Marshall, George:

$1,750 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

MARSHALL'S PRACTICAL MARINE GUNNERY; CONTAINING A VIEW OF THE MAGNITUDE, WEIGHT, DESCRIPTION & USE, OF EVERY ARTICLE USED IN THE SEA GUNNER'S DEPARTMENT, IN THE NAVY OF THE UNITED ... A rare, early gunnery manual for the United States Navy, published in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1822, and owned by a naval officer who participated in the Wilkes Expedition. The author, George Marshall (1782–1855), was a gunner in the United States Navy. Born on the Aegean island of Rhodes in Greece, Marshall had likely made his way to the United States by 1805. He enlisted as a seaman in the U.S. Navy in 1807 and was stationed at the Washington Navy Yard where he began training in gunnery. He received his warrant as a gunner on July 15, 1809, and went on to fight in the War of 1812 as part of Commodore Isaac Chauncey's Lake Ontario Fleet. In 1815, Marshall was assigned to the Mediterranean squadron aboard the USS Erie, protecting American ships from piracy in wake of the Second Barbary War. By 1820, Marshall was back in the United States, stationed at the Gosport Navy Yard (now the Norfolk Naval Shipyard) in Portsmouth, Virginia. While there he published the present volume, Marshall's Practical Marine Gunnery, in 1822. As Marshall explains in the preface, his "compendium of Nautical Gunnery originated in a view to individual and exclusive convenience of the Author," who, "[w]hile performing the station he has occupied during twelve years in the United States' Navy...had constantly to regret, the wa

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