The Hearts of Oak trilogy, will explore three of the most iconic and yet largely unexplored stories of the ‘Great Age of Sail’. The Fighting Temeraire, Admiral Benbow and The Glorious First of June, are the biographies of a ship, a man and a battle that will splice together to form a narrative of an era that stretches from the English Civil War of the 1640s to the coming of steam two centuries later. This ‘Great Age of Sail’ was once written about in heroic terms but many of those legends have since been overlooked.

The details of the stories themselves have become confused and the reasons behind the formation of those legends ignored. With more than a century of professional naval history to draw from together with new access to previously restricted archives, now is the time to look afresh at those stories of heroism from the perspective of the modern historian; now is the time to understand how and why The Fighting Temeraire, The Admiral Benbow and The Glorious First of June became legends.

“Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready; Steady, boys, steady!
We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.”

D. Garrick ‘Heart of Oak’