Xerox copy of the typescript memoirs of Rear-Admiral the Hon Algernon Charles Littleton.

Littleton began writing his memoirs in 1879. They are very detailed, seeming to name and describe every individual with whom he came into contact, and contain many useful footnotes. Beginning on 14 May 1856 when he went at the age of "twelve years and nine months" to the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth, he goes on to write about his early career aboard the SANS PAREIL (1851), noting that his great uncle Josceline Percy served in the "original" SANS PAREIL (1794). He remarks "my letters at this time when I first went to sea are very amusing and I am very glad my mother has kept them", and has put many quotations from them into the memoirs. The SANS PAREIL went first to Lisbon to participate in a drill with the squadron, then to China. He provides a list of officers for this voyage, and their fates since, for example Mate Charles J. Carey "Left service as a Comdr. and is now a wine merchant". He describes the line crossing ceremony, lead by a boatswain called Dixon dressed in seaweed as Neptune, and remarks that they were "the first screw line of battleship which had ever crossed the line". He describes every stop on the voyage, what the ship picked up or delivered, when it re-fuelled, what diseases people were dying of, his fear of the Sepoys in India, and detailed accounts of expeditions they were ordered on in various gunboats. About one expedition into China he remarks "It was strange that the only two officers killed on this expedition should have been killed by our own men accidentally". Littleton describes life aboard his second ship, the LIFFEY, and then his third the EXMOUTH in just as much detail; passages concerning punishments are particularly striking in the former, and the descriptions of Commander Arthur Barrow (a Somerset native known as "Varmer Jan") are very amusing in the latter. In 1861 he spends some time in a hospital in France recovering from a leg injury, and stopping in Italy on his way back to the EXMOUTH he witnesses Mount Vesuvius erupt. Further into the 1860s the memoirs become less detailed, as Littleton is relying more on his memory than his letters. He spends the mid-1860s in the Americas. By the end of the 1860s he has returned to work on the LIFFEY.