This is an excellent little booklet (as it is called in the introduction) and one that I wish I had bought when it was published in 1977 - I have no excuse for not doing so, for I was serving at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, in 1978!

The typeface (font) is small and the text dense and most of the many illustrations are small. Nevertheless, this monograph certainly gives a picture of the whole process of shipbuilding, manning, employment and deployment - the birth, life and death of a ship, if you will - in the years and centuries of maritime history up to (almost) the end of the Age of Sail in the mid-Nineteenth Century (the clue is in the booklet's title!). ( )