The Real Jim Hawkins

While the ship's boy is a familiar character in fiction, such as Jim Hawkins in Robert L. Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, little is known about the real-life seafaring boys of the 18th/19th century. Roland Pietsch's The Real Jim Hawkins is the first ever history of the boys in the Georgian Navy, the servants or "powder monkeys", who were brought up at sea to become seasoned sailors and the indispensable pillar of Britain's global empire. Based on the study of hitherto unused archival material, the book shows that the boys' lives were no less hazardous and colourful than the adventures of their famous fictional counterpart Jim Hawkins. Dr Pietsch's study goes beyond a maritime history: it begins with the boys ashore, explores their social backgrounds, their previous jobs and apprenticeships, their peculiar yet surprisingly familiar youth culture, the pressures and dreams that led them to sea, and the social and emotional challenges they faced when returning from the sea.

Roland Pietsch, MA (Berlin), PhD (London), has previously written on maritime history, the history of youth culture, and on the philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. Dr Pietsch's current research project is on Masculinity and Mental Health in the Georgian Navy, which is sponsored by a fellowship of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He has in the past lectured history at Queen Mary, University of London, and Canterbury Christ Church University. He also worked as a historian for TV documentaries, both for popular formats, such as the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, as well as for feature films like the award-winning Life Goes On: The Last Propaganda Film of the Third Reich by Mark Cairns & Carl Schmitt. His favourite job, however, remains having once been a manager for London's famous and nowadays much-missed music venue The Spitz. After growning up in Berlin, he moved to London's East End in the mid-1990s and became rather used to it, yet in 2011 moved back to Berlin to take up a post at New York University, Berlin.