This Week’s Re-Review – The First Texas Navy

I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.)  This is the second of two reviews I did on books about the Texas Navy back in 2006.

Seawriter

The First Texas Navy’ a fine addition

By Mark Lardas
The Daily News

Published October 1, 2006

“The First Texas Navy,” by John Powers, Woodmont Books, 308 pages, $49

While numerous books have been written about the Texas Navy — the naval arm of the Republic of Texas — the last serious study done prior to 2006 was Tom Henderson Wells’ excellent “Commodore Moore and The Texas Navy.” That was first published in 1960.

Several books have appeared since, adding little other than adventure tales.

Suddenly in 2006, two outstanding histories of the Texas Navy saw print: Jonathan Jordan’s “Lone Star Navy” (reviewed previously) and John Powers’ contribution, “The First Texas Navy.”

While Jordan’s book covered the entire history of the Texas Navy, Powers focuses on the Revolutionary Texas Navy.

The four ships of “The First Texas Navy” served the Republic during the Texas War of Independence and the Republic’s first years. More than the Texian Army, they were responsible for Texas maintaining its independence. These ships starved the Mexican army of supply while feeding the Texian forces with cargoes from ships they captured. They kept Mexico — which immediately repudiated Santa Anna’s grant of Texas’ independence — from renewing the conflict on land.

The early history of the Texas Navy is a tangled and uncertain skein. Several ships were acquired by republic partisans before Texas declared independence.

The paperwork associated with them is fragmentary. Powers does a magisterial job of untangling the threads. He re-examined the existing primary sources, and cleared away many myths associated with the Texas Navy. One example: The William Robbins, which later became the Texas Navy warship Liberty, was never — as often reported — a privateer.

The book is extensively footnoted — a serious student of the Texas Navy will find that invaluable — yet is both readable and entertaining.

Powers steers through shoals of information with a steady hand.

The book contains flaws, but they seem minor. Powers identifies the pivot gun on the Brutus, one of the Texas Navy’s warships, as a long 12-pounder. It may have been identified as such in the documentation. The gun found where the Brutus was wrecked in 1837 was a long 18-pound cannon. (This gun is on display at Galveston’s Texas Seaport Museum.)

If you could only buy one book about the Texas Navy, which should it be? If you seek a general history, pick Jordan’s book. For a summary of the second Texas Navy, Wells is still the man to beat. For the revolutionary Texas Navy, “The First Texas Navy” is a fine addition to the canon about the Republic’s Navy.

Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian and model-maker, lives in League City.