entirely fictional, as are most of the major events in the novel. Cooper, though, uses real historical events to explore complex themes of legitimacy and the rule of law, drawing parallels between the claims of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and Whycherly Whychecomb, a young naval officer from Virginia and heir to an English estate, and offering references to the series of usurpations and successions by force of arms in British history. Ever a fierce proponent of American republicanism, Cooper also used the British "Law of the Half-Blood," which prevents half-brothers from inheriting one from the other and escheats the inheritance to the Crown, to demonstrate the absurdities inherent in the aristocratic monarchies of the Old World. The publication of "The Two Admirals" in 1842 coincided with a major recession in both England and America, and sales were not impressive. But the book nonetheless seems to have been well-regarded, and by 1850 publishers were competing for the rights to the novel. The original American publisher issued a reprint, and a version slightly updated by the author was published in 1851 and reprinted in 1852. After Cooper's death the rights to that revised edition passed to a third publisher and illustrations were inserted. The illustrated version became part of a set of Cooper's works issued between 1859 and 1861, and reprints of that edition continued throughout the late 19th century.