The Autobiography of Phineas Pett

About the book

Phineas Pett's autobiography offers a personal view of shipbuilding and royal service in early modern England. Work on important vessels is embedded in a life of dependence on patrons, disputes, changing fortune, and household concerns. The narrative is valuable precisely because it is situated: Pett explains events from his own position rather than supplying a detached history of the navy. W. G. Perrin's edition places the account within a substantial introduction and adds documents concerning shipwrights, petitions, charters, and particular ships. Notes help with archaic and nautical language. Readers can follow both the practical demands of a craft and the social negotiations required to practise it, comparing the autobiographer's claims with the different kinds of evidence assembled around his story.

• Craft and service
• Patronage
• Professional identity

Why read it

For a rare occupational life story that connects the making of ships with the politics of making a career.

English autobiography · edited by W. G. Perrin for the Navy Records Society, 1918