Peter Padfield is a leading naval and military historian and a practical sailor. After training in HMS Worcester and service as a navigating officer on the P&O liners to Australia and the East, he was a member of the crew of the replica seventeenth-century bark Mayflower11 on her recreation of the Pilgrim Fathers' transatlantic voyage to Massachusetts. Subsequently he sailed local craft in the pacific. He made his name with works on naval gunnery and gunned warships, and a multi-volume history of decisive naval campaigns in the rise of the West, Tides of Empire.