As featured in 'further reading' section part of researching your maritime ancestors article

Your Family History magazine, May 2017

While Jim Hawkins, the cabin boy in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, is fictional, young boys often served at sea as trainees, cabin boys, or servants well into the twentieth century. This work is the first ever study of these children during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when London's Marine Society sent literally thousands of boys to sea, primarily in the Royal Navy.

The Real Jim Hawkins is an essential read for anyone interested in the Age of Sail.

New York Military Affairs Symposium

This is an engaging and compelling work which suggests the lives of real ship's boys were scarcely less colourful and dramatic that that of the fictional Jim Hawkins.

Pietsch strikes a balanced tone throughout. His writing is first-rate and his analysis consistently thoughtful. Notes are copious as are the excellent illustrations drawn from period engravings and prints. The Real Jim Hawkins deserves prominent place on the shelf of any interested in naval history or the eighteenth century in general.

Nautical Research Journal

The real Jim Hawkins is an important study, based on solid research, and is a valuable contribution to the field of naval social history.

The Real Jim Hawkins is a readable and enjoyable book that sheds much-needed light on the boys, later the sailors, on whom the success of the Georgian navy depended.

Journal for Maritime Research

This mixed novel not only includes fictional pieces of work but also reality pieces of work. By including the mixed reality of the work it adds that extra depth to the story and creates a detailed story about the looked-over boys' in the Georgian navy by filling in the pieces that were missing due to the fact that he wasn't there at the time of the war. Roland Pietsch creates a detailed account of what it was like for boys in the Georgian Navy by sectioning the life of one of the boys into different aspects of his life on board of one of the ships in the Georgian Navy. This eye opening novel makes the reader realize what it was truly like for the boys who were not well known in history as the boys on the Georgian ships, because they were the real boys' on the ships. The boys' who weren't from rich backgrounds; most of the boys' didn't even have families. Roland Pietsch creates a tribute to these boys with this book by showing what over 5,000 of them had to go through during the seven years of war without even being acknowledged for it, even though without them the navy would not have fought because they would not have had much of a navy without them, because of that is why I enjoyed this book so much.

Jenna (Customer Review)

Pietsch takes fiction as his starting point, tracing the character of the ship's boy in 'Treasure Island' and other novels before examining what their lives might actually have been like.

Imaginatively, he examines their behaviour through the lens of youth culture, outlining their options on land, exploring what tempted or forced them to sea and suggesting parallels with the impulses of young people today, whether manifest in anti-social behaviour, naive romanticism or a thirst for adventure.

Based on Marine Society records and enhanced by copious illustrations, this book is extremely readable and offers us the closest glimpse yet of "the real Jim Hawkins".

BBC History Magazine

Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island is probably the most famous boy to go to sea. Less is known about his real life counterparts - the boys who joined the Georgian Navy. Many were orphaned, delinquent or just seeking adventure and saw a life at sea as an escape from a bleak and miserable existence on land. Roland Pietsch shows us the lives of boys who typically ended up as ships' servants.

Seafarer, Autumn 2010