By Julian Stockwin
The Internet was still fairly immature as a tool for authors when I started writing my historical adventure series about a young man who was press-ganged into the eighteenth-century Royal Navy and over time came to love the sea life. This was not all that long ago actually – as I only started researching and planning my books in the late 1990s. Since then, the number of sites of relevance to a scribe like myself has grown astronomically.
There are some very good sites of ‘how-tos’ for writers but I hesitate to recommend specific ones as their appeal and usefulness varies so much between people. I would mention, however, my agent Carole Blake’s site, as it has advice on the submission of a manuscript.
The Internet has made gathering information so much easier – from both secondary and primary sources. But this mushrooming should come with a health warning. Sometimes inaccurate material is just pasted from one site to another with no attribution. The sheer volume of material can also be overwhelming. If you ‘google’ a general topic you can end up with so many hits you can never take them all in! If you make the search too narrow you can miss a little gem of information, and therefore some investment on how to conduct Boolean searches and so on is time well spent.
The Internet is a great gift to mankind but must be used with care. You have to be aware of who is putting the material on the site, what are their qualifications, what is their agenda and so forth. I’m fortunate to have a strong personal background in the area I write about – I served in the navy and have always had a deep interest in the sea – and so I have built-in alarm bells… I also maintain a vast reference library of books, whose volumes I consult frequently to cross-check Internet material.
One aspect of the Internet that may not be so obvious as a boon to research are the out-of-print book search sites. In the ‘old days’ you had to personally contact book dealers and physically search shops to try to find some elusive title but now not only can you search for a specific book but you can put on a ‘want’ request and they will find it for you.
The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich : sea, ships, time and the stars : NMM
I make use of so many resources at the National Maritime Museum, both at the physical museum and on the website. Here’s a few…
Period detail
My period of interest is 1793 (the year my hero Tom Kydd was press-ganged, on February 
onwards… The series title is ‘The Thomas Kydd Naval Fiction Series’. Kydd actually makes the incredible journey from pressed man to Admiral over the course of the series. Although he is not based on any one person, he is a composite of the tiny handful of men from the historical record in the eighteenth century who achieved the quarterdeck.
Some useful sites for researching the period include:
You might also like to check out my website www.JulianStockwin.com. It contains information which I hope enhances readers’ enjoyment of my books and also highlights some of the many Internet sites related in some way to the sea. Also please look at Intute’s collection of records of online resources for maritime and naval history which you can browse by time period or by resource type.
Intute would welcome any suggestions you have for additional online resources relevant to this Limelight. Please let us know what other Intute Limelights you would like to see. You may also want to explore this free, ‘teach yourself’ tutorial that lets you practice your Internet Information Skills, Internet for Historians.
Intute records
Nelson : part of National Maritime Museum collections online | AbeBooks | How much is that? | NMM (National Maritime Museum) : collections online | William Falconer’s dictionary of the marine, 1780 edition | Time and date | National Maritime Museum | Julian Stockwin official page |
Suggested searches
Horatio Nelson | William Pitt the Younger | naval uniforms | historical fiction |
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