Exeter alumnus David Peretz publishes Sailing for the Empire

Exeter alumnus David Peretz (1961, Chemistry) has written a book on naval history. Due to be published in January of next year, Sailing for the Empire: The Life of Admiral Sir John Corbett in Letters and Paintings, is, according to Andrew Lambert, a ‘strikingly handsome’ account of the ‘reality of naval service in the age of Empire’.  

Sir Corbett was the Commander in Chief in the East Indies and at the Nore, and was a major player in a range of colonial exploits. Peretz, his great-grandson, writes that he played a role in ‘the British effort to stop the slave trade’, but he was also involved in the Second Opium War, which led to the forced legalisation of opium in China by British forces. He also participated in campaigns in India, the Mediterranean, North America, Syria, and East Africa. 

Corbett documented his travels in hauntingly beautiful watercolours, which often belie the colonial violence in which he participated. For example, his c.1855 English Cay off Belize is a pale wash, with loosely sketched trees casting cool shade in the foreground, and the shadow of a two-masted ship in the background. The peaceful cay, a word for sandbanks or islets off the coast of South America, is ‘English’, and watched over by an English ship. The impression left is restful, yet threatening. 

Corbett’s letters and paintings illustrate Peretz’s book, casting his great-grandfather’s life not as dry history, but as a living collection of portraits of the world as he saw it. Lambert, a Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, writes that ‘this strikingly handsome book reminds us that the men who led the Victorian Navy saw the world in the round … using their artistic training to generate understanding and insight’. 

Sailing for the Empire can be pre-ordered from Blackwell’s and other bookstores.  

Sailing for the Empire by David Peretz