Overbearing, avaricious and difficult, yet talented and ambitious, George Brydges Rodney was an original thinker and one of the great admirals of the eighteenth century. The contents of this volume, the first of three, document his career from 1742 until 1763, touching on both his private and political life. 'The completion of the three-volume Rodney Papers series will plug a yawning gap in the published primary source literature about the eighteenth-century Royal Navy.' International Journal of Maritime History